Some of my liberal acquaintances lately have been suggesting that American moral credibility overseas is gone--due to Iraq, etc. Others have suggested that this recent international blowup between Russia and the Georgian Republic has somehow rebounded to the disadvantage of the United States. Well, they couldn't be more wrong, on both counts--as the NY Times explains today in an article on Poland's reaction to the whole thing:
"But the events in the Caucasus, and threats of a nuclear attack by a Russian general after the announcement of a deal to place an American missile defense base here, have cast a pall of doubt over a Poland that, flush and confident, has taken its place in the West, specifically on the side of America, as an ally rather than a vassal. As the United States and Poland formally signed the missile defense agreement on Wednesday, over vociferous objections from Moscow, polls in the daily newspaper Dziennik showed public opinion swinging sharply in the past month, from opposition to the missile base to support. “Before the Georgia invasion, I was against the installation of the missile shield in Poland, but now, after the events there, I feel threatened from the East, and I don’t regret the decision,” said Julian Damentko, 26, a student out this week for a walk in Saski Park here. Poland, the nation in which the Solidarity trade union hammered the first cracks into the old Soviet bloc, has been feeling its strength as a leader of the New Europe of former Soviet-sphere states. But since the Georgia crisis, this largest of post-Communist European Union members has moved to cement its relationship to action-oriented America and not just the tentative bureaucracies of Europe and NATO."
