Trump Gets It Right, Eventually, on Poland

By Jim Geraghty

Friday, May 22, 2026

 

Warsaw, Poland — Don’t blink, kids, because you don’t hear me say this all that often: President Trump got this decision absolutely right.

 

At least, as far as I can tell. At 4:26 p.m. ET, President Trump posted on Truth Social:

 

Based on the successful Election of the now President of Poland, Karol Nawrocki, who I was proud to Endorse, and our relationship with him, I am pleased to announce that the United States will be sending an additional 5,000 Troops to Poland. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

 

(From the wording of the president’s post, you might think that Karol Nawrocki, a right-of-center candidate from the Law and Justice Party, was recently elected. He was elected in the second round of elections completed in June of last year and inaugurated in August.)

 

If you’ve been reading this newsletter this week, you know that the Polish government was blindsided by the decision to cancel the rotation of the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division — more than 4,000 soldiers and associated equipment to bases in Poland. (The administration later insisted it wasn’t a cancellation, merely a delay.) As I’ve been laying out all week, the Poles have done everything the U.S. — and in particular, the Trump administration — has asked as an ally. Whether or not the cancellation or delay was meant as a slap in the face to Poland, the move was widely interpreted that way.

 

Back on April 27, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said during a school visit in Marsberg, a town in his home region of Sauerland, “The Iranians are clearly stronger than expected and the Americans clearly have no truly convincing strategy in the negotiations either,” and “an entire nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership, particularly by the so-called Revolutionary Guards.”

 

No U.S. president likes hearing the leader of an ally declare that his country is being humiliated by a hated enemy. At the beginning of May, the Pentagon announced that the U.S. would withdraw 5,000 troops from Germany.

 

The cancellation or delay of the rotation of troops to Poland came shortly thereafter. A German newspaper observed that the Pentagon’s decisions seemed to be punishing Poland almost as much as Germany:

 

The Sueddeutsche Zeitung questioned why the freeze targeted a country “exemplarily fulfilling all American demands regarding higher defense spending”, while acknowledging that “establishing the reasons for such a move is difficult.”

 

Trump’s Truth Social post didn’t specify if the 5,000 troops from the brigade combat team in Germany will be the ones moving to Poland. But no matter where the U.S. troops come from, it will bring a greater U.S. military presence to Eastern Europe, closer to where the threat is. And as the man who ran the civilian airport that turned into NATO’s main logistics hub for Ukraine told me yesterday, the Russians suddenly get a lot more hesitant and careful when the U.S. military is around.

 

Radek Sikorski, a former National Review contributor who is Poland’s minister of foreign affairs and deputy prime minister, said this morning:

 

Poland as you know, together with Lithuania, is the largest spender in NATO, 4.7 percent of GDP last year, 4.8 percent this year, and I have an additional reason for confidence this morning. I want to thank President Trump for his announcement that the rotation, the presence of American troops in Poland, will be maintained more or less at previous levels. I want to thank the president and everybody who contributed to these decisions: our friends in Congress, Ambassadors Whitaker and Rose, in NATO and Poland, and of course all the Polish officials that have contributed. I think Poland’s reputation as a country that takes defense seriously also helped. . . . All’s well, that ends well. . . . I think this makes Putin very uncomfortable.

 

‘Out Your Window, You Can See Patriot Missile Batteries . . .’

 

The Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs staffers who organized this reporting trip unknowingly took me full circle by making one of our last stops Rzeszów-Jasionka Airport — the site of my first report from this region, back in the summer of 2023.

 

Some things still look the same from my first visit; there are still Patriot missile batteries in a ring around the airport. (Some of them were provided by the Germans.) Convoys of flatbed tractor-trailers carrying smaller green military trucks and Humvees line the roads.

 

Up until the end of 2021, Rzeszów-Jasionka was the eighth-largest airport in Poland, with about as many flights in a year as Dulles International Airport gets in a month. But Rzeszów-Jasionka had two key characteristics. First, it had the second-longest runway of the country’s airports, after Warsaw International, which meant the largest military cargo planes in NATO could land there. Second, it was the civilian airport closest to the Ukrainian border.

 

And so, as former airport CEO Michał Tabisz told us, when NATO needed a logistics hub for sending supplies into Ukraine — everything from military equipment to humanitarian relief going into Ukraine, and medivacs and refugees coming out — the civilian airport he was running suddenly became one of the most important locations in the war.

 

Around Christmas 2021, the buildup of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border became serious enough that he was told to expect a contingent from the Pentagon. In mid-January, the first U.S. troops arrived, and Rzeszów-Jasionka continued to operate as a civilian airport, with large stretches of it turning into a NATO air base.

 

“The Americans told us it was much nicer than Afghanistan — no dust, friendly locals, and everyone speaks English,” Tabisz said.

 

When the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine began in late February, the small airport had the job of “bringing a dozen C-17s a day in, unloading them, refueling them, and sending them back. . . . It was a crazy time. Now, I’m happy to have been part of it, but it was crazy.”

 

Tabisz said that the Russians targeted the airport with cyberattacks, hacking, and physical spying. “Until the Patriot batteries arrived, F-16s were doing air patrols above the airport.

 

You often could hear them but couldn’t see them.”

 

The airport now features the United Kingdom-manufactured Sky Saber, which was the most advanced anti-missile system in NATO when it was deployed.

 

The United Kingdom Ministry of Defense contacted Tabisz and said the system needed to be deployed and up and running “immediately.” Looking back, he says, it should have worried him that the MoD was in such a rush. The Sky Saber is a complicated and advanced system; the British troops told Tabisz that if they could get it up and running within a week, they would pop champagne. They did it in three days, and four days later, they did indeed pop a bottle of champagne in Tabisz’s office.

 

“If we knew how serious it was, we would not have been that brave,” he said with a smile.

 

I asked about any other examples of Russia’s “gray zone” warfare, and Tabisz said that while he’s heard of major attempts at sabotage, arson, drone incursions, and other Russian efforts around Poland and other NATO countries, he always felt like the Russians did less against his airport. “The presence of the Americans always sent a strong signal to the Russians.”

 

Construction on what became Rzeszów-Jasionka Airport began in 1937; those who remember history class will recall that the Nazis invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, interrupting construction. It was built as an air base in 1940 using forced labor; then in 1944, the Nazis destroyed the airfield in the face of advancing Soviet forces; it was rebuilt as a civilian airport during the era of the Soviet occupation of Poland.

 

Thus, after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when Germany sent its troops to assist the Ukrainians, it marked the first time since 1945 that German troops were moving into Poland . . . and being welcomed.

 

“When the Luftwaffe landed, we looked at each other and said, ‘The boys are back,’’ Tabisz chuckled. He quickly added that Germany is a valued ally and member of NATO.

 

Throughout the use by NATO, and to this day, Rzeszów-Jasionka Airport is still used by civilians for flights around Europe.

 

“And we never canceled a single flight,” Tabisz boasted.