Poland’s Border Fortification Buildup Has Nothing To Do With Legitimate Threat Perceptions

Authored by Andrew Korybko via Substack,

Polish Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz announced last week that his country will build bunkers and trenches along its border with Russia and Belarus, which was followed by Prime Minister Donald Tusk confirming that security will be bolstered, including on anti-illegal immigrant pretexts.

The reality though is that this development has nothing to do with legitimate threat perceptions since Russia isn’t going to invade Poland while Tusk’s liberal-globalist coalition government favors illegal immigrants.

The premier has sought to appeal to Polish patriotism since January in order to distract from his country’s domestic political crisis and its comprehensive subordination to Germany under his rule. To that end, he’s hyped up the Ukrainian cause in parallel with fearmongering about World War III, which he predicts could happen through an impending Russian invasion of NATO. What he always dishonestly ignores, however, is that the US has repeatedly reaffirmed its ironclad commitment to Article 5.

Moving along to debunking the illegal immigrant aspect of his justification for Poland’s border buildup, Sejm Speaker Szymon Holownia posed with an illegal immigrant who infiltrated Poland from Belarus under the guise of being a “refugee” during a January photo-op inside the parliamentary chambers. This attitude aligns with his coalition government’s liberal-globalist “values”, which are sold to the public in this context as a means for replacing its aging population and thus keeping the economy competitive.

To be sure, the previous conservative-nationalist government was also hypocritical with respect to the reasons behind its own border buildup, having also dishonestly ignored the US’ commitment to Article 5 and being responsible for legally bringing in 250,000 civilizationally dissimilar migrants to Poland. The first simply saw it hype up the Russian threat like Tusk is doing, while the second concerned the scandal that broke out last summer before the elections and was cynically capitalized upon by the opposition.  

Back to the incumbent government, they hope to rally patriotic Poles behind their leadership as the military-strategic situation continues worsening for the West in Ukraine, with the supplementary objective being to distract some of them from its enthusiastic embrace of illegal immigrants. By pretending to prioritize national defense in spite of surrendering large swaths of Polish sovereignty in this respect to the Anglo-American Axis and Germany, Tusk expects to defuse growing dissent at home.

He might also want to precondition the public for the possibility of Poland conventionally intervening in Ukraine, whether unilaterally or together with France and others in a “coalition of the willing”, with the innuendo that it would be driven by national security purposes intended to defend Poland from Russia. It’s premature to say with certainty whether that’ll happen, but it nevertheless can’t be ruled out after Tusk himself just admitted that NATO troops are already there, albeit supposedly in non-combat roles. 

All that can be known for sure is that the justification behind Poland’s latest border buildup, which continues the process that was hypocritically begun by the incumbent liberal-globalist government’s conservative-nationalist predecessor, has nothing to do with legitimate threat perceptions. False pretexts are being concocted to justify these massive investments of a largely, but not entirely, symbolic nature mostly aimed at dishonestly advancing a domestic political agenda.