Front-paged @ European Tribune

Ahead of the G20 in Germany’s Hamburg, Trump is expected to give a major policy speech. His White House team has made a judgment this will take place in Poland, a nation that suffered greatly under the boots of Nazi’s and equally when the Red Army crossed borders and occupied the state during the 20th century.

Today’s Poland is run by a fascist leadership with similar appeals to its citizens as Trump has in America: nationalist and anti-immigration rhetoric or rather against asylum-seekers from outside of the EU. Poland has welcomed a flow of migrants from neighbouring Ukraine which is suffering from economic woes and corruption.

    The Polish Prime Minister, in a speech in the European Parliament, claimed that Poland did not have the capacity to accept any Syrian refugees, as it has already accepted one million Ukrainian refugees (Chapman 2016). However, while the migration flow has indeed increased, neither the purported volume, nor the declared character of migration has been reflected by the official data. The vast majority of Ukrainians coming to Poland seek gainful employment and are not a burden on the Polish taxpayer, but rather contribute to the country’s economic growth.

Poland is at the heart of criticism for EU capital Brussels and the role of giant economic power Germany.

Poland is also the point nation for neocon’s New Europe and a special role in rekindling the Cold War 2.0 from president George Bush,  Defence minister Rumsfeld, NATO’s General Breedlove to Obama’s State Department with HRC and Victoria Nuland – Cheney’s right hand on foreign policy vs. Russia.

Chances are, Trump’s major policy speech will likely unite a block of nations Trump has managed to alienate in his first 100 days of his presidency. I’ll be watching his speech as it happens.

Chancellor Angela Merkel is up for re-election in a few months and she has secured her lead in the polls and shown to be the leading statesman (statesperson) in Europe and on the world stage. Merkel is pulling all the right punches in domestic issues in a conservative constituency.

     « click for more info »

○ Poll: Germans want Merkel to remain as chancellor | DW |
○ The shadow of the Smolensk air crash over Polish politics

‘Trump needs some nice pictures from Europe,’ and Poland will likely oblige | WaPo |

WARSAW — President Trump arrived here late Wednesday in a country where the ruling Law and Justice party has called for Poland to “rise from its knees” — a phrase that carries echoes of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. The populist, nationalist government has also spurned calls for European nations to welcome in Muslim asylum seekers, just as Trump has sought to halt the flow of Syrian refugees to America.

Government leaders have even promised to bus in throngs of people from rural Poland — the heart of the ruling party’s support — to cheer the American president as he delivers a speech Thursday in the less-supportive capital city of Warsaw.
Trump’s decision to visit Poland ahead of a Group of 20 meeting in Hamburg this week is widely viewed as a pointed embrace of his ideological allies here — and a shot across the bow at Europe’s establishment forces, led by Germany and France.

For both governments, the visit is a chance to bolster their alliance at a time of heightened tensions with the rest of Europe. Trump has raised hackles with his friendly posture toward Russian President Vladi¬mir Putin and his rejection of the Paris climate deal, while Polish President Andrzej Duda is in the midst of a roiling debate over controversial constitutional changes spearheaded by the Law and Justice party.

Illiberal Democracies in the EU: the Visegrad Group

Poland’s accession to the EU was conditional to limit its citizens spreading across Europe. Germany had set limits for Polish migrants, other western European nations were more open and suffered the consequences of undercutting wages and labor rights. Polish migrants flowing into the UK played a major role in EU/Brussels bashing by UKIP leading to the Brexit referendum and its surprise outcome.

New Polish government shut down diplomatic missions and focused its foreign policy …

    Poland’s head of diplomacy said that the increasing of Poland’s security is of fundamental importance for his country. “Here we are focusing our efforts on co-operation with NATO, the United States and Great Britain while at the same time not neglecting co-operation with our other allies. As a result of intense diplomacy we have already been successful. An Alliance document was approved, which states that the eastern flank will contain a permanent presence of NATO troops. We are also putting emphasis on co-operation with our neigbours,” Minister Waszczykowski said, pointing to Poland’s increased engagement with the Visegrad Group.

My recent diary …

○ The Applebaum and Sikorski Show

My earlier diaries …

○ Saakashvili to GOP: Investigate Obama’s Poor Performance
○ US Policy of Military ‘Re-alignment’ and Obama’s Military Think-tank
○ Putin’s Response to the Color Revolutions of Regime Change

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