By Jo Harper
WARSAW (AA) - A sharp exchange between Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and President Karol Nawrocki exposed growing divisions in Warsaw about how openly Poland should confront US President Donald Trump following his renewed criticism of NATO allies.
The clash erupted after Tusk accused Nawrocki and opposition leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski of political submissiveness in response to Trump’s remarks questioning the military commitment of US allies.
“It’s time to get up off your knees, gentlemen. People are watching,” Tusk wrote Saturday on US social media platform X, addressing the president and Kaczynski, the head of the nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party.
Trump has repeatedly portrayed NATO as a “one-way street,” most recently suggesting in interviews that allied forces, including Polish troops, “stayed behind the front lines” during the war in Afghanistan, the only conflict in which NATO’s Article 5 collective defense clause was invoked.
Nawrocki responded, rejecting Tusk’s accusation and turning it back on the prime minister. “Give me a break, Mr Prime Minister. You’ve been kneeling for three decades — from Berlin to Brussels. Sometimes Moscow too,” Nawrocki wrote on X. “There are places in the world where no one expects you to kneel. These are just your bad habits.”
The president added that no one was asking Poland to show deference, implicitly defending his decision not to directly criticize Trump.
The dispute follows days of carefully calibrated reactions from Poland’s conservative leadership. Nawrocki earlier praised Polish soldiers who served in Afghanistan, calling them heroes and honoring the 44 Poles killed during the mission. But he avoided mentioning Trump by name.
Kaczynski dismissed Trump’s remarks as rhetorical excess, saying the US president simply has “a runaway tongue,” stopping short of condemning the substance of his comments.
By contrast, senior members of Tusk’s government have taken a firmer tone. Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said, “No one has the right to mock the service of our soldiers,” noting his time in Afghanistan and stressing that Poland’s Ghazni province deployment was among the most dangerous in the country.
Tusk cited his presence at ceremonies honoring fallen Polish troops in 2011, saying US military officers assured him at the time that “America would never forget Polish heroes.”
“Perhaps they should remind President Trump of that,” he wrote.
Poland is one of NATO’s most committed members, spending more than 4% of its GDP on defense and positioning itself as a cornerstone of the alliance’s eastern flank amid Russia’s war in Ukraine. At the same time, Warsaw remains heavily reliant on US security guarantees.
The dispute highlights Poland’s internal power struggle -- a pro-EU government seeking to defend NATO’s credibility versus a president and opposition reluctant to antagonize a US leader seen as strategically indispensable -- and politically popular among conservative voters.
As tensions rise over the future of transatlantic security, the debate in Poland reflects a broader European dilemma -- how to uphold alliance unity without openly confronting a US president whose support remains essential, but increasingly conditional.