Managing multiple foreign policy agendas for any state executive is an unimaginably weighty task. Navigating U.S. security and economic interests abroad while convincing domestic constituencies is arguably one of the toughest. President Joe Biden’s has adopted a ‘democracy-forward’ posture of loudly reminiscent President Georgie W. Bush’s prominence of a values-based approach in America’s foreign policy. To date: the Biden government has talked the talk, but not walking it. U.S. stated commitments to democracy abroad remain unclear; the Western Balkans are but one example.
And Hungary? The 2023 round of Biden’s “democracy summits” worldwide left Budapest again without an invitation. It is one thing for POTUS to not invite, say, Turkey’s Erdogan; an EU Member State is quite another. Questionable is whether Washington would have signed up with Brussels had not the Commission frozen EU funds otherwise marked for Budapest’s coffers.
As touched on in our last issue, the Orbán government sees its route to U.S. administration acquiescence - if not approval - running through the GOP. So does the current Democratic administration’s rejection amount to any genuine concern amongst Fidesz leadership? It is hard to see how. To date, Biden’s Washington hasn’t offered any real incentives best we can tell. Rather, Biden and company continue to operate not unlike President Bill Clinton – pray that the Europeans can ‘handle it’ until they can’t. (See Ukraine 2022-2023 and the former Yugoslavia’s dissolution in the 1990s). Without clear, White House-guaranteed incentives for Orbán in exchange for redirecting his eastward orientations to the West, publicly isolating Hungary from a larger community of global democracies is good optics yet of little consequence.
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