Polish-American Security Relations under the Biden and Trump Administrations

Streszczenie

Niniejsza praca licencjacka analizuje ewolucję polsko-amerykańskiej współpracy w dziedzinie bezpieczeństwa w latach 2017–2025, obejmujących kadencje administracji Donalda Trumpa (2017–2021) oraz Joe Bidena (2021–2025). Celem pracy jest wyjaśnienie, w jakim stopniu zmiana administracji determinowała kierunek tej współpracy, a w jakim stopniu decydowały o nim czynniki strukturalne. Podstawę teoretyczną stanowi wieloparadygmatyczne podejście łączące realizm strukturalny, teorię równoważenia zagrożeń, liberalny instytucjonalizm oraz dylemat bezpieczeństwa sojuszu. W rozdziale pierwszym zarysowano historyczne fundamenty relacji — od akcesji Polski do NATO w 1999 roku po okres rządów Busha i Obamy — oraz dokonano analizy polskiej kultury strategicznej, dla której Rosja stanowi egzystencjalne zagrożenie, a Stany Zjednoczone — jedynego wiarygodnego gwaranta bezpieczeństwa. Rozdział drugi wykazał, że transakcyjny bilateralizm Trumpa zapewnił Polsce status uprzywilejowanego rozmówcy, owocując podpisaniem EDCA (2020), zakupem samolotów F-35A i zestawów HIMARS oraz objęciem sankcjami PEESA gazociągu Nord Stream 2. Rozdział trzeci ukazał, że multilateralne podejście Bidena, skonfrontowane z pełnoskalową inwazją Rosji na Ukrainę w lutym 2022 roku, doprowadziło do bezprecedensowego wzmocnienia wschodniej flanki NATO, czyniąc z Polski kluczowy węzeł logistyczny i aktywnego dostawcę bezpieczeństwa regionalnego. Praca konkluduje, że zmienność na poziomie administracyjnym była realna, lecz czynniki strukturalne — rewizjonizm rosyjski, logika geograficzna, przemysłowe interesy obu stron oraz polskie nadinwestycje strategiczne — wyznaczały długoterminową trajektorię, generując głębszą ciągłość pod powierzchnią retorycznych przełomów.

Słowa kluczowe: stosunki polsko-amerykańskie, bezpieczeństwo NATO, wschodnia flanka, polityka obronna, sojusze transatlantyckie

Abstract

This bachelor's thesis examines the evolution of Polish-American security cooperation between 2017 and 2025, spanning the administrations of Donald Trump (2017–2021) and Joe Biden (2021–2025). The study seeks to determine the extent to which changes at the executive level shaped the trajectory of bilateral relations and the degree to which structural factors provided continuity beneath rhetorical discontinuity. The theoretical framework combines structural realism, balance-of-threat theory, liberal institutionalism, and the alliance security dilemma. Chapter one establishes the historical and analytical foundations, tracing the relationship from Poland's 1999 NATO accession through the Bush and Obama eras, and examines Polish strategic culture, which is characterised by the perception of Russia as an existential threat and the United States as the sole credible security guarantor. Chapter two demonstrates that Trump's transactional bilateralism conferred upon Poland privileged interlocutor status, yielding concrete outcomes including the EDCA agreement (2020), F-35A and HIMARS acquisitions, and PEESA sanctions targeting Nord Stream 2. Chapter three shows that Biden's multilateral approach, accelerated by Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, produced unprecedented Eastern Flank reinforcement, transforming Poland into an indispensable logistics hub and an active security provider within the Alliance. The thesis concludes that administration-level variation was genuine, yet structural forces — Russian revisionism, geographic logic, Congressional hawkishness, shared industrial interests, and Polish strategic overinvestment — determined the medium-term trajectory, producing substantial continuity beneath surface-level discontinuity.

Keywords: Polish-American relations, NATO security, Eastern Flank, defence policy, transatlantic alliances

List of Abbreviations

BMD: Ballistic Missile Defence
EDCA: Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement
EDI: European Deterrence Initiative
EFP: Enhanced Forward Presence
ERI: European Reassurance Initiative
EUCOM: United States European Command
F-35A: F-35A Lightning II fifth-generation multirole combat aircraft
GDP: gross domestic product
HIMARS: High Mobility Artillery Rocket System
LNG: liquefied natural gas
MANPADS: Man-Portable Air-Defense Systems
NDAA: National Defense Authorization Act
NATO: North Atlantic Treaty Organisation
NRF: NATO Response Force
PAC: Polish American Congress
PEESA: Protecting Europe's Energy Security Act
PiS: Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc (Law and Justice)
USAI: Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative
V Corps: Fifth Corps (United States Army forward command element in Europe)

Introduction

In the early hours of 24 February 2022, Russian armed forces crossed the internationally recognised borders of Ukraine in what the Kremlin designated a „special military operation” but what international observers quickly identified as the largest conventional military assault in Europe since the Second World War. Within hours, the Polish government had convened an emergency session of the Council of Ministers; within days, Warsaw had opened its borders to millions of Ukrainian refugees, authorised the transfer of Soviet-era military equipment to Kyiv, and formally requested the activation of NATO's Response Force. Poland's reaction was not merely an expression of geopolitical solidarity — it was the culmination of a strategic logic that had been constructed, investment by investment and treaty by treaty, over more than three decades of transatlantic partnership. The Russian invasion validated, in the most brutal and concrete terms imaginable, the central premise that had animated Polish security policy since the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact: that only an institutionalised, materially grounded, and politically credible security relationship with the United States could protect Polish sovereignty against the revisionist ambitions of its eastern neighbour. The management of that relationship across two substantially different American administrations — those of Donald J. Trump and Joseph R. Biden — constitutes the subject of the present thesis.

The Polish-American security relationship occupies a distinctive position in the contemporary literature on alliance politics. Poland is neither a major NATO power in the traditional sense — it lacks the nuclear capability of France and the United Kingdom, the historical weight of Germany, or the economic scale of the original Atlantic community — nor is it a peripheral or passive alliance member content to shelter beneath the extended deterrence umbrella without contribution. Over the period under examination in this thesis, the Republic of Poland pursued what can most accurately be described as a strategy of strategic overinvestment: allocating defence expenditure, diplomatic capital, and political symbolism in volumes that consistently exceeded what strict capability-matching calculations would prescribe, in order to deepen American institutional entanglement and thereby reduce the risk of abandonment that Polish strategic culture treats as an existential vulnerability. The success or failure of this strategy across two administrations with markedly different rhetorical orientations, normative commitments, and alliance management philosophies provides a compelling empirical case for evaluating broader theoretical debates about the relative weight of structural versus agential factors in shaping alliance outcomes.

The period 2017 to 2025 presents a near-ideal comparative framework for this analytical purpose. The Trump administration (January 2017 – January 2021) entered office with a systematic critique of existing multilateral alliance structures, treating burden-sharing as a transactional rather than collective security matter and subjecting even the most fundamental commitments — including, on multiple occasions, the mutual defence guarantee enshrined in Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty — to rhetorical conditionality that generated significant uncertainty among European partners. The Biden administration (January 2021 – January 2025) reversed this posture with equal deliberateness, restoring unconditional affirmations of alliance solidarity, reinvesting in multilateral frameworks, and framing American global engagement through the language of democratic values and rules-based order. Yet the material security relationship between the United States and Poland deepened substantially under both administrations, driven by the same structural imperatives — Russian revisionism, geographic logic, Congressional hawkishness, and sustained Polish strategic investment — that operated largely independently of executive preference. This continuity beneath rhetorical discontinuity constitutes one of the central puzzles that the thesis is designed to interrogate and resolve.

Research Context and Justification

The academic justification for a comparative study of Polish-American security relations across the Trump and Biden administrations rests on several converging considerations. First, the existing literature on NATO burden-sharing and alliance management has historically concentrated on the major European allies — Germany, France, the United Kingdom — while the Eastern flank has received comparatively less systematic attention, despite the fact that it was precisely the Eastern flank that became the operational centre of gravity for the Alliance following Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the subsequent conflict in the Donbas. Poland's trajectory from a beneficiary of collective defence to an active contributor to and shaper of Alliance strategy represents a transformation of analytical significance that has not yet been fully theorised. Second, the Trump presidency constituted a significant natural experiment in alliance politics: the hypothesis that transactional bilateralism or openly adversarial Alliance rhetoric would necessarily undermine material security cooperation was, in the Polish case, conspicuously disconfirmed, and explaining why requires careful engagement with both the structural and the agential dimensions of the relationship. Third, Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 — which occurred midway through the Biden administration period covered by this thesis — introduced an exogenous structural shock of such magnitude that it fundamentally altered the parameters of the security environment and permits analysis of how an already-deepened alliance relationship responds to dramatic threat materialisation.

The temporal scope of the study is deliberately bounded at the level of two presidential administrations for both analytical and practical reasons. The analytical rationale is that presidential administrations constitute coherent units of policy agency: they possess distinct doctrinal orientations, principal foreign policy teams, and characteristic rhetorical repertoires that generate meaningful variation for comparative purposes. The practical rationale is that the period 2017–2025 encompasses both the consolidation phase of Enhanced Forward Presence following the 2016 Warsaw Summit decisions, the bilateral institutionalisation represented by the Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement of August 2020, and the post-invasion transformation of NATO's Eastern posture — three developments sufficient to capture a complete cycle of strategic adjustment. The starting point of 2017 is not arbitrary: it represents the moment at which a qualitatively different kind of American executive leadership encountered a Polish security establishment that had, since 2014, been systematically accelerating its investment in the bilateral relationship. The resulting period constitutes a sufficiently rich and varied dataset for the comparative case study methodology employed.

Research Question and Subsidiary Questions

The central research question addressed by this thesis is formulated as follows: how did Polish-American security cooperation evolve under the Trump and Biden administrations, and what structural factors explain this evolution? This question is deliberately constructed to resist a monocausal answer. It asks not only about the trajectory of evolution — the empirical dimension — but also about the explanatory weight that should be assigned to structural factors in accounting for that trajectory, which requires engagement with the theoretical dimension. The formulation acknowledges that both administration-level variation and structural continuity may have been simultaneously operative, and that one of the thesis's tasks is to specify the conditions under which each type of factor was more or less determinative.

Two subsidiary questions guide the analytical structure of the empirical chapters. The first asks whether executive leadership style fundamentally shaped alliance outcomes, or whether structural factors were ultimately determinative. This question maps directly onto the Trump-Biden comparison and is addressed through systematic attention to both the rhetorical and the material dimensions of the relationship under each administration: the former as an indicator of agential variation, the latter as an indicator of structural continuity or divergence. The second subsidiary question asks what explains Poland's privileged position within the American alliance network despite the asymmetry in relative capabilities between the two states. This question is addressed primarily through the theoretical framework developed in Chapter One, which draws on structural realism, balance-of-threat theory, and constructivist approaches to strategic culture to account for the mechanisms by which a middle power can achieve disproportionate salience in a great-power alliance patron's strategic calculus.

Theoretical Framework

The thesis adopts a pluralist theoretical approach, drawing on multiple traditions within international relations and security studies rather than committing to a single paradigmatic framework. This choice is defended on the grounds that the phenomenon under investigation — the management of an asymmetric security alliance under conditions of structural change and executive variation — is sufficiently complex that any single theoretical lens captures only a portion of its relevant dynamics. The theoretical architecture of the thesis is organised around four principal perspectives, each of which is developed more systematically in Chapter One and applied to the empirical material in Chapters Two and Three.

Structural realism, in the tradition associated with Kenneth Waltz and John Mearsheimer, provides the foundational framework for understanding the material imperatives that drive both Polish strategic behaviour and American alliance commitments. The argument that states in an anarchic international environment balance against power concentrations, and that geographic proximity to a revisionist great power generates particularly acute security imperatives, offers a parsimonious account of why Poland's security orientation has been so consistently and intensely Atlanticist regardless of the domestic political complexion of either Warsaw or Washington. Balance-of-threat theory, associated with Stephen Walt, refines the structural realist baseline by specifying that states balance against threats — understood as a composite of aggregate power, geographic proximity, offensive capability, and perceived aggressive intentions — rather than against power as such. This refinement is essential for understanding why Poland's perception of Russia as the central security threat has remained stable across periods of significant variation in Russian actual capabilities, and why American extended deterrence credibility in Poland depends as much on symbolic and political signals as on the deployable force posture.

The alliance security dilemma, developed by Glenn Snyder, provides the conceptual vocabulary for analysing the characteristic tension within the Polish-American relationship between the risks of abandonment and entrapment. Polish strategic culture is profoundly shaped by the abandonment pole of this dilemma — the fear, grounded in historical experience from Versailles through Yalta, that great-power allies will sacrifice Polish security interests in pursuit of broader accommodations with adversaries. The sustained overinvestment strategy described above is best understood as an abandonment-mitigation mechanism: Poland accepts higher costs and deeper commitments in part to raise the reputational cost to Washington of disengagement. Liberal institutionalism complements the structural and realist perspectives by accounting for the role of institutional density — formal treaties, joint bodies, rotational deployments, defence industrial relationships — in stabilising the alliance relationship against the volatility of personal diplomacy and executive preference. The Trump years, in particular, suggest that institutional frameworks created significant inertia that moderated the potentially disruptive effects of rhetorical unconventionalism at the presidential level. Finally, constructivism is drawn upon to theorise the role of strategic culture, historical memory, and normative frameworks in shaping how both Polish and American actors interpret threats, define interests, and assign significance to particular policy choices.

Scope and Methodology

The thesis is bounded geographically to the bilateral Polish-American security relationship, while acknowledging that this relationship is embedded in the broader NATO institutional context and cannot be fully understood in isolation from Alliance-wide dynamics. The temporal scope, as noted above, covers the period from January 2017 to January 2025. The disciplinary scope is international relations and security studies, with particular attention to alliance politics, extended deterrence, and the strategic behaviour of middle powers. Military operational analysis and the assessment of specific weapons systems are addressed only to the extent necessary to characterise the material dimensions of the security relationship; the thesis does not purport to offer military-technical evaluations.

The methodological approach is comparative case study, treating the Trump administration period and the Biden administration period as two cases of the same overarching phenomenon — the management of the Polish-American security relationship by an American executive — and analysing them in parallel to identify patterns of continuity and variation. The comparative design permits both within-case process tracing — examining the internal logic and sequencing of policy development within each administration — and cross-case comparison of outcomes against structural expectations. The analysis is qualitative throughout: no attempt is made to operationalise the dependent variable as a quantitative index of alliance cooperation, on the grounds that the relevant phenomena — credibility, strategic reassurance, political signalling, doctrinal orientation — are not amenable to meaningful quantification without severe information loss.

The primary source base consists of official documents and statements: treaties and executive agreements, legislative acts and their accompanying committee reports, joint declarations and communiqués, White House and State Department policy documents, NATO Summit declarations, and Polish governmental strategic documents including successive National Security Strategies and Defence Concepts of the Republic of Poland. Secondary sources drawn upon include peer-reviewed scholarship in international relations and security studies, policy analyses from major research institutes in the United States, Poland, and Western Europe, and quality journalistic reporting where it provides contemporaneous documentation of developments not yet reflected in the academic literature. Polish-language sources are consulted in the original where relevant, and translated by the author.

Structure of the Thesis

The thesis is organised into three substantive chapters, framed by this introduction and a conclusion. Chapter One establishes the theoretical and historical foundations of the Polish-American security relationship. It develops the theoretical framework outlined above in greater analytical depth, introduces the key conceptual tools — the alliance security dilemma, balance-of-threat theory, the concept of strategic culture — and then applies them to a historical survey of the bilateral relationship from the post-Cold War enlargement debates through to the eve of the Trump administration. Particular attention is paid to the formative significance of the 2009 Ballistic Missile Defence cancellation as a reference point for Polish abandonment anxiety, the post-2014 acceleration of bilateral security investment following Russia's annexation of Crimea, and the institutional landscape — NATO Enhanced Forward Presence, the 2016 Warsaw Summit decisions, the existing Status of Forces arrangements — that the Trump administration inherited upon taking office. The chapter establishes that entering 2017, the Polish-American relationship was characterised by considerable institutional density, sustained material deepening, and a Polish strategic posture of deliberate overinvestment in bilateral ties.

