We aren’t sending our best, an American might conclude after surveying the current state of U.S. diplomacy. Though government officials abroad tend to inspire less scrutiny than those in Washington, it is a development that has become more apparent under the Biden administration.
Central Europe is a persistent flashpoint of this nakedly ideological foreign policy. Ambassadors Mark Brzezinski and Gautam Rana have lectured host-country residents, in Poland and Slovakia respectively, with the former openly allied with the newly elected government in Warsaw. The most egregious case is Hungary, where attorney David Pressman serves as the Biden administration’s representative. Pressman’s résumé is heavy on elite Democratic Party accolades but light on diplomatic or regional experience. The embassy has conducted diplomacy accordingly.
A recent Financial Times interview is emblematic of the Biden state department’s pervasive ‘Ugly American’ behavior. In it, Pressman threatened Hungary with the sort of rhetoric—“We absolutely have leverage … and we’re prepared to use our leverage”—one would expect to see deployed in dealings with Iran or North Korea, not a NATO ally. He gallingly objected to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s support of former President Trump in the same week Hungarian NGOs announced U.S. taxpayer funding for an assortment of anti-government Hungarian media outlets. The embassy reportedly selected the recipients. A recent visit from Pressman in Washington resulted in Sen. Ben Cardin (Democrat, Maryland) floating the prospect of visa complications and sanctions.
To the average observer, the most familiar outrage might have been Pressman’s assertion that Hungarian government policy concocts “imagined invaders.” May Hungary be the place this ubiquitous lie goes to die.
Even in the Hungarian context, it isn’t a novel rhetorical sleight. Atlantic columnist Anne Applebaum scorns Hungary’s “nonexistent Muslim migrants” in a recent book. “Immigration is an imaginary problem in Hungary, not a real one,” she asserts.
Hungarians are attuned enough to international developments to know that, once this problem is acknowledged, it’s too late. “For us migration is not a solution but a problem … not medicine but a poison,” Orbán once declared. “We don’t need it and won’t swallow it.”
Across the continent in once-traditional Ireland, the open-borders political consensus has been so strictly enforced that meaningful public discussion has just started after two transformative decades. While 66% of Irish believe the country has “accepted too many refugees” (the latter term itself being controversial), no party likely to enter parliament will entertain that notion. In Germany, responsible for at least some of the continent’s migratory fate, politicians and other societal figures seek to ban the surging Alternative für Deutschland party—thereby leaving no political force that would meaningfully address migration. In notoriously insular Japan, the migrant population has expanded to over three million (2.4% of the population). Warabi, north of Tokyo, has gained the moniker Warabistan, due to its Kurdish population.
Undoubtedly the most relevant cautionary tale is Hungary’s longtime ally Poland, which witnessed large-scale immigration under the outgoing national-populist Law & Justice (PiS) government. While PiS publicly condemned illegal migration and rejected EU migrant-redistribution schemes, it oversaw record arrivals of non-European migrants, in addition to a generally uncontroversial influx of Ukrainians and Belarusians. This poorly kept secret became a campaign issue when a cash-for-visa scam surfaced in Africa and Asia. One former Polish foreign-ministry official attempted suicide as a result, and the opposition battered PiS for its duplicity. The country’s Social Insurance Institution reported tens of thousands of new foreign claimants in 2023, with frequent source countries including India, Turkey, the Philippines, and Uzbekistan.
Tomasz Grzegorz Grosse, a political science professor at Warsaw University, noted that migrant absorption is “against the will of the voters.” Nonetheless, Poland might be joining its EU peers in having an unrepresentative government on this issue. As the new government under longtime EU bureaucrat Donald Tusk takes aim at Polish religious and cultural foundations, it need no longer fear a losing political stance on migration when it battles PiS. Indeed, just days after the power transition in December, Marshal of the Sejm (akin to Speaker of the House) Szymon Hołownia posed for a photo with a group of illegal migrants and NGO activists in the national parliament. Not long ago, Poles heard how immigration was an “imaginary problem.”
