Bleaching: Peace by Strength

American head of the reborn War Department Pete Hegseth at a spectacular general briefing at the Quantico base in Virginia on September 30, 2025 refreshed the knowing of the cold war's slogan "peace by force".

This is simply a mention to the concept of deterrence that another American presidents have enjoyed since Harry Truman faced with the "imperium of evil" that the russian Union, according to Ronald Reagan, was. The polarization of forces during the "cold war" period around the 2 poles gave hope to keep the global strategy in the process of unchangeable balance. Bipolarity minimized miscalculations and false perceptions, reducing the hazard of a war between the 2 largest atomic powers.

After a alternatively unexpected and fast breakdown of the east bloc and the collapse of the USSR, the global strategy entered the phase of unipolity. It has lost usage of the conventional dynamics of balancing forces. Despite China's emergence in power and the reconstruction of Russia's regional position, the US has had specified a large military advantage for decades that it is impossible to foretell erstwhile their hegemonic position will be abolished. This means that the strategy of building a ‘peace by force’ will stay at least in the average term.

American Unipol...

that is, there is no hegemonic power and in the foreseeable position it will have no equal competitor. If China maintains its fast growth and turns its economical power into military potential, they can yet become an equivalent competitor to the US. However, they do not have specified an expansionist determination or doctrine based on missionaryity in the name of values promoted by them to strive to organize the planet in their own fashion.

The Polish policy has for respective decades been a function of submission to American hegemonic interventions, based on the strategical concept of "peace by force". The inclusion of Polish quotas in the “criminal expedition” in Afghanistan or Iraq meant agreeing to usage fresh operational measures in the form of overtaking strikes or preventive attacks. As a result, the Western countries accepted lowering the threshold for US armed interventions and arousing expansionist tendencies. This was written in various papers in the West, but in Poland literature on this subject is very mediocre and one-sided. There is simply a deficiency of genuine, ideological debate on unipolarity as a origin causing conflicts in global relations.

The peculiarity of the Polish political scene, on the another hand, was the deep infatuation of politicians from left to right with the slogan "peace by force". They do not realize that they sound simply as an uncritical echo of a zaoceanic hegemon. After all, they have no assets of power that the leaders of America have. They call for intensification of arms and incite war, and peace is given unwanted meaning, as if it were a state held against their own will and reasonable calculations. Meanwhile, the society expects them to make a clear and unequivocal declaration that they will not plunge Poland and Poles into an unwanted and not “our” war.

On the wave of increasing concerns about the consequences of the Polish policy, it is worth asking the most crucial policy makers in the country the basic question: why do we request a war with Russia? After all, a diligent search casus belli, i.e. the pretext to affect Polish armed forces in the war against Russia, is absolutely not in the existential interest of Poles! It's the president and government's occupation to avoid provocation, not exaggerate it! The intrusion of drones into Poland on the night of 9th to 10th September 2025 had to be explained to the end, including the Russian side, if this proposed consultations. This is why the public felt that many messages deficiency credibility. In the end, negotiations were invented respective 1000 years before our era to benefit from them, including in utmost war situations. Or possibly even then!

Which politician will take work for further suffering and sacrifices, for a cataclysm that no doctrine or allied obligations justify? All the more so imposed from Washington, Brussels, Paris, Berlin and London, solidarity with Ukraine is not worth the transfer of Polish blood! The vital interest of the Polish people is to stay distant from the destructive war, it is to defend peace by the strength of defensive deterrence, but never with direct usage of it. Political leaders who only have a temporary mandate to regulation must not be charged or put the lives of soldiers and civilians at hazard in the name of another man's cause!

Anti-Russian Obsession Festival

The past fewer weeks have been a festival of anti-Russian obsession, verbal tensioning of muscles and demonstrating mad determination to yet hit Russia. Poland is in the vanguard of this false crusade. Polish politicians are boundless and uncritically able to rise up the Euro-Atlantic “hawks”, forgetting or not knowing that tenacity and uncompromisingness on the 1 hand and, on the another hand, the lofty declarations of peace-loving (Hegseth: “we all love peace”) are an old specialty of Anglo-Saxon and Western European war instigators.

Polish politicians should yet realize that both Biden, Trump and all the remainder of the Western Camarilla let the Poles and the Baltics to throw themselves at the rough waters of confrontation with Russia, which disturb themselves. At the same time, despite their assurances, they are placed in an insecure position to defend their holding state. The most thorough assessments of this situation appear to be presented by the Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán.