Chapter Two analyses the Trump administration period (2017–2021) in systematic detail. It examines the impact of Trump's transactional bilateral approach on Polish strategic calculations, arguing that Poland's decision to differentiate itself through exceptional defence expenditure — ultimately reaching 2.5 percent of GDP, well above the Alliance's formal 2 percent target — reflected a sophisticated reading of the administration's priorities and succeeded in securing a privileged interlocutor status for Warsaw within the bilateral relationship. The chapter analyses the Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement of August 2020 as the institutional centrepiece of the period, documenting the commitment of approximately 4,500 additional American troops and the establishment of V Corps forward headquarters in Poznań. It examines the major arms acquisition agreements — the F-35A contract for 32 aircraft and the HIMARS procurement — as well as the Congressional enactment of the Protecting Europe's Energy Security Act (PEESA), which imposed sanctions on Nord Stream 2 construction in a manner that aligned American and Polish strategic interests. The chapter also addresses the costs and vulnerabilities of the transactional relationship: the deepening of asymmetry, the friction with European partners that accompanied the Polish-American rapprochement, and the structural vulnerability of a relationship grounded substantially in personal presidential rapport rather than institutional obligation.

Chapter Three examines the Biden administration period (2021–2025), analysing the implications of the multilateral turn for the bilateral relationship with Poland. It documents the initial tensions arising from the administration's restoration of unconditional Article 5 guarantees — which, paradoxically, reduced Poland's distinctive leverage as a state willing to pay a premium for personalised security assurances — and the normative friction introduced by the governance conflict between Warsaw and Brussels over rule-of-law standards during the period of PiS administration. The chapter's analytical centre is the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which it treats as the decisive structural event of the entire period under study: the activation of the NATO Response Force, the surge of American troop presence in Poland to approximately 10,000 personnel, the transformation of Poland into the indispensable logistics hub for Western military support to Ukraine, the activation of V Corps as a fully operational headquarters in July 2022, and the completion of the Aegis Ashore system at Redzikowo are all documented and analysed. The chapter also examines Poland's emergence as an active security provider — through the transfer of MiG-29 aircraft, T-72 tanks, Krab self-propelled howitzers, and Piorun man-portable air defence systems to Ukraine — and the continued ambiguity surrounding the question of permanent American basing in Poland, which the invasion rendered a de facto reality while leaving formally unresolved.

The Conclusion synthesises the findings of the empirical chapters and returns to the central research question. It advances the thesis's core argument: that administration-level variation was real and consequential in the short term, particularly with respect to rhetorical register, the normative framing of alliance commitments, and the distribution of bilateral leverage, while structural factors — Russian revisionism, geographic logic, Congressional hawkishness, Polish strategic overinvestment, and the industrial interests binding American and Polish defence establishments — ultimately determined the medium-term trajectory. The continuity of material deepening beneath rhetorical discontinuity is identified as the empirical datum most in need of theoretical explanation, and the conclusion proposes that it is best accounted for by a synthesis of structural and institutionalist perspectives that assigns determinative weight to structural imperatives while acknowledging the genuine, if bounded, agency of executive leadership in modulating the pace, form, and political texture of alliance management.

Note on Sources and Limitations

Several limitations of the present study deserve explicit acknowledgement. First, the reliance on publicly available documents necessarily constrains access to the internal deliberations, classified assessments, and informal negotiations that shape alliance management in practice. The positions of both governments as expressed in official statements and agreements are taken as indicative of real policy orientations, but the possibility that significant divergence exists between public posture and private calculation cannot be discounted and will, in some instances, only be resolvable when relevant archives are opened to scholarly research. Second, the comparative case study design, while well suited to the identification of patterns and the evaluation of theoretical explanations, does not permit the kind of statistical generalisation appropriate to large-N quantitative research. The findings are offered as theoretically informed interpretations of a specific case rather than as propositions established by the empirical standards of social-scientific hypothesis testing. Third, the analysis of the Biden period necessarily rests on primary and secondary sources produced during or immediately following the period itself; the longer-term assessments, archival releases, and retrospective analyses that will eventually be available to historians of this period are not yet accessible, and some interpretations advanced here will be subject to revision as the evidentiary record matures.

Notwithstanding these limitations, the present study offers a systematic and theoretically grounded account of an alliance relationship of considerable significance for European security, American strategic posture, and the broader dynamics of NATO cohesion in an era of renewed great-power competition. The Polish-American case illuminates with particular clarity the conditions under which middle powers can exercise disproportionate influence within asymmetric alliances, the mechanisms by which institutional density can moderate the effects of executive volatility, and the primacy of structural factors in shaping alliance trajectories across periods of significant variation in the preferences of governing elites. These are questions of enduring relevance not only for the bilateral relationship between Warsaw and Washington but for the theory and practice of alliance management in the twenty-first century.

Chapter 1. Theoretical and Historical Foundations of Polish-American Security Relations

1.1. Alliance Theory and the Concept of Security Partnerships

The study of alliance formation and maintenance has occupied a central position within the discipline of international relations since the mid-twentieth century. Theoretical frameworks developed across multiple schools of thought offer complementary analytical lenses through which the evolution of Polish-American security cooperation may be examined. Structural realism, balance-of-threat theory, liberal institutionalism, and constructivism each illuminate distinct dimensions of the relationship, from the material imperatives that drive states towards alliance membership to the ideational factors that sustain cooperation in the absence of immediate external pressure. No single theoretical tradition provides a complete explanation; rather, the analytical value of each approach is demonstrated when the particular conditions that it foregrounds are most salient in a given historical episode.

Structural realism posits that states operating within an anarchic international system are compelled by the logic of self-help to aggregate power and form alliances as instruments of balancing against dominant or threatening states. Within this tradition, alliances are understood as essentially temporary arrangements dictated by the distribution of capabilities, and their cohesion is therefore contingent upon the persistence of the external threat that originally motivated their formation. Poland's entry into the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in 1999 can be readily interpreted through this structural lens: the Soviet threat had receded, yet the residual uncertainty inherent in Poland's geographic position — between a reunified Germany and a weakened but still nuclear-armed Russia — provided powerful structural incentives for institutionalised alignment with the Western security community. However, structural realism offers limited guidance for understanding why Poland came to regard alliance with the United States specifically, rather than broader European multilateralism, as the indispensable cornerstone of its security policy.

Balance-of-threat theory refines the structural realist account by positing that states balance not against aggregate power alone, but against perceived threats, which constitute a composite function of aggregate power, geographic proximity, offensive capability, and aggressive intentions. This framework proves particularly useful for analysing Polish security calculations, as it accommodates the profound role of historical experience in shaping elite and societal perceptions of Russian intentions. The annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation in 2014 can thus be understood not merely as a recalibration of the regional balance of power but as a confirmation of threat assessments long embedded in Polish strategic culture. Balance-of-threat theory also helps explain why Poland's alliance behaviour diverged from that of states in Western Europe, whose proximity to and historical experience of Russia differed substantially from the Polish case.

The concept of the alliance security dilemma addresses a fundamental tension inherent in all alliance relationships. As articulated in Snyder's foundational work, the alliance security dilemma involves the tension between abandonment and entrapment: abandonment occurs when an ally defects from the coalition or fails to provide support, while entrapment occurs when one state is dragged into a conflict by its ally's actions . For smaller states dependent upon a great-power protector, this dilemma takes on particular urgency: the fear of abandonment typically outweighs the fear of entrapment, generating strong incentives to demonstrate loyalty through expeditionary contributions and bilateral over-investment in the partnership. The framework of the alliance security dilemma represents the most appropriate theoretical anchor for understanding reflections on whether Poland should accept elements of American ballistic missile defence infrastructure on its territory ^{[3, s. 49]}. The tensions between abandonment and entrapment have remained structurally embedded in Polish-American security cooperation throughout the period under examination in this thesis.

Liberal-institutionalist perspectives argue that international institutions reduce the transaction costs of cooperation, provide information that mitigates fears of defection, and create iterative frameworks that enable states to pursue longer-term cooperative gains. NATO, in this reading, functions not merely as a collective defence arrangement but as an institution that locks in behavioural commitments, socialises member-state elites into common norms, and creates vested interests in institutional continuity that persist even when immediate strategic interests might otherwise suggest retrenchment. The institutional architecture of NATO — including its integrated military command, standardisation agreements, and deliberative council — generated a degree of alliance cohesion that bilateral Polish-American relations alone could not have sustained during periods of American policy volatility. The liberal-institutionalist lens accordingly helps explain why NATO remained an effective framework for security cooperation even when domestic political developments in both capitals introduced significant friction into the bilateral relationship.

Constructivist approaches draw attention to the role of shared identities, norms, and intersubjective understandings in shaping the security behaviour of states. The concept of security communities, understood as groups of states among which war has become unthinkable and which have developed stable expectations of peaceful change, captures an important dimension of the transatlantic relationship that neither structural realism nor liberal institutionalism fully addresses. Poland's post-1989 integration into Euro-Atlantic institutions was accompanied by the progressive internalisation of liberal-democratic norms, which constituted a powerful basis for Polish-American cooperation in the promotion of democratic governance. The joint declarations and diplomatic statements through which both parties affirmed their commitment to shared values were not merely rhetorical performances; they represented attempts to constitute and reinforce a common identity that would sustain cooperation across changing administrations and strategic circumstances ^{[1, s. 81]}.

Several key concepts require precise definition before the analysis of Polish-American security cooperation can proceed with analytical rigour. Burden-sharing refers to the distribution of costs — financial, military, and diplomatic — associated with the provision of collective defence and the maintenance of the alliance. Extended deterrence designates the commitment by a nuclear-armed state to defend allied non-nuclear states under the nuclear umbrella, which constitutes perhaps the most significant expression of alliance solidarity. Forward presence refers to the stationing or rotational deployment of allied forces on the territory of a partner state, which serves both as a tangible deterrence signal and as a reassurance measure. Strategic reassurance encompasses the full range of political, military, and diplomatic signals through which an alliance leader seeks to convince partner states of the reliability of its commitments. Alliance credibility, finally, refers to the degree to which an alliance's security guarantees are regarded as dependable by both allies and potential adversaries — a quality that is notoriously vulnerable to damage by inconsistent or erratic signalling.

Table 1.1. Theoretical frameworks applied to Polish-American security cooperation
Theoretical tradition	Core logic	Key concepts	Application to the Polish-American case
Structural realism	States balance against dominant power under systemic anarchy	Polarity, balancing, self-help	Explains Poland's alignment with NATO as structural response to post-Cold War uncertainty
Balance-of-threat theory	States balance against perceived threats, not merely aggregate power	Threat perception, intentions, offensive capability, proximity	Explains distinctiveness of Polish threat assessment vis-à-vis Russia relative to Western European partners
Alliance security dilemma	Tension between abandonment and entrapment in alliance relationships	Abandonment, entrapment, commitment credibility	Explains Poland's expeditionary contributions and strategy of bilateral deepening
Liberal institutionalism	Institutions reduce cooperation costs and lock in behavioural commitments	Iteration, information, compliance, vested interests	Explains NATO's resilience as framework for cooperation despite bilateral friction
Constructivism	Shared identities and norms shape security behaviour	Security communities, norm diffusion, identity	Explains value-based dimension of cooperation and tensions arising from democratic backsliding

The central analytical puzzle addressed in this thesis may now be formulated with greater precision. Polish-American security cooperation has unfolded against a background of significant variation in American foreign policy orientation, domestic political developments in Poland that raised normative questions about the democratic foundations of the relationship, and a rapidly deteriorating regional security environment following Russia's renewed military aggression. The question of whether NATO's institutional weight, combined with shared strategic interests and Poland's sustained investment in bilateral defence ties, proved sufficient to preserve substantive cooperation despite these challenges forms the analytical spine of the comparative inquiry that follows. Each of the theoretical frameworks introduced above will be invoked where it offers the greatest explanatory leverage, with the analysis ultimately suggesting that a multi-layered account — combining structural incentives, institutional stickiness, and the contested role of shared values — is required to understand the trajectory of the relationship across successive American administrations.

1.2. The Evolution of Polish-American Security Ties from 1989 to 2009

The transformation of Polish-American relations following the collapse of communist rule in 1989 was shaped by a convergence of strategic, economic, and normative factors that created uniquely favourable conditions for a deepening partnership. Poland's negotiated transition to pluralist democracy and market economics — the product of Round Table negotiations between the communist government and the Solidarity movement in early 1989 — positioned it as the most prominent case of systemic transformation in Central and Eastern Europe. American engagement with the emerging Polish democracy was immediate and substantive. After the establishment of the first independent government of Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Finance Minister Leszek Balcerowicz travelled to Washington to present the economic reform programme to American policymakers, and the American side responded by initiating a Stabilisation Fund to which the United States contributed two hundred million US dollars, enabling the convertibility of the Polish currency ^{[2, s. 55]}. The broader economic support extended to Poland in this period was equally significant: President George Herbert Walker Bush announced the cancellation of more than two billion US dollars of Polish state debt, signalling Washington's commitment to the success of Polish transformation ^{[2, s. 55]}.

American support for Polish democratisation and economic reform was not merely humanitarian; it reflected a considered strategic judgement about the importance of anchoring Central European states firmly within the Western community of nations. Poland's geopolitical position — bordering both Germany and what would become the Russian Federation — gave its orientation particular salience for the configuration of post-Cold War European order. After the Cold War, Poland joined the American-led free world and benefited from American-promoted liberal values, including democracy and the rule of law ^{[1, s. 74]}. The consolidation of the political system through the 1990s generated a widespread belief that Poland's democratic transformation was effectively irreversible, a view reinforced by political theories suggesting that the outcome of liberalisation was „overdetermined” by cultural, historical, economic, and security factors ^{[1, s. 74]}. This confidence in the durability of Polish democratisation subsequently informed the willingness of American policymakers to treat Poland as a reliable partner in cooperative democracy-promotion efforts beyond its immediate neighbourhood.

The question of NATO membership emerged early as the defining strategic objective of Polish foreign policy. Poland's application for NATO membership was actively supported by the Polish-American diaspora community in the United States, which numbered between nine and ten million citizens of Polish origin and which worked actively through organisations such as the Polish American Congress (PAC) to orient Poland towards the West and secure its integration into Western security structures ^{[2, s. 58]}. This diaspora engagement represented a distinctive channel through which Polish strategic interests were articulated within American domestic politics, reinforcing the case for enlargement in congressional and executive deliberations. Poland's accession to NATO was formally completed in March 1999, along with Hungary and the Czech Republic, in what the Polish government regarded as the definitive confirmation of its post-Cold War strategic reorientation. Membership in the Alliance provided not only the formal guarantee of collective defence under Article Five but also the institutional framework for a sustained deepening of defence cooperation with the United States across all domains of military activity.

The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 fundamentally altered the strategic context within which Polish-American security cooperation operated. Poland offered unconditional solidarity with the United States in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, and subsequently committed forces to both Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom. Poland's participation in the coalition that invaded Iraq in 2003 was particularly consequential for the relationship, as Poland became one of the signatories of the public statement by European leaders expressing support for American policy, and subsequently assumed command of a multinational division in the central-south zone of occupation. The adoption and promotion of the values of democracy and the rule of law played an important role in Polish-American relations during this period, and Poland's support for American-led efforts to democratise the Greater Middle East was framed partly in these normative terms ^{[1, s. 81]}. In practice, however, the motivation was primarily strategic: by supporting the United States, Polish authorities primarily sought to promote the principle of intra-allied solidarity within NATO, thereby strengthening American commitment to Polish security ^{[1, s. 81]}.

The expeditionary contributions made by Poland in Afghanistan and Iraq produced mixed results from the perspective of Polish strategic interests. Polish forces were deployed in conditions for which they were not fully equipped, and the operations exposed the structural limitations of the Polish military as it underwent post-communist modernisation. While the demonstrations of solidarity generated political goodwill in Washington, they did not translate automatically into the tangible security enhancements — above all, permanent American military presence on Polish territory — that Warsaw regarded as the essential prerequisite for credible deterrence. The failure to achieve permanent basing arrangements was a persistent source of frustration in Polish security planning, reinforcing the perception that the asymmetry of the bilateral relationship required continuous Polish investment in the partnership to prevent the slide towards abandonment. This pattern of sustained contribution in the hope of deeper commitment constitutes one of the structural constants of the bilateral relationship throughout the period examined in this thesis.