Seeing its friends and neighbors unravel, Hungarians are loath to accept the “imagined invaders” narrative. They might be uniquely suited to this steadfastness. The Hungarian experience is one of survival, as Hungarians have been surrounded by unrelated peoples for centuries. If they have any living relatives, a continent likely separates them. The language has preserved Asiatic naming conventions (Orbán Viktor or Soros György) and sports places names like Hódmezővásárhely. This people has outlasted the rule of the Ottoman and Habsburg, German and Soviet.
Furthermore, the “imagined” framing is objectively false. In 2015, waves of primarily fighting-age males descended, uninvited, on Hungary from all corners. In 2022, a different—and uncontroversial—kind of influx resulted from the war in neighboring Ukraine (the author’s experiences recounted here). In both cases, society experienced profound effects.
The migration issue is also a microcosm of the governing Fidesz party’s political dominance. Like other controversial globalist causes, it is deeply unpopular among Hungarians. Orbán fans and skeptics vote accordingly. Furthermore, the opposition has embraced a vicious cycle. It relies increasingly on the patronage of foreign entities like the U.S. foreign-policy establishment and the EU political apparatus; but this fuels the perception that it demotes Hungarian interests. Thus, the de facto spokesman for European border integrity conducts a fifth term in government, and fourth consecutive.
Nor is Hungary likely to submit to foreign pressure. The country’s two most acutely felt events of the last century—its dismemberment in the Treaty of Trianon after World War I and its anti-communist uprising in 1956—were ultimately moments of Western powers’ neglect. Superpower ambassadors thus do not enjoy the deference they might take for granted in other countries.
The world should understand Hungary as the anomaly it has always been, an island of endurance, rather than a blueprint. Much of Europe has crossed the migration Rubicon, and European civilization as we recognize it faces a murky future, irrespective of the policies pursued in Budapest.
Yet, let us resolve this on behalf of the spirited Magyars: if Hungary follows its neighbors into the globalist abyss, it ought not to be the work of American government.
Bury the Lie That Migrants Aren’t Coming
Photo by Rasande Tyskar / Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED
We aren’t sending our best, an American might conclude after surveying the current state of U.S. diplomacy. Though government officials abroad tend to inspire less scrutiny than those in Washington, it is a development that has become more apparent under the Biden administration.
Central Europe is a persistent flashpoint of this nakedly ideological foreign policy. Ambassadors Mark Brzezinski and Gautam Rana have lectured host-country residents, in Poland and Slovakia respectively, with the former openly allied with the newly elected government in Warsaw. The most egregious case is Hungary, where attorney David Pressman serves as the Biden administration’s representative. Pressman’s résumé is heavy on elite Democratic Party accolades but light on diplomatic or regional experience. The embassy has conducted diplomacy accordingly.
A recent Financial Times interview is emblematic of the Biden state department’s pervasive ‘Ugly American’ behavior. In it, Pressman threatened Hungary with the sort of rhetoric—“We absolutely have leverage … and we’re prepared to use our leverage”—one would expect to see deployed in dealings with Iran or North Korea, not a NATO ally. He gallingly objected to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s support of former President Trump in the same week Hungarian NGOs announced U.S. taxpayer funding for an assortment of anti-government Hungarian media outlets. The embassy reportedly selected the recipients. A recent visit from Pressman in Washington resulted in Sen. Ben Cardin (Democrat, Maryland) floating the prospect of visa complications and sanctions.
To the average observer, the most familiar outrage might have been Pressman’s assertion that Hungarian government policy concocts “imagined invaders.” May Hungary be the place this ubiquitous lie goes to die.
Even in the Hungarian context, it isn’t a novel rhetorical sleight. Atlantic columnist Anne Applebaum scorns Hungary’s “nonexistent Muslim migrants” in a recent book. “Immigration is an imaginary problem in Hungary, not a real one,” she asserts.
Hungarians are attuned enough to international developments to know that, once this problem is acknowledged, it’s too late. “For us migration is not a solution but a problem … not medicine but a poison,” Orbán once declared. “We don’t need it and won’t swallow it.”
