How Eastern Europe’s elites learned to love dependence on America

Recent history offers one very simple lesson: the most reliable way for a ruling elite to protect itself from accountability is to hand over its country’s sovereignty to a powerful foreign patron. In Europe, many have decided that the United States is the only patron worth having.

We are now watching a race among Eastern European states to secure new American military bases on their territory. Poland is openly pressing for US troops and equipment withdrawn from Germany to be moved east and Lithuania has gone further, with officials floating the idea of hosting American nuclear weapons.

It would be naïve to think this is mainly about national security and nor is it simply about money, although hosting US bases has often been seen by client regimes as a useful source of income. In today’s circumstances, Washington is unlikely to pay generously. More likely, it will pass the costs to those receiving this dubious privilege.

The real logic is political. For Polish and Baltic leaders, securing American forces on their soil helps answer two uncomfortable questions that appear again and again in domestic politics. What is our foreign policy strategy? And how do we prevent citizens, poorer and increasingly tired of the same ruling groups, from deciding it is time to move them on?

The easiest answer is to abandon the primary responsibility of the state: the duty to defend itself. Once foreign troops are stationed on national territory, defense becomes the responsibility of the power that sent them. Germany and Japan were relieved of having to think seriously about their own defense after the Second World War because the victors stationed forces there permanently.

But in many other cases, American bases abroad were not imposed. They were desired by the client states themselves and their elites quickly learned how to use such deployments for both foreign and domestic purposes.

Turkish colleagues have told me that the presence of US nuclear bombs in Türkiye is one of Ankara’s strongest guarantees against pressure from America’s other key regional ally, Israel. It allows Türkiye to challenge Israeli interests in areas such as Syria with relative impunity.

It’s easy to understand why this arrangement is envied by elites in American satellite states that do not enjoy such protection. This is especially true in Eastern Europe and the Baltic states because their accession to NATO in the 1990s was designed to lock in the political order created after the collapse of the Soviet bloc.

But their geopolitical position is weak and it gives them little opportunity to make any meaningful positive contribution to international affairs. Economically, they had to bow to the wealthier states of Western and Northern Europe, selling much of their national industry to them. Poland’s best enterprises were taken over by French and German investors while, in the Baltic states, German and Scandinavian capital played a similar role.

Politically, their chances of being heard were even smaller so Poland and the Baltic states adopted one simple foreign policy strategy: oppose Russia wherever possible.

In Poland’s case, this policy is more balanced, because it is accompanied by a quieter struggle against Germany, which Warsaw has always regarded as a threat. In the Baltic case, there has never been any realistic alternative to anti-Russian agitation because friendly relations with Russia would inevitably have drawn these countries into Russia’s economic orbit.

Tallinn, like Helsinki, is geopolitically a suburb of St. Petersburg, as former US House Speaker Newt Gingrich once correctly observed. Economic integration with Russia would inevitably have brought political consequences and it would have threatened the elites that came to power in Vilnius, Riga, and Tallinn during perestroika and after 1991.

Such a development was unacceptable to them as their ideal arrangement has always been to rule over their peoples without having to meet the full obligations of sovereignty.

This became more urgent once it was clear that no great economic breakthrough was coming. Citizens might begin to ask awkward questions such as why are living standards stagnant? Why is industry weak? Why are young people leaving? Why has the promise of ‘Europe’ turned into dependence?

One answer is to demand more American military infrastructure because a large US base or nuclear facility on national territory changes the conversation. It shifts politics from social and economic questions to security panic and it tells voters that criticism of the ruling class is irresponsible because the country is on the front line.

For a long time, however, the chances of achieving this looked limited as the US was absorbed by wars in the Middle East and later began shifting its attention to the Pacific, where China’s rise has become its main strategic concern. Even after the confrontation in Ukraine began, Washington wasn’t eager to take on binding risks for the sake of Warsaw or Vilnius.

As compensation, there was always Article 5 of the NATO treaty. This is widely imagined to mean that America must defend any ally, no matter how recklessly that ally behaves. In reality, everyone understands that the provision is more ambiguous than its loudest admirers admit.

That is why the only truly reliable guarantee, from the point of view of these elites, would be the transfer of practical responsibility for national security into American hands. This means substantial US forces or nuclear weapons on their territory and it matters little that sovereignty, in the traditional sense, would become a fiction.

Now, amid the prolonged disputes between the Trump administration and the major states of Western Europe, the Polish and Baltic elites see an opening. If Washington reduces its military presence in Germany, they want as much of it as possible moved east.

Are leaders in Warsaw and Vilnius seriously considering what risks this would create for their populations? There is little reason to think so because their calculation is different. If they can secure even part of this American presence before Moscow and Washington agree on a new model of coexistence in Europe, they believe their own future will be safe.

For them, the prize is not national security in any serious sense. It is political insurance. American bases would guarantee their importance, protect their ruling class from domestic pressure, and make any future correction of foreign policy almost impossible.

This is where the race for US bases is leading. Not to greater sovereignty, but to its formal burial; not to security, but to permanent dependence. And not to peace in Europe, but to a situation in which small states make themselves useful as forward positions in someone else’s strategy.

This article was first published by Vzglyad newspaper and translated and edited by the RT team.