America's Tricks:
As Usual, Poland is Falling for Them
"The
Americans are using all the same tricks they used when they were selling their
F-16 aircraft to Poland
in the late 1990s. The Americans are among the most effective negotiators.
There's a saying that the U.S.
administration could sell igloos to Eskimos."
Polish Foreign Minister
Radek Sikorski: He and Prime Minister Tusk are playing high-stakes poker,
demanding cash for military modernization and Patriot missile batteries
for Warsaw. He and Tusk say they aren't
satisfied that Washington has shown enough concern for Poland's security.
In the negotiations
over hosting the U.S.
anti-missile base, the Americans are using all the same tricks they used when
they were selling their F-16 aircraft to Poland in the late 1990s. I'm
surprised that the politicians are falling for them again.
1. It's a great honor for Poland. Buying the F-16 or agreeing to host
anti-missile shield installations in our nation means that we get to cooperate
with the world's greatest power! The initial drafts of the agreement simply
thank Poland
for accepting the honor of hosting the shield, without offering anything in
return.
2. New prospects for Polish industry and the
opportunity to modernize the country. Prior to the F-16 purchase, Lockheed Martin signed agreements with
Polish defense plants, and U.S.
officials pledged government-backed collaboration with Polish researchers and
engineers. Nothing came out of that. Now we've again heard about major
technology transfers and the development of Polish technical scholarship.
3. Negotiations are running out of time. The Americans suddenly rush the
negotiations, claiming the this
government is the only one Poland
can reach a deal with, because they trust one another. Or only thisU.S. administration can complete
the talks, because it's exceptionally friendly toward Poland. There's
been unofficial talk several times of the negotiations collapsing.
RUSSIAN NEWS:
CZECH REPUBLIC AND U.S. SIGN RADAR BASE DEAL
4. Stressing the "grave
consequences" that rejecting Washington's offer would have on bilateral
relations. During the F-16
talks, U.S.
officials spoke directly about how disastrous it would be for Polish-U.S. relations if Poland chose the European offer
(the same way they warned the British and the French about the effects of
rejecting Washington's
offer). Now the leaks about how Washington
is simultaneously negotiating with Lithuania serve a similar purpose.
Law and Justice Party politicians and Presidential officials seem to have
fallen for the trick.
[Editor's
Note: In Poland, The president has the power to veto legislation passed by
Parliament, but otherwise has a mostly representative role. President Kaczyński and his Law and Justice Party strongly favor
hosting the U.S.
anti-missile base, while the Prime minister his Cabinet and his Civic Platform
Party are less convinced that the deal in its present form is in Poland's
interests].
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk: The Polish opposition accuses him
of making a back-door deal with Russia, after he declared the latest U.S.
proposal for missile shield 'unsatisfactory.'
5. Inviting influential politicians to the United States. When the U.S. decided that what Poland needed
were old, used F-16 aircraft, every couple of weeks some Polish politician
returned from the United
States, stressing to newspapers that only
this solution was favorable to Polish interests and that purchasing new
aircraft would lead to disaster.
I'm willing to
believe that Presidential Minister Anna Fotyga, as
officials in President Kaczyński's office say,
had in fact been invited to Washington
by the Americans. There she was convinced of how generous the U.S. offer was,
how incompetent the Polish negotiating team was, and how important President Kaczyński's role was - because only he could save the
negotiations.
From this point of
view, Mr. Kaczyński's decision to abstain from
trying to exploit the issue for political purposes was a wise one.
6. The argument that Poland is
unprepared, unprofessional and doesn't know what it wants. In the era of the F-16 talks, the Americans
stressed without interruption that Poles had no concept of how to modernize the
air force. As soon as Poland
purchased the F-16, it turned out that Poland did indeed have such a
concept. Then it turned out that it didn't have a plan for how to collaborate
with U.S.
industry which would make funds available under the "offset
investment" agreement. And then it turned out that offset program
eventually came to nothing (or rather its value had been grossly overstated by
some of the factories that took part, including those owned by American
capital).
Now it appears that Poland has no
concept of how to modernize its anti-air defenses. And that's why it doesn't
need the Patriots [Patriot missile batteries].
Posted by WORLDMEETS.US
The Americans are
among the most effective negotiators. There's a saying that the U.S. administration
could sell igloos to Eskimos. Several years ago, Poland purchased F-16 aircraft.
U.S. lobbying was exceedingly effective. But the
deal proved very favorable to Poland;
the F-16 is a great aircraft and the value of the dollar is less than half it
was since we signed the agreement. But the issue of the anti-missile shield is
far too important from the point of view of Polish politics to leave purely to
luck.
