WARSAW — In 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump stood before the Warsaw Uprising monument, addressing a crowd of thousands waving American and Polish flags. He vowed the United States would “never, ever” stop supporting Poland.
One year into his second term, that promise is being questioned. Last month, only 30% of Poles said they still believe the U.S. is a reliable ally.
A growing share of voters and leaders are reconsidering Washington’s central role in Poland’s defense, and cautiously looking to the European Union instead.
That shift is now playing out at the top of government, in a clash between Prime Minister Donald Tusk and President Karol Nawrocki over a €44-billion EU defense loan from the bloc's Security Action for Europe borrowing instrument.
“Until Nawrocki vetoed SAFE, we actually had cross-party consensus on security and defense,” said Monika Sus, a political scientist at the Polish Academy of Sciences. “This veto of Nawrocki introduced something new to the Polish political scene [...] this is a fundamental change.”
End of the Polish security consensus
After returning to power in 2023, Tusk and his centrist coalition leaned on longstanding ties with former President Joe Biden, whose candidacy he endorsed in 2020. But relations with Trump’s White House have been cooler. Over the past year, Tusk has pushed back on several fronts, including Trump’s threats to seize Greenland.
Poland’s opposition party, Law and Justice (PiS) has taken an opposite tack — long embracing close ties to Trump’s MAGA movement. Trump even backed PiS-aligned presidential candidate Nawrocki ahead of last year’s election, and Nawrocki visited Trump at the White House only weeks after he was sworn in.
While the need for a strong defense is uncontested across Poland’s political spectrum, the dividing line, Sus said, lies in where Poland gets its second-level security guarantee, NATO or European allies. “We needed a wake-up call in terms of the reliance on the United States and Trump basically provided that.”
That debate recently crystalized around the European Union’s financing plan for defense, SAFE, launched in 2025. Tusk backs the SAFE program as a boost to Poland’s defense industry, emphasizing domestic manufacturing. Nawrocki, aligned with the MAGA-friendly, right-wing PiS, has said it would erode sovereignty and pull Warsaw closer to Brussels.
On March 12, Nawrocki vetoed legislation that would have allowed Poland to access €44 billion in European defense loans.
Nawrocki and his PiS allies have also argued SAFE could strain ties with Washington, since most the funds must be spent inside the EU, while Poland remains one of the bloc’s largest importers of U.S. arms.
However, Spasimir Domaradzki, a political scientist at the University of Warsaw, said that Poland is still a U.S. ally. “For us, it is very important for the United States to be close." Rather, Trump has become a focal point for ideological warfare between Polish parties, he said.
While Nawrocki’s veto signals a new rift in Polish domestic politics over the country’s security direction, Sus said it might also be PiS’ effort to build an anti-EU narrative ahead of the 2027 elections.
After being in government since 2015, PiS lost to Tusk’s coalition in 2023. Now the party is facing its worst polling numbers in over a decade and is under pressure from parties even further to the political right.
Law and Justice has framed its strategy for next year’s elections as a reinvention, following the nomination of a new prime ministerial candidate, said party lawmaker Janusz Kowalski. Central to that shift is a sharper emphasis on pro-Americanism and close ties to Trump’s MAGA movement — positioning the party in direct contrast to Donald Tusk’s pro-European stance.
Trump losing Polish support
Historically, Poland has been one of Europe’s most pro-American countries — a sentiment rooted in Cold War memory and reinforced by security ties today.
Warsaw residents told The Parliament they still associate the U.S. with figures like Ronald Reagan and Poland’s break from Soviet control, while the roughly 10,000 American troops stationed in the country remain a source of reassurance amid rising Russian aggression.
That affinity has largely endured regardless of who occupies the White House. Trump addressed crowds in Warsaw in 2017, while Biden spoke at the Royal Castle in 2022, shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
But favorability has dropped to 55% in 2025, down from 70% in 2018 during Trump’s first term, when Poles showed the highest pro-U.S. sentiment in Europe.
Bartłomiej Biskup, a political scientist at the University of Warsaw, said the drop in polling reflects a combination of Trump’s threats to Greenland, American rhetoric about pulling troops from Europe and Trump’s failure to deliver on pledges to end the war in Ukraine.
“In 2016, many people in Poland hoped Trump would be Ronald Reagan on steroids,” said Jakub Graca, an analyst at the Centre for New Europe. “But I'm joking that all we have left is steroids.”
Yet for others, Washington remains indispensable. Kowalski said it is “absurd” to think that the EU could replace the U.S. as Poland’s security guarantor. Despite more recent rhetoric, he said, Trump’s actions had consistently shown him to be an ally of Poland. “We are absolutely pro-American,” Kowalski said. “Only with the United States can we build our protection against Russia.”
That view is widely shared on the political right. At a protest outside the Civic Coalition offices in Warsaw, demonstrator Zygmont Poziomka said the EU lacks the military capacity to defend Poland.
“U.S. and NATO is the only guarantee of our security, and the U.S. is the most important part of NATO,” he said. “Without America, we do not feel secure.”
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