“Poland is not changing its opinion on the need, the absolutely fundamental need to maintain the closest possible ties with the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. This is in general indisputable,” he said.<\/p>\n
Poland is already NATO’s top spender, with its defense budget accounting for 4.7 percent of gross domestic product this year. Tusk told parliament that spending should increase to 5 percent of GDP \u2014 a figure touted by U.S. President Trump<\/a>.<\/p>\n Poland is is spending billions on weapons \u2014 Abrams tanks, Patriot missile defense systems and F-35 jet fighters from the U.S. as well as K2 Black Panther main battle tanks, \u00a0K9A1 Thunder howitzers, Homar-K rocket systems and jet trainers from South Korea.<\/p>\n The confusing signals coming out of the Trump administration are particularly worrying for Poland, which has built its security architecture around its close ties with the U.S. There are about 10,000 American soldiers stationed in Poland, and the country makes an effort to buy U.S. weapons systems \u2014 to the annoyance of other European countries.<\/p>\n But the sight of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy being berated in the White House<\/a>, the U.S. ending arms aid<\/a> to Ukraine, and Donald Trump’s comments<\/a> that the U.S. may not fulfill its NATO obligations to protect members against attack if he feels they are not spending enough on defense are very concerning.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are seeing a deep correction in U.S. policy with regard to Ukraine but we can\u2019t turn our backs to it only because we don\u2019t like it. We must be precise and honest in assessing what it means and what serves our interest and what doesn\u2019t,\u201d Tusk told parliament.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“Poland is not changing its opinion on the need, the absolutely fundamental need to maintain the closest possible…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2286,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[414,451,64,442,1988,323,9,231,126,908,127,423,710,444],"class_list":{"0":"post-2285","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-donald-tusk","8":"tag-defense-budgets","9":"tag-donald-trump","10":"tag-donald-tusk","11":"tag-eu-us-military-ties","12":"tag-military-recruitment","13":"tag-nato","14":"tag-poland","15":"tag-procurement","16":"tag-russia","17":"tag-south-korea","18":"tag-ukraine","19":"tag-united-states","20":"tag-volodymyr-zelenskyy","21":"tag-war-in-ukraine"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2285\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}