Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski talks foreign policy – but faceplants on immigration

Interviews with sitting foreign ministers can be expected to provide a defense of their country’s official position and maybe some kind of “trial balloon” suggestion about a possible change of policy. It would be a real misunderstanding to take the interview content as some kind of disinterested journalistic reporting or scholarly observations. They are also often bland and boring to hear.

All but that last part applies to the interview that Dan Kurtz-Phelan just did for Foreign Affairs with Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, who also has the distinction of having been married for three decades to historian and commentator Anne Applebaum. And Sikorski actually has some interesting observations here. The YouTube video also includes an AI-produced transcript that the listener came open. (1)

Sikorski talks about the Russian aerial provocations, the developing new European security architecture, and the challenges of dealing with the mercurial Donald Trump’s government. He uses diplomatic caution in answering the interviewer’s question about Polish nuclear weapons ambitions:

Kurtz-Phelan: There's been lots of speculation in the foreign policy crowd about the possibility that Poland would someday decide to acquire its own nuclear weapons. Is there any scenario where you can imagine taking that step?

Sikorski: No. No shift in NATO, no uncertainty about the alliance would prompt them. (10:00 in the video)

Things can change, of course.

Sikorski notes the challenge in the current European Union to pursue a common official foreign policy and creating a new European security architecture.

I think we've done better on defense. Germany, as you know, has changed its own constitution to uh generate a trillion euros, half of it for infrastructure, half of it for the feds.

[T]he European Union has passed a safe mechanism under which we will be spending 150 billion euros on defense including on collaborations with uh Ukraine. Unfortunately, Europe's defense budget, wonderfully called the European Peace Facility, is still blocked by a veto from Hungary. And we are still a confederation [the EU]. Which means that we don't have unity of command. So, on defense we've geared up.

Where we've done worse, I think, is on trade, because on trade. Because on trade, at that time, I was assuming we are a trade power equal to the United States. And actually Europe, unlike China, cracked under Donald Trump’s pressure.

Sikorsky basically ridicules Trump’s claim that European sales tax (VAT: value-added tax) is something aimed at disadvantaging the US.

He’s conciliatory about German defense spending – still a touchy subject in Polish politics - and notes that he thinks the conservative opposition to his government is getting more comfortable with that idea. Both Sikorski’s coalition, the ruling liberal-centrist Civic Platform (PO) and the rightwing, anti-EU authoritarian Law and Justice party (PiS), are distinctly anti-Russian in foreign policy. (2)

He makes a “military Keynesian” point that expanding defense spending could contribute significantly to the re-industrialization of Europe. (Even when this is true, it’s never an exclusively good thing to expand military spending.)

K-P: I think for the European populists, just like for American populists, migration is a is a more important issue. Have you seen a shift that you think will be sustained on the politics of migration in the block [the EU]?

S: We [the PO] pat ourselves on the back for winning our election in 23 by outflanking the populists on the right. Uh so we won on the back of a of scandals to do with issuing visas and I've personally mopped up those bad procedures and corrupt officials. And we've done a whole range of things to reduce uh both illegal and legal migration.

So, I've doubled the price of uh Polish visas. We've made it impossible to get a fake visa as a fake student. You know, we now verify whether people have the certificates to study in their own country, whether they can speak the languages of the of the tuition that they were supposed to take up.

And we have beefed up consular services in those countries that that have readmission treaties for with us, for example, so that we can return people whose contracts have ended.

We've also done something that nobody else in Europe dared to do. Um, we've passed a law which gives the government the right for 90 days at any one time to refuse asylum claims on our side of the border. Just not even allow people to apply.

I’m not an attorney or an expert on international law. But denying the right of refugees (or “migrants,” to use the rightwingers’ preferred term) who have crossed the border to apply for asylum is flat-out illegal under international law. It just is. Sikorski here is defending criminal conduct on the part of the government for which he is the foreign minister.

I would genuinely be curious to see an interview ask Anne Applebaum about the position her husband’s government is taking and which he defends. Because for European authoritarians, for American ones, for Indian ones, xenophobia is a core part of their political demagoguery. Unless the pro-democracy parties challenge it straight-on, it will in most if not all cases increase the credibility and effectiveness of the far right’s political narrative. (3)

Sikorski continues in this, well, demagogic vein: “You can still apply [for asylum] in the Polish consul or in Minsk or Moscow, but not having crossed the border illegally.” This is just insulting his listeners. He continues:

And we completed our big and beautiful fence [sic] on the border, 440 kilometers, a physical barrier, reinforced underground sensors, overground camera, a technical road, and it's now 98% effective. It cost us half a billion euros plus extra units of border guards, of riot police, and the army. Um and so we are now down to about 80 crossings per day.

It's still too many. And we've literally just the last 10 days had our border crossing with Belarus closed altogether to signal that that [border crossing] has to go down further. So we are contributing to our bit of the Schengen external perimeter. [He’s referring here to the Schengen area in which the country of first entry is responsible for checking passports.]

Because in Europe people value the fact that you can travel internally without passports [within the Schengen area].

But quite naturally [people] think that that system can only be held if the outside border is protected. And I imagine your advice to small-l liberal parties elsewhere would be to focus on the migration piece as the key.

Look, I'm of the view that you need to find a the right language to talk about migration, but also you need to to hear what people are saying in the United States, in Britain, in France, in in Germany, in Italy, and in Poland. They all tell us the same thing: fix migration or we will hire people who will do it for you.

So, it's either us doing it in in a humane way or populists doing it while dehumanizing migrants. Controlling migration is not racism. Countries have the right to decide what kind of migrants they need, at what volume, for how long, or how to make them into productive, loyal citizens. If you get it right, it can be mutually beneficial. If you get it wrong, you get fascism.

I’m sorry, that part is just rightwing doubletalk.

Somebody please ask Applebaum what she thinks about this. She probably will duck the question by saying (not unreasonably) that it wouldn’t be appropriate to comment on her Foreign Minister husband’s public statements. But some journalist should ask.

Look, nobody I’ve ever heard of except some crackpot anarcho-libertarian I once hear giving a speech to a Rotary Club meeting actually advocates for “open borders,” i.e., no international border regulations. The basic requirements of humane and practical border regulations that comply with international law are very well know. Heck, even the war criminal George W. Bush prosed one when he was President, which is own party rejected. Georgia Meloni, the neofascist Prime Minister of Italy and a Trump favorite, has also proposed what on its face sounds like a liberal and sensible immigration policy. (We’ll see what develops in practice.)

Minister Sikorski, do you really want to be taking an immigration policy stance that not only violates international law but puts you to the right of Shrub Bush and Italian neofascists on the immigration issue?

Notes:

(1) Radek Sikorski: Poland’s View From the Frontline of Europe. Foreign Affairs YouTube channel 09/25/2025. <https://youtu.be/HY3GasxGOpc?si=l2pB9cSWliJhJqNH> (Accessed: 2025-27-09).

(2) Krzysztof Katkowski discusses the positions of the Polish parties on Russia. Jacobin 10/14/2023. <https://jacobin.com/2023/10/poland-elections-lewica-razem-law-and-justice-far-right-ukraine> (Accessed: 2025-27-09).

(3) See: Biebricher, Thomas (2023): Mitte/Rechts.Die Internationale Krise des Konservatismus. Berlin: Suhrkamp.