Shredding the Postwar Order

On March 9 Poland’s minister of foreign affairs, Radosław Sikorski, posted on X about an apparent threat by Elon Musk to deny Ukraine access to the Starlink satellite system it uses to guide its military drones. Musk, whose company SpaceX operates Starlink, had written that Ukraine’s “entire front line would collapse if I turned it off.” Sikorski noted that

Starlinks for Ukraine are paid for by the Polish Digitization Ministry at the cost of about $50 million per year. The ethics of threatening the victim of aggression apart, if SpaceX proves to be an unreliable provider we will be forced to look for other suppliers.

US secretary of state Marco Rubio weighed in to admonish Sikorski: “Say thank you because without Starlink Ukraine would have lost this war long ago and Russians would be on the border with Poland right now.” (He is presumably unaware that Poland already shares a border with Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave.) Musk posted his own reply to Sikorski: “Be quiet, small man.”

Such boorishness had by then ceased to be shocking. Imitation is the tawdriest form of flattery: Donald Trump’s courtiers signal their devotion by inflicting his mode of puerile bullying on allied governments. Rubio’s “Say thank you” was an obvious attempt to curry favor with Trump by emulating Vice President J.D. Vance’s haranguing of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office on February 28: “Have you said thank you once?” Musk’s “small man” mimicked Trump’s familiar mode of insult—once aimed at “Little Marco” himself. The infantilization of America’s domestic politics has spread to its international relations. In Trump’s boys’ club, disdain for Europe is an important signifier of belonging: as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth assured Vance in a Signal message of March 14, inadvertently leaked to The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.”

What was nonetheless remarkable in this instance was the target. Poland is arguably the most pro-American foreign country on earth. In a Pew survey conducted in thirty-four countries across six continents last year, 86 percent of Poles said they held a favorable view of the US—higher than anywhere else, including Israel, the United Kingdom, and Japan. Trump’s demand that European members of NATO should spend more on defense has already been met by Poland—its military expenditure as a proportion of GDP is now more than twice as high as NATO’s official target of 2 percent and very close to the 5 percent that Trump proposed in January. Much of that outlay is on American arms and missile defense systems. In 2022 and 2023 Poland signed deals to buy more than $6 billion worth of Abrams tanks, and it has become the first European country to deploy them.

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