From the sabotage of the missile defense shield in 2008, through the reset with Russia, to today’s open diplomatic confrontation with the administration of Donald Trump, Donald Tusk’s foreign policy displays one constant feature: ruthless subordination to Berlin’s anti-American plans. The prime minister’s recent nervous reactions to U.S. strategic plans regarding Greenland, his vilification of Trump, and rhetoric accusing the United States of “imperialism” are not isolated 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 Warsaw government’s foreign strategy. This time, the pretext was Greenland – specifically, Donald Trump’s renewed expression of interest in taking control of the island, driven by the urgent geopolitical need to block Russian and Chinese influence in the Arctic.
Before departing for Paris to attend a meeting of the “Coalition of the Willing,” Prime Minister Tusk used a press conference at Okęcie Airport to attack Poland’s principal ally, suggesting that the United States poses a threat to NATO unity.
“No member of the North Atlantic Pact should attack or threaten another member of the North Atlantic Pact. Otherwise, NATO would lose its meaning if conflicts or mutual aggressive actions were to occur within it,” Tusk stated, equating American plans with preparations for military aggression against Denmark.
The prime minister’s political camp exploits every pretext to portray the United States under Trump as an unpredictable state threatening the 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 global security issues with the need for decisive action, Tusk’s entourage and sympathetic media immediately launched a narrative about Washington’s “imperialism” and “revisionism.”
This fits into a 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 by the U.S. president.”
Under Tusk, Poland has ceased to serve as a linchpin of transatlantic relations and has instead become part of an anti-American front within the EU. Former Polish foreign minister Prof. Zbigniew Rau aptly highlighted this strategy on TV Republika, asking rhetorically: “What interest does Poland have in this, how does it serve the Polish raison d’état, when we ourselves want to put ourselves on a collision course (…) with not only our fundamental but also our most reliable ally?” The answer is 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 Cadres
The past year of Donald Tusk’s government is a chronicle of a foretold catastrophe in Polish-American relations. A prime minister who, as recently as March 2023, publicly insinuated that Donald Trump was an agent, confronted with the reality of Trump’s presidency, not only failed to correct course but pressed even harder on the collision path.
The persistent push (against then-President Andrzej Duda) to appoint Bogdan Klich as ambassador to the U.S. – a politician who called Trump “unbalanced” – could only have been perceived in the White House as a provocation. Especially since it was not the only invective Klich had directed at Trump. In 2021, the would-be ambassador accused on X: “The presidency of D. Trump ends with disgraceful riots at the Capitol. Trump, praised to the skies by PiS politicians, leaves America divided like never before 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” – a claim all the more grotesque given that it was during Klich’s tenure at the Ministry of National Defence that a “Communication on cooperation between the Armed Forces of the Republic of Poland and the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation” was produced, envisaging joint planning, conduct, and observation of exercises and training, as well as Polish-Russian “peace-support and crisis-response operations.”
Particularly alarming is the condition of the intelligence services, which form the foundation of cooperation with the United States. By decision of the prime minister, leadership of the Military Counterintelligence Service (SKW) was assumed by Gen. Jarosław Stróżyk, who, in his doctoral dissertation, which he defended in 2019, wrote explicitly that “President Putin used classic intelligence methods and treated the U.S. president [Donald Trump] as a Russian asset.” It is hard to imagine a worse recommendation for cooperation with the CIA or the Pentagon than a head of military counterintelligence who considers the sitting president of an allied superpower a Russian puppet. Moreover, Stróżyk’s deputy became Col. Krzysztof Dusza – a figure symbolic of the reset with Russia, co-responsible for the scandalous SKW agreement with the FSB and for banquets with Russian chekists in Kadyny. American partners explicitly suggested his removal because of these ties, but the Tusk government ignored those signals, prioritizing protection of “its people” over allied credibility.
