Not that anybody asked him, but Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell upchucked some stern words about Hungary this week. The owlish Republican delivered nasty remarks accusing U.S. conservatives who favor Hungary of falling for Viktor Orbán’s ‘cult of personality.’
McConnell groused that Orbán ‘doesn’t just admire’ Russian president Vladimir Putin, but also ‘runs interference for Moscow, gumming up European and transatlantic efforts to combat Russia’s unlawful aggression at every turn.’
The veteran GOP leader also complained about China’s investment in Hungary and slammed the democratic NATO ally as an autocracy.
We’ve heard it all before. But what prompted McConnell’s outburst now? What prompted the latest installment of U.S. Ambassador David Pressman’s ongoing campaign against Hungary? Earlier this month, Pressman went farther than he ever has, saying in a speech that it is time for the West to have a ‘reckoning’ with Hungary. Why the intensified pressure from U.S. elites?
There is a big reason, and a small reason.
The small reason is Viktor Orbán’s close relationship with Donald Trump. The ‘forever war’ party in Washington—that is, hawkish Republicans and Democrats who want to continue funding Ukraine’s resistance to Russia —is afraid that a Trump victory will lead to a peace settlement. The Forever Warriors are trying to convince American voters that Trump is on the side of Russia appeasers and enemies of democracy, like Viktor Orbán. By attacking Hungary and its leader, the Washington establishment is hoping to harm Trump with voters.
By now weary Hungarians know from experience that Washington and Brussels define ‘democracy’ as marching obediently in step with policies dictated from on high. It’s an outrage to this crowd when the Hungarian prime minister ‘interferes’ with the U.S. presidential election by endorsing Trump and visiting him at Mar-a-Lago. But when Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky recently gave a joint speech with Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, thus inserting himself into the American presidential race—hey presto, democracy!
It is a terrible, terrible thing that China has invested so much money in Hungary, according to Sen. McConnell. It is true that Hungary accounts for 44 per cent of all Chinese direct investments in Europe. But the size of the investment relationship between China and other Western countries (U.S., Germany, etc.) dwarfs Hungary’s. Indeed, the investment relationships between a number of American elites and China—Sen. McConnell and his wife Elaine Chao have grown very rich from their own —makes the Hungary-hating Republican sound like a hypocrite.
The big reason for these attacks is that Ukraine is losing this war, indeed has likely lost it, and Washington is looking for a scapegoat for its colossal strategic failure. Viktor Orbán, who was right about this war from the beginning, is that scapegoat. If Harris wins in November, we can expect a narrative coming out of Washington saying that Ukraine and its allies would have prevailed if it had not been for Hungary stabbing Ukraine in the back. This absurd lie will be repeated again and again, until it becomes received as true by Americans.
‘Washington is looking for a scapegoat for its colossal strategic failure ’
Indeed, at the Danube Institute geopolitics conference earlier in September, John Fund, one of the top conservative political journalists in the U.S., bluntly warned that a Harris victory would mean that Washington would seek to make Hungary pay a terrible price for being a bone in Washington’s throat over Ukraine. We are now seeing that the DC elites are not going to wait for the November vote to start moving against Budapest.
Meanwhile, Francis Fukuyama, one of the most influential U.S. foreign policy intellectuals, gave a revealing interview recently to a Ukrainian broadcaster. In it, Fukuyama’s Ukrainian interviewer challenges his guest’s optimism about the American people’s support for Ukraine. Fukuyama denied this, saying it’s only an ‘extreme right wing’ and ‘fanatical followers’ of Donald Trump who oppose continuing U.S. support for the war. Fukuyama says, with evident satisfaction, that ordinary Americans have no idea about battle details, such as whether or not the U.S. should give Ukraine permission to send missiles deep into Russian territory.
It’s true, but it is shocking to see a man of Fukuyama’s stature attempting to reassure the Ukrainian journalist that he can count on the American people supporting the war because they don’t understand the risks of continuing it. But this week, Russian president Putin updated his country’s nuclear doctrine to say that a conventional attack on Russia by a nation supported by a nuclear power will be seen as an attack by that nuclear power as well.
In other words, if Ukraine sends missiles deep into Russia, Russia will consider this to have been an American act of war.
How many ordinary Americans understand the insane risks their government is running for the sake of Ukraine’s victory? It is perfectly understandable that Americans want to see Ukrainians beat back the Russians. But at what cost? The risk of nuclear war? Russia has the same interest in preventing Ukraine from going to NATO as Washington did in 1962, keeping Soviet missiles out of Cuba. You don’t have to like Russia, or support Russia’s invasion, to recognize that from a realist foreign policy perspective, Ukraine means far more to Russia than to the West, for obvious reasons.
Come on, relax, says Prof. Fukuyama: Americans are sheep who don’t know what’s really going on.
Well, Viktor Orbán knows what’s really going on, and he is not silent about it. This is why Washington is so eager to punish him and his country. Balázs Orbán, the prime minister’s political director, faces criticism now for remarks critical of Ukraine resistance to the Russians. The prime minister distanced himself from Balazs Orbán’s words, calling them ‘ambiguous’ and ‘a mistake.’ That ought to be the end of the matter. It won’t be. Look for this minor gaffe to be repeated and magnified by Péter Magyar and other Washington-backed figures. The anti-Hungary campaign is just launching.
If it strikes you as strange that Washington would be so eager to punish a NATO ally, well, war makes for unusual alliances. For most of this century, Dick Cheney, the ultra-hawkish vice president under George W. Bush, has been despised by liberals for his warmongering ways. Now, though, Cheney has endorsed Kamala Harris because she will continue pouring money into the Ukraine war effort.
No figure from the Bush administration was more hated by liberals than Dick Cheney, the Darth Vader of the neocons, but now that he is on Team D, Cheney has been rehabilitated as a respected statesman and champion of democracy. This is the kind of hypocrisy we are dealing with, all to sustain a failing war effort. The smears against Hungary in the U.S. media will be ramping up, especially tying a toxic Viktor Orbán to Donald Trump. For example, a top professor recently wrote in the Philadelphia daily paper that there is no opposition media in Hungary This, said the author, is why Americans should worry about Trump’s closeness to Orbán.
Who is going to tell Americans otherwise? Like Frank Fukuyama said about missile strikes inside Russia, ordinary Americans have no idea what’s really going on. Public opinion is therefore easier for Ukraine hawks in Washington and in the media to manipulate on behalf of the war. I have been in the U.S. for the past week and have found anti-war conservatives to be deeply frustrated over how difficult it is to challenge Washington’s Ukraine policy among their friends. Anybody who does, they tell me, is immediately suspected of being a Putin sympathizer.
What Washington and its allies in the media are doing to Hungary, they are also doing to Americans who want peace. Elon Musk’s X is one of the few places Americans can find criticism of NATO’s war policy. If Kamala Harris wins, look for Washington and Brussels to move hard against Musk, under the guise of protecting people from ‘disinformation’—while at the same time denouncing Viktor Orbán for his media policies.
We are all living in the fog of war, but sooner or later, somebody stumbling around in the confusion is going to follow idealist leaders of the Our Democracy cult off a cliff—and take entire nations with them. The reckoning Washington wants to have with Hungary is really going to be a long-overdue reckoning with the failures of its own governing elites. By then, though, it might be too late to avoid catastrophe.
