“The Polish-American alliance is strong, regardless of who governs in Warsaw and Washington,” Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said.
The U.S. will open a new air defense base in Europe on Wednesday, as many NATO members on the continent look on with trepidation as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House in January.
The missile defense base in Redzikowo, a town in northwestern Poland, close to the Baltic Sea, is the first permanent U.S. military base in the central European country, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said in a video posted to X, formerly Twitter, on Tuesday.
Redzikowo is just under 100 miles from Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave, where Moscow has a powerful military presence wedged between NATO members Poland and Lithuania.
Plans for the base were kicked off by President George W. Bush, and continued through Barack Obama’s presidency, Donald Trump’s first term in office and were finished off by Joe Biden’s administration, Sikorski said.
The project is a show of the “geostrategic consistency of the United States”, he said. “The Polish-American alliance is strong, regardless of who governs in Warsaw and Washington.”
Trump has been critical of NATO, and appeared to give the go-ahead for Russia to attack members he said were not contributing enough funds to the alliance earlier this year.
NATO is bound together by Article 5, which means that an attack on one state is an attack on all.
