Biden in Poland: How NATO’s eastern half increasingly leads on Ukraine

President Joe Biden’s much-anticipated address Tuesday on the war in Ukraine, one day after his unannounced visit to the wartime capital of Kyiv, was delivered in Warsaw.

The symbolism was important. Mr. Biden was affirming the growing importance of Poland and its neighbors as the center of gravity of both NATO and the European Union shifts decidedly eastward in the wake of the fierce war raging just across Poland’s borders.

“We’re seeing again today what the people of Poland, and the people across Europe, saw for decades: Appetites of the autocrat cannot be appeased – they must be opposed,” the president said.

At the same time, he added, the Herculean work the Western alliance faces in bolstering Ukraine and building the kind of world it wants encompasses “not just what we’re against – it’s what we’re for.”

Mr. Biden’s trip marks the first time an American president has ever visited Poland twice in one year. As the 6th biggest economy in Europe, the country has one of the largest armies in the European Union. It is host, too, to the Pentagon’s first permanent military presence in Eastern Europe.

Given their experience of Soviet domination, Poland and other Eastern European allies ramped up defense spending and pushed for more aggressive policies toward Moscow even before the war – moves that now seem prescient but were regarded by some in the West as a bit paranoid at the time.

“We woke up the West,” Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said last week. “We can’t let it fall asleep again.”

While it’s clear that Western leaders still hold the purse strings and the big guns, Eastern European voices have emerged as spirited, spiritual leaders of the war effort.

In the process, internal struggles over the rule of law that Western leaders had routinely decried among their Eastern allies have been back-burnered. The European Commission has released billions in aid for Warsaw that had been blocked over concerns about its democratic trajectory.

It’s not lost on NATO and the EU that Poland is the critical bridge to Ukraine through which upwards of 85% of war supplies flow. But the freed-up funds are also a nod to the fact that neighbors to the east are facing attacks that are costing them dearly “because they stood up for us, for Europe and the West,” as one senior E.U. official put it at the security conference in Munich last week.

Any struggles to uphold democratic norms within their own borders, however, will ultimately limit the amount of influence Eastern members will exert in the Western Alliance, analysts say. The question is whether, in an effort to be seen as more credible partners, they internalize that perspective.

“You need to lead by example, and Eastern Europe has definitely been doing that in terms of the support they give to Ukraine,” says Mathieu Droin, who served as deputy head of the strategic affairs unit of the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, where his work focused on NATO. He is now a visiting fellow in the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“But they need to step up in terms of rule of law if they want to really be acknowledged as countries that can steer Europe.”

"Finding its way" 

Top Western European officials acknowledge that the war in Ukraine has pushed them to think differently about security. Today, France and Germany have gone from dismissing their Eastern neighbors’ concerns about Russian aggression to spearheading a robust call to arms that has surprised even themselves.

“People changed their minds, they changed their perspectives – I never would have expected that that would have been possible in Germany,” Boris Pistorius, the German defense minister, marveled last week at the Munich Security Conference, where European heads of state mingled with fellow heavy hitters, including Vice President Kamala Harris.

As a result, Central and Eastern European nations “feel vindicated, because they’ve been warning for a long time that we couldn’t trust Russia,” says Eoin Drea, senior researcher at the Wilfried Martens Center for European Studies, the official think tank of the center-right European People’s Party.

Yet even as Eastern nations gain the confidence to push their positions, the question remains whether that is enough to exercise leadership. A case in point: when Warsaw vowed to wrench tanks from what it saw as a foot-dragging Berlin.

“The quiet criticism that we see is that Poland has not really been concerned enough about the unity of the alliance – particularly in the way it criticizes Germany,” says Michal Baranowski, managing director for the German Marshall Fund East in Warsaw.

“Poland is still finding its way in leadership, and it’s about balance. Sometimes it’s worth it to ruffle some feathers, but the Western view is that this can be done with a little bit better style.”

Some Western leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron, are concerned about Poland’s military ascendance reinforcing America’s NATO leadership role, even as Paris continues to push, ultimately, for more strategic autonomy for the continent.

“Warsaw is a very focused on its bilateral relationship with the U.S. – more so than ever before,” Mr. Baranowski says.

For its part, the U.S. particularly appreciates that Poland has vowed to boost its defense spending to 5% of its gross domestic product – more than double the minimum Washington has long lobbied its NATO partners to achieve. (In the wake of the war, Germany raised its defense spending to 2% of GDP, a level Berlin has now pledged to make permanent.)

A path to cultural change?

But there remain roadblocks to Eastern Europe being taken truly seriously by Western allies, analysts say – including failing to fully embrace democratic norms.

While Poland and Hungary have been sharply criticized by the E.U. for undermining the rule of law, media freedom, and the independence of the courts, other NATO member states including Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia have struggled with similar issues.

Analysts are keeping a close eye on upcoming parliamentary elections in Poland, which could bring a more left-leaning opposition party to power that would likely avoid some of the tough rhetoric that has rankled Western allies.

In the meantime, the hope within NATO headquarters is that the military cooperation that war is fostering could create cultural change, and that Western partners can pull their Eastern counterparts along when it comes to internalizing democratic values, even as they fight mightily to defend them.

Whether the war will help or hurt this effort is another matter. Depending on whether the Polish conservative incumbents retain power or the more progressive party wins autumn elections, “I could see the president shifting his stand on rule-of-law questions to be seen as a more credible partner for his counterparts,” Mr. Baranowski says.

“On the other hand, as the war continues it could create fear,” he adds, “and with fear people tend to rally around the flag.”

Yet democratic reform will be necessary should Warsaw and other Eastern European nations want to see the “full bloom” of their leadership potential, he notes.

“The truth is, the democratic challenges mean we’re not being invited to sit at the highest table – even though Western allies are not emphasizing it for the moment.”