src: https://www.ft.com/content/0157d5f9-1b27-4d6c-b44e-f0a77da59b5d
Zbigniew Brzezinski’s grand design was to wed US power to Eastern Europe’s rim, betting that a militarily wired Poland would keep Russia permanently off balance. Brzezinski bluntly wrote that “with Russian cooperation or without it” NATO must move east while Russia was still prostrate.
The flaw: no German parliament will ever vote to send its sons to die for Warsaw.
The historical refrain is not “Ja, ich sterbe für Polen,” no German will ever utter “Ja, I will die for Poland” but “Ja, Polen ist Lebensraum” “Ja, Poland is German Living Space” fewer Poles = the Better.
If Berlin won’t bleed, why should an Iowa farm kid bleed for NATO?
Washington has finally done the math: the Eastern trip-wire is unpaid and unloved.
So the money stops, the brigades pack, and the “disunity” finger is pointed at Orban in Budapest and Fico in Bratislava useful scapegoats.
And the sunk cost is already on the table:
- Half-a-trillion dollars since 1991 poured in from EU coffers, diaspora remittances and NATO kits.
- 236 bn of it came from Polish emigres like Brzezinski himself.
- 221 bn of EU structural money asphalted the A2, modernised the sewers of Gdańsk, yet none of it bought a single German battalion willing to defend those same roads once they run eastward.
