General Andrzejczak suggests in Didaskalia that Poland should base its security on saturating the country with American investments. This is not a strategy, it's political theology. An eristic analysis reveals five layers of messaging and the internal contradictions of the doctrine.
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I watched with interest a conversation in Didaskalia with General Rajmund Andrzejczak, former Chief of the General Staff, in which he presented Poland’s current situation in the context of the war in Iran, Donald Trump’s statements, and the America First strategy. I will analyze what the general is actually saying and whether his central thesis goes like this: greater American investment engagement in the region — hyperscaler data centers, nuclear power plants with American shares, critical infrastructure with capital from across the ocean — could compel their involvement in defending us against the Russian Federation. Since I know about geopolitics roughly as much as the average bread-eater, I decided to approach this argumentation not through the prism of military doctrines I don’t know, but through rhetoric and analysis of the structure of the promise — a workshop closer to my own.
The general himself states his thesis very plainly. He talks about the need for “increasing the volume of American interests, so that it simply pays them to help us” and invokes the concept of a “strategic torso”. He argues:
“how should we encourage these Americans, well, I don’t know, by setting up an Amazon data center here, or some Google or other interests, and that would make this alliance stronger and not through the volume of rhetoric”
He literally uses the term “entanglement” of Americans in Polish security. This is the field on which I want to engage with the general.
My preliminary conclusion is this: this is not a debate about defense. It is a debate about economic colonization wrapped in an eschatological promise of security. And it is an offer whose logical structure does not survive five minutes of analysis.
The general’s performative function
General Andrzejczak is not a stupid man. This must be said upfront, because the entire subsequent analysis rests on the assumption that he himself does not believe this and that his statement serves a function other than analytical. What hides beneath the performative layer I present at the very end.
Andrzejczak operates in performative mode, not analytical mode. His role in the public sphere — as former Chief of the General Staff speaking to the media after taking off the uniform — is to maintain a band of rational optimism so that morale doesn’t collapse after Donald Trump’s moves. This is a classic stabilizing function: the expert says what the audience needs to hear (and I do hope so), not what the expert thinks about the situation among decision-makers.
To put it bluntly: I hope Polish politicians don’t believe these fairy tales. Because that the general himself doesn’t believe them, I am one hundred percent convinced.
What the last four years have already taught us
The first problem with the general’s thesis is empirical. We have a laboratory in which his doctrine has been tested for four years on a living organism — Ukraine — and the result is unambiguously negative. American assets, from corporate investments to infrastructure with American capital, have been and continue to be systematically attacked by Russians. The US response: diplomatic declarations and further aid packages. Zero kinetic escalation, zero “drawing in” of the hegemon to defend the assets.
The tripwire doctrine, on which the general implicitly relies — the Berlin model, where one American brigade was enough for the USSR to calculate that an attack would end in WWIII — worked under Cold War conditions. It required a rational adversary, symmetrical response, steel nerves, and a credible deterrence policy. Today we have neither a rational adversary, nor a credible deterrence policy, nor even those nerves. What we have instead is a president in a red cap who calls NATO a paper tiger and who writes several times a day about how much he is winning and how undefeatable he is.
Moreover, even where Americans demonstrate strength, the demonstration increasingly has a theatrical rather than strategic character. Operation Absolute Resolve of January 3, 2026 — in which Delta Force pulled a sleepy Maduro in pajamas out of his bedroom and transported him to a court on Manhattan — was a media bombshell. I have to say: WOW! And what comes of it? Practically nothing. Venezuela still cannot be ruled remotely from Washington, the oil has not been recovered, and the legal precedent created is such that now any head of state is potentially extractable from bed. International law was also broken — law that today increasingly resembles an instrument of selective enforcement against the weaker, rather than a universal norm. We change the rules of the game mid-game, and what are you going to do about it?
Or take an even more telling economic example. For months, Americans have been firing missiles worth millions of dollars from aircraft worth hundreds of millions to shoot down cheap drones produced in factories at 20–50 thousand dollars per unit. Every such exchange is an economic loss for the US even when it is a tactical win. This is the real situation of the Pentagon in 2026. And in this situation, General Andrzejczak proposes (rhetorically, as we shall see) that we base Polish security on the assumption that this same Pentagon will want to spend further tens of billions of dollars defending an Amazon data center near Warsaw.
The general’s internal contradiction, or smokescreen?
The most interesting fissure in the general’s argument is in himself, within a single conversation. In one passage, the general analyzes Iran’s asymmetric strategy with admiration.
