From sabotaging the missile defense shield in 2008, through the reset with Russia, to today’s open diplomatic confrontation with Donald Trump’s administration, Donald Tusk’s foreign policy displays one constant feature: unconditional subordination to Berlin’s anti-American plans. The prime minister’s recent nervous reactions to U.S. strategic plans regarding Greenland, his attacks on Trump, and rhetoric accusing the United States of “imperialism” are not incidents, but a logical continuation of a course set years ago: a scenario aimed at pushing the United States out of Europe.
At the beginning of 2026, it was once again confirmed that anti-Americanism is a key element of the foreign strategy of the government in Warsaw. This time, the pretext was Greenland, specifically, the fact that Donald Trump, citing the urgent geopolitical need to block Russian and Chinese influence in the Arctic, once again expressed a desire to take control of the island.
Before departing for Paris for a meeting of the “coalition of the willing,” Prime Minister Tusk used a press conference at Okęcie airport to strike at Poland’s main ally, suggesting that the United States threatens NATO’s unity. “No member of the North Atlantic Pact should attack or threaten another member. Otherwise, NATO would lose its meaning if conflicts or mutually aggressive actions occurred within the alliance,” Tusk stated, equating American plans with preparations for military aggression against Denmark.
The prime minister’s political circle uses every pretext to portray the United States under Trump as an unpredictable state threatening international order. This was clearly visible in reactions to reports about American actions toward the regime in Venezuela. When the U.S. president, in an interview with The Atlantic, linked issues of global security with the need for decisive action, Tusk’s entourage and sympathetic media immediately pushed a narrative about Washington’s “imperialism” and “revisionism.”
This fits into the broader context of French and German diplomatic efforts. As reported by Politico, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot declared that Paris was working with allies, including Poland and Germany, on a “joint response to threats from the U.S. president.” Poland under Tusk, instead of serving as a linchpin of transatlantic relations, has become part of an anti-American front within the EU. Former Polish foreign minister Prof. Zbigniew Rau aptly summed up this strategy on TV Republika, rhetorically asking: “What interest does Poland have, how does this serve our national interest, when we put ourselves on a collision course with not only our principal but also our most reliable ally?” The answer seems self-evident: this interest is not defined in Warsaw, but in Berlin, for which the U.S. presence in Europe is an obstacle to building “strategic autonomy.”
Diplomacy of Insults and the Reset Personnel
The last year of Donald Tusk’s government has been a chronicle of a foretold disaster in Polish-American relations. A prime minister who, as recently as March 2023, publicly insinuated that Donald Trump was an agent has not corrected course in the face of Trump’s presidency, but instead pressed the accelerator on this collision path.
The persistent push (against the wishes of then-President Andrzej Duda) to appoint Bogdan Klich as ambassador to the U.S., a politician who called Trump “unbalanced”, could only have been seen in the White House as a provocation. Especially since this was not the only insult Klich directed at Trump. In 2021, the would-be ambassador wrote on X: “The presidency of D. Trump ends with shameful riots at the Capitol. Praised to the skies by PiS politicians, Trump leaves America more divided than at any time since the Civil War. These are the effects of populists in power who have only one obsession: power.” In February 2023, the Civic Platform politician called the Republican candidate “an echo of Russian propaganda”, an accusation made all the more grotesque by the fact that during Klich’s tenure at the Ministry of National Defense, a “Communiqué on Cooperation between the Armed Forces of the Republic of Poland and the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation” was created, envisioning joint planning, conduct, and observation of exercises and training, as well as Polish-Russian “peace support and crisis response operations.”
Particular concern is raised by the state of the special services, which form the foundation of intelligence cooperation with the U.S. By the prime minister’s decision, leadership over the Military Counterintelligence Service (SKW) was entrusted to Gen. Jarosław Stróżyk, who in his 2019 doctoral dissertation wrote plainly that “President Putin used classic intelligence measures and treated the U.S. president [Donald Trump] as a Russian asset.” It is hard to imagine a worse credential for cooperation with the CIA or the Pentagon than a head of military counterintelligence who regards the sitting president of an allied power as a Russian puppet. Moreover, Stróżyk’s deputy became Col. Krzysztof Dusza, a symbolic figure of the reset era, co-responsible for the scandalous SKW agreement with the FSB and social gatherings with Russian security officers in Kadyny. American partners explicitly suggested the need for his removal because of these ties, but Tusk’s government ignored these signals, prioritizing protection of “their own people” over allied credibility.