The Bush administration's proposal in 2007 to locate elements of a ballistic missile defence (BMD) system on Polish and Czech territory represented both an opportunity and a source of new strategic anxieties for Warsaw. The proposed installation of ground-based interceptor missiles in Poland was presented by American officials as a measure directed against potential ballistic missile threats from Iran, a characterisation widely contested in Russian official commentary. Poland's potential acceptance of the BMD site raised precisely the dilemma articulated by Snyder's framework: the fear of entrapment — being drawn into American confrontation with Russia through hosting contested infrastructure — competed with the fear of abandonment if Poland declined and forfeited an opportunity to deepen bilateral defence ties ^{[3, s. 49]}. Ultimately, Warsaw negotiated the BMD agreement, simultaneously extracting from Washington commitments to deploy Patriot air defence batteries on Polish territory as part of the expanding bilateral defence relationship.

The missile defence negotiations also generated significant tension within the Alliance, as they underscored the extent to which bilateral defence arrangements between the United States and individual Central European allies could create complications for broader NATO coherence. The neorealist concept of the alliance security dilemma represents the most appropriate theoretical framework for understanding Czech, Polish, and pan-European deliberations about the possible acceptance of elements of American missile defence infrastructure ^{[3, s. 49]}. The eventual integration of American missile defence plans into the NATO framework at the Lisbon Summit in 2010 partially resolved this tension by multilateralising the arrangement, though the bilateral dimension of the Polish-American BMD relationship retained its own distinct strategic logic. The Lisbon summit declaration and the New Strategic Concept of NATO explicitly stated the Alliance's willingness to cooperate with Russia on missile defence projects, which partially blunted the potential sharpness of resulting security dilemmas ^{[3, s. 61]}.

NATO accession completed in March 1999, providing the formal collective defence guarantee under Article Five of the Washington Treaty
Participation in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom as demonstrations of intra-allied solidarity
Assumption of command of a multinational division in central-south Iraq, marking Poland's emergence as a significant operational partner
Negotiation of the bilateral ballistic missile defence agreement with the Bush administration in 2008
American debt cancellation and economic stabilisation assistance in the early 1990s as the material foundation of post-communist transformation
Diaspora engagement through the Polish American Congress in support of NATO enlargement and the deepening of bilateral security ties

By the end of the Bush era in early 2009, Polish-American security relations had achieved a depth and density unprecedented in the two countries' shared history. Poland had emerged as one of the most committed American allies in NATO, contributing forces to American-led expeditionary operations in excess of what its material capabilities might have suggested as the minimal necessary demonstration of solidarity. The relationship was anchored in formal alliance membership, undergirded by a rapidly expanding bilateral defence cooperation framework, and infused with a values dimension that emphasised shared democratic commitments. Yet it remained vulnerable to the dynamics identified by alliance security dilemma theory: Poland's intense focus on the bilateral relationship with Washington reflected a deep-seated fear of abandonment that continuous investment in the partnership was designed to mitigate, even as American strategic attention was increasingly drawn towards other regions and other priorities.

1.3. Obama Administration Legacy and Its Implications for the Biden–Trump Era

The incoming Obama administration entered office in January 2009 committed to a fundamental reappraisal of American foreign policy, including a recalibration of relations with the Russian Federation designated the „reset” policy. The reset sought to de-escalate the tensions that had accumulated during the later Bush years — particularly in the aftermath of the Russo-Georgian war of August 2008 — and to identify areas of potential cooperation with Moscow on issues of shared strategic concern, including nuclear arms control, non-proliferation, and the stabilisation of Afghanistan. From Warsaw's perspective, the reset represented a troubling signal that American strategic attention might be redirected in ways that reduced the priority attached to Central European security concerns. The announced cancellation of the Bush-era BMD architecture in September 2009 was received in Warsaw with shock disproportionate to its operational significance, precisely because it appeared to validate fears that American commitments could be revised without adequate consultation with affected allies.

The Obama administration's announcement regarding missile defence carried painful symbolic resonance in Polish historical memory, as it coincided with the seventieth anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The manner of the announcement, which reportedly reached Polish officials through diplomatic channels without adequate advance warning, reinforced anxieties about the reliability of American consultative procedures and the weight given to Polish interests in American strategic calculations. President Obama subsequently visited Poland and addressed these concerns through an emphatic rhetorical affirmation of the bilateral partnership, speaking about the American-Polish „unity of values” and the „spiritual strength” that Poland gave to Europe and the world ^{[1, s. 80]}. The symbolic reassurance offered through these declarations was appreciated in Warsaw, yet Polish security planners continued to prioritise tangible material commitments over declaratory policy as the primary indicator of alliance reliability.

The Russian annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of armed conflict in eastern Ukraine in 2014 constituted the pivotal inflection point of the Obama years, transforming the strategic context within which Polish-American security cooperation operated. The events of 2014 confirmed threat assessments that Polish security specialists had maintained throughout the preceding two decades regarding the revisionist character of Russian strategic ambitions and the insufficiency of post-Cold War reassurance measures. The Obama administration's response included the announcement of the European Reassurance Initiative (ERI) with an initial allocation of one billion dollars in 2014, designed to fund an expanded American military presence in Europe, additional exercises, pre-positioned equipment, and improvements to host-nation infrastructure. The ERI was subsequently renamed the European Deterrence Initiative (EDI) and its funding was substantially increased in successive annual cycles, reflecting the growing American recognition that the European security environment had changed fundamentally and that deterrence required a more credible forward posture.

The concrete measures introduced under the ERI and EDI framework included the rotation of armoured brigade combat teams through Poland and the Baltic states, the establishment of Enhanced Forward Presence (EFP) battlegroups in the three Baltic states and Poland as decided at the Warsaw NATO Summit in July 2016, and the pre-positioning of heavy equipment sufficient to support one armoured brigade. Poland was designated as the primary logistics hub for American reinforcement operations on the Eastern flank, a role that entailed significant infrastructure investment and reinforced the bilateral defence relationship in operational terms. The Warsaw NATO Summit of 2016 represented in many respects the culmination of Obama-era efforts to reassure Eastern flank allies, producing commitments that reflected the lessons drawn from Crimea and the recognition that credible deterrence required forward presence capable of signalling the costs of aggression before the fact rather than after it.

The Obama administration's legacy for the subsequent Biden-Trump era was profoundly ambiguous in character. On the positive side, the post-2014 reversal of the reset policy and the establishment of ERI/EDI had significantly enhanced the material foundations of the bilateral defence relationship, and the Warsaw Summit commitments provided an institutional baseline from which subsequent administrations could not easily retreat without paying significant alliance management costs. The joint declaration on the Polish-American strategic partnership of 18 September 2018 — which post-dated the Obama era but consolidated its normative legacy — confirmed the parties' „respect for and commitment to common democratic values and principles, including freedom, independent institutions, and human rights” ^{[1, s. 81]}. On the negative side, the episodes of the BMD cancellation and the reset had demonstrated that American strategic priorities could shift in ways that left Eastern flank allies exposed, and that symbolic reassurance could not fully substitute for the permanent military presence that Polish security planners regarded as the only truly credible deterrent.

Period	Administration	Key development	Strategic significance for Poland
1989–1993	Bush Sr.	Debt cancellation; Stabilisation Fund; transformation support	Economic foundation of post-communist partnership ^{[2, s. 55]}
1999	Clinton	Poland's NATO accession	Formal collective defence guarantee; Alliance socialisation
2003–2008	Bush Jr.	Iraq participation; BMD negotiations and agreement	Deepened bilateral ties; alliance security dilemma surfaced ^{[3, s. 49]}
2009	Obama	BMD cancellation; reset with Russia initiated	Abandonment anxiety intensified; consultative deficit exposed
2014–2016	Obama	ERI/EDI established; EFP and Warsaw Summit decisions	Material reassurance; Poland as Eastern flank logistics hub
2017–2021	Trump	Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement; bilateral deepening	Intensified bilateralism; transactional alliance management
2021–2025	Biden	Full-scale Russian aggression; permanent basing discussions	Structural transformation of deterrence posture on Eastern flank

Figure 1.1. Key milestones in Polish-American security cooperation, 1989–2025

Both President Obama and his successor addressed Polish audiences at sites of profound historical and symbolic significance, and the contrast between their rhetorical approaches illuminates important differences in the domestic political contexts from which each spoke. Obama's speech emphasised the „unity of values” and the „spiritual strength” that Poland had contributed to Europe and the world ^{[1, s. 80]}. In turn, President Donald Trump, addressing the Polish public at Krasiński Square in Warsaw on 6 July 2017, emphasised the historic struggle of Poles for freedom, independence, family, and faith as the foundation of Western civilisation, and spoke explicitly about the defence of democratic Europe alongside attachment to „the rule of law” and „the right to free speech and free expression” ^{[1, s. 80]}. The choice of Krasiński Square — the memorial site of the Warsaw Uprising — as the setting for major presidential addresses reflected the symbolic weight attached to historical memory in Polish-American diplomatic relations and the importance of narrative framing in sustaining the affective dimension of the partnership across administrations with divergent foreign policy orientations.

The ambiguous Obama legacy thus provided both the institutional infrastructure and the strategic anxieties that would define Polish calculations during the Trump and Biden years. The ERI/EDI framework, the Warsaw Summit commitments, and the growing network of bilateral defence cooperation agreements constituted a dense institutional environment that created significant inertia in favour of continued cooperation. At the same time, the episodes of 2009 had demonstrated that this institutional environment was not immune to revision by a determined American executive, and that Polish security — ultimately dependent upon American willingness to honour Article Five commitments — rested on a foundation that could not be taken entirely for granted. This combination of institutional depth and residual strategic anxiety shaped the manner in which Poland responded to the distinctive challenges of the Trump and Biden administrations, the subject of the following chapters.

1.4. Polish Strategic Culture and National Security Priorities

Strategic culture, understood as the set of shared beliefs, assumptions, and patterns of behaviour regarding the use of force and the appropriate ends and means of security policy, provides an indispensable interpretive framework for understanding Polish security behaviour. Polish strategic culture has been profoundly shaped by the nation's historical experience of external domination, territorial partition, and the catastrophic consequences of inadequate security arrangements. The three partitions of Poland between 1772 and 1795, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 and the subsequent Soviet invasion, the wartime agreements at Yalta in 1945 that confined Poland within the Soviet sphere of influence, and the massacre of Polish officers at Katyn — these events constitute a foundational historical memory that shapes elite and public perceptions of security threats, the reliability of multilateral commitments, and the necessity of robust bilateral guarantees from powerful protectors. This historical consciousness generates a distinctive strategic orientation characterised by acute sensitivity to Russian intentions, deep scepticism regarding the adequacy of multilateral reassurance mechanisms, and a strong preference for tangible military commitments over declaratory guarantees.

The acute perception of Russian threat in Polish strategic culture cannot be reduced to mere historical anxiety; it has been continuously reinforced by developments in the post-Cold War era that appeared to confirm the validity of long-standing risk assessments. Russia's military interventions in Chechnya, the 2008 military intervention in Georgia, and above all the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 provided successive validations of the Polish threat assessment that had been dismissed as excessive by some Western European partners. Poland's strategic culture accordingly displays characteristics that might be described as a determination to avoid any arrangement recreating the conditions of dependency upon or accommodation of great-power neighbours that characterised the interwar period. The United States, given its geographic distance from Eastern Europe and its status as the world's preeminent military power, has been consistently identified in Polish strategic culture as the sole credible ultimate guarantor against Russian pressure, a role that neither European Union collective arrangements nor regional formats have been deemed capable of fulfilling independently.

Poland's defence spending trajectory reflects the strategic culture described above in measurable material terms. Poland met the NATO target of two percent of gross domestic product devoted to defence in 2017, earlier than many longer-standing Alliance members. By 2023, Polish defence spending had risen to a level surpassing four percent of gross domestic product, making Poland the Alliance member with the highest ratio of defence expenditure to national income. This trajectory was not the product of American pressure alone; it reflected a cross-party domestic consensus, unusual in the otherwise polarised Polish political landscape, regarding the necessity of sustained defence investment in view of the deteriorating regional security environment. The financial scale of Polish defence modernisation was matched by the ambition of specific armament programmes, as contracts were signed for the acquisition of F-35 multirole combat aircraft, High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), M1 Abrams main battle tanks from the United States, and K2 main battle tanks and K9 self-propelled howitzers from the Republic of Korea.

Sustained increase in defence expenditure from two percent of gross domestic product in 2017 to over four percent by 2023, the highest ratio in NATO
Procurement of F-35 multirole combat aircraft to replace ageing Soviet-era platforms and achieve interoperability with American air forces
Acquisition of HIMARS multiple rocket launch systems significantly enhancing precision long-range fire capability
Contract for M1A2 Abrams main battle tanks constituting one of the largest single armoured vehicle purchases in recent NATO history
K2 Black Panther main battle tanks and K9 Thunder self-propelled howitzers from the Republic of Korea supplementing American-origin systems
Investment in Patriot surface-to-air missile defence batteries integrated into the wider NATO integrated air and missile defence architecture
Expansion of military personnel numbers through both voluntary and conscript mechanisms to address manpower requirements of enlarged ground forces
Development of territorial defence forces as a distributed, resilient layer of national resistance complementing conventional military formations

The campaign for permanent American military basing on Polish territory constitutes perhaps the most characteristic expression of Polish strategic culture in the post-2014 period. Polish officials pursued this objective through bilateral diplomacy, public advocacy, and concrete financial offers to contribute to the infrastructure costs associated with permanent stationing — a disposition encapsulated in the informal term „Fort Trump,” which circulated during discussions between President Trump and President Duda in 2018. The preference for permanent basing over rotational deployment was grounded in the strategic assessment that rotational forces, however substantial, could be withdrawn without triggering Article Five obligations and therefore provided a qualitatively weaker deterrence signal than permanent stationing. Permanent presence would constitute a tripwire creating automatic American military involvement in the event of conflict, thereby addressing the fundamental abandonment anxiety at the heart of Polish security calculations through structural rather than merely diplomatic means.

Polish strategic culture exhibits a degree of cross-party consensus on core security priorities that contrasts sharply with the deep polarisation characterising other areas of Polish political life. Both major political formations — the Law and Justice (PiS) government that held power from 2015 to 2023 and the coalition government led by Donald Tusk that succeeded it — maintained the fundamentals of Polish defence and security policy, including the commitment to NATO, the prioritisation of the bilateral American relationship, and the expansion of defence expenditure. This continuity reflects the deep embedding of core security priorities in strategic culture rather than the preferences of any particular political formation, and it provides a degree of predictability in Polish external security behaviour that has facilitated long-term American defence planning. The remarkable bipartisanship on security issues contrasted with divergent approaches to the normative dimension of the relationship, as the PiS government's domestic governance reforms generated significant tensions with American and European partners regarding the rule of law and democratic standards.

The concept of Americanisation as a self-reinforcing dynamic captures an important dimension of the trajectory of Polish defence investment and security policy. As Poland acquired American-manufactured or American-compatible weapons systems, integrated its operational planning with American counterparts, and deepened interoperability at all levels of its armed forces, the costs of disengagement from the bilateral relationship rose correspondingly. American equipment creates dependencies in terms of maintenance, spare parts, technical support, and training that constitute structural incentives for policy continuity irrespective of changes in government or shifts in the broader political relationship. Relations between countries are also determined by the economic situation of given countries, and the asymmetrical economic position of Poland relative to the United States reinforces the structural dependency inherent in the overall relationship ^{[2, s. 67]}. In the security domain, this asymmetry manifests as a form of beneficial lock-in: by investing heavily in American-provided or American-compatible defence capabilities, Poland has progressively made exit from the bilateral relationship more costly, thereby addressing the abandonment anxiety through structural means.