The general openly praises this tactic:
“Iran does not strike American military installations there (…) instead it breaks alliances. Strike the adversary’s strategy, strike alliances, and only at the end the army”
What’s more, he himself gives a concrete example of an attack on cloud infrastructure:
“Iran attacked, I think it’s in Bahrain, those AWS Amazon Web Services, the most important data centers (…) to deprive Israel of strike effectiveness because their application (…) has one of its backups in that data center”
In another passage of the same conversation, the general proposes that Poland become saturated with American assets, which is supposedly to increase our security.
These two theses cancel each other out. If Iran acts rationally this way, then any rational adversary of the US — Russia first and foremost — will act the same way. That is, the saturation of Poland with American investments will make it a more, not less, attractive substitute target. The general himself provides us with the evidentiary case: if AWS in Bahrain becomes a target because an Israeli application’s backup sits there, then AWS near Warsaw will become a target because a backup of anything strategic for the US sits there.
I try to picture how this is supposed to work in our case. We have decentralized data centers of Microsoft, Amazon, and Google in Poland. The Russians are bombing our country. On CNBC, between sips of Coca-Cola, the burger-eater is shown a map: here and here lies Poland, these are our data centers, someone is sending missiles. I take it that this image is supposed to convince an American public dominated by America First to send marines? To deliver military technology? To go to war with a nuclear power over the availability of services in a data center that Amazon will replicate elsewhere within 48 hours?
I’m not buying it. I don’t buy snake oil, nor the promise that “everything will be fine.” So what is this really about? Let’s break it down to first principles.
The financial mechanics, or what writing off the loss looks like
The strategy of defending investments makes no sense at the purely financial level either. And here we deal with a mechanism worth unpacking, because it nicely shows who actually bears the costs.
Most American investments in Poland operate on attractive local terms: subsidies, tax breaks, grants from public funds, working capital loans leveraged through Polish banking branches. We finance their presence, offering “labor market revitalization” and “regional development” terms. The moment a data center is lost to arson, sabotage, or a missile strike, an accounting write-off occurs, a loss is recorded at the corporate level, and the data has long been redundantly replicated in other availability regions. Workloads shift in 48 hours.
The loss stays. In the region. With us. The American corporation completes an accounting cycle, we are left with rubble and unemployment. Oh, and with the dreams that the guy in the red cap was selling us.
This is not speculation. The mechanism of this effect is already observable today in the HoReCa industry, where threatened regions — eastern Poland, but not only — must be subsidized through travel funding programs to get anyone to come there at all. The mere perception of risk generates a cost borne by the Polish state, not the foreign investor.
This image, generated by AI and published by Trump and later picked up by the official White House X profile, is significant because it traditionally references conspiracy theories about papal plots functioning in the MAGA, Pentecostal, and Protestant milieu. Catholic right-wing MAGA enthusiasts got an ice-cold shower.
Eschatology as the structure of the promise
And here we arrive at the most interesting point. Because what the general offers is not a strategy. It is a political theology.
The structure of his argument is precisely eschatological. If you arrange yourselves properly with the hegemon, if you invite his altars (data centers, power plants, bases), if you properly perform the rituals (contracts for 43 billion dollars, concessions, regulatory facilitations), you shall be saved. On the day of judgment, when the Russian Federation comes, the hegemon will recognize you as his own and defend you.
This is magical thinking, not strategic thinking. It is precisely the same mental structure that made Poles in 1939 believe that “France and England are with us.” Interestingly, the general himself dismantles this illusion. Asked whether Americans will surely help us, he answers bluntly:
“no one knows that and that is not the essence of an alliance. Neither did we know it in ‘39 nor in many other areas”
He also adds soberingly about Article 5 of NATO:
“This does not mean that suddenly all members of the North Atlantic alliance will decide to send their soldiers to a country that has been attacked”
But the conclusion he draws is the opposite of the one that flows from his own example. Because if it didn’t work in 1939, and if Article 5 is not an automatic mechanism, why is it supposed to work today, in conditions where the hegemon publicly announces that he does not intend to defend us?
The eschatological answer goes: because this time we will offer a better deal. A bigger altar, more incense, a more attractive contract. More faith.
A colonial offer instead of sovereignty
I look at what is happening in parallel in other European countries. France is aggressively strengthening its own defense industry. Germany is rebuilding the Bundeswehr. The entire public sector in France is systematically dropping Microsoft in favor of Linux and sovereign cloud alternatives. These are actions with a common denominator: operational sovereignty as a response to the hegemon’s uncertainty.
Poland is being offered exactly the opposite. Not sovereignty, but deeper vassalization, wrapped in the language of economic development and security.
