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More Collateral Fallout from Trump's Attempted Appeasement of Putin [1]
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Date: 2025-03-07
One of the first casualties of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine three years ago was the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970 that sought to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons beyond the five acknowledged nuclear states at the time (USA, USSR, UK, France, and China).
Though it was fairly successful in its first 50 years of operation, with just India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel joining the ranks of the nuclear powers either officially or unofficially, the Russian invasion of Ukraine (which had actually given up the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal it had inherited from the dissolution of the old USSR in exchange for what proved to be essentially worthless security guarantees in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994) convinced nearly everyone else threatened by an aggressive nuclear power (i.e. Russia, and possibly the USA at this point) that the only way to protect your nation from a future invasion was to acquire your own nuclear deterrent.
Case in point now is Poland, which has no intention of being the victim of the above cartoon again — as reported by Bloomberg (bolding mine):
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk signaled his country may seek access to nuclear weapons as he issued a warning that Europe could face war with Russia in the next few years. … Tusk said there is “no doubt” that Russia is now re-arming and mobilizing on a massive scale, suggesting that the Kremlin is preparing for a full-scale military confrontation not only with Ukraine but “somebody significantly larger” within the next three to four years. ... On Friday, Tusk unveiled a plan to bolster the size of the country’s armed forces to half a million soldiers and to provide military training to every adult male. The announcement comes a day after European Union leaders met in Brussels to mobilize hundreds of billions of euros in defense funds.
Poland already spends the highest percentage of its GDP on defense of any NATO nation (4%, heading to 5% this year, when the USA is merely second at 3.5%), and now plans to more than double the size of its armed forces.
In that same speech to parliament today, Tusk also indicated Poland will be withdrawing from the 1997 Ottawa Convention prohibiting the use on anti-personnel landmines, and possibly the Dublin Convention against cluster munitions as well as reported by the Kyiv Post.
Finland and Lithuania are also considering withdrawing from the Ottawa Convention, and Lithuania has already done so with respect to the Dublin Convention. A new “Iron Curtain” marked by extensive use of landmines appears to be descending on Europe, only this time it’s on the borders of Russia and Belarus instead of down the center of Central Europe.
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