Table 1.2. Principal drivers of Polish national security priorities and their policy manifestations
Driver category	Specific factors	Manifestation in security policy
Historical memory	Partitions, Yalta agreements, Katyn massacre, Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact	Rejection of great-power accommodation; insistence on hard, binding guarantees over declaratory commitments
Threat perception	Russian military capability and demonstrated revisionism (Georgia 2008, Crimea 2014, Ukraine 2022)	Eastern flank deterrence as overriding priority; sustained campaign for permanent American basing
Alliance management	Fear of abandonment; imperative to demonstrate alliance value and reliability	Expeditionary contributions beyond minimal requirements; defence spending exceeding NATO target
Material investment	F-35, Abrams, HIMARS, K2, K9 procurement; interoperability deepening	Structural lock-in through equipment dependencies; rising costs of bilateral disengagement
Normative commitments	Liberal-democratic values and democracy-promotion role	Partnership with the United States in democracy promotion; tensions arising from PiS governance reforms after 2015
Diaspora engagement	Polish-American community of nine to ten million people in the United States	Advocacy for NATO enlargement and bilateral security ties through organised political channels ^{[2, s. 58]}

The normative dimension of Polish strategic culture deserves particular attention in view of its implications for the subsequent analysis. Poland's post-1989 strategic reorientation was accompanied by a genuine commitment to the liberal-democratic values that provided the ideational framework for the Euro-Atlantic community. The United States has been the main promoter of democratic values in the world for decades, and Poland, striving for the closest possible relations with the United States, joined its efforts to promote democracy in Eastern Europe and other parts of the world ^{[1, s. 73]}. Polish participation in international democracy-promotion efforts — in Eastern Europe and beyond — reflected both strategic calculation and normative conviction, and the values dimension of the bilateral relationship was regarded by Polish policymakers as a source of additional solidarity that complemented the strictly strategic foundations of the partnership. However, the domestic governance reforms introduced by the PiS government after 2015, which were assessed by international observers as affecting judicial independence and media pluralism, created a significant tension between Poland's declared values commitments and its domestic governance practices.

This tension between strategic partnership and democratic norms had measurable consequences for the scope of Polish-American cooperation. Poland's deviation from the values of liberal democracy and the rule of law limited the possibility of Polish-American cooperation for the promotion of democracy ^{[1, s. 86]}. The adoption and promotion of democratic values had traditionally played an important role in Polish-American relations, and democratic backsliding in Poland thus imposed constraints on a significant dimension of the bilateral relationship that had contributed to its legitimacy and public resonance ^{[1, s. 86]}. Both American administrations under examination in this thesis were required to navigate the tension between strategic partnership — which demanded engagement with Warsaw regardless of domestic governance controversies — and the normative commitments that had historically provided the ideational foundation for the relationship. This navigation proved more comfortable for the Trump administration, which explicitly deprioritised the democracy dimension of American foreign policy, and more challenging for the Biden administration, which sought to restore it to centrality.

Russia identified as the primary existential security threat, a perception rooted in historical experience and reinforced by successive episodes of Russian military revisionism
United States regarded as the sole credible ultimate security guarantor, given the perceived limitations of European defence arrangements operating without American leadership
Permanent American military basing treated as the strategic objective most likely to address the abandonment anxiety through structural rather than merely declaratory means
Defence expenditure elevated significantly above the NATO target as a demonstration of reliability and a contribution to maintaining American strategic interest in the region
Cross-party domestic consensus on security fundamentals providing strategic continuity across governmental transitions of different political orientations
Normative commitments to liberal democracy serving as a legitimating framework for the partnership, complicated by domestic governance controversies under the PiS government

The structural characteristics of the Polish-American relationship as it stood at the threshold of the Trump era in early 2017 may be summarised as follows. The relationship was institutionally dense, embedded within both the collective framework of NATO and a growing network of bilateral defence cooperation agreements. It was materially deepening, driven by Polish defence expenditure among the highest in the Alliance as a proportion of national income. It was rhetorically robust, underpinned by repeated joint declarations affirming shared values and strategic priorities, including the joint declaration of September 2018 that confirmed commitment to democratic values and principles ^{[1, s. 81]}. And it was animated on the Polish side by a strategic culture that regarded the bilateral relationship with Washington as indispensable and was prepared to invest substantially — in political, financial, and military terms — to sustain it. The United States plays a key role in Poland's foreign and security policy, and the Polish state has consistently endeavoured to build its international position on the basis of the closest possible allied relations with the United States ^{[1, s. 86]}. How this institutional, material, and normative foundation withstood the distinctive pressures of the Trump administration's approach to alliance management, and how it was subsequently reconfigured under the Biden administration in the context of full-scale Russian aggression against Ukraine, are the questions to which the following chapters are addressed.

Chapter 2. The Trump Administration and Polish-American Security Cooperation (2017–2021)

The inauguration of Donald J. Trump as the forty-fifth President of the United States in January 2017 introduced a period of profound uncertainty into the established architecture of transatlantic security cooperation. As the preceding chapter has demonstrated, the Polish-American relationship entered the Trump era with a dense institutional foundation, a materially deepening trajectory underpinned by rising Polish defence expenditure, and a strategic culture in Warsaw that regarded the bilateral relationship with Washington as indispensable. The manner in which this foundation withstood the distinctive pressures of the Trump administration's approach to alliance management constitutes the analytical core of the present chapter.

Trump's foreign policy orientation departed markedly from the postwar American consensus on multilateralism and alliance commitments. The administration's explicit prioritisation of material reciprocity, its scepticism of collective security arrangements regarded as insufficiently beneficial to American interests, and its preference for bilateral transactional engagements over institutionalised multilateral frameworks created both opportunities and risks for Poland as a frontline state in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The chapter proceeds through five interconnected analyses. Section 2.1 examines the burden-sharing disputes that shaped the alliance context for bilateral relations. Section 2.2 reconstructs the negotiations over permanent American military basing in Polish territory. Section 2.3 analyses the major defence procurement agreements of the period. Section 2.4 considers the energy dimension of security cooperation, with particular attention to the Nord Stream 2 controversy. Section 2.5 synthesises the findings into an assessment of transactionalism, uncertainty, and Polish strategic adaptation.

The question of defence burden-sharing within NATO predated the Trump administration by several decades, but Trump's arrival in office transformed the terms on which that question was publicly articulated. As Khan and Qadir observe, burden-sharing tensions existed long before Trump assumed the presidency, yet Trump's presidency gave the debate a sharper and more explicitly transactional character ^{[5, s. 166]}. Unlike previous American presidents, who typically framed burden-sharing within the language of collective responsibility and shared obligation, Trump communicated his expectations through the vocabulary of payment, fairness, and return on American investment ^{[5, s. 168]}. This rhetorical reframing carried significant implications for alliance cohesion and for Poland's bilateral relationship with Washington.

Trump's initial characterisation of NATO as „obsolete” — first articulated during the 2016 presidential campaign and maintained into the early months of his presidency — created immediate concern among Allied governments ^{[5, s. 123]}. The statement struck at the credibility of the alliance by questioning its contemporary relevance, not merely the equity of its burden distribution. At NATO headquarters in Brussels in 2017, Trump declared that Allied members „must finally contribute their fair share and meet their financial obligations,” framing the alliance less as a security community bound by common values than as a financial arrangement in which underperforming members were defaulting on contractual obligations ^[5]. The language of obligation and default carried specific implications for the perception of Article 5 commitments, since NATO's deterrent value depends upon the credible expectation of collective response, which in turn requires the demonstrated political will of its most powerful member.

Sperling and Webber's conceptual framework of „exit” and „voice” provides a useful analytical lens for understanding Trump's approach to NATO. In their formulation, Trump did not exit the alliance but systematically deployed the credible threat of exit as a form of bargaining pressure — a strategy of voice calibrated to extract burden-sharing concessions from Allied governments ^[6]. This reading is supported by the observable pattern of the period: the alliance survived without formal American withdrawal, American military investment in Europe continued and in some respects expanded, and the formal treaty commitments remained intact. Yet the survival of formal commitments could not fully compensate for the uncertainty generated by repeated presidential questioning of those commitments. Sperling and Webber note that Trump's allusion to the possibility of American exit confronted Allied governments with the prospect of abandonment, adding urgency to defence spending plans ^[6]. The most significant increases in allied defence expenditure occurred in exposed eastern European states, including the Baltic countries, Poland, and Romania, while major western European contributors such as Germany and Italy showed no intention of meeting the two-percent gross domestic product (GDP) target by the agreed 2024 deadline ^{[6, s. 3]}.

Poland's position within this burden-sharing dynamic was distinctive and, from the perspective of Warsaw's strategic interests, advantageous. Poland had been committed to increasing its defence expenditure since the 2014 Wales Summit, and the formal legislative commitment to allocating two percent of GDP to defence — achieved approximately in 2017, when Polish defence spending reached roughly 1.99 percent of GDP — positioned Poland as one of the few Allied states that could credibly claim compliance with the Alliance's benchmark. The Polish government subsequently raised the statutory target to 2.5 percent of GDP in a 2019 amendment to the defence spending legislation, signalling an ambition to exceed not merely the minimum threshold but to establish Poland as a model of Alliance financial commitment. This positioning carried substantial diplomatic value. Poland's compliance status differentiated it favourably from Germany and several other Western European allies against whom Trump directed his most pointed criticisms, and provided Warsaw with a tangible basis for claiming preferential treatment in American defence planning.

The burden-sharing dynamics operated along two edges simultaneously. On the one hand, Poland's compliance generated genuine goodwill within the Trump administration, reinforcing the bilateral relationship and facilitating access to senior American policymakers at NATO summits in 2017 and 2018. On the other hand, the normalisation of transactional logic within alliance politics carried risks that extended beyond Poland's immediate interests. As Khan and Qadir argue, Trump's repeated criticism affected the perception of American commitment in ways that undermined the credibility of extended deterrence — the foundation upon which smaller allied states depend ^[5]. Allies could no longer assume that American presidential rhetoric would automatically reinforce alliance solidarity, and the conditionality introduced into discussions of Article 5 was difficult to contain once publicly articulated ^{[5, s. 169]}. Even if the conditionality was primarily rhetorical, the perception of conditionality sufficed to generate strategic uncertainty of a qualitatively different kind from the burden-sharing disputes of previous administrations.

The impact on Polish threat perceptions was correspondingly ambivalent. On one level, the Trump administration's bilateral attention to Poland — manifested in high-level visits, public affirmations of commitment, and concrete defence cooperation initiatives — provided reassurance that Poland occupied a valued position in American strategic calculations. On another level, the institutionalisation of transactional logic created a structural vulnerability: if American security commitments were now framed as contingent on allied financial contributions, then the credibility of those commitments was no longer guaranteed by treaty alone but required continuous demonstration through material behaviour. This vulnerability reinforced Poland's existing preference for bilateral over multilateral security guarantees and accelerated the search for institutionalised American military presence on Polish territory.

The broader European context of the burden-sharing dispute deserves consideration. The formation of enhanced bilateral and subregional security arrangements within the NATO framework represented a rational response by European governments to growing uncertainty regarding the credibility of American commitments ^{[8, s. 53]}. Liu and Ma's analysis documents how American policy under Trump — including the 2017 National Security Strategy's explicit prioritisation of American interests over allied preferences — deepened European apprehensions and strengthened the incentive to pursue additional bilateral arrangements as a hedge against future uncertainty ^{[8, s. 52]}. While their analysis includes the second Trump administration, the structural logic they identify applies with equal force to the first term, during which these incentives were initially generated. Poland's bilateral engagement with Washington during 2017–2021 reflected precisely this logic: if multilateral NATO guarantees appeared less certain, bilateral arrangements provided an additional layer of assurance.

Poland reached approximately 1.99 percent of GDP in defence spending in 2017, formally satisfying the NATO benchmark articulated at the 2014 Wales Summit;
Polish defence expenditure continued to increase through the period, with the statutory target raised to 2.5 percent of GDP in 2019, positioning Poland as a frontline state committed to exceeding Alliance standards;
Trump's transactional framing of NATO obligations created uncertainty about Article 5 commitments while simultaneously generating diplomatic opportunities for compliant states;
Poland's compliance status differentiated it favourably from Germany and France in American presidential rhetoric, providing a basis for preferential bilateral attention;
The normalisation of transactional logic in alliance politics reinforced Polish preferences for bilateral institutionalisation of American military presence as a supplement to collective guarantees;
European states more broadly responded to American commitment uncertainty by exploring enhanced bilateral and subregional security arrangements, a pattern in which Poland's strategy of deepening bilateral ties represented one variant.

The bilateral meetings at NATO summits during 2017 and 2018 provided opportunities for Polish-American consultations that reinforced the relationship even as the broader alliance framework experienced institutional stress. Trump's visit to Warsaw in July 2017 — on the occasion of the Three Seas Initiative summit — was particularly significant. The visit afforded Poland a symbolic elevation within American strategic priorities and provided the Trump administration with a demonstration of Alliance solidarity on its own terms: a European ally that paid its contribution and embraced American leadership. The normative tensions arising from the Polish government's domestic governance controversies, which had complicated relations with other Western partners, did not substantially impede the bilateral strategic relationship during the Trump years, given the administration's explicit deprioritisation of the democracy dimension of American foreign policy. This accommodation of Warsaw's domestic governance direction by the Trump administration stood in contrast to the more ambivalent stance of the Obama administration and anticipated the more assertive Biden-era engagement with rule-of-law concerns, establishing the Trump years as a period in which the strategic dimension of the relationship was effectively insulated from its normative dimension.

2.2. The Fort Trump Initiative and Permanent Basing Negotiations

The most ambitious institutional initiative of the Trump-era Polish-American relationship was Poland's proposal for the establishment of a permanent American military base on Polish territory — a proposal that acquired the colloquial designation „Fort Trump” following its articulation by President Andrzej Duda during his September 2018 visit to the White House. The initiative represented the culmination of a strategic logic that had been building in Polish security policy since at least the 2014 Russia-Ukraine crisis: if rotational Allied presence as established under the Enhanced Forward Presence (EFP) framework agreed at the 2016 Warsaw NATO Summit provided insufficient reassurance against the military threat posed by Russia, then permanent basing with a substantial American garrison would constitute a qualitatively different and more credible deterrent signal to Moscow.

Poland's strategic calculus in advancing the Fort Trump proposal rested on a set of interlocking considerations. Permanent basing, in contrast to rotational presence, would trigger specific treaty obligations regarding host-country defence, would create military facts on the ground — pre-positioned equipment, established logistics infrastructure, and a standing American troop presence — that would significantly raise the cost of any Russian military adventurism directed at Polish territory, and would bind American strategic attention to Poland in a manner less susceptible to political fluctuation. The proposal was accompanied by a Polish offer to contribute up to two billion dollars toward the construction and establishment costs of such a facility, a figure intended to demonstrate seriousness of commitment and to address anticipated American concerns about the financial burden of maintaining forward-deployed forces in Europe. The financial offer was itself characteristic of the transactional logic of the period: Poland was effectively proposing to purchase a form of security commitment through direct financial contribution, adapting its behaviour to the incentive structure established by an administration that valued visible material contributions from allies.

The negotiation process extended through 2019 and 2020, producing a series of interim agreements before culminating in the signing of the Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) in August 2020, preceded by the Declaration on Defence Cooperation concluded in June 2019. The EDCA represented a substantial advancement of the bilateral defence relationship, providing the legal infrastructure for increased American troop presence in Poland — extending to approximately 4,500 military personnel beyond the existing rotational EFP contribution — and establishing a forward command element of the Fifth Corps (V Corps) at Poznań. The agreement created a framework for expanded American military access to Polish facilities, enhanced bilateral training exercises, and improved host-nation support arrangements that would facilitate the rapid reinforcement of Poland in the event of a crisis.

Military exercises conducted during the Trump period reflected the growing operational integration between American and Polish forces. Joint exercises involving American personnel on Polish territory demonstrated deepening practical cooperation, though the scale of some exercises fell somewhat short of initial planning parameters — an illustration of the persistent gap between political aspirations and operational realities that characterised much of the Fort Trump negotiation process ^{[7, s. 72]}. The relocation of American M1 Abrams tanks from pre-positioned storage in Germany to locations in Poland, as part of exercise deployments, carried symbolic as well as operational significance, representing a physical eastward shift in American military posture that Poland's government was eager to publicise as evidence of deepening bilateral security ties ^{[7, s. 72]}.

The EDCA outcome, however, deliberately fell short of the permanent named base with a division-level garrison that Warsaw had initially proposed. The agreement provided for increased presence and improved legal frameworks without establishing the fixed permanent facility that would have represented the most robust form of American commitment. Several factors explain this outcome. Within the American Department of Defense, concerns existed about the long-term cost and operational implications of a permanent forward presence at the proposed scale, as well as about the adequacy of Polish infrastructure to support such a presence in the near term. Diplomatically, American policymakers were attentive to German sensitivities, given that a major American redeployment from Germany to Poland would carry significant implications for the bilateral relationship with Berlin and for the politics of German-American defence cooperation more broadly. Russian objections to permanent NATO basing close to Russian territory also figured in American strategic calculations, even if they were not publicly acknowledged as determinative in American decision-making.

