Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki on Saturday criticized what he described as growing anti-Americanism among EU member states and said his country would seek to create stronger ties between Europe and the United States.
In a wide-ranging interview with German newspaper Die Welt, Morawiecki also laid into Germany and France for not meeting the NATO defense spending target and criticized the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project.
Asked what role Poland would play within the EU in the future, the prime minister said: “We are watching with concern the rise of anti-American reflexes in some EU member states. Warsaw will therefore use its good relationship with Washington to strengthen Europe’s alliance with the United States.”
Without America, he added, Europe could not survive “hybrid attacks from Russia and the growing influence of China.”
In September, U.S. President Donald Trump and his Polish counterpart Andrzej Duda signed a joint declaration on advancing defense cooperation between the two countries. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Poland has seen in the U.S. a vital ally against Russia.
“Donald Trump takes Polish security interests seriously and we’re very happy about that in Warsaw,” Morawiecki said, adding that the number of NATO soldiers stationed in Poland had risen from 300 to 6,000 in the past four years.
The Polish prime minister criticized Paris and Berlin for falling below the NATO defense spending target of 2 percent of GDP and said he “strongly disagreed” with French President Emmanuel Macron’s comments that the military alliance was “brain dead.”
“If NATO suffers from something, it’s from the lack of engagement of some [alliance] members,” he said. “France and Germany, among others, have so far not kept the promises they made about spending 2 percent of their [GDP] on defense. With that, how can NATO do what is expected of it?”
Morawiecki also criticized the Nord Stream 2 project, a pipeline that will ship gas from Russia to Germany via the Baltic Sea. Trump last month signed off on legislation allowing Washington to issue sanctions on firms involved in the pipeline.
“In Poland we of course wish the construction of Nord Stream 2 had never started … There is a worst-case scenario to avoid: Moscow must never be able to blackmail the EU with a gas delivery freeze. In order to not be dependent on Russia, we must diversify our energy sources,” he said, adding: “Nord Stream 2 is a step in the wrong direction.”