From Biała Podlaska to Fort Trump. More than 20 years of Polish efforts to host a US base

Donald Trump has announced that major progress has been made towards establishing a US Army base in Poland, with the location to be revealed soon. For Warsaw it is a moment that successive governments have worked towards for more than two decades. The story does not begin in 2018 with the famous Fort Trump. The first serious talks on American bases on Polish territory were held as early as 2003, when the sites under consideration included Biała Podlaska, Powidz, Mińsk Mazowiecki and Świętoszów. Today the question is no longer whether Poland wants a permanent American presence. The question is where its next permanent element will be built and how it will change the security architecture of NATO's eastern flank, and of the Baltic in particular.

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17 september 2026   |   21:05   |   Source: Gazeta Morska   |   Prepared by: Kamil Kusier   |   Print

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Major progress, but not yet a decision

On 17 September 2026 Donald Trump published a post on Truth Social that closed a chapter of a long story. He wrote that thanks to the bold leadership of his friend, President Karol Nawrocki, major progress was being made towards establishing a United States Army base in Poland. He added that if the project went ahead, the location would be announced very soon, and described the creation of the base as a historic step for the American-Polish alliance.

It is a very important statement, but one that needs careful reading. Donald Trump gave no location and no details on the size of the base, the number of troops or the type of units that would be stationed there. He also used the phrase "if this happens". It is therefore not an announcement of the opening of a finished installation, but of progress in a process whose details are yet to be presented. At the same time the declaration carries particular political weight: in 2018 Donald Trump spoke of considering a Polish proposal for a permanent presence, and eight years later he himself is announcing progress towards a base. The Polish President's Office was in contact with the White House before the post was published, as Marcin Przydacz, head of the President's International Policy Bureau, confirmed. But the history of the matter is far older.

It all began not in 2018 but in 2003

In Polish memory the start of efforts to secure a permanent American base is 2018 and the phrase Fort Trump. That is a shorthand. As early as the beginning of 2003, Washington was debating a redeployment of American forces in Europe. After the Cold War the United States was analysing how to restructure its bases, scale back some of the large garrisons in Western Europe and create a more mobile military system. In February 2003 Duncan Hunter, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, argued for moving part of the American military infrastructure from Germany to the post-communist states, and in March General James L. Jones, commander of US forces in Europe, said that the first bases could be moved to Central Europe, including Poland, as early as 2004, and reported consultations with allies.

In Poland the subject was already very concrete. In February and March 2003 the weekly Wprost reported confidential Polish-American talks on the possibility of American bases in Poland, naming Biała Podlaska, Mińsk Mazowiecki, Powidz and Świętoszów. The defence minister of the day, Jerzy Szmajdziński, declared support for the bases, and the subject was to be raised during President Aleksander Kwaśniewski's visit to the United States and Prime Minister Leszek Miller's meeting with George W. Bush. In April 2004 Secretary of State Colin Powell, asked by Polish television about the talks on moving some American bases to Poland, confirmed that the administration was reviewing the structure of US bases worldwide and holding talks with allies, but that no decision on a specific base in Poland had yet been taken. Poland was therefore talking to the United States about American bases more than 20 years ago.

Biała Podlaska was to be a Polish Ramstein

The most interesting element of the story is Biała Podlaska. In 2003 a concept emerged to use the former military airfield there as the main logistics base for American forces in Poland. Wprost wrote of Biała Podlaska as a potential Polish Ramstein, pointing to its road and rail links and existing aviation infrastructure. Powidz, Mińsk Mazowiecki and sites in Lower Silesia were also considered. In the end no such base was built.

That is precisely why today's statement by Donald Trump should be read against a backdrop of more than two decades. The history of Polish efforts is not one failed attempt that ended in 2018, but a sequence of stages in which both the international situation and the form of the American presence in Poland kept changing.

2004: Poles already knew it was about security and the economy

The question of American bases was already being polled. In January 2004 the CBOS institute ran a representative survey on the possibility of American bases in Poland: 38 per cent of respondents supported them, 36 per cent were against and the rest had no opinion. The benefits cited included greater security, protection of the borders, economic development of the regions concerned and the inflow of money connected with the bases. The subject was therefore no abstract expert debate; even then it was considered in its military, strategic and economic dimensions at once.

NATO, Iraq and a changing Europe

Why, then, was no base built at the time? There were many reasons. After the attacks of 11 September 2001 the United States was rethinking how it deployed its forces around the world, the war in Iraq was under way, Washington's relations with Berlin were shifting, and the Pentagon was asking whether it needed large traditional garrisons in Europe at all. The idea of an American presence in Poland in 2003 therefore had a different character from the later Fort Trump: it was not yet about a permanent installation as a symbol of eastern flank security, but about restructuring the American basing system and creating a more mobile infrastructure able to respond faster in different parts of the world.