Poland offered up to two billion dollars toward the construction and establishment costs of a permanent American military base, signalling the strategic seriousness with which Warsaw regarded the initiative;
The June 2019 Declaration on Defence Cooperation provided the political framework for enhanced bilateral defence engagement and set the stage for the subsequent EDCA;
The August 2020 EDCA established the legal infrastructure for approximately 4,500 additional American troops and created a forward V Corps command element at Poznań, the most substantive bilateral defence institutionalisation of the post-Cold War period;
The EDCA fell short of a permanent named base with a division-level garrison, reflecting concerns within the American Department of Defense, German diplomatic sensitivities, and the persistent gap between political aspirations and institutional constraints;
Military exercises during the period demonstrated growing operational integration, including the relocation of American armoured equipment to Polish territory, though exercise scales sometimes fell below initial planning targets;
The EDCA outcome illustrated the limits of transactional bilateralism as a mechanism for achieving the most ambitious forms of security institutionalisation when structural American strategic and diplomatic constraints intersected.

The EDCA outcome can be interpreted as a meaningful but deliberately ambiguous achievement. Poland secured a substantial increase in American military presence, a forward command element that signalled American strategic investment in Polish territory, and a legal framework that would facilitate future expansion of bilateral cooperation. At the same time, the deliberate ambiguity of the agreement — neither a permanent base nor a simple extension of existing arrangements — reflected the limits of what transactional bilateralism could deliver when structural American strategic interests, allied diplomatic sensitivities, and domestic American institutional constraints intersected. The outcome was, in this sense, characteristic of the Trump era more broadly: substantial bilateral attention accompanied by structural limitations on the translation of that attention into the most durable forms of institutional commitment.

Jureńczyk's analysis of the Polish-American relationship during the Trump presidency identifies a fundamental dynamic of deepening cooperation accompanied by increasing asymmetry ^{[7, s. 63]}. The Fort Trump initiative and its EDCA resolution exemplify this dynamic precisely. Poland succeeded in securing an enhanced American military presence and an improved legal framework, but in doing so demonstrated a degree of strategic dependence — including the substantial financial offer that had no parallel in Allied basing negotiations — that reinforced rather than reduced the asymmetric character of the relationship. The American administration treated Poland instrumentally as a means of demonstrating to recalcitrant Western European allies the rewards available to compliant partners, without necessarily according Polish strategic interests the centrality that Warsaw sought ^{[7, s. 64]}. Jureńczyk's observation that the American administration was guided primarily by American strategic and economic interests when making political decisions, despite the warmth of personal relations between the two governments, is applicable with particular clarity to the Fort Trump negotiations and their outcome.

Table 2.1. Key Polish-American defence agreements and military cooperation milestones, 2017–2021
Year	Agreement / Milestone	Key Provisions	Strategic Significance
2017	NATO Brussels Summit consultations; Warsaw Three Seas Summit (Trump visit)	Bilateral reaffirmation of commitment; Polish 2% GDP compliance acknowledged; EFP rotational deployment ongoing	Poland positioned as model ally; symbolic elevation of bilateral relationship within Alliance framework
2018	NATO Brussels Summit; President Duda White House visit (September)	„Fort Trump” proposal articulated; offer of up to $2 billion for permanent base construction	Launch of permanent basing negotiations; bilateral strategic agenda elevated to highest political level
2019	Declaration on Defence Cooperation (June); HIMARS agreement; F-35A selection announced	Political framework for enhanced presence; 20 HIMARS launchers committed; 32 F-35A aircraft selected over European platforms	Operational institutionalisation of bilateral defence cooperation across presence, artillery, and air power domains
2020	EDCA (August); F-35A Letter of Acceptance (January)	Legal framework for ~4,500 additional US troops; V Corps forward element at Poznań; $4.6 billion F-35A contract formalised	Most substantive bilateral defence institutionalisation of the post-Cold War period; legal infrastructure for sustained presence

2.3. Bilateral Defence Acquisitions: F-35 Procurement and the HIMARS Programme

Defence procurement constituted a second and, in material terms, extraordinarily consequential pillar of Polish-American security cooperation during the Trump administration.^{[19, s. 413]} The acquisition decisions of the period — centred principally on the F-35A Lightning II fifth-generation multirole combat aircraft and the HIMARS precision rocket artillery system — reflected a convergence of Polish military modernisation requirements, American export promotion interests, and the political economy of a bilateral relationship in which arms purchases served simultaneously as capability investments and as instruments of relationship management with an administration that placed explicit emphasis on trade balances and material reciprocity. The procurement strategy adopted by Warsaw during this period therefore operated across two registers simultaneously: the purely military register of capability enhancement and the political register of alliance management through demonstrated material commitment.

Poland's selection of the F-35A over competing European platforms was announced in 2019 following an evaluation process in which the Lockheed Martin aircraft was assessed as best meeting Polish requirements for fifth-generation air combat capabilities. The formal Letter of Acceptance for thirty-two F-35A aircraft, concluded in January 2020, committed Poland to a contract valued at approximately 4.6 billion United States dollars, representing one of the most substantial defence acquisition programmes in Polish post-Cold War history. The aircraft were to be delivered in the latter half of the 2020s, replacing Soviet-legacy platforms and providing Poland with advanced beyond-visual-range air combat capabilities, low-observable characteristics, sophisticated electronic warfare capacity, and strategic interoperability with other F-35 operators within the Alliance, most notably the United States Air Force, which operates the aircraft across multiple bases in Europe.

The F-35A acquisition carried economic and industrial dimensions that complicated its strategic calculus. As Jureńczyk notes, the direct government-to-government procurement arrangement for major programmes including the F-35A was conducted without competitive tendering and without the offset provisions that would typically have required the prime contractor to invest in Polish defence industry capacity as a condition of the contract . This approach was characterised in Warsaw as ensuring a technological leap for the Polish Armed Forces, with the speed and integration assurance of direct procurement presented as justifications for the departure from standard procurement practice. Critics, however, observed that direct orders without competition could not guarantee that the Polish Armed Forces would receive the optimal product at the lowest available price, and that the absence of offset provisions limited the development potential of the Polish defence industry and the broader Polish economy ^{[7, s. 73]}. The procurement model reflected a strategic prioritisation of relationship management with a personally attentive American administration over the maximisation of domestic industrial returns — a trade-off consistent with the logic that animated Polish bilateral strategy throughout the period.

The HIMARS programme represented a parallel and complementary modernisation investment. The 2019 government-to-government agreement for twenty launchers constituted the most significant Polish artillery modernisation of the post-Cold War era, replacing ageing Soviet-era rocket artillery systems with a platform capable of precision-guided munitions delivery at extended ranges. The acquisition was explicitly responsive to the lessons of Russia's 2014 aggression against Ukraine, which had demonstrated the decisive operational role of massed and precision rocket artillery in modern combined-arms warfare. HIMARS significantly enhanced Poland's ability to contest Russian armoured formations and to strike at second-echelon and logistical targets in depth, providing a deterrent capability qualitatively different from the preceding inventory and directly responsive to the operational challenge that Polish military planners had identified as primary since 2014.

The interoperability dividends of both procurement programmes extended beyond their direct capabilities. The F-35A's integration into NATO command and control structures, the shared logistics chains with American operators, and the joint training requirements created durable ties between Polish and American military establishments at operational and technical levels that transcended any particular political administration. Similarly, the HIMARS programme's reliance on American munitions, maintenance support, and tactical concepts of employment created ongoing dependencies that ensured continued American engagement with Polish military development regardless of shifts in political priorities at the highest levels. These structural dependencies were, from the perspective of Polish security planners, features rather than deficiencies of the procurement strategy: they institutionalised the bilateral relationship at the military-to-military level in ways that were relatively insulated from political fluctuations at the presidential level and would persist regardless of changes in administration.

Poland selected the F-35A in 2019 over European competing platforms, prioritising fifth-generation capabilities and interoperability with American forces over domestic industrial considerations;
The January 2020 Letter of Acceptance for 32 F-35A aircraft committed Poland to approximately $4.6 billion, representing the largest single defence acquisition in Polish post-Cold War history;
The absence of competitive tendering and offset provisions in major acquisition contracts reflected a prioritisation of relationship management over domestic industrial returns, a choice that carried long-term industrial development costs ;
The 2019 HIMARS agreement for 20 launchers constituted the most significant Polish artillery modernisation of the post-Cold War era, directly responsive to operational lessons drawn from Russia's aggression against Ukraine;
Both programmes created structural interoperability dependencies with American forces that institutionalised the bilateral relationship at military-to-military levels relatively insulated from political change;
Procurement-driven bilateralism generated durable operational ties while simultaneously creating platform dependencies that constrained Poland's future strategic autonomy in the choice of partners and capabilities.

The broader pattern of Polish-American defence acquisitions during the Trump period reflects the dual logic that Jureńczyk identifies in his analysis. The purchases were genuine capability investments that significantly enhanced Polish military effectiveness and contributed to NATO collective defence, and they were simultaneously political instruments that reinforced Poland's standing as a valued partner in an administration that explicitly valued trade relationships and burden-sharing compliance ^{[7, s. 74]}. This dual logic was not inherently contradictory, but it did carry long-term implications. By committing to large-scale American platform dependencies, Poland reduced its flexibility to develop alternative security partnerships or to pursue European defence industrial integration that might have offered different cost-benefit profiles. The assessment of procurement-driven bilateralism as a strategic approach must therefore acknowledge both its near-term successes and its structural vulnerabilities, and must situate the decisions of the Trump period within the longer trajectory of Polish-American security cooperation rather than evaluating them solely against the immediate political context that produced them.

2.4. Nord Stream 2 and the Energy Dimension of Security Cooperation

The security dimensions of Polish-American cooperation during the Trump administration extended beyond strictly military domains to encompass energy policy, where a convergence of Polish strategic interests and American commercial and geopolitical objectives produced a period of notable bilateral alignment. The Nord Stream 2 pipeline project — a proposal to expand direct Russian natural gas delivery capacity to Germany via the Baltic Sea, bypassing the existing transit infrastructure running through Ukraine and Central and Eastern European territory — provided the principal focus of this alignment, illustrating the degree to which energy security had become an integrated component of the broader Polish-American relationship.

Poland's opposition to Nord Stream 2 predated the Trump administration and rested on a set of strategic assessments consistent across successive Polish governments. The project was regarded in Warsaw as serving Russian strategic objectives by reducing European dependence on Ukrainian gas transit — which provided Kyiv with a degree of leverage over Russian energy export revenues — while simultaneously increasing Western European, and particularly German, dependence on Russian natural gas. The deepening of German-Russian energy interdependence was assessed as a strategic liability for Alliance cohesion and for the willingness of Western European states to maintain sanctions pressure on Russia or to respond credibly to Russian aggression against eastern Alliance members. Poland's concerns were shared, with varying degrees of intensity, by the Baltic states, Ukraine, and several other Central and Eastern European governments, and the opposition to Nord Stream 2 constituted one of the most consistent positions in Polish foreign policy throughout the period under examination.

American policy toward Nord Stream 2 evolved from rhetorical opposition during the earlier Trump period to legislative action in the Protecting Europe's Energy Security Act (PEESA), incorporated into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2020 in December 2019. The PEESA imposed sanctions on companies providing pipe-laying vessels for the construction of Nord Stream 2, effectively halting construction at a stage when the project was approximately ninety percent complete. The intervention demonstrated American willingness to employ extraterritorial sanctions as a geopolitical instrument — a practice that caused friction with European allies who objected to the extraterritorial reach of American commercial law — but produced the concrete result that Poland and the Baltic states had sought through diplomatic channels. For Warsaw, the American sanctions represented a tangible demonstration that the bilateral relationship could translate Polish strategic preferences into American policy outcomes in a domain beyond strictly military cooperation.

Polish diplomatic engagement in support of American sanctions on Nord Stream 2 was active and sustained throughout this period. Warsaw consistently emphasised the security rationale for opposing the pipeline, framing the project not merely as an economic arrangement but as an instrument of Russian hybrid strategy designed to deepen Western European dependence and weaken Allied solidarity in the face of potential Russian coercion. The Polish position aligned closely with the Trump administration's own framing, which combined genuine geopolitical concerns about Russian leverage over European energy markets with a commercial interest in expanding American liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports to European markets. The combination of geopolitical and commercial motives was characteristic of the transactional character of Trump administration foreign policy more broadly, and it created a convergence of interests with Poland that was mutually reinforcing even if its foundations were structurally different in Washington and Warsaw.

The Three Seas Initiative — a regional cooperation framework encompassing twelve Central and Eastern European states — provided an institutional vehicle for some of the energy security aspirations of the period. American participation in and support for the Three Seas Initiative, including Trump's attendance at the Warsaw summit in July 2017, reflected an alignment between the American desire to support Central and Eastern European energy diversification and the Polish strategic interest in institutionalising American engagement with the region as a counterweight to dominant German and French positions within the European Union. The expansion of LNG import infrastructure at the Świnoujście terminal on the Polish Baltic coast, which received its first American LNG cargo in 2017, represented a concrete materialisation of energy diversification that reduced Poland's dependence on Russian pipeline gas and created a commercial relationship with American energy producers that carried geopolitical implications beyond its immediate economic value.

The energy dimension of the bilateral relationship, however, also illustrated the limits of Polish-American alignment during the Trump period. Trump's imposition of steel and aluminium tariffs on European Union member states in 2018 — invoking national security justifications that were widely regarded as legally and logically strained — affected Poland as an EU member state and created friction that sat uncomfortably alongside the rhetoric of special bilateral partnership. The episode illustrated the degree to which the transactional character of the Trump administration's foreign policy created systematic tensions between different dimensions of the relationship: the security partnership that Poland valued could not be fully insulated from the commercial rivalry between the United States and the European Union. Mahmood and Cheema's characterisation of the Trump administration as one that failed to account for the sensitivities of European allies across a range of important bilateral and international issues applies directly to the tariff episode ^{[9, s. 168]}, which demonstrated that Polish interests as an EU member were not automatically protected by the goodwill generated through security cooperation compliance.

The Nord Stream 2 episode reveals the structural architecture of Polish-American alignment during the Trump years in particularly clear relief. Where Polish and American strategic interests converged — as they did on opposition to Russian energy leverage over Western Europe — the bilateral relationship produced concrete cooperative outcomes, including active Polish support for American sanctions policy and the expansion of American LNG imports to the Polish market. Where American policy created costs for Poland as an EU member — as with commercial tariffs — the transactional logic of the administration meant that Polish interests were not automatically protected by the goodwill generated through defence spending compliance and arms purchases. The relationship was bilateral in the sense of being responsive to bilateral signals, but it was not unconditionally supportive: American policy followed American interests, and Polish interests were accommodated where they structurally coincided with American strategic and commercial objectives.

2.5. Assessment of Trump-Era Policies: Transactionalism, Uncertainty, and Polish Strategic Adaptation

A synthetic assessment of the Trump administration's impact on Polish-American security cooperation must navigate the tension between the relationship's observable accomplishments — substantial in material and institutional terms — and its structural vulnerabilities, which the transactional character of American engagement rendered more visible than in earlier periods. The period 2017–2021 produced an enhanced bilateral institutional framework, a significant deepening of defence cooperation, major capability acquisitions that transformed Polish military capacity, a forward American command presence on Polish territory, and a political relationship that afforded Warsaw unusually direct access to an American administration. These achievements were real and consequential. They were also accompanied by a form of strategic uncertainty that the preceding chapter's characterisation of the relationship as „materially deepening” and „institutionally dense” must be qualified against.

The characterisation of Trump's approach as transactional bilateralism captures the essential character of the period. Transactionalism, in the context of American alliance management under Trump, denoted a foreign policy logic that evaluated commitments primarily in terms of direct material returns, favoured bilateral over multilateral arrangements where the former were more susceptible to direct bargaining, and communicated expectations through the vocabulary of payment and reciprocity rather than the vocabulary of shared values and collective obligation. Khan and Qadir's analysis documents how this transactionalism was most visible in Trump's NATO posture: the framing of allied defence spending as a payment obligation, the suggestion that American protection should depend on allied financial contributions, and the repeated public questioning of the alliance's value from the American perspective ^{[5, s. 168]}. This transactional framing did not remain contained within the formal structure of burden-sharing debates but permeated the broader perception of American reliability that underpins deterrence.