Completing this picture is 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 compatriots, creating a false image of America as a state hostile to Polish citizens. “Here everyone will find their own America,” the prime minister proclaimed pathetically, constructing a narrative in which his government alone was the defender against an “unpredictable” ally. In reality, no wave of deportations occurred, but the political objective – vilifying 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 internet platforms. A few months ago, Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz, Tusk’s man for special tasks, as a Member of the European Parliament, launched a harsh attack on the U.S., Trump, and Elon Musk, speaking outright of “American aggression.” Addressing right-wing MEPs, he thundered: “To the right side of the chamber: stop pretending you care about freedom of speech. You are the party of Trump and Musk in the European Union. Yesterday you applauded Trump, and you don’t mind that this president of the United States has declared a trade war that is destroying the EU economy.” He continued:
“Today, you defend American internet platforms, and you don’t mind that their algorithms will be part of American technological aggression against Europe. For me, as a Pole, support by platform X for AfD (Alternative for Germany) is already an act of aggression against my country. I am astonished that deputies from my country, from Law and Justice, accept this. If the European Commission is unable to stop platform X from interfering in European politics, if the DSA [the EU Digital Services Act targeting American platforms – ed.] becomes dead law – then the European Union will lose its sovereignty. And you, on the right side of the chamber, are the vanguard of this aggression. You are traitors to Europe.”
Anti-American rhetoric among figures associated with the December 13 coalition has also revived terms well known from communist-era propaganda: “revisionism” and “imperialism.” Former president and former speaker of the Sejm Bronisław Komorowski, who shortly after Russia’s invasion of Georgia was embracing war criminal Dmitry Medvedev, recently questioned on RMF FM the very rationale of the alliance with the U.S.: “So we have something to fear, because it is not as some Poles sometimes think, that the United States were, are, and will always be a bastion of freedom and our sense of security.” Komorowski also dramatized: “It is very worrying that the United States, a military, economic, and political power, has lined up with revisionist countries that assume border revisions in the contemporary world.”
Tusk’s “Finger Gun” and the Russian Agency
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.
The symbol of this infantile and dangerous attitude remains a photograph Tusk published on social media in 2019 – and a few months later in his book “Szczerze” (“Frankly”) – with the caption: “Our photographer persuaded me to stage some unusual scene with the other Donald. So I staged it.” The photo showed the then-President of the European Council aiming two fingers shaped like a gun at the back of the U.S. president. This “joke,” made during the G7 summit in Canada in June 2018, is symptomatic of the Civic Platform leader’s milieu, which in 2021 tweeted: “There is a Trump everywhere, so each of us must defend the Capitol.” In February 2024, Tusk’s chief of staff, Jan Grabiec, attacked Donald Trump as “a candidate who has the worst possible plans when it comes to Poland’s security.”
Trump was also insulted by the current Foreign Minister, Radosław Sikorski. In 2020, he declared on social media that “Trump weakens the West as a whole,” warning that “Trump is not a Republican but a charlatan” pushing the U.S. “toward a 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.” A few months later on X, he threatened: “Trump did to American conservatism exactly what PiS did to Polish conservatism – intellectually hollowed it out, reduced it to primitive nationalism, and disgraced it with conspiracy theories. May Polish followers of Trump end up like him.”
In January 2023, Sikorski warned on X: “The psycho-rightist mutiny failed two years ago in the U.S., is failing now in Brazil, and will fail in Poland. The putschists – Trump, Bolsonaro, and potential Polish imitators – should be exemplary punished.” In March 2023, the politician who had been one of the main authors and executors of the reset with Putin’s Russia said of the future U.S. president: “Now I understand why Putin and Trump like each other so much.”
Arkadiusz Myrcha, now deputy justice minister, also weighed in. On May 31, 2024, he stated on X: “A sense of impunity – the founding myth of all political populists, fraudsters, and thieves #Trump #PiS.”
The current U.S. president was likewise smeared by Małgorzata Kidawa-Błońska, today the Marshal of the Senate. In 2021, she warned on X: “What is happening at the Capitol now is unimaginable. Trump cannot come to terms with defeat and unfulfilled ambitions to such an extent that he is ready to set his homeland on fire. A very dangerous man who resorts to the worst methods, endangering others.” She also wrote: “What Trump is saying today cannot be listened to calmly. A man possessed by a mania of ubiquitous conspiracy. He lost and still shocks. All of this is very dangerous.”
