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Poland Tag

Brexit has caused quite the kerfuffle among the countries of the European Union (EU), and amid the dire warnings of lasting DOOOM!, the Polish Finance Minister notes that Brexit shows that the EU is not the only option for the nations of Europe. CNBC reports:
The U.K.'s Brexit vote may have changed attitudes to the European Union across the continent, Polish Finance Minister Pawel Szalamacha told CNBC Friday, adding that the decision showed that the EU is "no longer the only choice for the nations of Europe." Szalamacha suggested that more countries could be prompted to leave the 28-nation bloc, such as those "with a strong sense of identity, some of the Nordic countries," or even some countries who may "feel that their destiny … is no longer within their hands." He added, "I don't think it's a sensible policy just to rely on the decisions of the major international players," not least because "some policy mistakes were committed."
Szalamacha goes on to say he supports decentralizing the EU's power base in Brussels so that countries can have more control over their own economies and markets.

The United States and Poland have broken ground on the site of the new defense missile site, which will probably anger Mother Russia. But what else is new? Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work tried to assure by reminding them the site will only protect NATO members:
"Today we stand at a strategic inflection point and a change in the strategic landscape," Work said at this Polish military base situated in a northern village. Europe and NATO face a range of new and complex security challenges, he said. Addressing those challenges will require a "more capable NATO alliance, one that continues to evolve and adapt to threats," he said. In efforts to protect the alliance, NATO is making important investments, including in missile defense, he said.

Amid a massive refugee crisis, the diplomatic relations between Germany and Poland have reached a post-WWII low. German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s EU-backed proposal to distribute large number of newly arriving Arab and North African migrants across Europe has been met with stiff resistance from the recently elected Polish government. The rhetoric coming from Germany has turned especially hostile in recent months. Leading members of Merkel’s government have talked about taking “punitive measures” against Poland and placing the country “under supervision.” Germany’s Deputy Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel has also called for economic sanctions against EU-members who refure to “shoulder the burden” and accept their “fair share” of migrants.

In a show of defiance against the European Union, Poland's newly-elected conservative Prime Minister Beata Szydlo has broken with the practice of her liberal predecessors and decided to remove the EU flag from her weekly news conference. Last month, Prime Minister Szydlo's conservative Law and Justice Party won a landslide victory on an anti-immigration and Eurosceptic platform. The new Polish government is opposed to the EU-backed German proposal to distribute migrants across EU member states. Poland is only willing to accept displaced Christians from the Middle East.

The landslide victory of the conservative party in Poland has delivered a big blow to the open border policy pursued by German Chancellor Merkel and unelected Eurocrats in Brussels. Poland’s ruling liberal Civic Platform has now become the first political victim of EU’s mass migration policy. The conservative Law and Justice Party won most of the seats in the Polish parliament, securing about 38 percent of the votes. If the initial figures are confirmed, it will be the first time in democratic Poland’s history that a single party has secured a majority in the country’s parliament. 52-year-old miner’s daughter, Beata Szydło (Law and Justice Party) is expected to replace the incumbent Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz, who belongs to the Civic Platform party. With Prime Minister Kopacz’s devastating defeat, Chancellor Merkel has lost her most important ally in Eastern Europe. Hungary's President Victor Orban is already leading an open charge in Eastern Europe against Markel’s pro-immigration policy.

While America's attention has been focused on Iraq, it is easy to forget the month before we were concerned about Russian interventions in the Ukraine and Crimea. On another one of his #SmartPower/vacation tours, President Obama in early June went to Poland to promise that he would send aidto address tensions in the region.
U.S. President Barack Obama promised ...to beef up military support for eastern European members of the NATO alliance who fear they could be next in the firing line after the Kremlin's intervention in Ukraine. Under attack from critics at home who say his leadership on the world stage has not been muscular enough, Obama unveiled plans to spend up to $1 billion in supporting and training the armed forces of NATO states on Russia's borders. The White House also said it would review permanent troop deployments in Europe in the light of the Ukraine crisis -- though that fell short of a firm commitment to put troops on the ground that Poland and some of its neighbors had sought.
This is in addition to the U.S. Army paratroopers who were sent to Poland in April for a series of military exercises in four countries across Eastern Europe to counter the crisis in Ukraine. However, it seems that in some quarters of that country, Polish opinion of our assistance is on par with the substantially decreased popularity of our Commander-in-Chief. A Polish news magazine provided excerpts of a secretly recorded conversation with Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, during which he called his country's ties with the US "worthless".
According to a transcript of excerpts of the conversation that was published by Wprost on its Internet site, Sikorski told Rostowski: "You know that the Polish-US alliance isn't worth anything." "It is downright harmful, because it creates a false sense of security ... Complete bullshit. We'll get in conflict with the Germans, Russians and we'll think that everything is super, because we gave the Americans a blow job. Losers. Complete losers."