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In a nail-biter finish to a bitter campaign, a polarized Polish electorate over the weekend chose the Euro-skeptic, populist right candidate, Karol Nawrocki over Rafal Trzaskowski, the liberal mayor of Warsaw.
This contest, with close parallels to the recent one in Romania, produced an unanticipated triumph for Nawrocki, who, like George Simian, his Romanian counterpart, aligned himself with the MAGA agenda of President Trump. At a CPAC meetingheld in Poland in the lead-up to Poland’s runoff, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s endorsement of Nawrocki was applauded by populist nationalist leaders from across Europe.
The official results showed Nawrocki with 50.89% and Trzaskowski with 49.11%. Turnout of 71.63% was higher than in any presidential contest since Lech Walesa won the office in 1990.
Trzaskowski was the candidate of Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s pro-EU, pro-Ukraine Civic Coalition (KO), and his victory would have lifted the limits posed on Tusk’s domestic policy agenda by the veto power of outgoing President Andrej Duda, who, like Nawrocki, comes from the nationalist Law and Justice Party (PiS). Tusk’s government has become unpopular in part because it has underperformed on the promises it made to liberal voters in its impressive ouster of PiS after eight years in power in 2023.
Trzaskowski’s campaign unearthed several scandals about Nawrocki’s former involvement in brawls between rival soccer teams, his career as a boxer with alleged underworld contacts, and his allegedly having swindled a pensioner in the sale of an apartment. None of these scandals seems to have discouraged his supporters. He went into the campaign as a virtual unknown, having been the head of the Institute of National Remembrance and director of the WWII museum in Gdansk.
Since returning to power in 2023, Tusk has restored Poland’s position in the European Union, unlocking EU funding that had been withheld because of the clash between PiS in power from 2015 to 2023. There is a prospect of renewed friction with President Nawrocki obstructing Tusk’s pro-EU policies.
The potential resumption of the conflict with Brussels over PiS-era judicial appointments could affect Poland’s enhanced stature and clout within the EU on matters of foreign and security policy. Since Tusk’s election, the so-called Weimar Group of France, Germany and Poland has become a sort of foreign and security policy caucus among EU member states, and, with the UK, this group has spearheaded the Europeans’ drive to stay the course in military support for Ukraine, even as the U.S. under Trump has pressed for negotiations to begin in earnest to end the war.
Nawrocki pledged during the runoff campaign to oppose NATO membership for Ukraine and is certainly very cool on the idea of Ukraine’s EU accession, in part because of the impact on Poland’s farmers. While he is no friend of Russia, Nawrocki, a conservative historian, shares with much of the PiS rank and file some grievances against Ukraine for the treatment of the Polish minority in western Ukraine during WWII. Nawrocki shares with other nationalist-populist politicians in Europe the opposition to admitting asylum seekers and migrants, a position that even Tusk has had to accommodate. But unlike Poland’s liberals, Nawrocki’s voters are unhappy with the obligation to support large numbers of Ukrainian refugees.
Nawrocki owes his victory in part to the voters who supported the right-wing libertarian-nationalist candidate from the Konfederacja party, Slavomir Mentzen, who finished a strong third behind Trzaskowski and Nawrocki in the first round. The lion’s share of Mentzen’s voters supported Nawrocki in the runoff.
So long as Tusk remains prime minister, the European Commission is unlikely to move abruptly into open hostility with Poland, in part because the actual performance of Nawrocki in office remains to be seen. The Polish president’s powers are not comparable to the those of the other two nationalist populist leaders in Central Europe, Viktor Orban and Robert Fico.
Unlike Orban or Fico, Nawrocki will back harsher EU sanctions on Russia and will support boosting Poland’s already high defense spending to meet a perceived Russian threat. Like Tusk, however, Nawrocki opposes deploying Polish troops in any capacity in post-war Ukraine. Nawrocki is likely, however, to be even more determined than Duda was to veto legislation to roll back the PiS-era judicial reforms or to relax restrictions on abortion.
It is possible that Nawrocki will try to produce a legislative deadlock that forces early elections by splitting the multiparty majority led by Tusk. New elections are set for 2027 but could come earlier if the governing coalition were dissolved. Nawrocki is much more combative and ideological than Duda has been and can be expected to press his advantage to bring PiS back to power as soon as is feasible.
FBI Director Kash Patel promised that he wouldn’t touch any work related to the country of Qatar — until very recently, a lucrative client of his. Now, only a few months into the job, he’s had a change of heart and is already handling official FBI business related to the Gulf country.
After his confirmation hearing, Patel revealed that he worked as a consultant for the Embassy of Qatar until November. Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, Acting Vice President of Policy & Government Affairs at Project on Government Oversight, explained to RS that federal regulations stipulate that executive branch employees should recuse themselves on issues related to their former employers for a period of one year.
However, employees can avoid this requirement by simply obtaining a waiver — or, as Hedtler-Gaudette put it, “activating the escape hatch.”