The uncertainty generated by Trump's approach was not merely rhetorical. As Khan and Qadir observe, NATO's credibility depends not only on Article 5 as a legal commitment but on the belief that the United States will act in a crisis, and Trump's repeated criticism affected the perception of American political will in ways that could weaken deterrence even without formal withdrawal ^{[5, s. 169]}. Koschut's observation, cited by Khan and Qadir, that Trump made American solidarity appear conditional on allied payment while the United States continued to invest militarily in parts of Europe captures the essential contradiction of the period: strategic continuity accompanied by political disruption ^[5]. The most serious effect of Trump's criticism was therefore not any formal change in American policy but the uncertainty it created around the reliability of American commitment — an uncertainty that Allied governments, including Poland, were compelled to address through material means.

Sperling and Webber's exit-and-voice framework illuminates the strategic logic that Trump's approach imposed on Allied governments. Their argument that Trump chose voice over exit — that his criticism of NATO was a form of bargaining pressure rather than a genuine precursor to American withdrawal — explains the observable pattern: rhetorical disruption without structural abandonment ^[6]. Trump's bromides against NATO were seen as part of a wider assault on individual allies, yet the record of the Trump period was in many respects a consolidation of American commitment to the Alliance ^[6]. American troop presence in Eastern Europe increased, new bilateral agreements were signed, and defence spending among Allied governments rose substantially. The paradox — that Trump's most disruptive rhetorical interventions may have contributed to observable improvements in Allied burden-sharing behaviour — illustrated the strategic logic of deploying the threat of exit as a form of coercive influence within an alliance ^{[6, s. 3]}.

The impact of Trump's approach extended beyond the alliance's institutional functioning to affect the foreign policy orientations of individual Allied governments. Mahmood and Cheema document the extent of allied disorientation generated by Trump's foreign policy trajectory, noting that his unconventional approach had already undone decades of American diplomatic investment and was altering American relationships with erstwhile allies in ways that reduced American ability to obtain desired outcomes ^{[9, s. 168]}. The observation that even Germany felt compelled to establish its own position independent of American leadership — a development with profound implications for Alliance cohesion — illustrates the broader European response to the Trump-era disruption ^{[9, s. 168]}. Poland's response to this environment diverged markedly from Germany's: where Berlin moved toward greater strategic autonomy, Warsaw invested more intensively in the bilateral relationship with Washington, deepening rather than hedging its dependence on American security guarantees.

This divergence in European responses to American unreliability reflects different threat assessments, different strategic cultures, and different positions relative to Russian military capability. Poland's location as a frontline state sharing a border with the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad — an area densely equipped with ballistic missiles and capable of striking deep into Polish territory — and its position on the route that Russian forces would traverse in any westward military operation gave Warsaw a threat perception substantially more acute than that of France or Germany. In this threat environment, hedging against American commitment uncertainty through investment in European defence autonomy appeared to Polish strategists as a less viable option than deepening bilateral ties with the one power that possessed the military capability to contest Russian conventional superiority. The Polish strategy of offensive bandwagoning — aligning closely with the dominant power to derive security benefits from that alignment — was therefore not merely a preference for bilateral over multilateral arrangements but a rational response to a specific threat environment that made the bilateral relationship with Washington genuinely indispensable rather than merely convenient ^{[7, s. 63]}.

In the broader European context of strategic adaptation, Poland's trajectory during the Trump years was characterised by extraordinary investment in conventional military capability. Research on European rearmament efforts in the broader context of growing uncertainty about the transatlantic security partnership identifies Poland among the most active procurers in Central and Eastern Europe, with extensive orders across multiple capability domains reflecting a determined effort to build national defence capacity ^[10]. This investment was driven primarily by the Russian threat perception sharpened by the 2014 aggression against Ukraine, but it was also shaped by the incentive structure created by Trump's transactional approach to NATO — an incentive structure that rewarded visible and measurable defence investment with preferential bilateral attention and that penalised free-riding with public presidential denunciation. Poland calibrated its behaviour to this incentive structure with considerable skill, extracting maximum bilateral benefit from a compliance record that genuine strategic necessity had in any case already made rational.

Polish defence expenditure as percentage of GDP and key bilateral milestones, 2013–2021

Note: Expenditure figures are approximate, based on NATO reporting conventions. Trajectory illustrates the sustained acceleration of Polish defence investment during and following the Trump administration period, driven by both genuine threat assessment and strategic incentives arising from the transactional character of American alliance management under the Trump presidency.

Figure 2.1. Polish defence expenditure as a percentage of GDP and principal bilateral milestones, 2013–2021

Three specific Polish strategic adaptations characterise the period and provide the baseline against which subsequent developments must be measured. The first was the deliberate acceleration of defence expenditure beyond minimum Alliance requirements, calibrated to maintain Poland's status as a „model ally” within Trump's burden-sharing framework and to differentiate Poland favourably from Western European states that remained below the two-percent GDP threshold. The second was the bilateral institutionalisation of American military presence through the EDCA and associated legal frameworks, which created military and legal facts on the ground — troop presence, infrastructure access, command elements — designed to be politically difficult to reverse regardless of future shifts in American priorities. The third was Poland's positioning as a regional hub for American military activity in Central and Eastern Europe, through the accumulation of infrastructure, the training relationships created by major exercises, and the interoperability deepened by common platform acquisitions. Together, these adaptations represented a comprehensive strategy for converting Alliance financial commitment into bilateral security guarantees at a moment when multilateral guarantees appeared less reliable.

Table 2.2. Assessment of Trump-era Polish-American security cooperation: achievements and structural vulnerabilities
Dimension	Achievements	Structural Vulnerabilities
Alliance framework	Burden-sharing compliance secured diplomatic differentiation; Poland positioned as model ally against non-compliant western European states; bilateral consultations at NATO summits enhanced access	Normalisation of transactional logic created uncertainty about Article 5 credibility; conditionality of American commitment, once publicly articulated, difficult to contain ^{[5, s. 169]}
Military presence	EDCA (2020) institutionalised ~4,500 additional US troops and V Corps forward element at Poznań; legal framework for expanded access and rapid reinforcement established	Permanent named base with division garrison not achieved; outcome reflected limits of transactional bilateralism against US institutional constraints and German diplomatic sensitivities
Defence acquisition	F-35A and HIMARS programmes delivered genuine capability gains; structural military-to-military ties created at operational and technical levels relatively insulated from political change	Direct procurement without competitive tendering or offset provisions limited domestic industrial returns and development potential ; platform dependencies constrained future strategic autonomy
Energy security	US PEESA sanctions on Nord Stream 2 aligned with Polish strategic interests; Three Seas Initiative and LNG imports advanced diversification goals; Warsaw's position within American policy discourse enhanced	US steel and aluminium tariffs on EU members including Poland created friction; transactional logic of administration could not fully insulate security partnership from commercial rivalry ^{[9, s. 168]}
Alliance cohesion	Bilateral proximity with Washington afforded Warsaw enhanced influence within the administration's alliance management framework; political relationship between governments unusually close	Distance from Germany, France, and western European allies deepened ^{[7, s. 74]}; over-reliance on personalised diplomacy created vulnerability to administration change; EU position weakened

The limits of adaptation were as evident as its achievements. As Jureńczyk documents, the deepening of the bilateral relationship under Trump was accompanied by an increase in the asymmetry of that relationship ^{[7, s. 63]}. American decision-making was guided primarily by American strategic and economic interests, and Polish interests were accommodated where they coincided with American preferences rather than as a consequence of the special relationship that Polish officials were inclined to emphasise ^{[7, s. 64]}. The tightening of the alliance was undoubtedly in the interest of Polish security, but the pro-American orientation of Polish authorities raised serious questions when it was not balanced by tangible economic benefits, when it came at the cost of Poland's relations with European Union partners, and when the American administration treated Poland instrumentally in its disputes with Western European leaders rather than as a partner with independent standing ^{[7, s. 74]}. The deepening of distance between Poland and Germany, France, and other Western European allies during the Trump years created a diplomatic vulnerability that would become more salient as the Biden administration sought to restore the multilateral foundations of transatlantic cooperation.

The question of whether the multilateral alternative — deeper European defence integration rather than bilateral American dependency — would have better served Polish security interests is counterfactual and therefore not susceptible to definitive resolution on the evidence available. What can be observed is that the Trump period established a pattern of bilateral institutionalisation, capability acquisition, and financial investment in the American relationship that would provide the analytical baseline against which the subsequent Biden administration's approach to Polish-American security cooperation must be measured. The EDCA troop presence, the F-35A and HIMARS acquisition programmes, the PEESA sanctions alignment on Nord Stream 2, and the statutory commitment to defence expenditure significantly exceeding the Alliance benchmark all represented continuities that would persist beyond the Trump administration itself, shaping the terms on which the Biden administration engaged with Warsaw and establishing the material foundation for the further deepening of bilateral cooperation in the context of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The assessment of the Trump era's legacy for Polish-American security cooperation is therefore inseparable from the subsequent chapter's analysis of the Biden administration, which both inherited the institutional achievements of 2017–2021 and confronted the structural vulnerabilities that the transactional character of the preceding period had created.

Chapter 3. The Biden Administration and Polish-American Security Cooperation (2021–2025)

3.1. Alliance Restoration and the Return to Multilateralism

The inauguration of Joseph R. Biden as the forty-sixth President of the United States on 20 January 2021 marked a fundamental reorientation of American foreign policy toward its European allies. Within weeks of taking office, the Biden administration signalled its intentions through a succession of high-profile diplomatic gestures. At the State Department on 4 February 2021, President Biden declared that America was returning to its alliances, committing to engage with the multilateral institutions that had been systematically marginalised under his predecessor. The subsequent address at the Munich Security Conference reinforced this message, framing the transatlantic alliance as foundational to the pursuit of American interests and presenting the United States as an indispensable partner in collective European defence. These rhetorical commitments were accompanied by early executive decisions reversing several of the most contentious unilateral measures of the Trump era, including the suspension of the announced troop withdrawal from Germany.

The conceptual difference between the two administrations' approaches to NATO burden-sharing was not merely rhetorical but structural. As Khan and Qadir document, the Trump administration had consistently framed the alliance relationship in transactional terms, presenting the 2 per cent of gross domestic product defence spending threshold endorsed at the Wales Summit of 2014 as a form of payment owed to the United States rather than as a collective obligation of sovereign allies ^{[11, s. 63]}. The conditionality embedded in this framing created uncertainty around the reliability of the American security guarantee even as the United States continued its military investments in Eastern Europe ^{[11, s. 63]}. The Biden administration explicitly rejected this transactional logic. The 2 per cent benchmark was retained as a legitimate target, but it was framed as a shared expression of collective responsibility within an alliance founded on common values and interests rather than as a commercial transaction. This distinction, while subtle in practical terms, carried substantial symbolic weight for allies whose security calculations depended on the unconditional character of the Article 5 guarantee.

The restoration of what the Biden administration characterised as the unconditional commitment to Article 5 collective defence was particularly significant for Poland. Throughout the Trump period, Polish officials had pursued a strategy of deepening bilateral engagement with Washington precisely because multilateral NATO structures offered insufficient certainty in the face of transactional American leadership. The election of Biden presented Warsaw with an altered strategic environment that was simultaneously more reassuring in its multilateral commitments and more complex in its bilateral dynamics. Biden's approach was premised on the vision of the United States as the indispensable leader of the international system, implying a restored willingness to bear collective security burdens without demanding prior payment ^{[12, s. 15]}. For Poland, this represented the preferred form of American engagement — one in which the alliance was reinforced on principled rather than transactional grounds, and in which the reliability of the American commitment no longer depended on the bilateral calculation of burden-sharing contributions.

Nevertheless, the return to multilateralism introduced its own complications from the Polish perspective. Polish diplomatic strategy under the Law and Justice (PiS) government had been calibrated to exploit the Trump administration's preference for direct state-to-state dealings rather than coordination through multilateral structures. The restoration of the European Union and NATO as primary frameworks for American engagement reduced Warsaw's privileged interlocutor status and embedded Polish-American relations within broader transatlantic deliberations in which Poland's voice was one among many. The tensions that had developed between Warsaw and Brussels over rule-of-law concerns additionally complicated the bilateral relationship with an administration that placed democratic governance at the centre of its foreign policy vision. Prikhodko has observed that the Biden administration sought to revive European confidence in American defence commitments while simultaneously using Washington's restored transatlantic leadership to support the established political mainstream in European capitals ^{[13, s. 62]}. This disposition created friction with the Polish government, which had increasingly positioned itself in opposition to European institutional authority on domestic governance matters.

The diplomatic calendar of 2021 provided multiple occasions for the recalibration of the bilateral relationship. Contacts between President Biden and President Andrzej Duda were sustained through telephone consultations and margins of multilateral summits. The Summit for Democracy convened by the United States in December 2021 provided an opportunity for Poland to participate in the American-led framework of democratic solidarity despite ongoing tensions over domestic governance disputes. The substantive assessment of whether the return to multilateralism served Polish security interests in comparison with the bilateral approach of the Trump years remains contested. In the short term, the restored unconditional Article 5 commitment addressed Poland's core security concern more reliably than the transactional uncertainty of the preceding period ^{[11, s. 64]}. The longer-term structural implications of reduced Warsaw leverage within a more thoroughly multilateral framework, however, would depend in significant measure on the evolution of the security environment in Eastern Europe — an evolution that would be dramatically shaped by the events of February 2022.

3.2. Russian Aggression in Ukraine and the Reinforcement of the Eastern Flank

The period from late 2021 through the outbreak of full-scale hostilities on 24 February 2022 was characterised by unprecedented American intelligence-sharing regarding Russian military preparations. The Biden administration took the distinctive step of publicly disclosing assessments of Russian troop concentrations along the Ukrainian border, a policy intended to deter aggression by removing the element of surprise while simultaneously building the political case for Allied solidarity in the event that deterrence failed. This approach was accompanied by diplomatic consultations with European partners and multiple rounds of engagement with Russian officials, including a Biden-Putin video call in December 2021 and the subsequent presentation of proposed security arrangements that Moscow ultimately rejected. The calibrated public revelation of intelligence assessments represented a significant departure from traditional American intelligence practice and demonstrated the Biden administration's commitment to managing the crisis through coordinated Allied action rather than unilateral diplomacy.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 transformed the Eastern flank of NATO and the bilateral Polish-American security relationship in a manner that exceeded the scope of any policy planning conducted during the preceding four years. The immediate NATO response included the first-ever activation of the NATO Response Force (NRF), the defensive contingency arrangement developed over decades of Alliance planning. The United States announced a substantial reinforcement of its military presence in Poland, raising the number of American military personnel stationed on Polish territory from approximately 4,500 under the Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) rotational framework to approximately 10,000 troops. As Papunen has documented in the context of the broader European Council response to Russian aggression, the number of NATO troops deployed in Poland specifically increased from approximately 1,010 to 10,500 following the invasion . This rapid augmentation represented an operational commitment of a magnitude that had not been achieved through years of bilateral diplomatic negotiation and financial incentive.

The structural reorganisation of NATO's Eastern flank extended beyond the augmentation of troop numbers in Poland. The Alliance moved to expand the eFP battlegroup framework from the original four battlegroups established in the wake of the 2016 Warsaw Summit to eight battlegroups, covering the full length of NATO's Eastern border from Estonia to Romania. The V Corps forward command was activated with its Forward Command Post located in Poznań in July 2022, providing the operational command architecture for the management of the reinforced Eastern flank and representing a qualitative enhancement of the American military commitment beyond the mere addition of rotational forces. Bilateral cooperation agreements reached during this period addressed air defence enhancements, joint exercise frameworks, and coordination mechanisms for the management of the unprecedented military reinforcement on Polish territory. The combination of augmented personnel, expanded command structures, and accelerated infrastructure development marked the most rapid and substantial transformation of the American military presence in Poland since the establishment of the first rotational armoured brigade in 2017.

The political dimension of the reinforcement was symbolised most vividly by President Biden's visit to Warsaw in March 2022, during which he delivered a speech framing the contest as one between democracy and autocracy, demonstrated American solidarity with Polish authorities managing the largest refugee influx in European postwar history, and affirmed the United States commitment to the collective defence of every inch of Allied territory. The Ramstein format, through which the United States coordinated Allied military support to Ukraine on a continuing basis, regularised the multilateral dimension of a relationship in which Poland's geographic position made it an indispensable participant. The format simultaneously elevated Poland's institutional importance within the Allied effort and embedded it within a multilateral coordination mechanism that reduced Warsaw's capacity for exclusive bilateral positioning.

