Strategy&Future

Jacek Bartosiak and Albert Świdziński on ending the Ukraine War, deploying Polish troops to Ukraine, and US ambiguous strategy.

Jacek Bartosiak talks to Julian Lindley-French about the war in Europe, allies and Polish nuclear weapons.

The high intensity of geopolitical dynamics requires states to have a sophisticated toolkit of military instruments, including developing paramilitary and proxy military units to conduct a multilayered war. The proxies in Eastern Europe were perfect asymmetric instruments for achieving political and geopolitical goals. Still, often, they were symbols of the crisis of statehood in the countries where they operated or they caused existential threats, as in the case of Poland and Russia.

Military strategy is how the military is prepared, deployed, trained and exercised. Above all, it consists in the long-term development of broadly understood capabilities, which nowadays are more appropriately referred to as the “state resilience system” — so that these activities have a positive impact on our foreign policy, i.e. on our “room for manoeuvre.” For a military strategy to be credible in times of war and anarchy of the international system, when military violence is the final arbiter, a kind of supreme court between states that are in a dispute over which of them will push through its agency (and such times have come), our politicians in Warsaw must have the characterological and mental ability to make a decision, for example, about the killing of Wagnerians carrying out an armed raid on one of the towns of Podlasie.

Jacek Bartosiak and Albert Świdziński of S&F on the observations from Munich Security Conference.

The war in Ukraine continues. Its course emphasises the very significant influence of the USA on the political system of Europe. At the same time, a “rebellion of the periphery” is being carried out through an attempt to reduce the power of Germany and France in the European Union by Central and Eastern Europe with Poland at the forefront. In this combined context, we (in Poland) are not reaching out enough to the Scandinavian countries with joint initiatives: in particular, to Sweden, Finland and Norway – let’s skip Denmark as an insignificant player in the political game in Europe. These countries are a multiplier of the potential of our region, which wants to be supported by the Anglo-Saxons, through liaison with the Atlantic policy of the USA. The Scandinavians unanimously share this geostrategic orientation and have real troops and real importance in the clash with Russia.

Jacek Bartosiak and Albert Świdziński of S&F – View From Poland: World in Turmoil, part 2. 01/2023. Russian plans and future of Europe.

Jacek Bartosiak and Albert Świdziński of S&F – View From Poland: World in Turmoil, part 1 (January 2023).

The decision taken by the government of Tadeusz Mazowiecki in December 1990 to put the “Żarnowiec” Nuclear Power Plant then under construction into liquidation was preceded by a series of earlier political decisions, the careful examination of which shows that with the end of communism, the possibility of building the first nuclear-powered power plant did not close to Poland.

How would the situation in Europe and in the world have developed if Kyiv had been captured by the Russians in the first days of the war? I am of the opinion that despite all the risks associated with posing such counterfactual questions, it is worth asking them. Firstly, because I have the impression that in Poland we are not fully aware of how close we were to a catastrophe in the first days of the war in Ukraine. Secondly, because the war in Ukraine continues, its end result is by no means known and the dangers that Poland would face in the event of a quick victory for Russia in February are still hanging over us.

Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan begins a new era of confrontation between the US and China, and with it, marks the beginning of an already open conflict over Eurasia, this unique place where world history takes place and world wars are fought. It begins an era of war slightly different than the previous world wars, because it is scalable. Each of the subsequent system wars was obviously different from the previous one, so there is no surprise here. This time, in a scalable clash, each side will try to force its interests through various domains of contemporary dependencies in a densely globalised world that will be violently split open before our eyes.

We have long proposed at Strategy&Future to increase Poland’s activity “in the eastern direction”, in particular in Ukraine. We’ve written about the importance of a policy aimed at keeping Russia outside the European system, which Poland would not be able to achieve on its own without Ukraine’s participation. We’ve emphasised the importance of supply chains and control over the flows of goods and commodities.