US Vice President JD Vance has said he would be “shocked” if US President Donald Trump decided to deploy nuclear weapons in Central and Eastern Europe but later acknowledged that this was his opinion rather than US policy.
“I haven’t talked to the President about that particular issue but I would be shocked if he was supportive of nuclear weapons extending further east into Europe,” Vance told Fox News on March 13 when asked about comments made by Polish President Andrzej Duda in the Financial Times published on the same day.
Duda had called on the US to station nuclear weapons on Polish territory as a deterrent against potential Russian aggression. He said: “NATO’s borders moved eastward in 1999, so 26 years later, there should also be a shift of NATO infrastructure to the East.”
The US currently has bases with nuclear weapons in several NATO country’s including Germany, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey.
In Poland the US has a force of 10,000 personnel available on a rotational basis. During a recent visit to the country, the US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said the US had no plans to remove or reduce that capability in the foreseeable future.
The Polish President expressed hope for the expansion of the Nuclear Sharing project in Europe, which he unsuccessfully proposed in 2022 to the administration of then-US president Joe Biden.
Duda’s international affairs aide, Wojciech Kolarski, followed up on Duda’s appeal with an interview on Poland’s commercial broadcaster RMF FM. In that he argued nuclear protection would improve security for Poland, a NATO member along the alliance’s eastern flank that shares borders with Ukraine, Belarus and the Russian territory of Kaliningrad.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, a political opponent of the opposition Conservative (PiS)-allied Duda, reacted to the US nuclear weapons proposal by saying he thought it was better to address such issues discreetly rather than in media interviews but added he believed the President had good intentions.
“We should formulate certain expectations … publicly when we are certain, or have reasons to be convinced, that such appeals or calls will be heard and that the addressee, in this case the American administration, President Trump, is prepared for a positive response,” Tusk told reporters.
On March 7, he had said Poland was in talks with France, the only nuclear power in the European Union, concerning French President Emmanuel Macron’s proposal to use the his country’s nuclear deterrent to protect Europe from Russian threats, a proposal which Russia claimed was “extremely confrontational”.
Poland now spends a higher proportion of its gross domestic product (GDP) on defence than any other NATO member, including the US. Its spending reached 4.1 per cent of GDP in 2024 and it is planning to spend 4.7 per cent this year.
Poland’s former ambassador to the US Marek Magierowski on March 14 stated that Poland ideally wanted to have both the European nuclear capacity and that of the US. He added, though, that the matter had to be seen through the eyes of Poland’s internal political debate over whether to be closer to the EU or the US.
Magierowski said that for the PiS and Duda “European autonomy remains a mirage” whereas Tusk had always been more inclined to reinforce ties with EU partners, “partially and implicitly at the expense of Poland’s bilateral bond with the US”.
The former Polish ambassador added that the PiS was accusing Tusk of joining forces with Germany and France in trying to push the US out of Europe. In contrast, he said, the Prime Minister’s centre-left was accusing the Polish Right of being vassals of Trump.
According to Magierowski, Duda’s and PiS’ message to Poles was that although “you may dislike Trump’s policies, and in particular his animus toward the EU, turning our backs on the United States now would be preposterous and suicidal”.
