The Intermarium Revival
Poland's status as a European powerhouse may be a recent trend, yet the strategic basis for such a development extends back well over a century.
Perhaps no nation in Europe has experienced such a tragic series of events in modern history than Poland, which has long found itself wedged between two of Europe’s most historically aggressive nations: Germany and Russia. In fact, much of Polish history has been defined by its relative strength to these very two problematic neighbors. During the Middle Ages, when Prussia and Muscovy were only beginning to emerge, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth enjoyed the status as a regional hegemon. Polish armies captured Moscow in 1610, and in 1683 Polish King Jan III Sobieski led a decisive campaign at Vienna that halted the advance of the Ottomans into Central Europe.
This long chain of successes came to an unfortunate end as the Kingdom of Prussia and the Russian Empire rapidly centralized and expanded in the 18th century. As its two neighbors became more formidable, Poland stood no chance to resist encroachments from both its east and west. By 1795, the nation had been entirely partitioned, as it would remain until the end of the First World War.
However, German and Russian dominance would not last forever. In 1918—with Russia reeling from the Bolshevik revolution and Germany being subjected to the Treaty of Versailles— Poland once again emerged not only as an independent state, but also as a regional powerhouse. In 1920, Polish forces crushed the Red Army at the Battle of Warsaw and conquered almost half of Soviet Ukraine. Throughout much of the Interwar Period, Warsaw would command a military twice as large as Germany’s. In a moment of German-Russian weakness, Poland once again stood secure.
Poland, however, would once again suffer from a joint German-Soviet invasion in 1939 as a consequence of the two nations’ rapid military buildups, and until the end of the Cold War, Poland would remain firmly under Soviet control. However, the fall of the Soviet Union presented itself as an unprecedented opportunity for Poland to capitalize on a Russia experiencing full imperial collapse and a Germany with an apathetic foreign policy and a laughably small military budget.
As Germany’s economy stagnated and the Kremlin tried to recover what was left of its former prestige, Poland quietly emerged as a European powerhouse in the years following its independence. Between 1990 and 2025, its GDP per capita rose from well under $2,000 to almost $25,000, and many economists agree that its total GDP will surpass 1 trillion USD no later than 2026. In this same time frame, Poland has maintained a defense budget that exceeds that of almost all of its peers in NATO and the European Union, making its military in the same league as France, Turkey, and other major European states.
In lieu of its emergence as a regional power once more, Poland has looked back to its long history for inspiration in its foreign policy. While Warsaw certainly needs not to worry about its German ally deviating from NATO anytime soon, Russia’s aggressive moves in Ukraine and the Caucasus in the past two decades have once again reignited Polish concerns of Russian expansionism. It has hence developed strong ties with Ukraine and initiated the “Eastern Shield” program in conjunction with its neighbors in the Baltic States. To Eastern Europe’s minor powers, Poland has become a fulcrum of the anti-Russian bloc. Warsaw’s foreign policy, as can be clearly seen by these moves, has thus become based upon defense through close association with its neighbors. Russia’s setbacks in Ukraine have shown that such a “strength in numbers” approach is not only plausible, but highly effective in hindering any efforts by Moscow to continue its strategic objectives in Ukraine and elsewhere.
This approach to foreign policy, while novel in its application, has represented an idealistic aim of Polish grand strategy ever since the nation’s rebirth in 1918. Upon assuming leadership of Poland in 1918, Polish Head of State Józef Piłsudski quickly recognized that Germany and Russia’s unquestionable weakness induced by the Versailles Treaty and the Bolshevik Revolution would only be temporary. If Poland were to survive, Piłsudski believed that Poland would have to seize enough territory in Eastern Europe, most notably in Belarus and Ukraine, to create an “Intermarium” federation that would stretch “between the seas” (the Baltic Sea to the north and the Black Sea to the south) that could prove strong enough to repel any future aggression by either Germany or Russia. While this approach failed due to a variety of chaotic circumstances that plagued 1920’s Europe , its ideological bearing would live on through Polish exiles and nationalists until the nation’s true independence was regained in 1990.
Poland’s goals of creating a bloc of independent nations stretching from Estonia and Latvia in the north all the way to Ukraine and Romania in the south may have failed in 1920, yet a century later it has become an unquestionable reality of European affairs. Poland and its bloc now possess a degree of self-sufficiency and deterrence capability that arguably matches that of Russia, perhaps even without backing from the rest of NATO. While Poland’s recent history has been fraught with misfortunes and crises, it thus appears that Warsaw’s favorable position in modern Europe will remain a reality of the region’s power dynamics for decades to come.