Germany’s next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, set European pigeons flying in circles when he suggested last month that, given rising mistrust in President Donald Trump’s commitment to NATO, he wanted to talk to France and Britain about extending nuclear deterrence over Germany.

Warning that a "profound change of American geopolitics” had put Poland, as well as Ukraine, in an "objectively more difficult situation,” Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Poland suggested the same, while hinting that Poland, with its long history of Russian occupation, might eventually develop its own bomb.

Then Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, said this past week that it was time for the United States to consider redeploying some of its nuclear weapons from Western Europe to Poland. "I think it’s not only that the time has come, but that it would be safer if those weapons were already here,” Duda told the Financial Times.