Poland has long been vital for Britain’s security
From our UK edition
Starter for ten: why did Britain declare war on Nazi Germany 87 years ago this month? If you answered 'to defend Poland as a result of a British-Polish alliance', you’d be partly right. I’ll get to that in a minute, but first let’s think about the roots of that decision. After all, what a remarkably strange decision it was to ally with Poland. Britain had neither diplomatic ties nor longstanding friendship nor geographic closeness to the country, nor much appetite for acquiring any closeness to it. This wasn’t Belgium. For the most part, Poland was seen (as it still is too much today) as a new and brittle country on the map, then perilously perched between Germany and Russia, two far greater powers.
