The US president, Donald Trump, has said he was not considering pulling US troops out of Poland and pledged to stand with Warsaw “all the way” during a meeting with the country’s conservative nationalist president, Karol Nawrocki, at the White House.
Backed by the populist rightwing opposition Law and Justice party, which ruled Poland between 2015 and 2023, Karol Nawrocki unexpectedly won Poland’s presidential election after running a campaign under a Trumpesque slogan of “Poland first, Poles first”.
The historian turned politician had met the US president before the election, securing his highly prized endorsement and presenting himself as someone who could safeguard Poland’s interests with the conservative US administration.
During their meeting in the Oval Office, Trump praised the Polish president for winning in a “pretty tough, pretty nasty race”, saying: “I don’t endorse too many people, but I endorsed him, and I was very proud of that, the job he’s done.”
Responding to a question from a Polish reporter, Trump declared he was not considering pulling US troops from Poland, despite growing concerns in the region about rumoured changes to the US force posture in Europe.
“If anything, we can put more there, if they want; they’ve long wanted to have a larger presence,” he joked. He later went further by saying the US “never even thought in terms of removing soldiers from Poland”, even as he confirmed there were discussions “about it with regard to other countries.”
“We are with Poland all the way and we will help Poland protect itself,” he said, praising Warsaw’s defence spending, the highest within Nato.
Trump was also asked about the lack of progress in Russia-Ukraine talks on ending the war, saying Vladimir Putin would have to make a decision on next steps and “if we are unhappy about it, you will see things happen”.
Just hours before Trump and Nawrocki were to meet, Poland was forced to scramble its own and allied aircraft to monitor its airspace during another night attack on Ukraine, with more than 500 strikes across the country.
Before travelling to Washington – his first overseas trip since taking office last month Nawrocki hosted a summit in Warsaw last week involving the leaders of Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Ukraine. He also spoke with other EU leaders by phone to prepare for the meeting, as he wants Poland to play a broader role in representing the region’s interests.
But the visit has exacerbated tensions with Donald Tusk, Poland’s centrist prime minister, who was formerly president of the European Council.
Nawrocki, a fierce critic of Tusk who has pledged to continue supporting Kyiv but opposes Ukraine’s membership in Nato and pushed for tightening the benefits paid out to Ukrainian refugees in Poland, signalled his intention to pursue a foreign policy independently of the government.
Shortly before the Alaska summit between Trump and Putin, he joined a leaders’ phone call with the US president sidelining Tusk, who had previously represented Poland in similar discussions. Presidential aides said Nawrocki had got involved at Trump’s personal invitation.
The move locked Tusk out of a prestigious call, reducing his role to participating in preparatory and debriefing calls with other European leaders instead.
Poland subsequently skipped the high-level Zelenskyy-Trump meeting altogether, sending no representative to join the Ukrainian president and a group of European leaders at the White House, with both camps trading blame for the absence.
The turf war between the Polish president and prime minister was brought back to the spotlight before the White House visit, after ministers repeatedly asked Nawrocki to toe the government’s line in his talks with Trump.
The president’s aides responded by insisting the visit could instead be an opportunity for “a new opening” in relations, which they argued had been damaged by Tusk and his ministers’ past critical comments on Trump.
As the row deepened, a one-page memo outlining the government’s advice for the president was leaked to the media. Presidential aides publicly ridiculed the document, describing it as “resembling a college essay”, and rejected the ministerial insistence on following their instructions as “impertinent”.
Nawrocki also did not invite any government officials to join his delegation, breaking with a tradition that a junior minister would sit in the president’s meetings overseas. His chief foreign policy adviser, Marcin Przydacz, said Nawrocki would instead send a memo to inform the government of any developments.
Despite Nawrocki’s meeting with Trump on Wednesday, Tusk said he would be representing Poland during a hybrid meeting of the “coalition of the willing” on Thursday.
The internal divisions could weaken the country’s influential role in shaping Europe’s response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, after it welcomed more than a million Ukrainian refugees and turned into a major logistics hub for military and humanitarian aid deliveries for the war-torn neighbour.
