U.S. President Donald Trump and U.S. Vice President JD Vance’s verbal assault on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office will mark Feb. 28, 2025, as an infamous moment in American and world history. The United States is rapidly destroying its good name and alienating everyone except the world’s most brutal dictators. The damage to America’s credibility and reputation will take decades to repair — and may be irreparable. More broadly, with the end of the postwar U.S.-centered i

Before the U.S. presidential election, it seemed like no one but Donald Trump’s staunchest supporters believed he could win. After all, the man is a convicted felon, a putschist-provocateur, an agent of chaos, and a walking scandal who has been disowned by almost all his former advisors, some of whom describe him as a fascist. Moreover, the incumbent Democratic administration presides over an economy with low inflation, low unemployment, high economic growth, a record-high stock market, and majo

One year after a coalition led by Donald Tusk defeated Poland’s right-wing ruling party, Law and Justice (PiS), the mood in the country is subdued. While a victory by pro-democracy parties in a free, but decidedly unfair, election was necessary, it was not sufficient to eliminate the illiberal populist threat. Prying PiS’s tentacles out of every nook and cranny of the state is proving to be a much longer process. In the meantime, PiS is seeking political advantage from the opposition benches. W

There is a saying in Poland that, “No one will die for Gdansk.” No matter what kind of security guarantees Poland gets from Western countries, most Poles believe that we will still have to fend for ourselves. After all, when the Nazis invaded in 1939, Poland had security guarantees from Great Britain and France, yet neither country came to its aid (though they did formally declare war on the Third Reich). Yes, according to Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, an attack on one NATO member is

As Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine rages on, the stability of neighboring Belarus, which has been backing Russia's aggression, appears to be fracturing. Has Russian President Vladimir Putin's war of aggression opened a Pandora's box for a regime that is practically a remote wing of the Kremlin? Recall that, in Belarus' presidential election in August 2020, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya almost certainly defeated the incumbent Alexander Lukashenko, whose minions had dismissed his opponent as a

Immediately after World War II, the Paris-exiled Polish intellectual  Jerzy Giedroyc (of Lithuanian origins, born in Minsk) coined a phrase that would come to define Poland’s foreign policy toward its eastern neighbors: “There will be no independent Poland without an independent Belarus, Lithuania, and Ukraine.” Since the fall of communism, it has been an article of diplomatic faith in Warsaw. Ukrainian patriots, who inspired current Ukrainian policies, have thought similarly. Even if Ukraine f

Although local elections often don’t make international news headlines or involve widely recognizable household names, anyone who cares about the state of liberal democracy would do well to pay attention to them. In Turkey, for example, recent elections not only revealed widespread dissatisfaction with the country’s autocratic president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan; they also offered broader lessons for long-struggling opposition parties about how to select effective candidates and run effective campai

It has been a month since Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s government took office, and the task now is to rebuild Polish democracy after eight years of corrupt misrule under Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s Law and Justice (PiS) party. No country in Europe has ever faced a political transition quite like this one. After all, Poland’s veto-wielding president, Andrzej Duda, remains loyal to the ousted populist government, and Tusk’s coalition government lacks the votes to remove him from office despite Du

WARSAW – This week, Donald Tusk won a vote of confidence in Poland’s parliament to lead a new government as the country’s new prime minister, following a failed bid by the incumbent, Mateusz Morawiecki to remain in that role. The vote provoked a visibly nervous reaction from the leader of the outgoing populist government, Jarosław Kaczyński, who stormed up to the rostrum to denounce Tusk, a former prime minister who subsequently served as president of the European Council, as a “German agent.”

WARSAW – In October, Polish voters demonstrated that even extremely unequal elections against authoritarian incumbents can be won. The opposition’s victory, and the country’s subsequent re-democratization, may hold useful lessons for like-minded forces in Hungary, Turkey, and elsewhere. In Poland, the defeated populist leader, Jarosław Kaczyński of Law and Justice (PiS), is relearning the rules of democracy the hard way in the newly elected parliament. For the past eight years, he did not enter

WARSAW – This wasn’t supposed to happen. With sweeping control over state financial resources and public and local media, Poland’s populist ruling party, Law and Justice (PiS), had a massive structural advantage in this month’s parliamentary election. It should have won handily and continued consolidating its illiberal, anti-democratic rule. Instead, PiS confronted a national uprising, winning just over 35% of the vote, while opposition parties won more than 54%. Poland’s democratic institution

WARSAW – There is a growing belief that Poland will soon have Europe’s strongest army. Poland’s ruling party, Law and Justice (PiS), has not missed any opportunity to drum this message home, and one increasingly hears it being echoed abroad, too. But is it true? The claim largely rests on the PiS government’s unprecedented arms purchases and plans to expand the army to 300,000 soldiers by 2035. Under the new national-defense law, military spending should reach 3% of GDP this year – a full perce

Even though Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recently honored the victims of a 1943 massacre of Poles by Ukrainian nationalists, some Poles still think their country is owed an apology. Worse, such demands are symptomatic of a broader embrace of messianic victimhood that has taken hold in recent years. WARSAW – July 11 marked the 80th anniversary of the Volhynia massacre, when Ukrainian nationalists fighting for their own state slaughtered nearly 100,000 Poles in a matter of days. People