Polish President Andrzej Duda said Tuesday that if Germany doesn’t want American troops on its soil, Poland would be happy to take them.
Duda was responding to remarks by Germany’s election winner Friedrich Merz, who said that U.S. President Donald Trump doesn’t care about Europe and that the continent urgently needs to strengthen its own defenses.
“If Germany does not want American troops, does not want partnership with the United States, we will very willingly accept partnership with the United States,” the Polish president said in an interview with Polsat News.
“I am interested in transferring all the cooperation that Germany has with the United States to Poland. Very willingly,” Duda added.
The Polish president was also skeptical about Merz’s other suggestion that Europe might have to find a replacement for NATO.
“NATO without the United States? … Everything is possible, but what’s the point? If there is a security alliance without the United States, then its guarantees without the world’s strongest power would simply be illusory,” Duda said.
“A reliable ally is, above all, the United States, which has repeatedly shown over the last hundred years that when they return to the game, they are able to interrupt any armed conflict, to end it. We saw this during World War I, we saw this during World War II, right here in Europe,” the president said.
Under the Polish political system, the government, led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk — a Duda opponent — takes the lead in foreign and military policy.
Tusk is also strongly pro-American, but has been taking the lead in meetings of European leaders to figure out the continent’s security policy in light of what is happening in the United States.
Duda has reached out to Trump, traveling to the U.S. over the weekend to the conservative CPAC conference, where he met briefly with the U.S. president.
In the interview, Duda said he’s not afraid that Trump would “sell Ukraine” — a reaction to the U.S. president’s closer ties with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and sharp denunciations of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Trump is also demanding a minerals deal with Ukraine to repay what he incorrectly says was $500 billion in U.S. aid for Kyiv.
“America has invested a huge amount of money in Ukraine,” Duda said, adding: “He has the right to expect that the U.S. will get something out of it. In this sense, Donald Trump is more concerned about Ukraine not being sold into Russian hands,” Duda says.
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