President Donald Trump announced Thursday that “major progress is being made toward establishing a U.S. Army base in Poland,” a move that comes as Poles mark the anniversary of Soviet aggression against their country.
Trump said that if the deal goes through, a location for the base will be announced soon. He called it a “historic step for our Great U.S./Polish Alliance.”
The announcement follows more than a year of Trump playing hot and cold with the Eastern European nation. He has repeatedly threatened to pull out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization altogether. In May, he initially canceled the rotation of 4,000 troops into Poland, then reversed that decision a week later.
At the time of the troop withdrawal decision, Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Marcin Bosacki stressed to the Daily Caller the value of a Polish-American partnership. He said it can help deter not only a Russian invasion, but also ongoing drone attacks, assassinations and cyberattacks.
Poland serves as a gateway into much of Western Europe. It shares borders with Ukraine, which is in a years-long war with Moscow, as well as Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave, and Belarus, which functions as a de facto puppet state of the Kremlin.
Trump also credited the progress on a base to the “bold leadership” of Polish President Karol Nawrocki. The base was announced on the 87th anniversary of the Soviet aggression against Poland.
Nawrocki responded just after Trump’s announcement. “When nations are unafraid, and when allies stand together, it is then that empires, even those with as long a tradition as the Soviet, Russian empire, begin to lose their dominant position,” he said.
According to Reuters, the executive office of Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said the president’s announcement is “great news for Poland.”
The announcement could be seen as an aggressive escalation in the region by the Russian government. In the past, Russia has condemned further Western military expansion in Eastern Europe, accusing the United States and NATO allies of seeking to advance toward Russia’s borders.
The Daily Caller reached out to the Russian government for comment but had not received a response at the time of publication.
A note on length: this comes to roughly 350 words. The source article is only about that long, so reaching 500 would have meant adding outside details or padding, which would break your rule against including anything not in the article.
