The Trump administration will announce Thursday an agreement with the government of Poland to sell the Eastern European ally American-manufactured surface-to-air missile systems. The agreement comes seven years after the Obama administration removed a group of missile launchers from near the Russian border with Poland after Moscow objected to their placement.
According to Trump administration officials, the president and his Polish counterpart, Andrzej Duda, will announce the countries have signed a memorandum of understanding that will move forward with Poland’s acquisition of an unknown number of Patriot missile systems. The United States has sold the Patriot system to other American allies in the past, including Germany and Taiwan.
Polish state media first reported the agreement Wednesday.
On Thursday, Trump will hold a bilateral meeting with President Duda in Warsaw, where the American president will also deliver a speech touting Poland’s national identity and history of standing up for itself, say administration sources.
Trump will travel later on Thursday to Hamburg, the site of this weekend’s G20 economic summit, where on Friday he plans to hold a bilateral meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin. It will be the first meeting between these two leaders, and it’s likely among the issues Trump and Putin will discuss will be this missile-system deployment.
Putin’s anger with both the missile launchers in Poland and a planned American missile-defense radar system in neighboring Czech Republic prompted the Obama administration to pull back from these commitments, originally made during the George W. Bush administration.
Trump EPA Hits a Bump In the Courts Over Methane Emissions
A federal appeals court ruled on Monday that the Environmental Protection Agency cannot temporarily suspend Obama-era rules regulating methane emissions, complicating the Trump EPA’s project of unraveling restrictions they say hinder economic growth.
The regulations, which were written in May 2016 and scheduled to go into effect last month, require energy companies to monitor and reduce the amount of methane leaking from oil and gas wells.
The D.C. court ruled 2-1 that the EPA would be within its rights to rewrite the rules but not to suspend their implementation. The EPA had wanted to delay the rule for two years, arguing that the energy industry had not had sufficient time to comment.
Since his tenure began, EPA administrator Scott Pruitt has busied himself with a flurry of deregulation, rolling back climate change rules, plans to reduce water pollution, and a pesticide ban. Business advocates have praised the changes for reducing red tape and allowing them to self-police, while environmental activists have decried what they see as free rein to pollute.
“This is the first of what we hope will be many court setbacks for Scott Pruitt,” David Doniger of the Natural Resources Defense Council told the New York Times.
The EPA did not respond to a request to comment, but a spokeswoman said on Monday that the agency was reviewing the decision and weighing its options.
Trump and Sisi Talk About the Qatar Problem
President Trump discussed ongoing tensions among multiple Arab states Wednesday morning on phone call with Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
Trump expressed to Sisi his desire that the Arab states would both resolve their dispute with their neighbor Qatar and reaffirm their commitments “to stop terror financing and discredit extremist ideology,” according to a readout of the call.
Following Trump’s visit to the Middle East in May, the White House touted a joint memorandum condemning national terror financing cosigned by members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. Shortly after Trump’s return home, however, four states cut diplomatic ties with Qatar, accusing the small nation of sponsoring terrorist activity.
Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt released a list of 13 demands, including that Qatar shut down state-owned media corporation Al Jazeera, scale back cooperation with Iran, cut off contact with groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, and make reparations payments to its neighbors. Qatar has decried the list of demands as an “affront” whose terms are so unreasonable they seem “made to be rejected.”
The four nations announced on Wednesday that Qatar remained recalcitrant.
“The response the four states got was overall negative and lacked any content,” Egyptian foreign minister Sameh Shoukry said in a statement. “We find it did not provide a basis for Qatar to retreat from its policies.”
The White House’s rhetoric on the diplomatic rift has been unsteady. President Trump has repeatedly called for a resolution to the dispute while at the same taking credit for the embargo on Twitter and calling Qatar, a U.S. ally, a “funder of terror at a very high level.”
“During my recent trip to the Middle East I stated that there can no longer be funding of Radical Ideology,” the president tweeted on June 6, the day after the blockade went into place. “Leaders pointed to Qatar – look!”
