Former President of the Polish Senate visits USC
Dr. Longin Pastusiak visited and gave a speech at the University of South Carolina yesterday. If you are unfamiliar with who Dr. Pastusiak is (as I was before I went to this speech), he has served as a member of Poland’s lower house of Parliament for ten years and as the President of the Polish Senate (comparable to our Speaker) for four years. Along with this, he has written over 600 scholarly publications, 60 books, and 3,000 (yes 3,000) articles in daily and weekly journals. If that wasn’t enough, he is currently a Professor at Appalachian State in North Carolina. (I tried to find more information to put on here but it was all written in what I’m guessing was Polish.)
The title of his speech was “Is Poland America’s ‘Trojan Horse’ in the EU?” The whole idea of his speech was to shed some light on the current missile defense base that the United States has proposed to install in Poland. Poland has seemed somewhat reluctant in recent months to go along with this plan. Therefore, to try to get things moving again, talks between the two countries started yesterday and according to the International Herald, things preceded smoothly. However, in his speech, Dr. Pastusiak pointed out several reasons why the US might run into problems with Poland cooperating completely.
Before Dr. Pastusiak listed some of the reasons tensions are forming between our two countries, he gave a lbried history of Polish/US relations and why Poles seem to have such a strong liking for the United States. He contributed several things to why we are on such good terms. One of the reasons is that Poles have had such a long history with our country, going back to having colonists at Jamestown. Poles were also present during our Revolutionary War and played and important part training some of our forces.
He even stated that in more recent times, the United States has always helped Poland. At the end of WWI, Woodrow Wilson established an independent nation of Poland with his Fourteen Points. American aid programs were also there helping the Poles reconstruct their country after the war. Another reason for our good relationship can be contributed to the fact that we have never had a war with Poland. This might not seem like a lot but when you consider that the rest of Europe has some deep seeded animosity because of past wars, our peaceful relationship helps a lot.
After stating all these reason why Poles like Americans, he stated some issues that are presently straining our relationship. One problem is that despite the good relationship in politics between our two countries, the economical relationship isn’t there. According to Dr. Pastusiak, Poland is currently our 11th largest trading partner. Another issue that is straining our relationship is the unfullfillment of our promise to help Poland’s army modernize. Dr. Pastusiak pointed out that our current promised aid is only $20 million. This is minuscule compared to the billions that we have given to Israel and Egypt.
Finally, the missile defense base that the US wants to install in Poland is straining our relationship. Poland had an assessment taken and the risk currently outweigh the benefits for installing a defense base. Combine this with the fact that 52% of Poles don’t want the base there and you get some tension forming between our two countries. This is why the talks mentioned above are taking place; the US is trying to negotiate some way to make sure the benefits outweigh the risks to the country. According to Dr. Pastusiak, some of the issues on the table are things like installing patriot missile systems to defend this base along with demanding the necessary funding to successfully modernize the Polish Army.
If you want to watch the part of his speech where he talks about the missile defense base, you can watch it here:
Dr. Longin Pastusiak talks about Missile Defense in Poland
Go here if you would like to watch the whole, roughly 40 minute speech:
Dr. Longin Pastusiak Speaks at USC (Part 1)
Dr. Longin Pastusiak Speaks at USC (Part 2)
Dr. Longin Pastusiak Speaks at USC (Part 3)
Dr. Longin Pastusiak Speaks at USC (Part 4)
Overall, even if you don’t care too much about the missile defense debate going on right now in Poland, I would recommended watching his whole speech because it shed a lot of light on the history of US/Polish relations that I had no idea existed.
