Barely two weeks have passed since the Madrid NATO Summit, which has been described as “historic”.

The fanfares have died down, and now it's clear: Poland is disappointed.

The country's liberal opposition immediately criticized the lack of progress in Madrid in securing the alliance's eastern flank.

Gerhard Gnauck

Political correspondent for Poland, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania based in Warsaw.

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In the meantime, Poland's summit participant, President Andrzej Duda, has followed suit.

Before the meeting, it was assumed that the number of allied soldiers actually present in Poland would be increased, the president told a group of journalists.

That didn't happen;

it remains with the previous 11,600 soldiers, primarily Americans, alongside Britons, Croats and Romanians.

As before, they are all only present on a "rotating" basis, not stationed with kith and kin like the Americans in Germany.

This rotation principle, introduced by NATO after the annexation of Crimea, was intended at the time as a concession to appease Russia and is apparently intended to continue to apply.

After all, according to Washington, the leadership of the 5th United States Army Corps in Poznań in western Poland, with 700 officers in the future, is to become a "permanent" facility in the country.

This would make it the second permanent American facility after the integrated missile defense base in Redzikowo near the Pomeranian town of Stolp.

According to Washington, this base should be ready as early as 2018, and although it is well advanced, it is still not ready for use.

Without self-defense only rubble and corpses

It is true that the summit participants in Madrid decided to dramatically increase the number of alliance troops in Europe that are on standby to 300,000.

But the increase only means that the additional troops are assigned to specific areas of operation in Eastern Europe and sometimes practice there, but essentially stay at home.

When asked what that means for the security of the small Baltic states, for example, Duda frowned and looked meaningfully at the sky.

Poland likes to refer to the arguments put forward by the representatives of Estonia and Latvia in Madrid: After the lesson of the Russian war of annihilation in Ukraine, it is frivolous to rely on Western "rescue forces" only flying in from outside after a Russian attack would have to be.

In Warsaw, despite all the praise for NATO, people like to emphasize that Poland must be able to defend itself first.

The head of the ruling national-conservative PiS, Jarosław Kaczyński, set an ambitious goal at the end of 2021, when many governments were already warning of a Russian attack on Ukraine: the number of army personnel had to be doubled.

The Department of Defense's website says this should happen "over the course of a few years."

The aim is "about 250,000 professional soldiers and about 50,000 soldiers of the territorial defense troops".