Polish Lessons.

• Author: Kimmage, Michael C.
• Position: Jozef Pilsudski: Founding Father of Modern Poland

Joshua D. Zimmerman, Jozef Pilsudski: Founding Father of Modern Poland (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). 640 pp., $39.95.

Eastern Europe occupies an increasingly prominent place in American foreign policy. The United States is a treaty ally of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania. Through NATO, it has an Article 5 commitment to defend these countries if they are attacked. Having kept Ukraine at arm's length on NATO accession since 2014, when Russia started its war against Ukraine, Washington has become the biggest supplier of military aid to Kyiv. U.S. intelligence helped Ukraine to survive the first few weeks of Russia's February 2022 invasion, just as it has materially helped Ukraine to fight the war. The United States is more active in Eastern Europe than France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, Europe's major military powers. If Russia loses, the United States will be the region's dominant power. It will have the most allies, the most diplomatic say, the most on-the-ground clout.

American influence in Eastern Europe is not without precedent. Woodrow Wilson bestowed the phrase "ethnic selfdetermination" on the peoples of Eastern Europe. He did so just as four massive empires--Russian, German, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian--collapsed and the hope for a new mode of Eastern European nationhood emerged. (Today the central train station in Prague is named after Woodrow Wilson, in honor of his contributions to the Czech nation.) Then came a long hiatus. Washington did nothing in 1939, when Adolf Hitler initiated World War II by attacking Poland. Nor could President Harry Truman do much more than watch as a victorious Soviet Union subjugated one ethnically self-determined state after another in Eastern Europe. In the 1980s, the United States took its revenge on Joseph Stalin, exploiting nationalism and anti-communism in Poland and elsewhere to bedevil the Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev never found a way to manage these complications.

In 2022, the degree of U.S. engagement in Eastern Europe was unwilled by Washington. When Ukraine endured the first round of Russia's war in 2014 and 2015, the United States had the goal of "Europeanizing" the conflict. Hence the diplomacy meant to terminate the war--it would come to be known as "Minsk" after the Belorussian capital city in which it was negotiated--was led by France and Germany. Their job was to help Ukraine negotiate with Russia. Forget Dayton, Ohio. Forget a sleepless Richard Holbrooke corralling the leaders of the Balkans and restoring Europe to peace. "Minsk" was to signify the hour of Europe in Europe; but this hoped-for hour of Europe never came. "Minsk" failed.

War returned in 2022 and with it the United States.

Given the enormous military and financial outlay the United States is making in Ukraine, the importance of U.S. actions to the war in Ukraine, and the large impact the United States will have on whatever postwar settlement comes into being, both policymakers and U.S. citizens should be thinking carefully about the history of Eastern Europe. This history is not well known in the United States, where Europe often means Western Europe and where the reservoir of historical references and analogies is tacitly Western European: Versailles as in the 1919 treaty of Versailles; Munich as in the appeasement of Hitler in the late 1930s; the Marshall Plan as in the assistance the United States gave to Western European nations after World War II; and NATO itself, which extends across Europe in 2022, but as its very name indicates was originally rooted in the "North Atlantic," in Europe's West. At the same time that policy questions related to Ukraine are being debated, so too should the historical questions related to Eastern Europe be reviewed.

Joshua D. Zimmerman's Jozef Pilsudski: Founding Father of Modern Poland is a well-timed book. Zimmerman holds the Eli and Diana Zborowksi Chair in Holocaust Studies and Eastern European Jewish Studies at Yeshiva University. Pilsudski, who died in 1935, has no...