According to the new disclosure filing, Patel received this waiver from his agency’s ethics officer for a particular matter related to Qatar on March 4. The new disclosure does not specify what work or case Patel’s waiver is for — but if official FBI business involving Qatar is landing on the Director’s desk and it’s worth asking for a waiver over, it’s a good sign the work carries some weight.
In his ethics disclosure from before his confirmation hearing, Patel pledged to avoid actual and apparent conflicts of interests; “I will not participate personally and substantially in any particular matter involving specific parties in which I know a former client of mine is a party or represents a party for a period of one year after I last provided service to that client or until the client satisfies any outstanding bill, whichever is later, unless I am first authorized to participate.”
It turns out those last seven words did most of the heavylifting.
“This waiver should never have been granted,” Craig Holman, Government Affairs Lobbyist for Public Citizen, told RS. “There is no reason why Patel has to address whatever specific issue this is relating to Qatar when he can just delegate it to someone else in the FBI.”
Patel’s consulting business, Trishul LLC, earned a neat $2.1 million according to his financial disclosure. The Embassy of Qatar is listed as one of nine clients, though it does not provide a breakdown as to how much Patel received from each client. Other clients include a Kremlin-connected Russian filmmaker and the Chinese e-commerce platform Shein.
Patel first began working for Qatar shortly after leaving the Trump administration, where his last post was as chief of staff to the secretary of defense. A source with familiarity of his work explained to RS that Patel signed a contract to advise Qatar on security issues ahead of the World Cup. When the World Cup ended, Patel pivoted to advising the Qatar Embassy on counterterrorism issues and election monitoring, even identifying potential personnel in a future Trump administration.
Patel himself has not released a statement explaining the nature of his work for the Qatari Embassy, leaving some to wonder if he should have registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. “Based on everything I have seen, it seems like he probably should have registered as a foreign agent,” explained Hedtler-Gaudette. “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably was a foreign agent,” he added.
In February, Attorney General Pam Bondi — herself a former lobbyist for Qatar — released a memo stating that FARA would only be enforced in cases of “traditional espionage.”
The FBI investigates everything from terrorism to public corruption, including a number of probes which involve foreign governments, leaving no shortage of possibilities of what the waiver could be for. Holman explained that if and when Qatar’s name does pop up in the FBI building again, Patel is likely to seek another waiver. “And, it’s likely to be granted.”
The FBI is also responsible for carrying out investigations into foreign influence; in January, Bob Menendez was sentenced to 11 years in prison for bribery and foreign agent charges. As part of that case, Menendez accepted gold and F1 tickets, among other gifts, in exchange for using his influence to help a New Jersey real estate developer obtain millions of dollars from a Qatari investment fund. On the other hand, Qatar has also been a key partner in negotiating the release of hostages and a ceasefire in Gaza in which security agencies were part of many of the sensitive talks they had — without the specifics of what the waiver for it's impossible to say.
But all of this begs the question — what did Patel seek a waiver for exactly?"
“A Navy Second to None” has been the most enduring consensus in American national defense. For more than a century, the American people and their elected leaders — Restrainers and Warhawks alike — have agreed that the U.S. Navy is, and must remain, “The Shield of the Republic.”
Yet today the Navy is in trouble. The Navy and its boosters in Congress want us to believe the problem is all about too few ships and too few facilities.
In fact, the rot runs much deeper. Americans can see that something is wrong, especially when it is staring them in the face: Navy “bureaus” that cannot design ships, builders that cannot build, shipyards that cannot repair, depots running out of munitions, command failures and corruption, accidents at sea, and billion-dollar fires in port.
The disorder is in fact positioned in the heart of the Navy Ethos itself. The precise term-of-art — “Navy Ethos” — was first introduced in 1980, here. It signifies the core, or essence of the Navy’s sense of self: Its codification of meaning, belonging, and identity — as a society and culture.
Hence, the real story of the Navy’s roads to ruin lies in the unraveling of the Navy’s own Ethos.
Yet how to show this? The Navy's five big, and indeed, existential problems can be best showcased by highlighting the struggles of five other navies in history that were forced to confront all-or-nothing cultural crises in their own “Navy Ethos.”
No matter what they say, armed forces prepare for the war they want to fight. Before Pearl Harbor, the United States and Imperial Japanese navies built mirrored fleets centered around lines of battleships that would someday meet in mortal combat, which in the space of a single event — a Pacific Clash of Titans — would decide the destiny of nations.
Yet when war came, the efforts of both fleets, try as they might, could not make this happen. Alfred Thayer Mahan’s prophecy of “Seapower” mesmerized the U.S. and Japanese navies with the mutual conviction that a Pacific War could be decided by a single event: Another Tsushima or Trafalgar. Yet even if there were no way to achieve such a choreographed final fantasy, theidée fixe of decisive battle had become a way of life for both USN and IJN. This obsession with almighty battleships locked in a last battle led to the destruction of America’s prewar fleet in the first year of war, and then eventually, Japan’s.