The general tries to sell this, among other things, through an analogy to Israel: a small state capable of “entangling” a great power in its own interests. He argues:
“assessing the effectiveness of policy dryly (…) it makes it so that a small state can in fact entangle the United States both in aid and in war”
This is precisely where he pins his hope of drawing the hegemon into Poland’s defense. Except that recent months have shown the exact opposite of the general’s thesis. It was not Israel that was drawn in by the US to defend its interests; it was Israel that, through its own diaspora in Congress, AIPAC, and decision-making structures in Washington, forced American involvement in a war with Iran. Based on fabricated and manipulated threats. Israel has nuclear weapons, the most advanced military technologies at the producer level (not the recipient level), and a world-class arms industry of its own. In that relationship, the US is a tool in Israel’s hand, not the other way around. Poland has none of these assets, not to mention the unity of nation and self-awareness, so the general’s analogy is simply structurally false. One cannot “become Israel” by accepting a few data centers and signing a tank contract.
One can, however, become a territory on which American corporations test how deeply the local market can be penetrated with minimal reciprocal commitment. That is the literal definition of 21st-century economic colonialism, with the difference that the metropolis now offers “defense” instead of “civilization” as the justification for control.
The recipients of the real message, or what the general is actually saying once we strip away the layer for the street
We arrive at the finale. It is worth asking whether, for an intelligent person who has the ability to falsify theses on the fly and to verify them against reality, these arguments are simply ridiculous. In my opinion, that is their function. The general is doing a survey of the operative myths, packaging an entirely different story in this eschatological narrative.
It would be unfair to leave this analysis at the level of mere rhetorical critique, because beneath the performative layer General Andrzejczak conveys several things that are serious and with which I largely agree. Their problem lies not in the content but in the packaging in which they were delivered. If we break this conversation down into floors of addressees — that is, if we identify the model readers (which is the second method of my analyses, alongside rhetoric) — it looks roughly like this:
- Message to the Polish political class: you have no strategy, the 2020 document does not answer the question “how does Poland intend to win against Russia,” and the internal document circulation does not respond, so I am using a public microphone because no other was left to me. The general formulates this charge plainly: “the President of the Republic has an old, no-longer-binding national security strategy from 2020” and asks the elites: “how do we want to win against this Russia?”.
- Message to the Ministry of Defense and the generalship: the passive-positional doctrine is archaic, “defense” as an operational category is lost by definition, we need a proactive doctrine, blockades of the Gulf of Finland, new operational configurations with Finland and Estonia. The general goes back in memory to his own command: “one word was forbidden in the battalion and it was the word ‘defense’” and calls for a “proactive posture” and “building a strategic dilemma”.
- Message to society: get used, slowly, to the thought that the Americans will not come, because “neither did we see it in 1939”. This sentence is, in Polish public discourse, essentially a crossing of a taboo threshold and constitutes the real value of this conversation.
- Message to Europe: there is room for a Northern Alliance, which the general sketches outright: “sketching the kind I’m calling on the fly the Northern Alliance (…) with Poland, the Baltic states, and Sweden, Finland (…) and Ukraine”. Poland is the natural regional hegemon in this configuration, so it is a very advantageous configuration for us, without Germany and France in leadership roles.
- Message to Russia: militarily we are ready, the problem is elsewhere, do not calculate that we are weak. The general demonstrates this with hard operational declarations: “they have shifted this dilemma of ours to closing the Gulf of Finland — and suddenly it turns out that Russia’s second-largest city, St. Petersburg, has no possibility of communication (…) From a military point of view (…) it is doable today, already today”. He throws in the Kaliningrad thread as well: “Kaliningrad has gas autonomy of about three or four weeks and then it’s simply over (…) blockading”. Every hour-and-a-half appearance by the former Chief of General Staff is analyzed in the GRU and SVR as a signal, and the general knows it.
If we strip away the platitudes for the street about Amazon data centers and the attractiveness of unattractive strategic location for a nuclear power plant in which US capital must be engaged, then five serious messages remain, each worth a separate conversation. The problem is that they have been served in one bowl with the eschatological promise of “entangling the US in our interests” — a promise that, as I have tried to show above, is intellectually indefensible and ethically constitutes a proposal of another form of vassalization.
The general probably assumes that different audiences will pick up different layers: foreign decision-makers and analysts will read the expert floor, the mass viewer of Wirtualna Polska will read the reassuring floor. Except that this maneuver has its cost, borne by the general himself. Because when serious strategic proposals are wrapped in a narrative about Amazon data centers as a protective shield, the whole thing starts to sound like bigos — a stew in which it’s hard to tell the meat from the cabbage. The reader who is able to break it down into components will see value in it. The reader who is not will remember only the promise of salvation through capital and may come to believe in it. The first is a communication success for the general; the second is a problem for the Polish state.
I recommend studying rhetoric and eristics. You don’t need to know geopolitics or the military — analysis of sentence structure and arguments is enough. Interesting things come out. The lack of this competence equals belief in snake oil. And on top of that, good old Umberto Eco with his concept of the model reader and interpretation works real wonders.
