WARSAW — Love him or hate him, Donald Trump stirs passions. Mike Pence, not so much.
The U.S. president’s last-minute decision to call off a two-day visit to Poland to concentrate on Hurricane Dorian, which is barreling toward Florida (with a possible direct hit on his treasured Mar-a-Lago resort), left his Polish hosts with a second-rank U.S. visit.
That’s a problem for Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) which was hoping to bask in the glory of a presidential appearance — something that would help the party shake off a string of scandals ahead of October 13 parliamentary elections. A Trump visit would have sent the signal “that this government is not isolated and has powerful friends,” said Marcin Zaborowski, a lecturer in international relations at Warsaw’s Łazarski University.
Instead, the government will have to make do with Pence, who will sub in for Trump during Sunday’s ceremony marking the 80th anniversary of the start of World War II.
That doesn’t mean that Pence’s presence will be unimportant. He’ll still make the announcements that Warsaw is looking forward to — boosting U.S. troops in the country and promising to end the need for Poles to get visas to visit the States.
Under Trump, Poland has become one of America’s key European allies — and one which poses few political problems for the administration. It’s one of the rare NATO countries that meets its commitment to spend 2 percent of GDP on defense — something Washington has used to berate Germany, which spends much less.
“Poland meets its 2% of GDP spending obligation towards NATO. Germany does not. We would welcome American troops in Germany to come to Poland,” tweeted Georgette Mosbacher, the U.S. ambassador to Warsaw.
Guest bearing gifts
Pence is expected to announce the deployment of an additional 1,000 troops to Poland during his speech — adding to the 4,500 who are in the country on a rotating basis. The Poles will be listening carefully to see if he uses terms such as “enduring” rather than “rotating” to describe the move. Warsaw wants a full-time U.S. military presence in the country, while Washington has been reluctant to completely scrap earlier NATO commitments against setting up permanent military bases in ex-communist countries.
The Polish government, like its predecessors, has been keen to cultivate a strong defense relationship with the U.S. Warsaw has promised to spend $2 billion on a base to accommodate the troops — which pleased Trump, who called it a “world-class” facility. There was even talk by Polish President Andrzej Duda of naming it Fort Trump, although both sides have since backed away from the idea.
Warsaw is planning to buy 32 F-35 fighters from the U.S. and signed a $4.75 billion deal to buy the Patriot missile defense system. The PiS government is much cooler toward arms purchases from European countries, in 2016 scrapping a deal to buy helicopters from France, which soured relations with Paris for years.
Poland is also buying liquefied natural gas from the U.S. to lessen its dependency on gas imports from Russia. Trump has long railed against the Nord Stream 2 pipeline being built by Russia to ship gas directly to Germany — a project that Poland sees as a security threat.
Pence will have another present for his hosts: a promise to push for Poland to be admitted to the U.S. visa waiver program. Poland is one of the few EU countries whose citizens need visas to travel to the U.S. Warsaw has been pressing Washington for years to change that, so any movement on the issue would be a symbolic win for the government.
Finally, Pence seems unlikely to repeat the humiliation meted out to the Polish government by Barack Obama during the 2016 NATO summit in Warsaw, where he criticized PiS’s record on democracy. Trump sees the Polish government and Viktor Orbán’s Hungary as kindred spirits who share his skepticism toward immigration and supranational institutions like the EU.
“Poland, like most other U.S. allies, has to constantly compete for the interest and attention of the U.S. administration. I think over the last few years, Poland has done a pretty good job of this competition,” said Sławomir Dębski, director of the Polish Institute of International Affairs. “We’d rather that there be as little turbulence as possible. Where Poland can act is to show the Trump administration that even in Europe it can find partners to cooperate with.”
But Pence won’t give the government much of a PR boost. PiS has seen its lead in opinion polls shrink after a series of scandals: The speaker of parliament was forced to resign for abusing his right to fly on government planes, and the justice ministry is in turmoil after several pro-government judges were accused of waging an online smear campaign against judges resisting the government’s sweeping reforms of the court system.