By John Czop
Polish American Congress National Vice President for Public Relations Małgorzata Margo Schulz and this writer participated in the 2022 Chancellor’s Council Meeting and Gala in Washington, DC on September 27- through September 29, 2022. This $1,000 event, which took place at The Ritz-Carleton Hotel in Pentagon City, Marlatt Mansion on the IWP Campus, and The Victims of Communism Memorial Museum, at 900 15th Street, NW, is IWP’s annual fund raiser. More members of the PAC should participate in next year’s Chancellor’s Council events which amplify the PAC’s mission that a strong Poland helps to protect United States national security interests in Eastern Europe and promotes the American values of free enterprise and democratic government in that strategic part of the world.
Professor John Lenczowski, an expert on the world communist movement, the former Soviet Union and today’s Russian Federation, who served with distinction on President Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council, established IWP in 1990. He did so because he saw a need for a graduate school of international affairs and national security studies based on the values of America’s Founding Fathers. He did so at this moment when Marxism, with its tendentious interpretation of American history as the story of oppression of workers and minorities, had become the hegemonic ideology of the history and political science departments at top universities throughout the United States. After learning a slanted and negative version of American history, and especially our country’s foreign policies, the graduates of these universities go on to staff positions in our State Department, Defense Department, and intelligence services.This is not right. By contrast, thanks to Professor Lenczowski’s insistence that America’s engagement in world politics must be based on steadfast adherence to the moral principles of our Western tradition, and NOT on Marxian critiques of that tradition, IWP’s graduates serve in government with a commitment to uphold American and Western values
In 2008, Lady Blanka Rosentiel, founder of the American Institute of Polish Culture, based in Miami, Florida, challenged Polish Americans to match her institute’s one million dollars grant to establish the Kosciuszko Chair in Polish Studies at IWP. Today, the Kosciuszko Chair is still not fully funded. The first incumbent and present holder of the Kosciuszko Chair at IWP is Professor Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, whose many books, especially his Intermarium: The Land between the Black and Baltic Seas, published in 2012, and of high contemporary relevance, shows that Poland and America are partners in freedom. Moreover, Professor Chodakiewicz puts forward the truth about Poland and the Poles during World War II, and he is a member of the PAC Washington, DC Metro Division.
Recently, Professor Lenczowski retired as President of IWP, and the interim president is Ambassador Aldona Wos, M.D., who served as United States Ambassador to Estonia. This highly accomplished medical practitioner, with a distinguished career in public service, was born in Poland and her parents fought in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Ambassador Wos also serves on the Board of Trustees of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. The Honorable Dan Lipinski and Professor Chodakiewicz serve on the Advisory Council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. This Foundation’s Victim’s of Communism Museum features numerous panels which describe the struggle of Poland and the Poles against communism. The panel on the Battle of Warsaw, August 15, 1920, Assumption Day, is especially well done and shows how Polish soldiers, many of them barefoot, defeated the Red Army and saved Europe from communism for a generation.
The speakers at the Chancellor’s Council Meeting on September 28 included IWP Professor Rebeccah Heinrichs, who also is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute. The title of her lecture, The U.S. Nuclear Deterrent and the Military Buildup of our Adversaries, called attention to the lack of medium nuclear weapons in America’s nuclear arsenal. Readers recall that Mr. Ian Brzezinski made this very point in his speech to the PAC Council of National Directors Meeting, which was held in Washington, DC, in September 2017. An effective deterrent requires heavy, meduim, and light nuclear weapons and it is distressing that since 2017 there has been little progress to achieve this goal.
This writer asked Professor Heinrichs if she views as a failure of collective security the refusal of the United States and the United Kingdom to live up to their commitments under the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 to defend Ukraine after that country complied and surrendered her nuclear arsenal to the Russian Federation. Professor Heinrichs replied that the Budapest Memorandum did not have the status of a treaty ratified by the United States Senate. Other participants then commented on whether or not collective security is broken. This is why competing views on how to fix collective security is a key topic in world politics.
Mr. John Russo, IWP graduate and former official in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, gave a first-rate presentation on how little is being done to counter Chinese Espionage here in America.
Ambassador G. Philip Hughes gave a speech in which he characterized almost all high level foreign policymakers in the Biden Administration as second stringers.
Professor Lenczowski and Ambassador Wos described their plans for the future of IWP. Their goal is to raise funds in order to increase in the size of the student body. Approximately 95% of IWP graduates find jobs in their field of specialization, most often in government and especially with the intelligence services, one year after graduation. This is an outstanding record of achievement. Polish Americans are leading IWP and the Polish American community must support this educational institution that shows that America and Poland are partners in freedom.
