Throughout the trans-Atlantic marital spat over Iraq, Central Europeans have remained friendly to the United States. The new democracies risked the wrath of France and Germany, whose favors they need as they enter the European Union, and they backed up their words with deeds. Polish special forces have fought in the port of Umm Qasr and in more than 60 operations since. Thursday Poland suffered its first casualty: Maj. Hieronim Kupczyk was shot dead on the road between US Camp Dogwood and Poland’s headquarters at Babylon. Soldiers from Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia and Ukraine serve in the Polish sector between Basra and Baghdad, providing relief for about 10,000 US troops. Yet unless the United States acts, this may be the last emergency in which it can count on Central European support.
These are countries that have good historical reasons to feel comfortable with US leadership. Thanks to President Woodrow Wilson, Poland was resurrected and Czechoslovakia created after World War I. Ronald Reagan supported dissident movements behind the Iron Curtain while many West Europeans appeased the Soviet Union. The United States insisted on confirming the permanence of borders in Europe at the time of German unification, and it insisted that NATO embrace Central Europe when the EU was dragging its feet. Central Europeans’ feelings of gratitude are enhanced by the fact that the current generation of their leaders, whether post-communist or post-dissident, were brought up on Radio Free Europe broadcasts and Fulbright scholarships.
But it would be a mistake to think that they shared all of the United States’ concerns about Iraq. While many in the region have sympathy with human rights arguments, most never felt threatened by Saddam Hussein, and they were skeptical of intelligence reports about his weapons of mass destruction. As a result, the public in the most pro-American country in Europe, Poland, opposes military involvement in Iraq 2 to 1 — and that was before any casualties. Governments have chosen to participate nevertheless, because — unlike some West Europeans — they do not feel threatened by the United States, and they support US leadership. They hoped their participation would produce feelings of reciprocal commitment: Surely, most believed, the United States would want to show that it pays to be America’s friend.
Now it seems that Central Europeans will be disappointed. Six months after the invasion, companies from the region are still on the sidelines as US giants move in. Poland and Bulgaria used to employ tens of thousands of people in Iraq, building roads, factories and electricity grids. Both had hoped that by siding with the United States they could recover some of the billions of dollars Iraq had never paid them for their work. Instead, they are being pressured to write off the money, even though the debt is several times bigger in proportion to their gross domestic products than what Iraq owed the United States.
Central Europeans had also hoped that the United States would help them modernize their militaries. Because it’s so much cheaper to send foreigners to Iraq than Americans, this seemed a good time to help these armies come closer to NATO standards, which would make them more easily deployable alongside US forces. Instead, these countries’ investments in defense are being postponed to finance operations in Iraq.
But even more upsetting to Central Europeans is the way they are treated by the US visa process. If we are such good allies, they ask, why can’t we enter the United States without visas, as the French or the Germans? While Americans travel without visas to most of Central Europe, natives pay $100 for the privilege of applying for a US visa, effectively subsidizing the US immigration service, with no guarantee of receiving a visa. Polish newspapers are full of stories of students deported in manacles and famous actors prevented from working on Broadway. Small issues sometimes have a political effect out of all proportion to the cost of dealing with them, and this is one.
Last but not least, President Bush’s words on Russia have been noted with dismay. “I respect President Putin’s vision for Russia,” Bush said at the recent summit with Vladimir Putin — “a country in which democracy and freedom and rule of law thrive.” I wager that this sentence will one day embarrass George W. Bush as much as Vice President Henry Wallace’s wartime praise of Kolyma, the vast Soviet gulag in which millions of slave workers toiled.
Every instance of unwarranted praise for Putin’s increasingly authoritarian regime resurrects the specter of Yalta and undercuts faith in the United States.
As of next year, Western Europe’s pull in Central Europe will multiply. Millions of motorists will see signs marking EU-financed infrastructure projects; millions of farmers will get EU agricultural subsidy checks in the mail; and tens of thousands of journalists, scientists and academics will become eligible for EU grants. If the United States wants to remain a player, it better get into the game.
(The writer, Poland’s former deputy minister for defense and for foreign affairs, is executive director of the American Enterprise Institute’s New Atlantic Initiative.)
