This is why Biden goes to Poland | CNN Politics

CNN
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If there’s one nation that understands Ukraine’s torment, it’s Poland, which welcomes President Joe Biden on Friday as a part of his emergency mission to shore up NATO’s defenses following Russia’s brutal invasion.

In the USA, Biden’s warnings that democracy is underneath siege from menacing autocrats can appear distant, even after former President Donald Trump’s US Capitol rebel and try to steal the 2020 election.

However in Poland, which neighbors Ukraine, freedom is contemporary sufficient to nonetheless be a novelty. In a tortured Twentieth-century historical past, the nation – torn between East and West – was repeatedly conquered, was dominated by overseas tyrants and noticed thousands and thousands of its individuals purged or pushed as refugees from houses destroyed by warfare.

Poland once more finds itself on the entrance line of battle. It’s on the dividing line between states within the NATO membership, to which it now belongs, and President Vladimir Putin’s Russian orbit, which incorporates one other Polish neighbor, Belarus. Poland has opened its borders to greater than 2 million of the three.7 million Ukrainians who’ve fled Putin’s onslaught, and the struggle got here near its borders with a Russian strike on a base in western Ukraine earlier this month.

Like Ukraine, Poland lived for many years underneath Moscow’s Communist iron fist. Like Ukrainians, Poles are sometimes gritty, are deeply suspicious of Russians and have preventing for his or her freedom and sovereignty ingrained of their DNA. In contrast to Ukraine, one of many founding republics of the Soviet Union, Poland made it to the West after a long time underneath the Warsaw Pact umbrella. And along with being in NATO, it’s a member of the European Union, albeit one which has had tensions just lately with Brussels over its personal flirtations with populist nationalism.

As Putin’s menace mounted in recent times, Poland hosted rotations of US troops and jets. In February, earlier than Putin invaded Ukraine, Poland was one of many nations to which Biden ordered 3,000 troops to bolster the alliance’s japanese flank. If the struggle in Ukraine spills over right into a broader battle between Russia and the West, a daunting prospect, there’s an excellent probability it may occur in Poland.

“We really feel that it’s the proper place for (Biden) to go to have the ability to see troops, to have the ability to see humanitarian consultants, and to have the ability to meet with a frontline and really weak ally,” US nationwide safety adviser Jake Sullivan stated this week.

Biden’s journey comes a number of weeks after Vice President Kamala Harris was in Warsaw and helped ease a disagreement between the 2 governments about Poland’s plan to ship Soviet-era jets to Ukraine. Biden opposed the switch, reasoning that it might be seen by Putin as an escalation of the battle that might create a cascade of penalties and a showdown between the West and Russia, which might danger a nuclear trade.

People and American presidents are widespread in Poland – a legacy of robust US help for the dissident Solidarity motion, which was nurtured within the shipyards of the northern metropolis of Gdansk and created a number of the first cracks within the Soviet Empire, with the help of the Polish Pope, John Paul II.

Ronald Reagan, the American President principally credited with successful the Chilly Struggle, was revered in Poland. And his successors have usually discovered a heat welcome on European excursions. Poland, acutely aware of its debt to the US and eager to construct stronger ties to the West, despatched troops to America’s early Twenty first-century wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – at the same time as lots of Washington’s older allies balked at becoming a member of the latter battle.

Over the subsequent two days, Biden will meet Polish President Andrzej Duda and is anticipated to go to US forces despatched to bolster Poland’s defenses. Biden will go to a number of the 1000’s of Ukrainian refugees within the nation to shine a highlight on the grave humanitarian disaster unleashed by Putin that’s straining well being and authorities providers in Japanese Europe. Biden, who introduced Thursday that the US would settle for as much as 100,000 Ukrainian refugees, hinted after a NATO summit that he would meet a number of the throngs of people that have fled Putin’s civilian bombardments in Ukraine and his nationwide safety adviser, Jake Sullivan, stated Friday that Biden will meet with Ukrainian refugees and ship a “main handle” in Warsaw on Saturday.

Forward of that potential go to, the President mirrored on refugees whom he had met in camps elsewhere on this planet over time.

“You see kids which are with out dad and mom in these camps … women and men who’re fully misplaced … and also you see that clean look on their face, that absolute feeling of ‘My God, the place am I?’” Biden stated.

US presidents have lengthy seen Poland as an exemplar of freedoms that NATO was set as much as safeguard and have lauded its lengthy and profitable battle for its personal existence – a wrestle that Ukraine is now waging.

Poland was eviscerated in the course of the Twentieth century when virtually all of its substantial Jewish inhabitants was murdered within the Holocaust. The preserved camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau, west of the southern metropolis of Krakow, stand as a haunting memorial to the horrors of the Nazi occupation. The autumn of the Third Reich didn’t, nevertheless, deliver liberation. Poland then endured almost half a century of Communist repression imposed by Russia.

In 2003, in Krakow, President George W. Bush lauded the eastward growth of NATO, which has so irked Putin, saying it had introduced “the peace and safety of our alliance to the younger democracies of Europe.” On the time, nevertheless, Bush was extra preoccupied with the dual wars in Afghanistan and Iraq launched after the September 11, 2001, assaults than a revived showdown with Moscow.

In 2014, marking the twenty fifth anniversary of an election that began a course of that led to the downfall of Communist rulers in Warsaw, President Barack Obama stated: “The victory of 1989 was not inevitable. It was the end result of centuries of Polish wrestle.”

However Trump selected a special tone touring to Warsaw in 2017 to align himself with right-wing forces in Poland and Europe hostile to the EU – a bloc that the-then President abhorred. In a speech that redefined conventional Western values and fleshed out his personal model of populist nationalism, Trump did reaffirm NATO’s Article 5 creed that an assault on one member is an assault on all. However he additionally slammed US intelligence assessments that Russia had interfered within the 2016 election in remarks that bolstered Putin, warned {that a} wave of Muslim immigration and lax border controls threatened Western values and lashed out at American journalists in a nation that had been accused by the EU of eroding its personal press freedoms.

Biden’s message will likely be very totally different.

After assembly Duda in Warsaw on Saturday, the President will ship a speech that the White Home says will body the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a problem to the core objective of his presidency at house and overseas: securing “a future that’s rooted in democratic rules.”