Jan Cienski: Why Poland is Increasingly Leaving the U.S. Behind

Jan Cienski is Warsaw correspondent for the Financial Times.

WARSAW — Poland extended Barack Obama an enthusiastic greeting upon his arrival on Friday, but it's increasingly clear that relations with the United States are no longer a top priority for policymakers here. Buoyed by the confidence of a dynamic economy -- the only European Union member to have survived the global financial crisis without falling into recession -- it's the EU and Germany, Poland's historic foe, that now capture Poles' imagination.

"America is as important for us as in the past, but Europe has become more important than before," said Bogdan Klich, Poland's defense minister, in a recent radio interview. It was no accident that Poland's prime minister, Donald Tusk, chose Berlin as the destination for  his first foreign trip after being elected in 2007, nor was it that Bronislaw Komorowski, Poland's president, went to Brussels soon after last year's presidential election....

Of course, in previous decades, Poland's aspirations were fixated on the United States. Although Washington acquiesced in the post-war division of Europe which left Poland a Soviet satellite, U.S. status as the core of the anti-Soviet movement in the Cold War left it much less tainted in Polish eyes than Britain and France by that wartime betrayal. Plus, the two countries already had existing cultural ties: millions of Poles had emigrated to the United States, starting in the 19th century and continuing throughout the communist era.

The warm feelings were strengthened by Washington's strong support for the Solidarity trade union after the communists tried to crush it in 1981. Poland's joining of NATO in 1999 cemented the U.S. role as the ultimate guarantor of Polish independence in the case of a resurgence of Russian imperialism -- something that still remains a worry for a segment of the Polish population and a standby of right-wing political rhetoric.

During the first two decades of Polish independence, governments of both the left and the right saw Washington as their key foreign partner. That was in large measure why Poland was one of only three allied countries -- the others being Britain and Australia -- whose armed forces took part in the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003. (Polish Special Forces helped secure some Iraqi oil drilling platforms.) At the same time, Poland provided one of its military airports for American intelligence services to use for their secret detention program of terrorist suspects....