Warsaw – New York, January 13th, 2018
To Polish American Leadership Summit Patrons, Attendees, Supporters, and Partners:
As organizing members of the Honorary Program Council and Co founders of RTMx (Round Table Mixer), we would like to extend our warmest invitation to the inaugural Polish American Leadership Summit in Miami, Florida.
In devising this event, we have aimed to deliver the first ever bilateral Polish and American business-centered conference that endeavors to strengthen the commercial and economic ties, as well as the security ties, of this important geopolitical and historical alliance.
It is well understood by students of history that the Polish and American alliance effectively dates to the American Revolution, and is thusly America’s first notable trans-national alliance. When Polish freedom fighters Tadeusz Kosciuszko and Casimir Pulaski joined the American revolutionary war effort and came to the aid of the fledgling democracy’s fight for self-determination, a relational mark had been set. This was the sort of existential battle that Poles had fought for, and would have to continue to fight for, throughout Polish history. Soon after shedding the yoke of imperial tyranny, the newly minted United States of America guaranteed natural rights, those rights ordained by God, not government, by codification in the first post-enlightenment constitution (1789). Poland adopted this framework merely two years later (1791) in the creation of its own constitution, which was the first in Europe to uphold these universal values.
This seminal alliance proved integral to both nations’ security and larger geopolitical stability many times over. In 1918, the American-devised “Fourteen Points” plan, as the adjudicating framework after the First World War, gave Poland its independence for the first time in the industrial age. Two years later, in 1920, American fighter pilots flew alongside their Polish counterparts in the Battle of Warsaw to beat back the Russian Bolshevik scourge hellbent on installing global communism against the will of free nations. During the Second World War, America fought, sacrificing much and suffering greatly, to liberate the European continent from the German Nazi designs on continental despotic hegemony. Over the entire length of the multi-generational Cold War, America consistently labored to set free those nations behind the Iron Curtain suffering under the jackboot of Soviet oppression with Poland serving as ground zero for the cultural information war strategy of promoting freedom and resistance via Radio Free Europe. And just recently, newly elected President Donald Trump’s first visit to a sovereign capital to meet with a national government was to Warsaw in July 2017 to stand in solidarity with a government elected on the same thematic platform as he was- that of nation state sovereignty preservation and conservative patriotic values. This historic visit reinforced the Polish and American commitment to bilateral relations around joint security issues but also focused on the deepening bilateral economic relations between Poland and the United States which is key to evolving this relationship in the 21st century.
In this inaugural Polish American Leadership Summit, we aim to serve this integral component of contemporary global diplomacy and societal advancement- that of interdependent free trade between allies. Since 1989, when Poland liberalized from a communist command economy to a market based one, the economic ties between the nations have continued to strengthen. But we believe that the surface has been barely scratched and the potential for commercial and intellectual transfer exists far more than what has heretofore been consummated- accruing to the material benefit of both economies and societies writ large.
It was not coincidental that President Trump’s Warsaw visit coincided with the opening of Europe’s newest large-scale LNG offloading depot in Swinoujscie. President Trump and his administration recognized what then-Minister of Development (and now Prime Minister) Mateusz Morawiecki believed in bringing this facility online- that energy policy, and the security which comes from raw energy source diversity, is an integral guarantor of safety and stability with direct security implications. In contemporary Europe, there exists a dominant continental supplier willing to use their capacity to trade energy as a political weapon in contravention of market based incentives with the clear goal of destabilizing their adversaries in order to gain an upper hand in revanchist military operations. This clear and present danger, ignored by the previous Polish and American governments, but now astutely appreciated by the Trump and Morawiecki administrations, is best countered by free and robust trade in the energy sector.
Poland, as a growing counterparty for the consumption of American goods and services, technology transfer, OEM industrial production, knowledge-based service sector employment, and education exchange, is also uniquely positioned to become the leader of the developing “Three Seas Initiative” regional trade and security bloc. This project enthusiastically ties together a dozen sovereign European Union member nations, between the Baltic, Black, and Adriatic Seas in Central/Eastern Europe. This multilateral arrangement aggregates 112 million Europeans of the fastest growing economies who worry about the undermining risk to their sovereignty from the politically centralizing and oftentimes coercive spheres of power that lay both to their East and to their West. Poland has asserted itself from inception as the political and economic anchor and driver of this project as the largest nation state by both economic output and population and the primary public stock exchange listing marketplace in the region.
Given these evolving dynamics, we believe this is the perfect moment to bring together Polish and American business interests from the energy, defense, technology, telecommunications, and consumer sectors, as well as economic thought leaders, defense and security strategists, investors with access to capital pools, and all those interested in the economic growth story of the “Polish Miracle” and the historic and ever-developing Polish-American alliance.
We hope you join us in Miami in February 2018, the 100th anniversary of Polish independence, to increasingly develop, for mutual benefit, the economic ties that can further secure our two nations’ prosperity and bind our two societies ever more tightly together- politically, economically, and in the perpetual shared desire for peaceful stability for the coming generations!
Michał Maciej Lisiecki & Matthew Tyrmand
RTMx Co-Founders & Honorary Program Committee Chair & Co-Chair Polish American Leadership Summit 2018