The history-known logic of combining hostility and dialog allowed Donald Trump. to meet with Vladimir Putin in Alaska, although European allies of America have done a large deal to destruct its outcome. Or was it just to mislead the public? erstwhile the masks fall off, it may turn out to be repeated for years a strategy of distracting from actual preparations for war. The Western Service is busy in this matter.

A fewer decades ago, thanks to a mixed strategy of strength and diplomacy, Reagan and Gorbachev were able to communicate with Gorbachev during “cheeks” in Geneva and Reykjavik. Despite the changed circumstances and geopolitical conditions, communication links and individual contacts between the leaders between Moscow and Washington could again service as a basis for calming the tense global situation and extinguishing the inflammatory outbreaks. But it's not very good for someone.

Hope or chance?

The reopening of the summit dialog between the largest powers and groups of states could facilitate the establishment of fresh rules in the restructuring of global forces. According to Donald Trump's desire to usage leverage to end ongoing conflicts, there is simply a certain hope, though not necessarily a chance to reconstruct dialog (plurilog) between the biggest players in the long word and make the foundations of a fresh order. On this occasion, possibly individual will be reminded of the Roosevelt's request to build “power through peace”? After all, only division of work between large powers and groups of states – as he wanted Franklin Roosevelt – can prevent the outbreak of a global conflict in which there would be no winner.

Poles anticipate the rulers to present a clear peaceful position in the context of the demonstrated attitude of the American ally and protector. The U.S. Secretary of War makes it clear that putting America on power serves to guarantee that no 1 touches it and tries to “whack” it. As you can see, it is the egotistic interest of the United States that comes first, not the altruistic alliance commitments. Trump's shifting NATO's maintenance costs to European allies (i.e. eliminating the problem of the alleged gapowiczs) and commercialising military aid fighting Ukraine clearly shows that if Poland joins the war Poland will be subjected to another test of naivety and credulity. The aid of European allies will not be counted upon due to the fact that they do not want to bring any misfortune on their countries. It will be impossible to leave the trap set on Poles.

These assumptions consequence from the essential conclusions for the Polish east Policy. Given the long-standing clash between the interests of the geopolitical Western powers and Russia, and now besides with China, Poland, despite its organization affiliation with the collective West, should not tie its raison d’etre into a chariot of war of American interests. It is advanced time we realize that we are treated by allies in an instrumental way as NATO's front state towards Russia.

Knowing the vanity of the U.S. President, who wants to put him on the list of Nobel Peace Prize winners, Polish politicians should anticipate various experiments to test our loyalty and alliance readiness. This requires intellectual resilience and assertiveness in defence of their right. Instead, we observe the excessive zeal of Polish notes in following the American protector and demonstrating servillism, regardless of organization colors. This truly means a disaster for the Polish insteer and self-determination.

The cognitive blindness of politicians,

...combined with historical amnesia and geopolitical ignorance, he leads Poland astray. We are already suffering tremendous costs of the conflict in Ukraine today, and the public is incapable to encourage the rulers to change the incorrect policy. Political destabilisation and economical collapse can become a price for the generous financing of the war in Ukraine, especially as the government is looking for further sources of power to Ukraine at the expense of interior debt growth.

Poland has never participated in continental balance of power systems. During the period of practicing these models did not number in the balance of potentials or was not at all on the map of Europe. However, it is worth remembering that the rivalry of the powers in Europe has frequently led to catastrophic clashes in the form of planet wars. The 20th century brought specified tragic clashes that without the participation of the United States it was impossible to reconcile conflicted parties. Thus, many historical parallels are a clear warning: those doomed to the common safety of the European powers will sooner or later quarrel again. They will not be able to combine their interior defence capacity with external military restraint. The US will one more time gotta enter the arena as an arbiter in pace et bello. Whether this will happen with Russia and China remains an open matter.

Bringing Poland into a power competition in the form of a large war will mean its destruction. Poland has neither adequate resources nor potential, nor affirmative experience, how to deal with 2 giants in the nearest neighbourhood in the east and west to avoid annihilation. The issue is serious, that the distance between the US and Europe opens up a space for Germany to awaken fresh hegemonic and imperial aspirations (the alleged Merza doctrine).

