The world stage looks completely different to a small country. Large global powers may set the tectonic shifts of geopolitics in motion, but the other players have always had to figure out how to survive in the cracks in between.
In two months, the Trump administration has threatened allies with tariffs and trade wars, dismantled foreign aid and silenced Voice of America. President Trump scolded the president of Ukraine in the Oval Office and withheld military aid and intelligence sharing. America joined Russia, North Korea and Belarus in opposing a resolution in the U.N. General Assembly that demanded Russia immediately withdraw its forces from Ukraine, and Mr. Trump has treated President Vladimir Putin of Russia as a reliable partner for discussion.
A Trump foreign policy doctrine is becoming clear, at least in outline. Mr. Trump’s America seeks to lead a world in which the great nuclear powers take what they can. They choose their spheres of influence, the size of their territories and the shape of their borders. To other big powers Mr. Trump’s approach may be understood as transactional or realist. But to many of the smaller democracies of Eastern Europe and South and East Asia, which have for decades hitched their fate to an America that they thought would enable them to continue to exist near the border of Russia or China, the Trump doctrine is the foreign policy of betrayal.
Since the fall of Communism, many of the small and medium-size countries in Eastern Europe, including the Baltic States, Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary, adapted to meet the demanding standards of liberal democracy. Those countries wrote and amended constitutions, democratized political life, built market economies and signed trade agreements. Some even agreed to the installation of American military bases or secret C.I.A. prisons. The Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary joined NATO in 1999, others followed later. This adaptation was imperfect and uneven — consider Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s “illiberal democracy” in Hungary and the eight-year rule of Poland’s nationalist-populist Law and Justice party, which did not end until 2023 — but the overall direction of travel always seemed clear: The small democracies of Eastern Europe would modernize and democratize and, by forging the strongest possible ties with the world’s premier democratic superpower, become more wealthy and secure. (Keeping the differences in mind, much the same can be said in Asia about South Korea and Taiwan.)
This faith in the idea of the West required some degree of diplomatic forgetting of earlier betrayals. Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, responded to Nazi Germany’s annexation of the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia in 1938 by saying that it was part of a “quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing.” In the 1930s, it seemed easy for Mr. Chamberlain to overlook that a totalitarian country was seizing land from a democratic one, but those countries did not forget. Many small nations also carry scars of the betrayal of the meeting in 1945 at Yalta, where the leaders of the great powers decided their fate without consultation, and the redrawn borders tore families apart.
Yalta consigned Eastern Europe to brutal decades behind the Iron Curtain. But in the early 1990s, after the fall of Communism, fledgling democracies chose to again believe that an association with the West — its image freshly burnished and shining — would bring freedom, wealth and stability.
Now that idea of the West has been broken in two. One half belongs to Mr. Trump and other predatory populists. The other is composed of those who still believe in liberal democracy, respect for international agreements and the right of nations to self-determination.
For now, small countries that have thrown their lot in with America find themselves in a geopolitical trap. For Ukraine in particular, Mr. Trump’s words and actions have triggered something close to an existential panic. But the rest of the direct neighbors of Russia need a new plan, too: alliances of democratic values.
The European Union seems to be fundamental to this effort. For those countries that are already members, including Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania and Estonia, the question of how to move forward is simpler. The E.U. is also an aspiration for those countries which aren’t yet members, but have candidate status. As in the ’90s, integration will require adaptation and change — first and foremost, perhaps, in military spending, as the bloc embarks on a plan to spend hundreds of billions to rearm the continent. (Here, Poland is already a model.)
But Europe is only part of the answer to Mr. Trump’s foreign policy of betrayal. Countries like Canada and South Korea cannot join the E.U., but will still seek security alliances with those countries that still share their democratic values — Canada is already moving closer, and is in talks to join the bloc’s military expansion.
It is the end of a chapter. But in alliances of security and values, there will be another: Strange as it may sound, for maybe the first time in history there are two Wests.
Jaroslaw Kuisz is the author of “The New Politics of Poland: A Case of Post-Traumatic Sovereignty” and editor in chief of Kultura Liberalna, a Polish weekly. Karolina Wigura is a professor at the University of Warsaw. They are research associates at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies and senior fellows at the Center for Liberal Modernity in Berlin.
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