President Biden Seems To Have It in for Hungary, and Budapest Is Getting Irked

What happens in small countries is often a reflection of trends and political vicissitudes in larger ones. Consider Moldova, whose decision to join the EU’s sanctions regime against Russia last November triggered Moscow to declare that the tiny country had fallen prey to “an anti-Russian campaign of the collective West.” Cue the by-now predictable Russian disinformation campaigns and shadows of hybrid warfare designed to pull Moldova away from the West and closer to Moscow’s orbit. Where the broad sweep of Transylvania ends there begins another country, known to Americans as Hungary.Hungary is already a member of the EU and the North Atlantic Treaty. Strange as it may seem, the signs that Biden administration officials are, for lack of a better word, pestering Budapest are getting impossible to ignore. Some of the White House’s antics fly in the face of standard diplomatic protocols between friendly nations.Europeans are starting to notice. It is hardly a secret, moreover, that President Trump and Hungary’s Eurosceptic prime minister, Viktor Orbán, are friends. Somewhat off the radar, though, Mr. Biden is prone to exhibiting some of his characteristic gruffness at Mr. Orbán.On the campaign trail this month Mr. Biden accused the head Hungarian of eschewing democracy and seeking a “dictatorship.” Hungary’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, was less than amused. He responded that Budapest “is not obliged to tolerate lies, even from the president of the United States.”Furthermore, our ambassador to Hungary, David Pressman, was summoned by Hungary’s foreign ministry for an explanation. Then a spokesman for our embassy at Budapest condescended, “Ambassador Pressman always welcomes the opportunity to discuss the state of Hungary’s democracy with our ally.”Mr. Pressman is the least loved American ambassador in Europe right now — and possibly the most tone-deaf since Joseph Kennedy represented America at the Court of St James’s. Flouting diplomatic norms, he has openly criticized the Hungarian Children Protection Act.That legislation was passed in 2021 and essentially banned gender reassignment surgery for minors under the age of 18. It did not, contrary to some misinterpretations, ban homosexuality. Mr. Pressman works for a Department of State that just proscribed flying rainbow flags next to Old Glory outside our embassies.Mr. Biden contends that the proscription — part of the spending bill he just signed — amounts to a “policy of targeting LGBTQI+ Americans.” So is it any wonder Mr. Pressman would take aim at Budapest’s move to protect traditional family values?With foreign policy things get trickier, but here again Mr. Biden’s envoy to the Danube is running roughshod over standard etiquette. This week the American embassy at Budapest took out a paid advertisement on Facebook with a video rebuking Hungary over its slow pace in weaning itself off of inexpensive Russian energy. This is more than just hypocritical. For one thing, as the Financial Times first reported, the Biden administration has asked Ukraine to stop attacking Russian oil refineries — not out of any specific fear of retaliation, but out of concern for the impact such attacks could have on pushing up global oil prices before a presidential election. It has apparently not dawned on the brilliant minds of Foggy Bottom that just as America has economic interests of its own, so, also, too do friendly countries like Hungary. Lecturing them on Facebook might strike some as an inapt innovation in diplomacy. Budapest is much closer to the tectonic plates of continental history than is Washington. It would be reductive and mistaken to conflate Mr. Orbán’s known animosity toward President Zelensky with appeasement. The Hungarians may be imperfect but they are also pragmatic. Sitting as they do in the middle of Europe, how could they survive otherwise? Some look at the economic thunderclouds gathering over fellow EU member Germany with an alarm that’s hard to fathom for Mr. Biden’s gloomy bureaucrats. The flip side of Berlin’s principled stance on Ukraine has been the collapse of one of its pillars of growth: cheap energy from Russia. So fast is Europe’s economic powerhouse deindustrializing that on a visit to a factory construction site in northern Germany this week Chancellor Scholz had to remind people that Germany still has some industry. High energy costs are taking a wrecking ball to chemical and heavy industries. The decline was long in the making, but sending billions of euros to Ukraine has accelerated it — and the standard of living is falling, too. Things that were supposed to keep German economic growth humming, like the Nord Stream pipeline, are out of commission and won’t be coming back any time soon. Supporters of President Biden’s foreign policy might argue that his administration’s quiet weaponization of a state-heavy industrial policy is serving geopolitical goals. After all, Russia did launch an illegal invasion of its neighbor, and sanctions have helped isolate Russia more than at any time since the Cold War. So getting Budapest to hew to the anti-Moscow line makes sense. Yet in 2024 the economy is global, and nothing is simple. When carried to extremes, pushing countries to pursue identical goals, whether commercial or cultural, risks cleaving a highly integrated world marketplace into separate economic blocs. Last year, Germany’s was the worst-performing of the major global economies. Hungary may be a bit player on many fronts, but Mr. Orban remains popular, and he has allies in center-right European politicians like Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and France’s Marine Le Pen. Mr. Biden is happy to lash out at Europe’s little guy, but he wouldn’t dream of barking at the French or the Italians — or would he? Mr. Orban, for one, is banking that he won’t have that chance. A tip of Saint Stephen’s crown to that.

President Biden Seems To Have It in for Hungary, and Budapest Is Getting Irked

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