Poland, however, was growing in importance. In 1999 it joined NATO, in 2003 it became one of the United States' most important European allies in the war on terror, and after 2004, as a member of the European Union, its geopolitical weight grew further.

2008: Patriot and permanent infrastructure

The next stage came in 2008, when Poland and the United States signed a declaration on strategic cooperation and an agreement on the deployment of a Patriot battery in Poland. It was not yet a permanent US Army base, but another step towards American military infrastructure in Poland. From that moment the military relationship began to encompass not only exercises and political cooperation but concrete installations, equipment, logistics and the presence of American troops.

2014 changed the security calculus

The turning point was Russia's aggression against Ukraine. The annexation of Crimea and the conflict in the Donbas fundamentally changed how security in Central and Eastern Europe was perceived. On NATO's eastern flank the question stopped being whether to strengthen the Alliance's presence and became how to do it as quickly as possible. Poland became one of the main countries pressing for a larger American presence. In 2017 an enhanced rotational presence of US forces began, but Warsaw wanted more: a presence that did not depend solely on successive decisions to rotate units.

2018: Fort Trump

Then came Donald Trump. During a meeting at the White House on 18 September 2018 Andrzej Duda said he would very much like permanent American bases to be set up in Poland, which he would call Fort Trump. He argued that a permanent presence of American troops was in the interest of both countries and pointed to Poland's strategic location. The idea was far more ambitious than the earlier talks on single installations: Poland declared its readiness to spend heavily on infrastructure, and in Washington the subject reached the political agenda. Mariusz Błaszczak, defence minister at the time, later said that his talks in Washington with the administration, the Pentagon and Congress had put the question of a permanent base on the highest political level.

No single large base named Fort Trump was created, however. Instead, successive elements of the American presence were developed.

Instead of one base, a network of presence

In the following years Poland and the United States concluded further agreements, including the Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement of 2020. Infrastructure was expanded, troop numbers grew, logistics and command cooperation developed, and above all elements emerged that made the American presence in Poland more than rotational. In 2022, after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the United States decided on the permanent presence in Poland of elements of the US Army's V Corps, and in March 2023 US Army Garrison Poland was established in Poznań, described by the Polish defence ministry as the first permanent garrison of American forces in Poland. In institutional terms, part of what Poland had sought for years had already happened. Today's matter concerns the next level.

2026: Poland makes a formal proposal

In the spring of 2026 the matter entered a new phase, and a tense one. After signals that part of the American force in Poland might be reduced, Donald Trump reversed course within days and announced the dispatch of 5,000 additional troops to Poland. The government decided not to wait for that pledge to materialise. On 29 May Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz submitted to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth a formal proposal to establish a new permanent base for American forces, and on 16 June the Council of Ministers adopted a resolution on measures to create it, authorising the defence minister to negotiate with the American side and coordinate the preparation of infrastructure and logistical support. Prime Minister Donald Tusk said at the time that Poland had to prepare the logistical, financial, organisational and housing conditions, because the base was not only a chance to radically improve security but also a major effort.

The resolution itself, submitted by the defence minister, is a document that opens a process rather than a decision on a site. According to the Prime Minister's Office it allows preliminary work to begin: consultations and arrangements with the American side and the preparation of proposals on the base's location, the necessary infrastructure, the cost of the undertaking and its sources of funding. The government justifies it by arguing that a permanent base would be not only a confirmation of defence relations within NATO but a real, long-term reinforcement of security and deterrence on the Alliance's eastern flank, and that it would strengthen cooperation with Poland's most important partner in the region, increase the interoperability of the two armed forces and shorten response times in a crisis. The text of the resolution has not been published; only its assumptions are known.

Two days later, on 18 June, at the meeting of NATO defence ministers in Brussels, Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz read out part of the Pentagon's official reply and announced that the United States viewed the Polish proposal positively. He stressed that a permanent American presence was a goal pursued by previous governments, that any location was a good one, that the American side would decide the scale of its involvement, and that establishing the base would be a multi-year process and a multi-billion investment co-financed by both countries. That reference to previous governments is key to understanding the whole story: today's declaration is not the success of one cabinet or the result of one visit, but the outcome of a policy pursued by successive Polish governments, however much they differed in how they pursued it.

