Reports on British and Polish prospects in Year 2 of the “new world order” of the Trump 2.0 era- and the what-if of the “Istanbul talks” of 2022

British strategists surely want to keep military cooperation with members of the current EU strong. But the country is caught in a dilemma. Like its neighbors in the EU, it needs economic stimulus but is still suffering from the chronic austerity-politics conventional wisdom that has afflicted it since the days of Maggie Thatcher’s premiership.

As Robert Skidelsky has recently noted, Prime Minister Keir Starmer seems to be hoping for stimulative effects from military spending. But Skidelsky warns about how promoting military spending can also lead to threat inflation in evaluating potential external dangers. (1)

Britain is a key ally for the EU countries in preparing the new security architecture in the new environment. But the current government of Starmer and Starmer’s own starkly conservative bent in politics are making Labour’s polling numbers resemble Donald Trump’s. And Starmer’s reckless embrace of rightwing xenophobic political themes is having the effect that such a strategy has had across Europe and also in the US: it is strengthening the far right in British politics.

With the US commitment to NATO and even to traditional nuclear deterrence in relation to Russia no longer as certain as they once were – to put it mildly – Britain’s role as one of the two NATO powers in Europe along with France makes its importance in collective European defense more urgent than ever.

The logic of nuclear deterrence here is not dependent on evaluations of the other side’s intentions. It’s dependent on the grim concept of Mutually Assured Destruction, whose initials MAD are grotesquely appropriate. It refers to the idea that it would be crazy for one nuclear nation to launch nukes against another one because the initiating country would also result in unacceptable destruction to the initiating nation, as well.

Zeteo reports on the messy British political situation: (2)

Poland’s positioning

Poland shares a border with Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and EU member Lithuania. From Poland’s viewpoint, it’s a potentially dangerous neighborhood even in the best of times. Poland’s border with Russia is the enclave containing Kaliningrad, which has no direct land connection to the rest of Russia.

Poland has one of the largest armies in the EU and currently has the most soldiers on active duty. And in the current situation, it’s not surprising that Poland is making more formal defensive preparation against potential Russian threats.

Poland plans to complete a new set of anti-drone fortifications along its eastern borders within two years, a top defence official has said, after a massive incursion of unmanned Russian aerial combat vehicles into Polish airspace earlier this year.

“We expect to have the first capabilities of the system in roughly six months, perhaps even sooner. And the full system will take 24 months to complete,” the deputy defence minister, Cezary Tomczyk, told the Guardian in an interview in Warsaw. …

More than a dozen suspected Russian drones entered Polish airspace in September, in an incident that led to airport closures, fighter jets being scrambled, and damage to buildings on the ground as drones were shot down. The foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, told the Guardian at the time that the attacks, which involved drones not carrying any ammunition, were an attempt by Russia “to test us without starting a war”. (3)

In the conventional scheme of things, it is the job of the defense ministries to evaluate the capabilities of potential adversaries and that of the foreign ministries to evaluate their intentions.

It’s notable that Foreign Minister Sikorski describes recent Russian drone incursions as being designed to test Poland but not to start a war, i.e., he’s stating his government’s public interpretation of Russian intentions. While the deputy defense minister is quoted as agreeing with Sikorski’s assessment but also refers to Russia’s capabilities:

“The truth is that as long as Ukraine is defending itself and fighting Russia, Europe is not at risk of war in the conventional, strict sense of the word. What we will face instead are provocations and acts of sabotage,” said Tomczyk. But, he said, if the west allowed Russia to win in Ukraine, it could be not long before the Kremlin set its sights on Europe.

That also touches on one of those more-than-one-thing-can-be-true issues. That is, every Western nation from Washington to Warsaw is aware that there are potential geopolitical benefits from weakening and/or distracting Russia with combat in Ukraine, whether or not those potential benefits are consistent at a given moment with Ukraine’s own perceived interests. That calculation would be consistent with need to evaluate the capabilities of potential adversaries.

But that does not mean that the polemical argument used by Russia and its partisans that the US and NATO deliberately provoked the current war in 2022 as a way to weaken Russia is accurate. It could certainly at the same time be true that once the war started, the notion that a war would weaken Russia played a role in the West’s response to the diplomatic initiative that Russia made soon after the 2022 invasion. In that instance, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson apparently persuaded Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to break off the talks that were taking place between Ukraine and Russia over an interim settlement proposed by Russia. (4) Those negotiations are now referred to as the “Istanbul talks.“

(There was a different set of talks in Istanbul in mid-2025 between Ukrainian and Russian representatives.) (5)

However serious or non-serious that Russian initiative may have been, it’s now long since become one of the many “what-ifs” of history.

In a December account of the 2022 “Istanbul talks” experience, Branko Marcetic concludes, “All of this will surely go down as one of the great missed opportunities of history.” (6)

It’s probably too early for “surely.” But it will likely remain an open “what-if” for a long time to come.

Notes:

(1) Skidelsky, Robert (2025): Ukraine - the delusion of the warmongers. Lord Robert Skidelsky’s Substack 12/15/2025. <https://robertskidelsky.substack.com/p/ukraine-the-delusion-of-the-warmongers> (Accessed: 2025-15-12).

(2) Is Keir Starmer CORRUPTING the Labour Party? Zeteo YouTube channel 12/27/2025. <https://youtu.be/O-P1hvPqymY?si=aQssb9122YWWt_I7> (Accessed: 2025-27-12).

(3) Walker, Shaun (2025): Poland preparing €2bn anti-drone fortifications along its eastern border amid Russian threat. The Guardian 12/27/2025. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/27/poland-anti-drone-fortifications-eastern-borders-cezary-tomczyk> (Accessed: 2025-27-12).

(4) Echols, Connor (2022): Diplomacy Watch: Did Boris Johnson help stop a peace deal in Ukraine? Diplomacy Watch: Did Boris Johnson help stop a peace deal in Ukraine? Responsible Statecraft 09/02/2022 <https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/09/02/diplomacy-watch-why-did-the-west-stop-a-peace-deal-in-ukraine/> (Accessed: 2025-27-12).

The Russian proposal was analyzed at the time by Fiona Hill and Angela Stent in The World Putin Wants. Foreign Affairs Sept-Oct 2022, published online 08/25/2022. <https://www.foreignaffairs.com/russian-federation/world-putin-wants-fiona-hill-angela-stent> They took a notably skeptical approach to the possible seriousness of the proposal and a notably dark view of Putin’s broader territorial intentions. In that article, they accurately predicted, “if Donald Trump or a Republican with views like his becomes president of the United States in 2025, U.S. support for Ukraine will erode.”

(5) Russia and Ukraine discuss more prisoner exchanges at Istanbul talks (Accessed: 2025-27-12).

(6) Branko Marcetic (2025): Pranked Biden official exposes lie that Ukraine war was inevitable. Responsible Statecraft 12/17/2025. <https://responsiblestatecraft.org/ukraine-nato-sloat/> (Accessed: 2025-27-12).