“THE fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive,” Donald Trump declared on July 6th, standing in front of a monument commemorating the Warsaw uprising against the Nazis in 1944. In a speech that recalled his inaugural address, when he invoked the prospect of “American carnage,” Mr Trump asked whether we have the courage to protect our borders and to preserve our civilisation in the face of “those who would subvert and destroy it”.
To some, Mr Trump’s speech may have sounded like typical American grandiloquence. In fact, with its echoes of Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilisations, it was a dramatic departure. Earlier American administrations defined “the West” with reference to values such as democracy, liberty and respect for human rights. Mr Trump and many of his advisers, including the speech’s authors, Stephen Bannon and Stephen Miller, apparently see it as rooted in ethnicity, culture and religion. When George W. Bush visited Poland for his first presidential visit, in 2001, he referred to democracy 13 times. When Barack Obama spoke in Warsaw in 2014, he mentioned democracy nine times. For Mr Trump, once sufficed.
The speech included some of the usual Trumpian improvisations. (“That’s trouble. That’s tough,” Mr Trump said of the invasion of Poland in 1939 by Nazi Germany from the west and the Soviet Union from the east.) But for the most part, it was a disciplined repetition of familiar themes: the“dire threats” of Islamic extremism and immigration, “the steady creep of government bureaucracy”, the dark forces conspiring “to erase the bonds of culture, faith and tradition that make us who we are.” Mr Trump invoked the “blood of patriots”, and the ties of family and God. The rhetoric sounded strikingly similar to that used by the nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party that governs Poland, and its leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski.
The spectators, mainly conservative Catholics bused in from around the country and promised a free picnic at the defence ministry afterwards, lapped it up, chanting “Donald Trump! Donald Trump!” One 60-year-old restaurant worker from Warsaw, who joined PiS last year, applauded Mr Trump’s appreciation of Polish heroism and Christian values. Islam, he says, “teaches people to kill”. Beata Drozdz, who runs a far-right group in Piotrkow Trybunalski, a town in central Poland, said she had tears in her eyes during the speech: “It was unforgettable.” The crowd hurled insults at opposition politicians, booing when Lech Walesa, the anti-communist hero and a critic of the current government, left the square.
In fact, Poles are deeply divided over their government, and mainly disapprove of Mr Trump. According to polling by Pew, just 23% have confidence in America’s president to do the right thing, down from 58% under Mr Obama. Still, a narrow majority backs his plan to restrict people entering America from a list of Muslim-majority countries. “Preserving identity is very important, not introducing Multikulti,” said Tadeusz, a student from southern Poland at the speech, who was carrying a Confederate flag. He had left home at 3am to travel to Warsaw on a free bus organised by a local PiS member of parliament.
Poland’s fiercely anti-Russian government may have been privately disappointed in Mr Trump’s failure to criticise Moscow more strongly. His speech mentioned Russia just once, condemning its “destabilisation” of Ukraine. At a news conference, he insisted that no one knows for sure whether Russia interfered with America’s presidential election (contradicting the conclusions of his own intelligence agencies).
Still, Mr Trump did unambiguously endorse NATO’s Article 5, the commitment to collective defence that underpins the alliance, which he had until recently appeared to question. Both Poland and other European states will breathe a little easier.
But the greatest reason for Poland’s government to be delighted with Mr Trump was what he did not mention: PiS’s undermining of democratic institutions to entrench its own power. The party has stuffed the civil service and the diplomatic corps with loyalists and has weakened the independence of the judiciary. It has transformed the national broadcaster into a mouthpiece of the state. Independent journalists face new restrictions. The European Commission has warned the government that its reforms pose “a systemic risk to the rule of law.”
Yet Mr Trump, who seems to see PiS’s nostalgic nationalists as kindred spirits, has offered the government his unrestricted support. In Warsaw, he attended a session of the newly formed “Three Seas” initiative, an attempt to form a counterweight to French and German dominance of the European Union. At a press conference, he slammed the American media as “fake news”, then turned to Andrzej Duda, Poland’s president. “Do you have that also, Mr President?” he asked. Mr Duda nodded enthusiastically.