Karol Nawrocki: a permanent presence is our path

Karol Nawrocki, who visited the United States in June at Donald Trump's invitation, spoke just as firmly about a permanent presence. After the defence ministry received Pete Hegseth's letter, the president said that Poland's path was now a permanent presence of American troops, as the Secretary of War had confirmed in his official letter to Deputy Prime Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz. Karol Nawrocki also said that at the political level, between the presidents of Poland and the United States, the direction of an enlarged and permanent presence had been confirmed, and that the two defence ministries should now fill it with detail. Today Donald Trump speaks of major progress. It is the next step.

Why this base matters so much for the Baltic

Here begins the part of the story of particular importance to northern Poland. On the map, Poland is not merely a country between Germany, Belarus, Ukraine and the Czech Republic. It is one of the principal security states of the Baltic. To the north lies Russia's Kaliningrad exclave, to the east Belarus, to the north-east Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and beyond them the Baltic, crossed by trade and energy routes and home to ports, subsea cables, power interconnectors and the installations of a growing offshore wind sector. In that configuration Polish territory is one of the key rear areas for the defence of the eastern flank, and the significance of the American presence goes far beyond troop numbers.

From Pomerania's perspective the Kaliningrad exclave matters most: a Russian territory on the Baltic, separated from the rest of the Federation and wedged between Poland and Lithuania. In the event of conflict its position matters for the entire security arrangement of north-eastern Europe. Every permanent change to military infrastructure in Poland must therefore also be analysed in the Baltic context, and an American base would not be a purely Polish-American undertaking but an element of NATO's architecture.

Redzikowo, another piece of the puzzle

Pomerania cannot be left out of this picture. At Redzikowo the American Aegis Ashore base operates as part of NATO's ballistic missile defence. It is an installation of an entirely different nature from the US Army base Donald Trump is talking about, but from the region's security standpoint it adds another element of American military presence in northern Poland. If a new permanent base is created, Poland will have an increasingly developed structure of American presence covering missile defence, command, logistics, ground forces, aviation and the infrastructure to receive further forces.

A base is also the region's economy

A permanent base also means an economy. The story of Biała Podlaska in 2003 shows that even then local governments looked at an American presence not only through the lens of security but of jobs, infrastructure investment, inflows to the local economy and the growth of services. Today the scale of the potential investment would be quite different. Building a large military installation means demand for infrastructure, transport, logistics, services, technical support and the broadly understood security sector. For the region in which the base is located it would therefore be not only a strategic decision but an economic one.

Will it be Fort Trump?

Not necessarily. The name Fort Trump was a political label for the concept Andrzej Duda presented in 2018. Today's project may have a different structure: a large base, the expansion of existing infrastructure, primarily a logistics and command hub, or a link to existing American installations. At this stage the details are unknown, which is exactly why the announcement of the location promised by Donald Trump will be the most important piece of news.

From Biała Podlaska to 2026

The story has a remarkable continuity. In 2003 Poland talked to the United States about the deployment of American bases, with Biała Podlaska, Powidz, Mińsk Mazowiecki and Świętoszów on the table. In 2008 it concluded agreements including the Patriot battery. After 2014 the American presence on the eastern flank began to grow rapidly, and in 2017 larger rotational contingents arrived. In 2018 Andrzej Duda presented Donald Trump with the Fort Trump concept, in 2020 the Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement was signed, in 2022 the decision was taken on the permanent presence of V Corps elements, and in 2023 the first permanent US Army garrison in Poland was established in Poznań. In May and June 2026 the Polish government formally began work on another permanent base, Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz reported the positive position of the American side, Karol Nawrocki spoke of a permanent presence as the direction of further cooperation, and on 17 September Donald Trump announced major progress and promised to reveal the location soon.

More than two decades

That is why today's event should not be described as a sudden decision taken over a few months. It is the next stage in a history of more than twenty years of Polish efforts to anchor the American military presence permanently in Poland. In 2003 the talk was of Biała Podlaska, Powidz and Świętoszów, in 2018 of Fort Trump, in 2023 of the first permanent garrison in Poznań, and in 2026 Donald Trump speaks of major progress towards another base. The names, the concepts, the governments in Warsaw and the administrations in Washington changed, as did the security situation in Europe. One thing remained constant: Poland strove to make the American military presence on its territory ever more permanent.

Today we may be closer to realising that idea than at any time since it was first seriously discussed. We do not yet know where the base will be, how many troops will be stationed there or what its character will be. We do know that after more than two decades a subject that in 2003 was the stuff of confidential talks about possibly moving American bases from Western Europe to Poland is once again at the highest level of relations between Warsaw and Washington. This time Donald Trump speaks of a historic step. And for Poland, for NATO's eastern flank and especially for the security of the Baltic, the next chapter of this story may prove one of the most important.

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