In Poland, we must not forget the negative experiences associated with building governance after planet War II, based on the dictatorship of the victorious powers. besides after the dissolution of the russian Union in 1991, American political elites, followed by the Western European establishment, became convinced, which turned into a complex of superiority, that they decide not only about the political form, but besides about alliance affiliations, condemning recently adopted states to submit to the interests of the West.

Lessons from History

Poles should be smarter about negative experiences of the 20th century, both from the interwar and cold war period. Historical pulsation shows that the main quarterbacks were and stay the old European powers and the United States. The global strategy of forces is now being shuffled, in which the destiny of Western leadership decides. China, assisted by the BRICS+ group, is on the rise. It is impossible to find what the final result of this competition will be, due to the fact that it is not certain how much old models of governance will be pushed out by fresh ones. All we know is that we are immersed in global instability, which is worth surviving without being exposed to direct inter-power confrontation. The good advice for Poland in the form of paraphrases, which comes from the old curd, is therefore: "Do not put your feet where horses are forged".

In an highly dynamic global environment, erstwhile many events are unpredictable and the hazard of a global conflict is very high, it is easier to lose and lose through unwise decisions of politicians than to gain and strengthen their position. The global majority, against the West, advocates rejecting the extremist anti-Russian stance. The attitude of the Global South states, which is the majority of Asian, African and South American countries, to the conflict in Ukraine, is the best manifestation of this. This means that outside the West itself there are no crucial states that would want to defeat Russia. Poland, too, should depend more on calming the conflict, due to its position in the “crushing zone” than sinking into it until self-destruction.

In the context of the emergence of crisis phenomena in Western countries and the departure from the liberal model, there is an chance to decision towards inter-civilisation coexistence. They will be forced by the progressive polarization between fresh forces. For now, this is expressed in the balance between Donald Trump's conflicting visions and the search by European allies for their own place in the Atlantic strategy through militarism and war escalation. Unfortunately, Polish political elites cannot afford to specify their priorities independently, which aim to defend sovereignty and peace, as safety and economical growth correlations. Getting to war is the worst possible election.

Today's Poland is committed to maximising security, brought to conventional military threats. This entails military mobilization, which was not known even during the “cold war”. large investments in the war economy show that the Atlantic strategy has, on the 1 hand, put the chance to defeat Russia on the battlefield, utilizing Ukraine to do so, and, on the another hand, intensifying economical and political pressures to lead to interior destabilisation and global isolation of Russia.

The results of specified actions are half-hearted. The hazard of direct clash between NATO's armed states and Russia is very advanced and increasing, but at the same time, during the conflict in Ukraine, Russia has managed to strengthen its ties with most countries for which the precedence is to effectively transform the global strategy towards multipolarity. It appears that most countries do not associate global safety with the armed conflict between the West and Russia, but search to recognise the hierarchy of threats and safety challenges arising from the needs of socio-economic development. It is simply a pity that Polish decision-makers deficiency the same strong determination to increase spending on science, education, wellness protection or inexpensive energy as for reinforcements.

It seems that fleeing into wartime hysteria makes it easier for unprofessional politicians to rule. People are easy subject to the psychosis of fear, hence they can be manipulated, gained listening and subjected to authoritarian training. Meanwhile, Poland, with its suspension between Atlantism and Continentalism, does not request any enemy at its borders. Due to its transit geographical location, it could carry out intermediary roles and make good money on them. The Polish Minister of abroad Affairs, alternatively of zealous activity in the anti-Russian crusade, could seriously consider rebuilding Poland's image of predictable and able to build non-antagonist relations with its neighbours. The correct reading of facts and relationships between them, the knowing of the motivation of another countries, including allies, and the care of our own interests, is simply a test of the wisdom and reasonableness that we deficiency so much.

Regardless of how and erstwhile the confrontation between the West and Russia against the background of Ukraine will end, we must already have a critical assessment of the ongoing "war games" whose global consequences may prove tragic to humanity. It cannot be overlooked that the American “paternism” resulting from hegemony, reaching for fresh spaces in Eurasia, has led to the top threats to global order. In addition to categorically blaming authoritarian regimes led by Vladimir Putin for aggressive and destabilizing actions, should it besides be fair to justice liberal Western leaders who cynically legitimize bloody interventionism in global relations?

Prof. Stanisław Bielen

Think Poland, No. 41-42 (12-19.10.2025)