Since 1945, the American presence in Europe has served two main purposes: ensuring that fallen Nazi Germany would not resurrect as another imperial threat to peace and curbing Soviet expansion that could lead to the conquest of Western Europe by the Kremlin.
The fall of communism brought an illusion of possible change in the continent’s division. Germany, increasingly assertive, began to claim that as the country most committed to democratic values and as Europe’s strongest economy, it could independently guarantee peace. This policy was supported by the Russian Federation, moving in lockstep with Berlin. An informal alliance emerged aimed at ousting the USA from Europe. France, for different reasons, joined this alliance despite evidently losing out. However, Paris’ strategy was completely fettered by historical phobias and extreme ideological projects. The counterweight to this new continental architecture was the actions of Great Britain. Unfortunately, the British decided to leave the EU, paving the way for German-Russian dominance. Eastern European countries outside the EU had to comply with Moscow. In case of dissent, military intervention followed. Georgia experienced this, and later Ukraine in 2014. Germany executed its actions without tanks, yet by undermining the democratic will of societies. Using EU tools and its influence in media and politics, it began to establish compliant governments in Central Europe. For countries like Poland, cooperation between Moscow and Berlin was necessary. The pinnacle of this cooperation was, of course, the reset policy pursued by Donald Tusk, often backed by former communists and Soviet-era intelligence officers, subservient to Germany. A tangible symbol of the Berlin-Moscow collaboration was the Nord Stream pipelines, meant to bring economic growth to Germany and energy control to Russia over Central European countries.
The reset policy was challenged at the end of Barack Obama’s term with the outbreak of the first war in Ukraine. Nevertheless, Berlin did not relinquish anything, having to diversify between building influence in Ukraine and cooperating with Moscow. The victory of the right-wing party in Poland in 2015 and Donald Trump taking office in 2016 overturned the table. Trump opposed the policy of pushing the USA out of Europe and focused on the Intermarium countries, with Poland at the forefront. These were four years of growing Washington influence in our region and four years of relative peace.
Trump’s defeat by Joe Biden caused a return to the German-Russian hegemony policy in Europe. Moscow deployed almost its entire military potential to Ukraine, causing the largest massacre since World War II. Worse still, with the support of the American ambassador in Poland, Germany led to the overthrow of the right-wing government and the disintegration of the Intermarium concept. Thus, Biden’s policy not only drastically reduced U.S. influence but also ignited a great war in Europe, which at any moment (like previous disruptions on our continent) could escalate into a global war.