By Independent News Roundup
AfD co-leader Tino Chrupalla said during a recent appearance on public media that “Poland could also become a threat to us…We see that Poland’s interests differ from Germany’s…We are seeing double standards on the Nord Stream issue. Poland did not extradite a wanted criminal, a terrorist, to Germany.” He’s not wrong, but he’s also not right for the reasons that people might think, namely the assumption that Poland might one day pose a military threat to Germany. The present piece will clarify the matter.
It’s true that “Poland’s interests differ from Germany’s”, though not necessarily in the economic sense since Poland became a larger export market for Germany earlier this year than China, and Poland has benefited from the German-led EU’s subsidies (that benefit Germany even more though). Their different interests largely pertain to the future of the EU, which Germany envisages becoming a federation under its leadership while Poland wants it to be a loose union of states that retain more of their sovereignty.
Nord Stream embodied these differences since Germany could have leveraged what would have been its leading energy role in the EU had the second pipeline come online to coerce the Central & Eastern European (CEE) countries into making more concessions on their sovereignty to Berlin-backed Brussels. Poland feared this scenario for self-evident reasons, while the US didn’t want the rise of a de facto German-led “Federation of Europe”, so they plotted together to prevent this from happening.
Poland’s Swinoujscie LNG terminal opened in 2015, and it’s now poised to serve as the entryway for US LNG into CEE as explained here, which will erode German influence there. In parallel, the US supports the Polish-led “Three Seas Initiative” of more robust integration among the CEE states, which is one of the means through which Poland plans to revive its long-lost Great Power status. These aforesaid policies were then given an unprecedent boost after the Nord Stream attack that the US arguably orchestrated.
Had the Ukrainian Conflict ended as a result of spring 2022’s peace talks, then the opportunity for blowing up that pipeline would have closed, hence the importance of Poland aiding the UK in its efforts to convince Zelensky to keep fighting by allowing the unlimited transit of military aid to that end. In the three years since that attack, the German economy greatly weakened, which Poland and the US expect to accelerate the erosion of German influence in CEE and facilitate its replacement with their influence.
Poland can’t replace Germany’s economic influence there even though it just became a $1 trillion economy, but the lopsided trade deal that the EU agreed to with the US could eventually see the latter doing so instead. Polish influence can instead take the form of leading CEE’s containment of Russia now that it commands NATO’s third-largest army, thus creating a wedge between Germany and Russia like the US also wants, and rallying the region behind its vision of the EU’s vision in opposition to Germany’s.
Chrupalla was therefore correct in claiming that “Poland could also become a threat to [Germany]” since the successful implementation of the abovementioned grand strategy would shatter German hegemony over CEE. What he didn’t mention, and perhaps he hasn’t (yet?) realized it, is that the aforesaid is a joint Polish-US plan that’s been operational for years already. If it wasn’t for US support, Poland could never pose any strategic threat to Germany, so it’s really the US that already poses the greatest one of all to it.
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