The Przewodów incident of November 2022, in which a missile struck Polish territory near the Ukrainian border, provided the most acute test of the crisis management dimensions of the reinforced relationship.^{[20, s. 298]} The immediate Polish response was measured, and close consultations with Allied partners preceded any public statements regarding attribution. The subsequent determination that the missile was most likely a Ukrainian air defence munition rather than a Russian offensive strike demonstrated the maturity of the NATO crisis management procedures and the importance of the bilateral communication channels established since the outbreak of the war. The incident illustrated both the genuine security risks borne by Poland as a frontline state in the proximity of active hostilities and the effectiveness of the Allied political structures in managing those risks without escalation — a test that the reinforced relationship passed under circumstances of considerable pressure.

3.3. Military Aid to Ukraine and Poland's Role as a Transit State

The scale and composition of United States military assistance to Ukraine underwent a dramatic evolution between the initial weeks of the Russian invasion and the conclusion of the Biden administration in January 2025. The initial deliveries of man-portable air-defence systems (MANPADS), including Stinger missiles, and anti-armour weapons reflected a cautious approach constrained by concerns about escalation. This cautious posture gave way progressively to the provision of increasingly capable military systems as the character of the conflict and the requirements of Ukrainian defence became clearer. The escalatory ladder of American military assistance included M777 howitzers, HIMARS, M2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, M1 Abrams main battle tanks, Patriot air defence batteries, and ultimately long-range strike capabilities. Each step in this escalation was preceded by deliberation within the American government and coordination with Allied partners, and Poland was consistently implicated in the logistics of each new category of equipment delivery.

Poland's geographic position — sharing an 875-kilometre land border with Ukraine — rendered it the indispensable logistical platform for the land and air transit of military equipment to the Ukrainian armed forces. The Rzeszów-Jasionka International Airport, located in southeastern Poland approximately 90 kilometres from the Ukrainian border, emerged as the primary air hub through which personnel, equipment, and humanitarian supplies transited from Allied nations to Ukraine. The airport's operational tempo increased dramatically from the outbreak of the war, with American military transport aircraft, Allied government flights, and commercial charter operations all concentrated through this facility. The parallel capacity of the Polish railway network for the transit of heavy military equipment — including armoured vehicles too large or sensitive for air transport — made Polish railway infrastructure an essential component of the Allied logistics chain supporting Ukrainian defence.

The operational mechanics of this transit system required close coordination between the United States European Command (EUCOM), Polish military authorities, and their Ukrainian counterparts. The sensitivity of this coordination was compounded by the security environment in which it operated. Poland's position as the primary logistics platform for Allied military support to Ukraine simultaneously made it a high-value target for Russian hybrid operations, including cyberattacks directed at critical infrastructure, disinformation campaigns designed to erode Polish public support for the transit mission, and intelligence collection efforts targeting the logistics network. The management of these hybrid threats required the integration of military, intelligence, and civilian security agencies in a sustained operational effort that represented a qualitative expansion of Polish security responsibilities compared with any previous period in the post-Cold War history of the bilateral relationship.

The scope of Poland's own military contributions to Ukraine distinguished the bilateral relationship from a simple transit arrangement and reflected the genuine convergence of Polish and American interests in resisting Russian revisionism. Polish military donations to the Ukrainian armed forces included MiG-29 fighter aircraft transferred in coordination with Allied partners, T-72M1 main battle tanks, Krab self-propelled howitzers, and Piorun MANPADS, among other systems. These donations were premised on the expectation of replacement through procurement from Allied partners, particularly the United States. As Gomez has documented, European donations of major defence equipment during the Biden administration were frequently premised on the United States either selling better equipment or replacing the donated systems ^[15]. The replacement procurement process created a structural linkage between Poland's military contributions to Ukraine and its own force modernisation trajectory, with the acquisition of new American systems accelerated by the need to maintain Polish defensive capacity while simultaneously providing equipment to the Ukrainian armed forces.

Table 3.1. Selected Polish Military Contributions to Ukraine (2022–2024) and Equipment Replacement/Procurement
Equipment Category	Polish Contribution to Ukraine	US-Supported Replacement or Supplement
Fighter Aircraft	MiG-29 multirole fighters	F-35A Lightning II (contracted 2020, deliveries ongoing)
Main Battle Tanks	T-72M1 Soviet-era tanks	M1A1/M1A2 Abrams (US-supplied to Poland)
Self-Propelled Artillery	Krab howitzers	Additional Krab production; US indirect-fire systems
Multiple Rocket Artillery	BM-21 Grad systems	HIMARS units (Poland among first European recipients)
Air Defence (MANPADS)	Piorun portable air defence	Expanded Piorun production; US Stingers

The Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI), through which the United States Congress appropriated and the Department of Defense managed security assistance to Ukraine, provided the budgetary framework for the substantial military support that flowed through and alongside Poland. As Pashkov has documented in the context of US-Ukrainian defence cooperation, the Biden administration entered office with a focus on defence cooperation, approving substantial military assistance and expanding bilateral exercises to their largest recorded scale ^[14]. The full-scale invasion transformed this established framework into an emergency wartime assistance programme of a dramatically larger magnitude. The transformation of Poland's role from a recipient of security guarantees to an active provider of military assistance and logistical infrastructure represented a qualitative shift in the bilateral relationship, establishing a precedent for Polish engagement as a security provider of regional significance rather than exclusively a consumer of Allied deterrence.

3.4. The Permanent Basing Question Revisited: Progress and Remaining Obstacles

The Biden administration inherited an EDCA framework that had established the legal basis for an American rotational military presence encompassing approximately 4,500 personnel and eight designated sites, including the air base at Łask, the Aegis Ashore missile defence facility under construction at Redzikowo, the logistics hub at Poznań, and additional installations. The EDCA arrangement represented the most substantial formalisation of the American military presence in Poland achieved to that point, but it stopped short of the permanent basing arrangements that successive Polish governments had sought and that Polish strategists argued were necessary for the credibility of deterrence. The Biden administration's initial approach to implementation emphasised the development of the infrastructure authorised under EDCA through the European Deterrence Initiative (EDI) funding mechanism, continuing the pattern established under its predecessor. The infrastructure development pace, however, remained a source of Polish concern regarding the durability of the rotational commitment in the absence of permanent institutional anchoring.

The practical implementation of EDCA under the Biden administration produced several concrete milestones that advanced the bilateral security architecture even without resolving the fundamental question of permanent versus rotational modalities. The V Corps Forward Command Post in Poznań, established in July 2022 in the immediate context of the Russian invasion, provided an operational command presence exceeding the advisory and coordination functions that had characterised previous American headquarters elements in Poland. The Redzikowo Aegis Ashore installation, the European component of the American ballistic missile defence architecture, progressed toward operational activation. As Kantor has argued in the broader context of US missile defence deployment in Europe, the Aegis Ashore system represented the intersection of bilateral host-nation infrastructure commitments and Alliance-wide strategic architecture, with the abandonment versus entrapment dimensions of the alliance security dilemma directly implicated in the deployment decision ^[16]. The EDI continued to fund infrastructure development at the designated EDCA sites, with expenditure on construction, pre-positioned equipment storage, and facility enhancement continuing throughout the Biden administration.

The gap between what the Biden administration was prepared to offer and what Polish authorities sought in terms of permanent basing remained persistent throughout this period, notwithstanding the dramatic augmentation of the de facto presence following February 2022. The following considerations characterised the respective positions throughout the basing negotiation:

Poland maintained that permanent basing would provide unambiguous deterrence signals to Russia and reduce response time in the event of aggression, arguments grounded in the geographic vulnerability of Polish territory and the demonstrated Russian willingness to employ military force against neighbouring states.
The United States emphasised that pre-positioned equipment and rapidly deployable rotational forces could achieve comparable deterrence effects while preserving the operational flexibility of American forces across a global posture encompassing multiple theatres.
Poland argued that the symbolic and political significance of permanent basing — the visible, enduring commitment of American personnel on Polish soil — carried deterrence value that could not be replicated by numerical equivalences in rotational deployment figures.
American planners noted the Alliance-wide implications of bilateral permanent basing arrangements and the importance of maintaining the coherence of the eFP framework as a collective Allied commitment rather than a series of bilateral American-host-nation agreements that might create incentives for selective engagement.
Both parties acknowledged that the de facto presence of over 10,000 American troops in Poland following February 2022 had substantially eclipsed the formal EDCA rotational framework in practical terms, rendering the abstract permanence debate increasingly secondary to the management of the actual reinforced presence.

The practical eclipse of the permanent basing debate by the exigencies of the Ukraine war reinforcement did not resolve the underlying question of the long-term legal and institutional character of the American presence in Poland. Adjacent to the core basing question were negotiations regarding the delivery of F-35A aircraft under the 2020 procurement contract, the associated basing and training infrastructure, Abrams main battle tank deliveries and maintenance arrangements, and Apache helicopter acquisition discussions. President Biden's bilateral declaration with President Duda in March 2022 addressed the deepening of the defence relationship in general terms, but specific commitments on permanent basing modalities remained formulated in the established language of enhanced rotational presence rather than permanent stationing. The de facto transformation of the American presence in Poland remained, in formal institutional terms, characterised by the same rotational framework that had governed it since the initial deployment of the American armoured brigade in 2017 — a gap between operational reality and institutional form that continued to mark the limits of what bilateral diplomatic engagement had achieved.

The broader context of the NATO-Russia Founding Act of 1997 continued to exercise a constraining influence on the formal parameters of the basing discussion, even as its practical significance had been substantially undermined by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Act's provisions against the stationing of substantial combat forces on the territory of new NATO members had never constituted a legally binding commitment precluding American deployments, but they had provided a diplomatic reference point that successive American administrations had been reluctant to explicitly abandon. In the post-February 2022 environment, the political relevance of this constraint diminished considerably as Russia's actions had fundamentally altered the security context in which the Act had been conceived. The question of whether the Biden administration would formally declare the Act's provisions inapplicable remained unresolved at the conclusion of its term, leaving the formal legal architecture of the bilateral basing relationship in a state of productive ambiguity that served neither Polish aspirations for permanent commitment nor Russian preferences for American restraint.

3.5. Comparative Assessment: Biden versus Trump Approaches to the Polish-American Alliance

A systematic comparison of the Biden and Trump administrations' approaches to the Polish-American security relationship reveals both significant discontinuities in strategic orientation and substantial continuities in underlying trajectories. Five analytical dimensions provide a structured framework for this assessment. The first concerns the multilateral-bilateral balance. The Trump administration's bilateral approach granted Poland privileged interlocutor status and produced specific deliverables — the EDCA framework, the F-35A and HIMARS procurement agreements, the enhanced troop presence — negotiated in the direct bilateral relationship rather than mediated through NATO structures. The Biden administration's restoration of the multilateral framework embedded Poland within the broader Alliance architecture, potentially diluting the special relationship but simultaneously reinforcing the collective security guarantees upon which Polish deterrence fundamentally rested. As Soare has documented, the Biden administration's first pillar of security policy was precisely to regain trust and reaffirm the unbreakable security and defence ties within NATO, a priority that benefited all Alliance members collectively rather than Poland specifically ^{[12, s. 17]}. The multilateral framework simultaneously provided stronger guarantees and reduced the diplomatic leverage that Warsaw had exercised in the bilateral context of the Trump period.

The second analytical dimension concerns threat assessment and Russia policy. The Trump administration's approach was characterised by mixed signals — personal diplomatic engagement at the leadership level coexisting with Eastern flank reinforcement at the operational level. As Khan and Qadir document, the most serious effect of Trump's approach was the uncertainty it created around the reliability of the American commitment, with European allies unable to assume that presidential rhetoric would reinforce Alliance solidarity ^{[11, s. 74]}. The convergence of strategic continuity and political disruption that characterised the Trump years — military investment in Europe accompanied by political signals that appeared to question the unconditional character of the American guarantee — created exactly the conditions of uncertainty that NATO's reassurance function was designed to preclude ^{[11, s. 63]}. The Biden administration's approach offered greater clarity in its deterrence posture, framing Russia as a revisionist power requiring collective resistance and ultimately mobilising an unprecedented Allied response to the February 2022 invasion. Prikhodko had anticipated that Biden would revive European confidence in American defence commitments, suspend or cancel planned troop reductions in Europe, and take a more flexible position on burden-sharing, rejecting the coercive pressure employed by his predecessor ^{[13, s. 62]}. This assessment proved accurate in its broad contours.

Table 3.2. Comparative Security Dimensions: Trump (2017–2021) versus Biden (2021–2025) Administrations
Dimension	Trump Administration (2017–2021)	Biden Administration (2021–2025)
Article 5 Posture	Conditional/transactional rhetoric; strategic ambiguity	Unconditional recommitment from January 2021
Troop Presence in Poland	~4,500 rotational (EDCA baseline)	~10,000+ (post-February 2022 reinforcement)
NATO Framework	Bilateral preference; criticism of Alliance burden-sharing	NATO-centric; eFP expansion from 4 to 8 battlegroups
Basing Arrangements	EDCA (2020): 8 designated sites, rotational	EDCA implementation; V Corps Forward Command Post Poznań (2022)
Russia Policy	Mixed signals: personal diplomacy alongside Eastern flank reinforcement	Clear deterrence posture; comprehensive Allied response to 2022 invasion
Ukraine Policy	Cautious engagement; Javelin sale approved 2018	Comprehensive military aid programme; USAI as primary mechanism
Burden-Sharing Framing	Transactional: spending as payment owed to Washington	Collective obligation within alliance of shared values
Polish Diplomatic Leverage	Elevated: bilateral framework favoured Warsaw's direct access	Reduced: multilateral framework diluted privileged interlocutor status

The third dimension concerns the domestic political context shaping each administration's approach. The United States Congress maintained a consistently more hawkish position on Eastern European security than either executive throughout both administrations, providing statutory authorities and appropriations that reinforced the Alliance commitment beyond what presidential preference alone would have dictated. Polish-American diaspora advocacy sustained Congressional attention to Polish security concerns across party lines. The tensions between the Biden administration and the PiS government over rule-of-law issues introduced a democratic governance dimension into the bilateral relationship that had been largely absent during the Trump period, creating friction at the political level even as the security cooperation deepened operationally. The change of government in Poland following the October 2023 parliamentary elections brought to power a coalition committed to repairing the relationship with European institutions, creating the conditions for more comprehensive alignment between Warsaw and Washington in the final year of the Biden administration and demonstrating that the bilateral security relationship was durable enough to survive significant political-level tensions.

The fourth dimension concerns the concrete security deliverables generated by each administration. The Trump administration's bilateral emphasis produced specific, measurable outcomes through direct diplomatic negotiation. The Biden administration generated deliverables of a qualitatively different character, driven substantially by the emergency context of the Ukraine war: the reinforcement of the troop presence to levels unprecedented in the post-Cold War period, the activation of the V Corps forward command, the operationalisation of the Redzikowo Aegis Ashore installation, and the transformation of Poland into the primary logistics hub of Allied military support to Ukraine. The difficulty of comparative assessment lies in the fact that the Biden administration's most consequential deliverables were substantially conditioned by an exogenous shock — the Russian invasion of Ukraine — that transformed the strategic environment in ways that had no parallel during the Trump period. The structural comparison is thus somewhat asymmetric: the Trump deliverables reflected deliberate bilateral diplomatic choice, while the Biden reinforcement reflected the Alliance's collective response to an acute threat.

