Poland Hopes for European Armies and Bets on the US

While Western Europe breathed a sigh of relief at how the continent had pushed back against Donald Trump’s plan to seize Greenland, Poland took comfort in the fact that a deeper rupture between the United States and Europe had ultimately been avoided. But it is not out of the question that if Warsaw were forced to choose its friends – it would pick America. For NATO’s largest eastern member state, the main concern is defence against Russia. And as conversations directly from Warsaw make clear, Poles see no better ally than America, despite Trump’s behaviour.

Greenland as a stress test

As elsewhere in Europe, the topic of possible American annexation of Greenland dominated public debate in Poland. ‘Trump is fighting for Greenland with tariffs’, the hotel television announced three days before the meeting in Davos took place, at which the American president ultimately ruled out any attempt to acquire Denmark’s autonomous island by force.

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Fears that the United States (US) would force the takeover of a territory belonging to another NATO ally have eclipsed every crisis of the past year – and there have been many. Denmark’s prime minister, under whose control Greenland falls, went so far as to warn of the ‘end of NATO’. What that would mean, nobody really knows. Yet if Europe were to part ways with America, it would mark the most dramatic shift in the continent’s foreign policy in almost a century.