He helped defeat Soviet Communism, now Reagan's friends is taking aim at Wall Street.

Now, Wałęsa has announced that he will be joining the protests in New York city in person:

Solidarity hero Lech Walesa [sic] is flying to New York to show his support for the Occupy Wall Street protesters. “How could I not respond,” Walesa told a Polish newspaper Wednesday. “The thousands of people gathered near Wall Street are worried about the fate of their future, the fate of their country. This is something I understand.”

Wałęsa was instrumental in organizing the Solidarity union that helped mobilize to overthrow the Soviet Union’s control over Poland. In 1983 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. None other than President Ronald Reagan — no left-wing, anti-capitalist activist — responded by praising Wałęsa’s leadership, saying he was “one of the world’s greatest labor leaders”:

REAGAN: I’d like to take a moment this afternoon to send a moment of congratulation to one of the world’s greatest labor leaders, Lech Wałęsa. [...] This award demonstrates that the world will always remember and will honor the commitment to freedom and the committement to free trade unions that Lech Wałęsa and millions of brave Polish people share.

Watch Reagan’s remarks:

Wałęsa says he’s coming to help protest economic “unfairness.” “Union leaders and capitalists need to figure out what to do, because otherwise they will have to contend with a worldwide revolt against capitalism,” he warned.

Charles Lemos at MYDD has me reconsidering my position on the role of Poland’s odd political institutions in its disappearance as a state at the end of the 18th century. Lemos’ point is that while the fix may have been in for geographic and strategic reasons by the time of the Partitions of Poland, the Liberum Veto played a big role in Poland’s decline in the mid-17th Century, the series of events that set the stage for the later extinguishment of the state:

It is true that Poland’s geography, not just its location but the fact that the country is a flat hard to defend plain, made it ripe for invasion. Nonetheless, Poland had historically been able to fend off successive foreign invaders including the Mongols (three times), the Teutonic Knights, and the Russians without much difficulty before 1650. The country, however, had a harder time throwing off the Swedes. This was due to the introduction of the Liberum Veto in 1652 just three years before the start of the seven decade on and off war with Sweden. [...]

Based on the assumption that all members of the Polish nobility were absolutely equal politically, the Liberum Veto meant, in practice, that every bill introduced into the Sejm had to be passed unanimously. The political system found itself in a prolonged crisis that prevented Poland from developing a fiscal-military state, the model that allowed other European countries to wage war and defend themselves. The paralysis that enveloped the Polish state made it easy prey for rising powers who had developed centralized fiscal-militarty states to take advantage of Poland’s weakness.

Obviously, I’m not really well-versed in these events but that seems cogent enough to me. The story of Sweden’s 17th century moment in the sun as a great power is pretty interesting. I’ve read C.V. Wedgewood’s old book on The Thirty Years War but don’t know of much else on the subject that’s accessible.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has declared his country ready to take part in a revised US missile defence plan. Mr Tusk told visiting US Vice-President Joe Biden that Poland was “ready to participate”. [...]

After meeting the Polish prime minister Mr Biden said: “We appreciate Poland has stepped up and agreed to host an element of the previous missile defence plan, and we now appreciate that Poland’s government agrees with us that there is now a better way… with new technology and new information, to defend against emerging ballistic missile threats.”

That was sarcasm, of course. Contra neocon bleating on the subject, Poland’s participation in the Bush-era scheme was always unpopular in Poland and the Czech Republic so finding an alternate approach is fine with everyone.

Looking more broadly at the experience of the communist bloc under communism, over the period 1950-1988, no East European country grew as slowly as the UK, Mexico, Switzerland, Colombia, the US, Australia, India, New Zealand, Peru, Chile, Argentina or Venezuela.

People right sometimes about the poor policy choices that led to Argentina’s poor growth performance in the 20th century. But it’s hard to make the case that Argentina was following worse policies during this period than Poland. Also: “Between 1928 and 1937, at the same time as farms were brutally collectivized, famine killed as many as 10 million people in the Ukraine, and Stalin‘s great terror was unleashed, the Soviet Union was the fastest growing country in the world.”

NB: I am not advocating Stalin-style economic policies.

History’s impact can often be surprisingly long-lasting. It’s been a long time since taking midwestern agricultural products via train to Chicago and then by boat across the Great Lakes, across the Eerie Canal, down the Hudson, and to the port at New York was a major element in the American economy. But we still have two giant cities in Chicago and New York specifically because it used to be very important. I wouldn’t be surprised if the German-run bit of Poland was richer in 1918 than the rest of it, and that the differential has persisted since then. By the same token, we can expect the East Germany part of Germany to remain poorer than the West Germany part for a long time.

“This is an agreement that, of course, will establish a missile defense site here in Poland, a missile defense site that will help us to deal with the new threat to the 21st century of long-range missile threats from countries like Iran or from North Korea,” Rice said yesterday at the Polish presidential palace in Warsaw.

As Spencer Ackerman wisely points out the idea of a North Korean missile attacking Poland is laughable and of an Iranian missile doing so only very slightly less so. The countries that Poland worries about are Russia and Germany; the countries with substantial missile arsenals are the United States and Russia; the country that this would defend Poland against if it worked (which it doesn’t) is Russia.

Matt Welch has an excellent little reason article putting John McCain’s heated Georgia rhetoric in the context of McCain’s larger record of overreacting to every international event. He wasn’t just worried by North Korea’s nuclear program in 1994, he called it “the most dangerous and immediate expression” of “the greatest challenge to U.S. security and world stability today.” He didn’t just favor military action over Kosovo, he wanted “infantry and armored divisions for a possible ground war” thrown into the mix as part of “an immediate and manifold increase in the violence against Serbia proper and Serbian forces in Kosovo.” But he also thinks that Islamic radicalism is “the transcendent issue of our time” and also that the standoff with Russia is the first “serious crisis internationally” since the end of the Cold War, since Russia is aiming “to restore the old Russian Empire.”

In short, not only is Russia on the march beyond Tbilisi to Ukraine, Finland, and substantial swathes of Poland but that’s not even the transcendent issue of our time. And North Korea’s nuclear program is “the greatest challenge to U.S. security and world stability today” but that’s not the transcendent issue of our time. And Islamism is the transcendent issue of our time, but not a serious international crisis or an especially great challenge to U.S. security and world stability. Now of course there’s no way to make sense of that, because it’s not supposed to make any kind of sense. McCain just thinks that overreacting is the right reaction to everything. It’s a hysteria-based foreign policy.