This picture is completed by the instrumental use of anti-Americanism in domestic politics. Shortly after Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, Tusk stirred hysteria over allegedly impending mass deportations of Poles from the U.S. He publicly instructed Radosław Sikorski to prepare consulates to receive returning compatriots, creating a false image of America as hostile to Polish citizens. “Here everyone will find their own America,” the prime minister said pathetically, building a narrative in which his government was the only defender against an “unpredictable” ally. In reality, no wave of deportations occurred, but the political objective, discrediting the U.S. in the eyes of Polish society and justifying a pivot toward Berlin, was pursued with iron consistency.
Tusk’s political camp also actively participates in attacks on American online platforms. Several months ago, Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz, Tusk’s special-tasks man and now an MEP, harshly attacked the U.S., Trump, and Elon Musk, speaking outright of “American aggression.” Addressing right-wing MEPs, he thundered: “Stop pretending this is about freedom of speech. You are the party of Trump and Musk in the European Union. Yesterday you applauded Trump, and it doesn’t bother you that this U.S. president has launched a trade war that destroys the EU economy.” He continued: “Today, you defend American internet platforms, and it doesn’t bother you that their algorithms will be part of American technological aggression against Europe. For me, as a Pole, X’s support for AfD is already an act of aggression against my country… If the European Commission cannot stop X from interfering in European politics, if the DSA becomes dead law, then the EU will lose its sovereignty. And you, on the right, are the vanguard of this aggression. You are traitors to Europe.”
In the anti-American rhetoric of figures associated with the ruling coalition, terms familiar from communist-era propaganda have also appeared: “revisionism” and “imperialism.” Former president and Sejm speaker Bronisław Komorowski recently questioned the very rationale of the U.S. alliance, saying on RMF FM radio: “We have reason to be concerned, because it is not as Poles sometimes think, that the United States was, is, and always will be a bastion of freedom and our sense of security.” He dramatized further: “It is very worrying that the United States, a military, economic, and political power, has joined the ranks of revisionist countries that assume border revisions in the contemporary world.”
Tusk’s ‘Toy Gun’ and Russian Agents
To understand the depth of the crisis in Warsaw-Washington relations, it is not enough to look at recent months. One must go back to the moment when Donald Tusk, not yet prime minister but already actively fighting for power, made attacking Donald Trump part of his political identity.
A symbol of this infantile and dangerous posture remains the photograph Tusk published in 2019, and later in his book Szczerze (eng. Honestly), captioned: “Our photographer persuaded me to stage some unusual scene with the other Donald. So I staged one.” The photograph shows the then-President of the European Council pointing two fingers shaped like a gun at the back of the U.S. president during the G7 summit in Canada in June 2018. This “joke” is symptomatic of the mindset of the Civic Platform leader, who wrote in 2021: “There is a Trump everywhere, so each of us must defend the Capitol.”
Trump was also insulted by current Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski, who in 2020 stated that “Trump weakens the West as a whole,” called him a “charlatan,” and warned that he was pushing the U.S. “toward regular civil war.” In January 2021, Sikorski wrote on Facebook: “For proto-fascists like Trump or Kaczyński, elections or verdicts matter only when they go their way.” Later, he tweeted: “Trump did to American conservatism exactly what PiS did to Polish conservatism – intellectually drained it, reduced it to primitive nationalism, and discredited it with conspiracy theories. May Polish Trump followers end up like him.”
Arkadiusz Myrcha, now a deputy minister of justice, also added his voice to the attacks on Trump. On May 31, 2024, he wrote on the platform X: “A sense of impunity – the founding myth of all political populists, frauds, and thieves #Trump #PiS.”
The current U.S. president was likewise harshly criticized by Małgorzata Kidawa-Błońska, today the Speaker of the Polish Senate. In 2021, she warned on Twitter: “What is happening at the Capitol right now is unimaginable. Trump is so unable to come to terms with defeat and his unfulfilled ambitions that he is ready to set his own country on fire. A very dangerous man who resorts to the worst methods, putting other people at risk.” She also wrote: “What Trump is saying today cannot be listened to calmly. A man possessed by a mania of an all-pervasive conspiracy. He has lost and continues to shock the others. All of this is very dangerous.”