Today, the Navy still pines for a Pacific fleet showdown, this time with China. It is still obsessing over its capital ship idée fixe (with carriers in place of battleships) — when, like 1941, its fleet is simply too small, too old, and too out of shape.
In World War II, the U.S. Navy was saved only by America’s titanic industrial power, which in 1941 was building two backup fleets: A "two ocean" armada, to be followed by and an even bigger one. That second force, 5000+ ships, was built de novo — as though out of nothing — in just four years. The Navy was saved, not by its adaptable resilience, but by American Captains of Industry.
In tragic contrast, the Imperial Japanese Navy — the most powerful fleet in the world in 1941 — had no backup. When faced with a U.S. shipbuilding monster, it was literally ground down by those 5,000 brand spanking new American hulls. In this sense, the Nihon Kaigun is very much like the U.S. Navy today. War came, and it simply could not replace ships lost.
Frankly, the Japanese actually built quite a few new ships during the war — just not enough. Likewise, there are no Captains of Industry to save the U.S. Navy today. China has 200 times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States, and fabulous repair and maintenance that serves the entire maritime world. If America cannot build, repair, and maintain even its current, “incredibly shrinking” Navy, then it is no “maritime nation.”
What happens to the Navy that reaches the acme of power and success, and comes to believe that it will command the seas forever? That would be Great Britain from 1815-1914. For the Royal Navy, it meant atrophy, that invisible sclerosis hardening into an ossified way of life.
As it celebrates its always-triumphant orthodoxies, it also forgets how to think, it takes itself way too seriously, and it believes without a flicker of doubt that, to stay on top, the Fleet simply must keep doing what it has always done, in sufficient quantity and quality, of course. The Royal Navy may have survived on the basis of quantity and quality of ships.
Yet what about quality and originality of thought? A Navy Ethos that punishes new thinking, that throttles innovation, that cashiers criticism — all by the time proclaiming how it celebrates these things — is an ethos chained to its own “Rules of the Game.”
In this sort of culture, only the right people, who say the right things, and put on the right, bright face to the public can expect to move up. This is the sclerosis of success, and it is, for any society of war, the most dangerous disorder: For it cannot be cured from within. Thus, the strategic reckoning of the Royal Navy in World War I will be as nothing to what awaits its American Cousin, very soon.
To know the U.S. Navy’s rot at its deepest means pulling back the curtain on a seemingly unlikely historical antecedent: Namely, the ruinous inner-working of Medieval and Early Modern Muslim empires.
This is the dynamic of the "slave dynasties." Corps of "Mamluks" or "Ghilman" ("enslaved soldiers") came to rule both Arab kingdoms and Caliphate. This aggressive artifact, burrowing deep into the heart of Muslim empire, reached its peak at the Ottoman Empire’s very height, where the business of the Sultan and his Sublime Porte became the business of its Janissary Corps.
This is what happens when servants become masters. Today, the business of the Navy is the business of its prime defense contractors, which have effectively taken over their titular overlords — the old bureaus — in the Department of the Navy. Today, the ideal cursus honorum, or life passage, for a naval officer is no longer to “make flag” and command a carrier strike group, but rather to realize one’s true destiny after retirement, with a seven-figure berth at one of the Big Five.
Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, RTX (formerly Raytheon), Boeing, and a few others do good work (of course), yet it is they who now define the Navy's course. Their splashy ads proclaim their loyal service, everywhere, and which also — subtly yet undeniably — proclaim that it is they who truly rule.
In 1781, in the American War, the French Marine Royale was literally "Peak France" at sea. Arguably, the Bourbon Coalitions’ navies won the war. Never before or since would the French Fleet be the instrument of such historic transformation as it achieved with this “world-historical” event. Yet, however triumphant, the war had dire consequences for the victor. France quickly unraveled into bankruptcy and revolution. Political calamity cascaded into a downstream disaster for the French Navy.
The U.S. Navy — which clearly does not represent "Peak America" at sea — cannot begin to be compared to the fleet that sealed the fate of Britain’s American empire and ensured U.S. independence. Yet as surely as for the Ancien Régime of 1789, a crisis in the American constitutional order would hit the U.S. Navy hard. It would feel the savage bite of American domestic strife, as well as the crippling burden of national debt working its way into the heart of national defense. A diminished nation will also mean an even more diminished Navy.
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The bottom line is clear: Crises faced by others in history pale in comparison to the multiple vectors of failure facing the U.S. Navy today. Yet there are still hopeful guidelines the Navy might follow to hold ruin at bay: 1) Stay out of war for at least a generation, 2) Do what you can to leverage the State to create a real merchant navy and shipbuilding base, 3) Throw off the Old Religion. Let the Prophet go, and for a few years, simply observe the world as it is, and 4) Immediately consult a physician who can diagnose your sclerosis and tell you hard truths.
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