The U.S. will open a new air defense base in Europe on Wednesday, as many NATO members on the continent look on with trepidation as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House in January.
The missile defense base in Redzikowo, a town in northwestern Poland, close to the Baltic Sea, is the first permanent U.S. military base in the central European country, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said in a video posted to X, formerly Twitter, on Tuesday.
Redzikowo is just under 100 miles from Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave, where Moscow has a powerful military presence wedged between NATO members Poland and Lithuania.
Plans for the base were kicked off by President George W. Bush, and continued through Barack Obama‘s presidency, Donald Trump’s first term in office and were finished off by Joe Biden‘s administration, Sikorski said.
The project is a show of the “geostrategic consistency of the United States,” he said. “The Polish-American alliance is strong, regardless of who governs in Warsaw and Washington.”
Trump has been critical of NATO, and appeared to give the go-ahead for Russia to attack members he said were not contributing enough funds to the alliance earlier this year.
NATO is bound together by Article 5, which means that an attack on one state is an attack on all. The U.S. is the most influential member, and has historically provided expensive capabilities for European members.
President Joe Biden’s administration denounced Trump’s remarks at the time as “appalling and unhinged.”
Each NATO member is asked to dedicate 2 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) to defense. For years, many nations had not met this threshold, which is not enforced by the alliance. Now, roughly two thirds of countries will likely reach 2 percent by the end of the year.
Trump’s reelection was greeted in parts of Europe, particularly the Baltic states that share a land border with Russia, with trepidation. Remarks from the Republican in the past may have been “disturbing,” Estonian Minister of Defense Hanno Pevkur told Newsweek on the sidelines of the IISS Prague Defence Summit in the Czech Republic over the weekend.
But he quickly added: “I’m not so pessimistic as many are.” Trump “always comes with strategic uncertainty,” said Laurynas Kasčiūnas, Lithuania’s defense minister. “It’s his modus operandi.”
NATO nations on the alliance’s eastern flank, close to Russia and the conflict in Ukraine, have stormed ahead of Western European countries with defense spending. Warsaw announced in the summer it would spend 5 percent of its GDP on defense in 2025.
Europe “urgently needs to take more responsibility” for its own security, Sikorski said as votes were counted in the U.S. last week.
Russia has opposed the Redzikowo base since the 2000s. Moscow said in 2010 it did “not understand the logic and focus of U.S.-Polish cooperation in this sphere.”
This predates Russia’s annexation of Crimea and military pushes in Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions in 2014, as well as the full-scale invasion of Ukraine eight years later that has marked the lowest point in relations between Washington and Moscow since the Cold War.
Hillary Rodham Clinton, then-U.S. Secretary of State, said in 2010 that the base was part of a “purely defensive system” that didn’t threaten Russia, and would “protect Poland and our allies from evolving threats, such as those from Iran.”
The Redzikowo base, along with another site in Deveselu, Romania, hosts “Aegis Ashore,” a land-based system designed from the U.S. Navy’s Aegis system to intercept short and intermediate-range ballistic missiles. NATO has described the Redzikowo site as “part of a larger NATO missile shield.”
The U.S. also has destroyers deployed at the Rota base in southern Spain, and a radar station in the southeastern Turkish town of Kürecik to supply information on missiles.
The site in Deveselu has been up and running since 2016.
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