Where US translates as freedom

After two years of traveling almost exclusively to Western Europe and the Middle East, Poland feels like a geopolitical spa. I visited here for just three days and got two years of anti-American bruises massaged out of me. Get this: People here actually tell you they like America 8212; without whispering.

What has gotten into these people? Have all their subscriptions to Le Monde Diplomatique expired? Haven8217;t they gotten the word from Berlin and Paris? No, they haven8217;t. In fact, Poland is the antidote to European anti-Americanism. Poland is to France what Advil is to a pain in the neck. Or as Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins foreign affairs specialist, remarked after visiting Poland: 8216;8216;Poland is the most pro-American country in the world 8212; including the United States.8217;8217;

What8217;s this all about? It starts with history and geography. There8217;s nothing like living between Germany and Russia 8212; which at different times have trampled Poland off the map 8212; to make Poles the biggest advocates of a permanent US military presence in Europe. Said Ewa Swiderska, 25, a Warsaw University student: 8216;8216;We are the small kid in school who is really happy to have the big guy be his friend 8212; it8217;s a nice feeling.8217;8217;

Indeed, all the history and geography that Western European youth have forgotten, having grown up in a postmodern European Union, are still central to Polish consciousness 8212; well after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. 8216;8216;We still remember many things,8217;8217; said Jan Miroslaw, 22, also a Warsaw University student. 8216;8216;We are more eager to cooperate with America rather than just say 8216;no.8217; The West Europeans just don8217;t remember many things 8212; like the wars. They live too-comfortable lives.8217;8217;

No wonder then when young Poles think of America, they think of the word 8216;8216;freedom.8217;8217; They think of generations of US presidents railing against their communist oppressors. There is a huge message in this bottle. In the Arab world, because of a long history of US support for Arab autocrats, who kept their people down but their oil flowing to us, America was a synonym for hypocrisy. In Poland, where we have consistently trumpeted freedom, America means freedom. We need to remember that. We are what we stand for.

Poland8217;s becoming a member of the EU will give the US an important friend within that body 8212; a counterweight to those EU forces that would like to use anti-Americanism as the glue to bind the expanding alliance and that would like to see the EU forge its identity as the great Uncola to America8217;s Coca-Cola.

But as powerful as Poland8217;s bond to America is these days, we dare not take it for granted. Poland has some 2,400 troops in Iraq. That8217;s the good news. The bad news is that roughly 75 percent of Poles oppose their deployment. Polish officials will tell you Poland sent troops to Iraq to help keep the Americans in Europe. But the pwblic doesn8217;t make such connections, and most people don8217;t understand what their boys are doing there or what Poland is getting out of it. How about a few extra visas for Poles? If the US ends up in a mess in Iraq, so will Poland. Many 8216;8216;old8217;8217; Europeans will then laugh at Warsaw, and that would be highly corrosive for Polish-US relations.

At the same time, once Poland is fully ensconced in the EU, its young people will grow up in that postmodern EU nirvana, where anti-Americanism is in the drinking water. Sadly, many education and public diplomacy programs the US directed at Eastern Europe after the fall of communism have been cut or redirected to the Muslim world. Bad timing.

There is now a competition between the United States of America and the United States of Europe for the next generation of Poles 8212; who don8217;t all have their parents8217; emotional ties to the US 8212; 8216;8216;and the US is losing this competition,8217;8217; says a Polish foreign policy expert, Grzegorz Kostrzewa-Zorbas. 8216;8216;The new generation in Poland likes American pop culture, but it has less contact with American high culture 8212; like education. It is so much easier for young Poles to go to university in Germany or France.8217;8217;

Given Poland8217;s geography and history, there8217;s a limit to how far it will drift from America. Poland will never be France. But we shouldn8217;t assume it will remain the Poland of 1989 forever, either, and if it doesn8217;t, that could have real consequences for America8217;s standing in Europe.

The New York Times