Perhaps even more reckless were the posts of Tomasz Siemoniak, today head of the Ministry of the Interior and coordinator of the special services. “President Trump is supported by Russia and acts in Russia’s interest,” he emphasized in 2020, adding elsewhere that the American politician “went along with Russia.” Two years later, he complained on social media that “Trump praises Putin,” and assessed: “The less influence politicians like Trump, Le Pen, and Salvini have in Western politics, the safer it will be 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.”
The Foundations of Atlantic Betrayal
The current anti-Trump hysteria among politicians of the December 13 coalition is neither new nor accidental. It is a relapse of an attitude that formed the foundation of the foreign policy of Donald Tusk’s first government from 2007 to 2014. Then, in the name of a disastrous reset with Russia and under Berlin’s dictate, Warsaw systematically dismantled the alliance with Washington, treating American security guarantees as an obstacle to building a “new order” with Vladimir Putin.
The most glaring proof of this anti-Atlantic turn was the sabotage of the missile defense shield project. When the George W. Bush administration offered Poland an installation that was to become a strategic pillar of our security, Tusk’s government began a cynical game of delay.
The Polish prime minister publicly questioned the sense of the American presence, suggesting that the shield increased the threat to Poland rather than reducing it. “We are not enthusiastic about this project” – that was the message from the prime minister’s office, while Moscow rubbed its hands. Ultimately, Tusk’s maneuvering led to the collapse of the original project, the most beneficial for Poland. Russia’s “Novye Izvestia” then awarded Tusk, for his pro-German and pro-Russian stance, a certificate of a true European:
“The new Polish prime minister demonstrated to Washington that his country is no longer a ‘vassal’ 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.”
Distance from the U.S. went hand in hand with brutal attacks on President Lech Kaczyński, who alone understood that only a close alliance with Washington could stop Russian imperialism. The culmination of this dispute was the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008. While President Kaczyński, shoulder to shoulder with President Bush, fought for a NATO Membership Action Plan for Georgia and Ukraine, Tusk’s government quietly supported the German-French position blocking Alliance enlargement. Blocking the aspirations of Kyiv and Tbilisi was, de facto, a death sentence for those states, as confirmed by Russia’s invasion of Georgia just months later. Tusk chose loyalty to Angela Merkel, turning his back on the U.S. and the states of our region.
The architect of this disastrous doctrine was Radosław Sikorski. The same politician who today tries to lecture Americans on democracy was then promoting concepts that now sound like a grim joke. Sikorski was an advocate of inviting Russia into NATO, which in practice would have meant the end of the Alliance as a Western defensive pact.
It should also be noted that on February 21, 2011, during joint sessions of the lower chambers of the parliaments of Germany, Poland, and Russia, cooperation between Berlin, Warsaw, and Moscow was inaugurated within the so-called Kaliningrad Triangle. This was a non-institutionalized form of trilateral cooperation intended to “coordinate” the policies of the three states, aimed at NATO cohesion and the U.S. presence in Europe. One Russian regime analyst praised this initiative as follows:
“Voices are emerging (still few) about the need to transform Kaliningrad into a geopolitical junction of three states – Poland, Germany, and Russia. Kaliningrad is assigned the role of a regional pole around which Warsaw, Berlin, and Moscow can unite in response to American dominance on the European continent (…). The idea of creating the Kaliningrad Triangle is thus an idea of pan-continental integration of Europe with Russia. This poses a threat to Anglo-Saxon hegemony in the region.”
Today, as Donald Tusk and his team once again attack Washington, it is worth remembering that this is not the result of 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, emboldening Russia to aggression. Today, in the face of an ongoing full-scale war on our eastern border, a return to an anti-American course is nothing less than playing with fire atop a powder keg.