Even more reckless were perhaps the posts of Tomasz Siemoniak, who today serves as Minister of the Interior and Administration and coordinator of the special services. In 2020, he emphasized: “President Trump is supported by Russia and acts in Russia’s interest,” and in another post added that the American politician was “doing Russia a favor.” Two years later, he complained on social media that “Trump praises Putin”; in another post, he assessed: “The less influence politicians like Trump, Le Pen, and Salvini have on Western politics, the safer it is for Poland, Europe, and the world.” In January 2023, Siemoniak stated outright that Trump stands “on Russia’s side” and is “a pro-Russian politician.”
Foundations of Atlantic Betrayal
The current anti-Trump hysteria among ruling coalition politicians is neither new nor accidental. It is a recurrence of the stance that formed the foundation of the first Tusk government’s foreign policy from 2007 to 2014. At that time, in the name of a disastrous reset with Russia and under Berlin’s guidance, Warsaw systematically dismantled its alliance with Washington, treating American security guarantees as an obstacle to building a “new order” with Vladimir Putin.
The most striking proof of this anti-Atlantic turn was the sabotage of the missile defense project. When the George W. Bush administration offered Poland an installation meant to become a strategic anchor of its security, Tusk’s government began a cynical delaying game. The prime minister publicly questioned the sense of the American presence, suggesting the shield increased rather than reduced threats to Poland. Ultimately, this led to the collapse of the original project, most favorable to Poland. “We are not enthusiastic about this project” – this was the message coming from the prime minister’s office, while Moscow was rubbing its hands in satisfaction. Ultimately, Tusk’s maneuvering led to the collapse of the original project, which had been the most advantageous for Poland. The Russian newspaper Novye Izvestia at the time awarded Tusk, for his pro-German and pro-Russian stance, a certificate of a true European, writing: “The new Polish prime minister demonstrated to Washington that his country is no longer a ‘subservient’ partner of America (…): as head of government, before flying across the ocean, he visited Berlin and Moscow, thereby emphasizing the priority of his cabinet’s pro-European policy.”
This distancing from the U.S. went hand in hand with attacks on President Lech Kaczyński, who understood that only a close alliance with Washington could deter Russian imperialism. During the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, while Kaczyński worked alongside President Bush to secure a roadmap to NATO for Georgia and Ukraine, Tusk’s government quietly supported the German-French position blocking enlargement. Blocking the aspirations of Kyiv and Tbilisi amounted to de facto passing a sentence on those states, as confirmed by Russia’s invasion of Georgia just a few months later. At that time, Tusk chose loyalty to Angela Merkel, turning his back on the United States and the countries of our region.
The architect of this disastrous doctrine was Radosław Sikorski. The same politician who today attempts to lecture Americans about democracy was, at that time, promoting ideas that now sound like a grim joke. It was Sikorski who advocated inviting Russia into NATO, which in practice would have meant the end of the North Atlantic Alliance as a defensive pact of the West.
It is also worth noting that on February 21, 2011, during a joint session of the lower houses of the parliaments of Germany, Poland, and Russia, cooperation between Berlin, Warsaw, and Moscow was inaugurated under the so-called Kaliningrad Triangle. This was an informal format of trilateral cooperation intended to “coordinate” the policies of the three states, directed against NATO’s cohesion and the U.S. presence in Europe. One Russian regime analyst praised the initiative in the following terms: “Voices are emerging (still few in number) calling for the transformation of Kaliningrad into a point of geopolitical convergence for three states – Poland, Germany, and Russia. Kaliningrad is being assigned the role of a regional hub, based on which Warsaw, Berlin, and Moscow can unite in response to American dominance on the European continent (…). The idea of creating the Kaliningrad Triangle is therefore an idea of pan-continental integration of Europe with Russia. This poses a threat to Anglo-Saxon hegemony in the region.”
Today, as Tusk and his team once again attack Washington, it is worth remembering that this is not about concern for democracy or the rule of law. It is the continuation of an old strategy: pushing “Anglo-Saxon influence” out of the continent to make room for Berlin’s hegemony and interests. In 2007-2014, the price of this policy was high, the emboldening of Russia to aggression. Today, with a full-scale war ongoing just beyond Poland’s eastern border, a return to an anti-American course is nothing less than playing with fire atop a powder keg.