Polish Foreign Minister Sikorski rebuked President Duda for publicly disclosing to a journalist that he discussed their country hosting US nuclear weapons during his latest trip there. According to this top diplomat, “Mr President has already been told, at the highest levels… not to talk about it, that there is no chance for it now. I don’t know why he said it.” Sikorski also said that the Council of Ministers, Poland’s top policymaking body, didn’t authorize Duda to discuss this issue publicly either.
In his words, “These are very complicated issues that we discuss at NATO nuclear planning meetings”, and they “should not take place in public.” The rub though is that Duda was merely responding to a journalist’s relevant inquiry that built upon his party’s repeated offers to host these weapons. It didn’t come out of the blue and no new information was revealed. The only reason why it made headlines was because of the subject matter and the context of growing NATO-Russian tensions.
Declining to comment might have prompted even more speculation, the same as outright lying that it wasn’t discussed could have as well, hence why Duda simply told the truth. Sikorski rebuked him not because some international media predictably exploited his words for clickbait, but for domestic political reasons. After all, Poland’s top diplomat represents the new coalition government that replaced Duda’s party after last fall’s elections, and it’s aiming to take the presidency during next year’s vote too.
Several days after Duda’s uneventful disclosure, Sikorski gave a lengthy speech at the Sejm about Poland’s foreign policy goals, a significant part of which explicitly sought to discredit his predecessors. One way in which this was attempted was by painting them as paranoiacs who unilaterally made reckless moves that ultimately endangered their country’s national interests. Although Duda isn’t paranoid, the fake scandal surrounding his interview frames him as reckless, which aligns with this narrative.
Observers should remember that Sikorski himself tacitly confirmed that Duda was indeed entrusted to discuss hosting US nuclear weapons during his latest trip there, with the only problem being that he publicly admitted that this was on the agenda, but it was already explained why this isn’t controversial. Seeing as how there’s no legitimate basis for Sikorski to be angry at Duda, the only credible explanation is that it’s all about domestic politics ahead of next year’s presidential election.
What’s most interesting though is that Sikorski is focusing only on Duda allegedly spilling state secrets about Polish-US talks but is ignoring two of his much more scandalous revelations. In the same interview where he confirmed that he talked about the aforementioned topic during his trip to DC, Duda also admitted that a major infrastructure project outside of Warsaw has dual military purposes. Readers can learn more about it here, where they’ll discover that it’s at the center of a heated partisan dispute.
One week prior, Duda spilled the beans about how foreign companies own most of Ukraine’s industrial agriculture, which was meant to defend the prior government’s decision to stop the import of cheap and low-quality Ukrainian grain that had flooded the domestic market to local farmers’ detriment. It also served to pressure the new coalition government against selling out the country’s national interests on this issue under the cover of reaching a “compromise” with Ukraine.
These two disclosures are much more scandalous than his confirmation that he once again discussed Poland hosting US nuclear weapons during his latest trip there, yet Sikorski conspicuously ignored both in favor of creating a fake scandal of the last-mentioned example. That’s because he doesn’t truly have national interests in mind, but only domestic political ones, and he fears drawing more attention to those other two issues otherwise he could have brought them up in his rebuke of Duda.
