Polish President Andrzej Duda posited that former U.S. President Donald Trump will likely keep his pledge to end the conflict in Ukraine within 24 hours if he wins this year’s election.
Trump, who is the presumptive Republican nominee to contest incumbent President Joe Biden this November, has said on various occasions that he would tackle the two-year-old conflict “in one day” if he were to win the presidency again.
“I can say from my personal experience as the president of the Polish Republic … what [Trump] promised to me was fulfilled,” Duda told reporters in Rwanda, as per Newsweek. “I can say that President Trump keeps his word and if he says something, he takes it seriously,” Duda added. “That is as much as I can tell right now.”
Duda enjoyed close relations with Trump during the latter’s time in the Oval Office, during which the United States and Poland signed bilateral energy, defense, and trade deals. The two leaders increased the presence of U.S. troops in Poland. During a visit to the White House in 2018, Duda remarked that a permanent U.S. garrison in the country could be named “Fort Trump.”
However, both men have taken very different stances on the conflict in Ukraine, with Duda’s government donating an estimated 3.2 percent of the country’s GDP to Kiev, and Trump repeatedly accusing Biden of dragging the United States toward “World War III” with his policy of open-ended military aid to Ukraine.
“I would get [Russian President Vladimir] Putin into a room. I’d get [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky into a room. Then I’d bring them together. And I’d have a deal worked out,” he told NBC News in September. Trump did not elaborate on how he would achieve this, explaining that “if I tell you exactly, I lose all my bargaining chips.”
Zelensky stated that Trump’s claim was “a little scary,” and voiced concern that he would go ahead with the plan even if “[did] not work for us, for our people.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said last month that Moscow had “no understanding of how” Trump could bring the conflict to an end, and that Putin’s administration has “not had any contact” with Trump’s team.
Also, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said at a UN press conference in late January, “I doubt that the Ukrainian side would be ready for any resolution.”
Reactions among other Eastern European leaders have been mixed. Czech President Petr Pavel — who has urged his fellow NATO leaders to increase the supply of weapons to Ukraine — warned last week that the bloc should “be prepared” for Trump to make a peace deal with Putin. The former U.S. president, Pavel pointed out, “looks at a number of things differently.”
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, like Trump, has repeatedly contended that the conflict never would have happened had Trump become U.S. president in 2020. “Today, apart from him, I do not see anyone in Europe or America who would be a strong enough leader to stop the war,” Orbán told France’s Le Point news magazine earlier this month. “Peace has a name: Donald Trump,” he added.
On February 3, The New York Times reported a rising concern among German leadership that NATO will not survive if Trump is reelected as U.S. president.
Unofficial discussions reportedly taking place in Berlin and other European capitals, concentrating on a potential disintegration of the bloc, mark an “astounding reversal of thinking” compared to the talk of a “new unity” following the start of Russia’s military campaign against Ukraine in February 2022, the newspaper continued.
“Their immediate concern is growing pessimism that the United States will continue to fund Ukraine’s struggle,” the Times reported, alluding to a months-long stalemate in Congress over Biden’s $60 billion proposed aid package for Kyiv.
Citing anonymous sources, the Times reported in December that EU diplomats and representatives of several think tanks had been “making pilgrimages to associates of Mr. Trump” to inquire whether he was planning to withdraw the United States from NATO.
Earlier that month, Mark Esper, who served as U.S. defense secretary under Trump from July 2019 to November 2020, told MSNBC that, if reelected, his former boss “would withdraw support for Ukraine.”
“His next move would be to begin pulling us out of NATO, certainly troops out of NATO countries,” the former Pentagon chief claimed. Esper cautioned that such a scenario “could cause the collapse of the alliance.”
Addressing his supporters in Las Vegas in January, Trump stated that the United States is “paying for NATO, and we don’t get so much out of it,” adding that “if we ever needed their help, let’s say we were attacked, I don’t believe they’d be there.” The former leader has repeatedly slammed Washington’s NATO allies for not contributing their share, and proclaimed in 2017 that the military bloc was “obsolete.”
Trump remains comfortably in the lead for the Republican presidential nomination ahead of November’s vote, with various contenders having dropped out of the race.
Besides, Republicans have made the unblocking of further defense aid to Ukraine and Israel contingent on the Biden administration agreeing to increase controls on the U.S.-Mexico border to curb the flow of illegal immigrants. On February 7, citing an anonymous official within the bloc, Bloomberg reported that the EU is preparing itself for a possible trade war with the United States if Trump wins the November presidential elections.
The European Commission is working on a formal economic assessment of how a Trump victory would impact member states, the source told the business news agency, without offering details of Brussels’ potential response.
In a separate article based on interviews with Trump campaign insiders, Bloomberg reported that a second Trump administration would impose a minimum 10 percent tariff on imports from the EU, the same as for China.
Another proposal involves retaliation for the taxes enforced by Brussels on digital services in the past several years, which have targeted U.S.-based tech giants such as Meta and Amazon. The counteraction would be launched under provisions in the Trade Act of 1974, which Trump deployed during his first term to tackle trade imbalances with foreign nations, sources explained.
The Trump presidency was at odds with the EU over a U.S. trade deficit and what Trump viewed as European reluctance to support Washington against China. The tariffs imposed by Trump on European steel and aluminum were only partially undone by the Biden administration last year.
Notably, European officials are hesitant to fight back despite viewing the measures as unfair “due to concerns that it could help Trump’s election chances,” Bloomberg noted.
In many EU capitals, Biden is regarded as less hostile than Trump. Last May, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz publicly voiced his preference for the Democrat to remain in office.
Nonetheless, some of Biden’s policies have upset the Europeans, the outlet said, especially the $390 billion subsidy program to support green technology packed into the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The money offered incentives to European manufacturers to shift production to the United States.
