JD Vance Crossed the Line This Time: The Ally That Is Starting To Look Scary

Can Poland rely on a U.S. administration that supports the AfD, a post-Nazi party in Germany? This frightening question arises at a time when it’s no longer possible to rule out a Russian invasion of the West in the near future.

Years ago Polish President Aleksander Kwaśniewski warned against having to choose between father and mother: NATO and the U.S. So, in fact, between the U.S. and Germany and France. He believed that this could put an end to the golden age of peace and development that Poland experienced after the fall of communism.

There is growing evidence that this moment is approaching with great strides. During the Munich Security Conference, Vice President JD Vance called for breaking the cordon sanitaire formed around the Alternative for Germany. This is a party whose leaders have repeatedly downplayed the crimes of Nazism … and Poland happens to be one of the biggest victims of these crimes.

AfD Calls for an End to ‘Culture of Shame’ over Third Reich Crimes

Under German law, the promotion of such propaganda is prohibited. As a result, some AfD members have been detained, and others have been deprived of the right to participate in public life. Although the far-right party came second in the polls ahead of elections at the end of February, all the other parties have declared that they will not enter into a coalition with it.

For many European politicians, the U.S. vice president’s speech criticizing the state of European democracy was “unacceptable.” “This is not the Europe I live in,” indignant German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said. Meanwhile, according to The Washington Post, Vance met with Alice Weidel, the leader of the far-right AfD.

Not only did Vance think these restrictions should be ended, but he went so far as to argue that the policy of containment of nationalist populism posed a greater threat to Western Europe than Russia and China. The vice president also met with Weidel, who is seeking the chancellorship. A few days earlier, Elon Musk had interviewed her on X, increasing the social media reach of the far-right party.

Weidel calls for an “end to the culture of shame” against the Third Reich. Her grandfather, Hans Weidel, who convicted a huge number of Polish heroes, was a prominent judge in occupied Poland by direct appointment of Adolf Hitler.

First, Defense Minister Pistorius, then Chancellor Olaf Scholz and CDU leader Friedrich Merz, who has a good chance of taking the helm of the government after the election, openly opposed the U.S. vice president. Scholz not only accused him of unacceptable interference with the democratic process in Germany, but also warned that the restrictions Vance wanted to be lifted ensured that war would never start on German soil again. Merz pointed out that the Trump administration should first stop expelling the representatives of the Associated Press — which opposes its nationalist agenda — from the White House before teaching others lessons in democracy.

Jarosław Kaczyński Wanted To Build a European Army Years Ago — We Must Revisit That

Can Poland still trust such an America? In Munich, it was Volodymyr Zelenskyy who gave the clearest answer to this question. He called on Europeans to start arming themselves en masse so that no one could disrespect or threaten them anymore. Back in 2017, Kaczyński said, “I had a concept that I still consider to be good, but, unfortunately, completely unrealistic with the current attitude of the European elites. It is about creating a European Union that would radically reduce interventions in the affairs of individual states, but would become a real superpower with a real army — much stronger than the Russian one.”

On Friday in Warsaw, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth gave another argument in favor of returning to Kaczyński’s idea. He pointed out that the U.S. military is not in Europe “forever” and did not rule out that part of the agreement between Washington and Moscow may be the reduction of Allied troops on the eastern flank of NATO.

Unfortunately, on the threshold of the presidential election in Poland, nothing indicates that today’s Law and Justice and Civic Platform are ready to tell the truth about the threat posed to peace in Europe by the shift of the American administration. There may be little time to correct this error. In Munich, Zelenskyy, citing intelligence data, said that Putin is preparing major maneuvers in Belarus this summer — similar to the ones that preceded the invasion of Ukraine. Only, the next time the Russian troops’ direction may be westward, not southward.