On May 29, the lower house of Poland’s parliament voted 428-3 to honor the 250th anniversary of American independence. Nobody voted against. Watching from the gallery was Tom Rose, the U.S. ambassador who had spent the previous four months in an open, personal feud with the marshal who announced the result.
Rules of professional diplomacy say that a combination is impossible. An envoy who attacks the speaker of a host parliament in public is understood to have forfeited the relationship. Rose attacked him twice, in writing, by name, and the relationship did not move an inch.
The claim here is not that the feuding produced the vote, as it obviously did not. The claim is narrower and harder to argue with: Warsaw’s key assumptions, about what an ambassador must never do, turn out to be wrong.
Rose did not come up through the foreign service. He ran The Jerusalem Post for eight years, cohosted a talk radio show with Gary Bauer, and served as chief strategist and senior adviser to Vice President Mike Pence. He is an Orthodox Jew and an unembarrassed Zionist, and he treats neither as a private matter to be filed away on arrival. It is the equipment he works with. He presented his credentials to President Karol Nawrocki on Nov. 6.
He represents his president, not the building
On Feb. 5, after Sejm Speaker Włodzimierz Czarzasty said President Donald Trump “does not deserve the Nobel Peace Prize,” Rose announced the embassy would have “no further dealings, contacts, or communications” with him over “outrageous and unprovoked insults directed against President Trump.” Prime Minister Donald Tusk answered within hours: “Mr. Ambassador Rose, allies should respect, not lecture, each other.”
Rose did not retreat. When Czarzasty told the Financial Times in April that Trump “is becoming a leader of chaos” whose conduct is “absolutely irrational,” the ambassador posted: “This man is a menace. The aim of his inflammatory rhetoric disparaging @POTUS can only be to damage U.S.-Poland ties, and weaken his own country. Perhaps as a notorious far-left, ex-communist apparatchik, we shouldn’t be surprised.”
Then, on May 29, he wrote to Czarzasty to thank him for the resolution. The boycott was over a man’s conduct toward the American president, not over the office or the institution, and Rose dropped it the moment the institution did something worth thanking. That distinction is the entire craft, and it is the part Washington keeps getting wrong in the other direction: lecturing the country while flattering whoever currently runs it.
He walks into the fights the job says to avoid
The most controversial thing that Rose has done is his handling of Holocaust memory, and it cuts both ways. In November, he told a Warsaw conference of Jewish lawyers that the charge of Polish complicity is “a grotesque falsehood and the equivalent of a blood libel” against the Polish nation. In July, on the 85th anniversary of the Jedwabne pogrom, he said hundreds of Polish Jews there were “murdered by their fellow Poles” — a statement that Polish nationalist activists were protesting against before the anniversary — while calling the massacre “the exception, not the rule in occupied Poland.”
Menachem Rosensaft, who teaches law at Cornell and Columbia and whose parents were deported to Auschwitz, has now twice accused him of distortion, writing that “the Poles who killed Jews at Jedwabne did so because they wanted to do so and because they could.” Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski thanked Rose for the same Jedwabne message. That argument will not be settled in an American opinion column. The point here is that Rose walked into it rather than around it.
He also tells Americans something most of them will not believe. Poland, he said in that same November speech, “is the safest country in Europe for a Jew to walk the streets.” An Orthodox Jew took the Warsaw posting and made it his business to correct the American picture of Poland as a reservoir of inherited antisemitism.
His hosts tested that claim in April. Konrad Berkowicz of the right-wing Confederation party carried an Israeli flag to the Sejm rostrum with the Star of David replaced by a swastika, calling Israel “the new Third Reich.” Rose, at the March of the Living in Oświęcim that day, wrote: “SHAME SHAME SHAME on YOU!! Maybe even you have noticed that we Jews aren’t so easy to push around anymore, are we?” He does not flatter his hosts, and he does not soften the picture when it embarrasses his own argument.
The relationship did not break
Poland’s 2026 budget puts defense spending at roughly 4.8% of GDP, up from 4.5% the year before, and SIPRI records Poland as the largest importer of major arms among European NATO members from 2021 to 2025. None of that began with Rose; most of it began with Russian tanks in 2022. But none of it wobbled during his feud either. In Łódź in March, at a signing tied to Apache servicing capability in Poland, he put it plainly: “Poland today is the new great power of Europe. And it is the model Europe must follow.”
The clearest measure came in April, when Belarus freed Andrzej Poczobut, a Gazeta Wyborcza reporter and a leader of the country’s ethnic Polish minority, after 1,860 days in a penal colony. Trump’s special envoy for Belarus helped broker the exchange; Rose had no part in it. But Radosław Sikorski, foreign minister in the government whose parliamentary speaker Rose had written off two months earlier, said the release “would not have been possible without President Donald Trump and his decisions.” The feud was real, but it reached nothing that mattered.
Washington should read Warsaw as a test
For a decade, the American message in this region was the one Vice President JD Vance repudiated at Munich in February 2025: that the danger to these societies was primarily internal, and that Washington’s job was to grade them on it. Ambassadors arrived with portfolios on judicial reform and media pluralism and spoke the vocabulary of Brussels while presenting them. In Warsaw and Budapest, it taught voters that the American embassy was one more office of the European managerial class, with a bigger flag.
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Rose inverted the assignment. He defends his host nation’s honor abroad, his president’s honor at home, and declines to arbitrate anything in between. Tusk’s rebuke identified the real risk in that: an ambassador who publicly grades members of a host parliament stands very close to a line, and a sovereign government is entitled to say so. It is a fair objection about conduct. It is not evidence that the conduct costs anything.
Washington can staff its embassies with people who represent the building that sends the dispatch, or with people who represent the president who sends them. The profession insists the second kind loses allies. Warsaw has been running that experiment since November, and the vote was 428-3.
Miłosz Manasterski is a Warsaw-based journalist, CEO of the Polish news agency Agencja Informacyjna and a regular commentator on Telewizja Republika. From 2018 to 2023 he was a political commentator for Polish Television and Polish Radio. He is a recipient of the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta.