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Poland, making a play for a U.S. military base, offers to call it Fort Trump

The Polish leader discussed that proposal with President Donald Trump at the White House on Tuesday, trying to get traction for an idea his government has been pushing for months.

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The Polish leader discussed that proposal with President Donald Trump at the White House on Tuesday, trying to get traction for an idea his government has been pushing for months to deter any possible Russian aggression. The Polish government has even been willing to pay — to the tune of $2 billion.

Of course, Duda was not the first European leader to seek to curry favor with Trump by appealing to his sense of self — or by injecting an element of flattery into the geopolitics of the day.

Britain lured Trump this year with an invitation to have tea with Queen Elizabeth II. (The visit finally took place in July, but protests from Britons forced the organizers to offer a limited program that did not include the full panoply of a traditional state visit.)

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President Emanuel Macron of France invited Trump to be at his side last year during the annual July 14 parade along the Champs-Élysées in Paris — an event that so impressed the American leader that he ordered a similar parade in the United States for Veterans Day. In August, he canceled those plans, citing costs.

But Duda’s comments in Washington seem to have brought little praise at home, where critics castigated him Wednesday for what they depicted as craven behavior.

“President Duda decided to take advantage of Trump’s vanity and came out with this Fort Trump,” Barbara Zdrojewska, a Polish senator, said on Twitter. “Had he done it in a private conversation, jokingly, it would have been a crafty move, but blurting it out during a news conference in front of half of the world was pathetic. He humiliated himself, us and Trump.”

Tomasz Siemoniak, a former defense minister who is now a senior member of the biggest opposition party, Civic Platform, also used Twitter to criticize the Polish leader: “What an embarrassment in front of the entire world! Even leaders of banana republics had more respect for themselves and their countries than President Duda does.”

And Polish unhappiness over the matter only seemed to deepen with the publication of a photograph showing the two presidents, one (Polish) standing and smiling, the other (American) sitting and stern-faced.

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“Didn’t Poland’s president deserve at least a chair in the White House in exchange for billions of dollars? Horrendous situation,” Eugeniusz Smolar, an analyst at the Center for International Relations, said on Twitter.

While NATO has agreed to deploy troops in Poland, including some from the United States, the idea of a permanent American base in what was once a part of the Warsaw Pact alliance also seemed certain to annoy President Vladmir Putin of Russia.

The Russian leader has long chafed at Western encroachment in lands that Moscow viewed as part of its geopolitical bailiwick, including such places as Crimea, Georgia, Ukraine and the Baltic States.

But for Trump, the notion of a NATO ally paying for a U.S. security guarantee dovetails with his campaign to redress what he has depicted as an unfair overreliance of some NATO allies on Washington’s largesse.

“It’s one thing when we defend countries that can’t defend themselves and their great people,” Trump said at the news conference Tuesday. “We should help them; we don’t expect anything for that.”

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“But when we’re defending immensely wealthy countries and they’re not paying for the defense to the United States, they’re only taking advantage of us,” he continued. “And we get along with them very well, but it’s not fair. That includes NATO.”

Duda said: “I was smiling when talking to Mr. President. I said that I would very much like for us to set up permanent American bases in Poland, which we would call Fort Trump. And I firmly believe that this is possible.”

It was not clear whether Trump had agreed to set up a base, and it appeared that he and the Polish leader had not finalized a price tag. Trump said Duda “offered us much more than $2 billion to do this, and so we’re looking at it.”

“We’re looking at it from the standpoint of, number one, military protection for both countries, and also cost — a term you don’t hear too often and you haven’t heard too often over the last 25 years,” Trump said. “But that’s the way it has to be.”

Like other former Soviet satellites, Poland has been deeply mistrustful of Russian intentions — both military and economic; Many in the region fear Putin seeks to rebuild Moscow’s influence in areas that would shield Russia’s borders.

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Duda said, for instance, that Russia’s energy policies constituted “a threat of Russian energy domination” across Europe. Russia had also been militarizing “in a systematic way,” he said.

“So these are, today, political and military facts of Europe, and the presence of the United States is only providing a guarantee of security and a possibility to defend,” Duda said. Poland hosts a rotating international contingent of around 7,000 troops, most from the United States.

Only a few months ago, the U.S. response to the idea of setting up a permanent base in Poland was said to be one of caution. At the same time, U.S. forces were reported to be flying surveillance drones from a base in northwestern Poland.

In June, some 2,000 Special Operations forces from the United States and 10 other NATO countries carried out one of their biggest-ever military exercises in Poland and the Baltic States.

This month, Russian troops conducted what Moscow depicted as much more ambitious military maneuvers in Siberia, although their actual scope remained unclear.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Alan Cowell © 2018 The New York Times

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