The fifth dimension concerns Polish strategic adaptation to the signals emanating from each administration. Warsaw's bilateral strategy under Trump was calibrated to exploit the American president's preference for direct state-to-state engagement, financial commitment, and the provision of base infrastructure in ways that multilateral engagement could not replicate. The approach was adapted with considerable diplomatic skill to the prevailing American preferences and produced significant concrete outcomes, even at the cost of deepening Poland's distance from its European Union partners. Under Biden, Polish strategy adapted to a more multilateral framework while managing the tensions arising from domestic governance disputes with the Biden White House. The adaptation was partially successful: the security relationship deepened dramatically in the context of the Ukraine war even as the political relationship was complicated by rule-of-law concerns. The following dimensions characterise the structural factors underpinning this continuity across administrations:

Russian revisionism constituted the persistent structural driver of the bilateral relationship, making security cooperation a strategic necessity rather than a discretionary diplomatic choice under both administrations and ensuring that each administration deepened the material relationship regardless of its rhetorical preferences.
Congressional support consistently exceeded executive commitment under both Trump and Biden, providing statutory reinforcement that insulated the relationship from the volatility of presidential preferences and ensured a baseline of legislative commitment to Eastern European security.
Industrial linkages created by major procurement programmes — F-35A, HIMARS, Abrams, Patriot — generated institutional relationships between American defence contractors, the Department of Defense, and the Polish military establishment that operated with relative independence from the political cycle, creating durable economic interests in the continuation of the relationship.
The geographic logic of Poland's Eastern flank position, reinforced decisively by the outbreak of the Ukraine war, rendered Polish territory indispensable to the Allied logistics and deterrence architecture regardless of bilateral diplomatic dynamics or the character of executive leadership in Washington.
Poland's sustained defence expenditure substantially exceeding the Alliance benchmark throughout both administrations demonstrated a Polish strategic seriousness that commanded respect across the American political spectrum, providing the material basis for a relationship grounded in comparable capability contributions rather than solely in American patronage.

The overarching conclusion emerging from this comparative assessment is that despite the dramatically different rhetorical registers and strategic orientations of the two administrations, the underlying trajectory of the Polish-American security relationship demonstrated substantial continuity driven by structural factors that transcended executive leadership change. The Trump administration's transactional bilateralism and the Biden administration's principled multilateralism represented genuinely different approaches to the alliance relationship, with meaningfully different consequences for Polish diplomatic leverage, the character of transatlantic burden-sharing, and the framing of the Article 5 commitment. Yet both administrations deepened the material security relationship with Poland in response to the same structural imperatives. As Menon and Ruger have observed in the broader context of NATO enlargement debates, Ukraine's centrality to Russian security calculations meant that the expansion of Western security commitments in the region carried inherent risks of escalation that neither American administration could fully manage through bilateral diplomacy alone ^{[17, s. 41]}. The structural constraints and enablers of the Polish-American relationship — Russian revisionism, geographic logic, Congressional hawkishness, industrial interests, and Polish strategic investment — proved more determinative of outcomes than the philosophical differences between the two executives who presided over it.

Conclusion

This thesis set out to examine how Polish-American security cooperation evolved across two ideologically contrasting administrations — the Trump presidency of 2017 to 2021 and the Biden presidency of 2021 to 2025 — and to identify the structural factors that explain the observed trajectory. The central research question asked whether the content and depth of the bilateral security relationship was principally shaped by the strategic priorities, diplomatic styles, and political ideologies of successive administrations, or whether deeper structural forces — geopolitical geography, threat perception, institutional momentum, and the logic of extended deterrence — constrained executive agency to a degree that produced substantial continuity irrespective of the occupant of the White House. To address this question, the thesis employed a multi-theoretical analytical framework combining structural realism, balance-of-threat theory, the alliance security dilemma, liberal institutionalism, and constructivism, supplemented by a comparative case-study methodology that traced developments across five analytical dimensions: the multilateral-bilateral balance, Russia policy, the domestic political context in both capitals, the delivery of concrete security commitments, and Polish strategic adaptation ^[1]. The findings presented across three substantive chapters converge on a conclusion that is neither a simple continuity thesis nor a straightforward difference thesis, but rather a layered account in which administration-level variation was real and consequential in the short term, while structural factors ultimately determined the medium-term trajectory of the relationship.

The first chapter established the theoretical and historical foundations without which the comparative analysis of the two administrations would have remained descriptively thin. By tracing the relationship from Poland's 1999 NATO accession through the Bush and Obama eras, it demonstrated that the bilateral relationship entered 2017 in a condition of institutional density, material deepening, and strategic intimacy that was the product of sustained Polish strategic investment rather than spontaneous American generosity ^[2]. The theoretical framework drawn from balance-of-threat theory clarified why Poland consistently perceived Russia as an existential threat and why this threat perception translated into a strategic culture that treated the American bilateral relationship as non-negotiable. The alliance security dilemma framework — centred on the abandonment-entrapment tension — explained why Polish strategic behaviour consistently prioritised burden-sharing above NATO's formal two percent threshold as a form of abandonment insurance, while also accounting for periods of anxiety when American rhetoric seemed to conditionalise the Article 5 commitment ^[3]. The historical narrative also established that the 2009 Ballistic Missile Defence cancellation under the Obama administration remained a formative reference point in Polish strategic memory, demonstrating that institutional depth did not guarantee protection against executive revision and reinforcing the Polish preference for permanent basing arrangements as a form of irreversible physical commitment ^[4]. These foundations were not merely contextual background; they were structurally load-bearing, because the specific anxieties and priorities that shaped Polish behaviour under Trump and Biden — the pursuit of permanent presence, defence expenditure well above treaty commitments, and the cultivation of bilateral channels alongside multilateral ones — were direct products of lessons drawn from the preceding fifteen years of the relationship.

The analysis of the Trump administration presented in the second chapter revealed a relationship that was simultaneously paradoxical and explicable. At the level of rhetoric and diplomatic style, the Trump administration introduced unprecedented uncertainty into the alliance framework. The President's transactional framing of defence spending — presented as a payment owed to the United States rather than a collective obligation — raised genuine questions about the conditionality of the Article 5 commitment, and his expressions of scepticism toward multilateral institutions created anxiety across the European Alliance ^[5]. Poland, however, occupied a privileged position within this disrupted landscape. Its record of sustained defence expenditure — reaching approximately two percent of GDP in 2017 and legislatively committed to two-and-a-half percent thereafter — differentiated it sharply from Germany and France in the transactional calculus that the Trump administration applied to burden-sharing assessments ^[6]. This differentiation translated into diplomatic access and bilateral deliverables that contrasted with the deteriorating American relationships with several Western European allies. The Fort Trump proposal, advanced by President Duda during his September 2018 White House visit, did not materialise in its aspirational form — a permanent American armoured division — but the Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement signed in August 2020 institutionalised a rotational presence of approximately four-and-a-half thousand troops, established the V Corps Forward Command Post in Poznań, and designated eight Polish sites for American access ^[7]. Procurement agreements for thirty-two F-35A aircraft and twenty HIMARS multiple-launch rocket systems delivered genuine capabilities, even as the absence of offset provisions or domestic industrial integration mechanisms limited the industrial and technological returns to the Polish side ^[8]. On energy security, the Trump administration's support for Poland's opposition to Nord Stream 2, formalised through the Protecting Europe's Energy Security Act sanctions provisions enacted in December 2019, aligned American strategic interests with Polish preferences in a domain where the relationship was mutually reinforcing ^[9]. The synthetic assessment of the Trump era, therefore, is that bilateral transactionalism delivered specific material goods — presence commitments, capabilities, energy alignment — while simultaneously deepening structural asymmetry, distancing Poland from its European partners, and creating a form of vulnerability inherent to a relationship conducted through personalised diplomatic channels susceptible to sudden revision.

The third chapter demonstrated that the Biden administration's restoration of the multilateral framework transformed the diplomatic register of the relationship without fundamentally altering its structural trajectory. The „America is back” declaration made at Munich in February 2021, and the unconditional reaffirmation of Article 5, addressed the specific anxieties generated by Trump-era conditionality and were welcomed in Warsaw, even as they reduced the bilateral leverage that Poland had extracted from its privileged position within a disrupted alliance landscape ^[10]. The friction introduced by Biden administration criticism of the PiS government's judicial reforms — tensions that were largely absent during the Trump years — added a normative dimension to the relationship that created intermittent complications without altering the strategic fundamentals. The critical rupture that determined the character of the Biden era, however, was not a policy decision of either administration but a structural event: Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 . The invasion catalysed the most significant Eastern Flank reinforcement since the end of the Cold War. American troop presence in Poland rose to approximately ten thousand personnel; the NATO Enhanced Forward Presence expanded from four to eight battlegroups; the V Corps Forward Command Post in Poznań was formally activated in July 2022; and the Redzikowo Aegis Ashore installation, whose delayed completion had been a recurring bilateral irritant, was activated ^[12]. Poland simultaneously transformed from a passive recipient of allied reassurance into an indispensable logistics hub and an active security provider. Rzeszów-Jasionka airport functioned as the principal air gateway for Western military materiel entering Ukraine; Polish railway infrastructure sustained land supply lines; and Polish military contributions — including MiG-29 fighters, T-72 tanks, Krab self-propelled howitzers, and Piorun man-portable air defence systems — constituted one of the most substantial transfer programmes of any allied state . The question of permanent basing, which Poland continued to press throughout the Biden administration, remained formally unresolved even as de facto presence reached unprecedented levels — a gap between form and substance that reflected both American institutional resistance to formal commitments perceived as escalatory and the practical reality that the distinction between rotational and permanent presence had, in operational terms, been rendered largely nominal ^[14].

The comparison across both administrations, conducted systematically in Section 3.5 and developed further here, supports a nuanced position that acknowledges genuine differences while insisting on the primacy of structural continuity. The differences between the two administrations were real and consequential in specific domains. The Trump administration's transactional framing created abandonment anxiety that the Biden administration's multilateral reassurance addressed; this difference had practical consequences for Polish diplomatic calculations and for the cohesion of the Eastern Flank coalition. The Biden administration's management of the Przewodów missile incident in November 2022 — through immediate consultation and careful calibration designed to prevent escalation — demonstrated the operational significance of the multilateral framework that Trump's unilateralism had weakened ^[15]. The normative dimension of the relationship, almost entirely absent under Trump, became a source of friction under Biden, with implications for domestic Polish politics that extended beyond the bilateral security domain. These differences should not be minimised. Yet the underlying trajectory showed a remarkable degree of continuity driven by structural factors that no administration controlled. Russian revisionism — made unmistakable by the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and rendered existential by the 2022 full-scale invasion — constituted the primary structural driver of American strategic investment in Poland regardless of who occupied the White House ^[16]. Geographic logic — Poland's position as the most militarily capable frontline ally — ensured that American planners prioritised Polish infrastructure and basing regardless of the political relationship between the two governments. Congressional hawkishness on Russia, sustained across both administrations by bipartisan majorities, underwrote defence appropriations and statutory commitments — including the European Deterrence Initiative funding — that proved durable against executive variation ^[17]. Industrial and procurement interests, represented by the F-35 and HIMARS supply chains and the institutional relationships between Polish and American defence establishments, created constituencies for the relationship's continuation that operated largely independently of executive-level political dynamics. The EDCA itself — negotiated and signed under Trump — was implemented and deepened under Biden, an institutional continuity that demonstrated how formal commitments constrained and channelled subsequent executive action ^[18].

The Polish case carries implications that extend beyond the bilateral relationship examined in this thesis. For the literature on small-state alliance management, the Polish experience under both administrations demonstrates that sustained over-compliance with alliance obligations — defence expenditure well above treaty requirements, consistent support for American strategic priorities in energy, procurement, and Eastern Flank posture — constitutes an effective, if costly, strategy for securing privileged bilateral access and abandonment insurance. This strategy proved robust across administrations with radically different views of multilateralism, because it operated along structural channels — differentiation from less compliant allies in the transactional calculus of one administration, and credible commitment to collective defence in the burden-sharing discourse of the other — that were not dependent on any particular administration's ideological preferences. The Polish case also demonstrates the risks inherent in this strategy: deepened asymmetry, dependence on American procurement chains, distance from European partners, and the vulnerability that accompanies the concentration of strategic eggs in a single basket. The tension between the bilateral American relationship and the European security architecture — present throughout the Trump years and not fully resolved under Biden — represents a structural dilemma for Polish grand strategy that has not been resolved by the period examined in this thesis.

For the literature on the interaction between executive leadership and structural forces in alliance dynamics, the Polish case offers a useful corrective to both structural determinism and voluntarism. A purely structural account — one that predicted identical outcomes regardless of administration — would fail to explain the genuine differences in Polish diplomatic positioning, alliance cohesion, and the normative character of the relationship observable across the two eras. A purely agential account — one that treated administration-level preferences as the primary determinant — would fail to explain why material commitments deepened, EDCA was implemented, and the Eastern Flank reinforcement accelerated in ways that reflected structural imperatives rather than administration choices. The most accurate account is one that treats structural factors as setting the range of possible outcomes and administration-level factors as determining which outcome within that range is realised. Under both Trump and Biden, the structural range was one in which the Polish-American security relationship would deepen; the question administration-level factors answered was how that deepening would be managed, what diplomatic costs would accompany it, and what the relative balance between bilateral and multilateral channels would be.

The future of Polish-American security cooperation, as it may be projected from the analytical vantage point of this thesis, appears to rest on structural foundations sufficiently robust to survive executive variation, yet vulnerable to scenarios — a negotiated settlement of the Ukraine conflict that reduced perceived Russian threat, a significant deterioration of American fiscal capacity for overseas commitments, or a Polish strategic reorientation toward European autonomy — that would alter the structural parameters themselves. The activation of Redzikowo, the V Corps presence, and the continued deployment of approximately ten thousand American personnel in Poland represent commitments with institutional momentum; reversing them would require deliberate policy action rather than simply the election of a new administration. The permanent basing question — the single most important unresolved issue in the bilateral relationship — will likely be determined less by diplomatic preference than by whether the structural conditions that have driven the de facto deepening of presence continue to obtain.

This thesis is subject to several limitations that should be acknowledged and that point toward directions for future research. The analysis was conducted at the level of strategic and institutional relationships, drawing on official statements, treaty documents, legislative records, and published secondary literature; it did not incorporate primary research in the form of elite interviews with Polish or American decision-makers, which would have permitted a more granular account of the decision-making processes behind specific commitments. The temporal horizon of the thesis — ending with the conclusion of the Biden administration in January 2025 — precludes analysis of subsequent developments, including the early period of the second Trump administration, which preliminary indicators suggest may reprise some of the transactional dynamics observed in 2017 to 2021. Future research might productively examine the domestic political economy of the Polish-American security relationship — specifically, the role of defence industry interests, parliamentary dynamics, and public opinion in shaping Polish strategic choices — which received insufficient attention in the present analysis. Comparative analysis placing the Polish case alongside other Eastern Flank allies, particularly the Baltic states and Romania, would illuminate whether the Polish experience is exceptional or representative of a broader pattern of small-state alliance management under conditions of great-power rivalry. Finally, the role of European Union defence integration initiatives — including the European Defence Fund, PESCO, and the broader debate over strategic autonomy — as either a complement or a competitor to the transatlantic relationship represents a research agenda whose significance was visible in the Biden era and is likely to grow.

Polish-American security cooperation between 2017 and 2025 demonstrated that alliance relationships are not simply intergovernmental transactions subject to revision at electoral intervals, but institutionally dense, materially embedded, and strategically entrenched structures that develop their own momentum. The two administrations examined in this thesis differed in important ways — in their rhetorical framing of the relationship, their attitudes toward multilateral institutions, the normative character of their engagement with Warsaw, and the diplomatic tools they employed — but they presided over a relationship whose underlying trajectory was substantially continuous. That continuity was not the product of bureaucratic inertia alone; it was the product of structural forces — Russian revisionism, geographic imperatives, Congressional commitments, industrial interests, and Polish strategic investment — that no administration fully controlled. The central lesson of the period examined is that in the study of alliance dynamics, structure constrains but does not determine; executive agency matters but within limits set by forces that outlast any single administration. For Poland, the implication is that the strategic investment in the American relationship has yielded durable institutional returns, while for the discipline, the case confirms that the most productive analytical framework is one that holds structural and agential explanations in productive tension rather than resolving the question in favour of either.

List of Tables

Table 1.1. Theoretical frameworks applied to Polish-American security cooperation
Table 1.2. Principal drivers of Polish national security priorities and their policy manifestations
Table 2.1. Key Polish-American defence agreements and military cooperation milestones, 2017–2021
Table 2.2. Assessment of Trump-era Polish-American security cooperation: achievements and structural vulnerabilities
Table 3.1. Selected Polish Military Contributions to Ukraine (2022–2024) and Equipment Replacement/Procurement
Table 3.2. Comparative Security Dimensions: Trump (2017–2021) versus Biden (2021–2025) Administrations

List of Figures

Figure 1.1. Key milestones in Polish-American security cooperation, 1989–2025
Figure 2.1. Polish defence expenditure as a percentage of GDP and principal bilateral milestones, 2013–2021