Across the continent in once-traditional Ireland, the open-borders political consensus has been so strictly enforced that meaningful public discussion has just started after two transformative decades. While 66% of Irish believe the country has “accepted too many refugees” (the latter term itself being controversial), no party likely to enter parliament will entertain that notion. In Germany, responsible for at least some of the continent’s migratory fate, politicians and other societal figures seek to ban the surging Alternative für Deutschland party—thereby leaving no political force that would meaningfully address migration. In notoriously insular Japan, the migrant population has expanded to over three million (2.4% of the population). Warabi, north of Tokyo, has gained the moniker Warabistan, due to its Kurdish population.
Undoubtedly the most relevant cautionary tale is Hungary’s longtime ally Poland, which witnessed large-scale immigration under the outgoing national-populist Law & Justice (PiS) government. While PiS publicly condemned illegal migration and rejected EU migrant-redistribution schemes, it oversaw record arrivals of non-European migrants, in addition to a generally uncontroversial influx of Ukrainians and Belarusians. This poorly kept secret became a campaign issue when a cash-for-visa scam surfaced in Africa and Asia. One former Polish foreign-ministry official attempted suicide as a result, and the opposition battered PiS for its duplicity. The country’s Social Insurance Institution reported tens of thousands of new foreign claimants in 2023, with frequent source countries including India, Turkey, the Philippines, and Uzbekistan.
Tomasz Grzegorz Grosse, a political science professor at Warsaw University, noted that migrant absorption is “against the will of the voters.” Nonetheless, Poland might be joining its EU peers in having an unrepresentative government on this issue. As the new government under longtime EU bureaucrat Donald Tusk takes aim at Polish religious and cultural foundations, it need no longer fear a losing political stance on migration when it battles PiS. Indeed, just days after the power transition in December, Marshal of the Sejm (akin to Speaker of the House) Szymon Hołownia posed for a photo with a group of illegal migrants and NGO activists in the national parliament. Not long ago, Poles heard how immigration was an “imaginary problem.”
Seeing its friends and neighbors unravel, Hungarians are loath to accept the “imagined invaders” narrative. They might be uniquely suited to this steadfastness. The Hungarian experience is one of survival, as Hungarians have been surrounded by unrelated peoples for centuries. If they have any living relatives, a continent likely separates them. The language has preserved Asiatic naming conventions (Orbán Viktor or Soros György) and sports places names like Hódmezővásárhely. This people has outlasted the rule of the Ottoman and Habsburg, German and Soviet.
Furthermore, the “imagined” framing is objectively false. In 2015, waves of primarily fighting-age males descended, uninvited, on Hungary from all corners. In 2022, a different—and uncontroversial—kind of influx resulted from the war in neighboring Ukraine (the author’s experiences recounted here). In both cases, society experienced profound effects.
The migration issue is also a microcosm of the governing Fidesz party’s political dominance. Like other controversial globalist causes, it is deeply unpopular among Hungarians. Orbán fans and skeptics vote accordingly. Furthermore, the opposition has embraced a vicious cycle. It relies increasingly on the patronage of foreign entities like the U.S. foreign-policy establishment and the EU political apparatus; but this fuels the perception that it demotes Hungarian interests. Thus, the de facto spokesman for European border integrity conducts a fifth term in government, and fourth consecutive.
Nor is Hungary likely to submit to foreign pressure. The country’s two most acutely felt events of the last century—its dismemberment in the Treaty of Trianon after World War I and its anti-communist uprising in 1956—were ultimately moments of Western powers’ neglect. Superpower ambassadors thus do not enjoy the deference they might take for granted in other countries.
The world should understand Hungary as the anomaly it has always been, an island of endurance, rather than a blueprint. Much of Europe has crossed the migration Rubicon, and European civilization as we recognize it faces a murky future, irrespective of the policies pursued in Budapest.
Yet, let us resolve this on behalf of the spirited Magyars: if Hungary follows its neighbors into the globalist abyss, it ought not to be the work of American government.
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