Washington’s foreign development agency USAID has recently launched a new program in Central European countries to strengthen democratic institutions and bolster media plurality. According to The American Conservative, however, this is just another attempt to bring about color revolutions in the countries that are still reluctant to accept the liberal worldview, especially in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.
It’s not the first time USAID has come into the region, but the circumstances were quite different the last time it was active in Europe. After helping to oversee the democratic transition of former Warsaw Pact countries, USAID left Central Europe at the end of the 1990s, perhaps with a Fukuyaman confidence that the work was done and liberalism had prevailed. Nonetheless, the past decades saw the overwhelming and lasting success of national-conservative governments in the region, so naturally, Biden put Central Europe back on USAID’s map.
According to the press release published last December, USAID returns to Central Europe (in particular to the V4 countries, Bulgaria, Romania, and Slovenia) “with the goal of strengthening democratic institutions, civil society, and independent media” through—ironically enough—supporting “locally-driven initiatives.” For anyone even a bit familiar with the Democrats’ foreign policy newspeak, these terms are code for “do things the liberal globalist way,” the American Conservative writer believes.
USAID’s new mission was kicked off by a visit to Budapest by the head of the agency, Samantha Power, a figure well-known in U.S. foreign policy circles. Originally a war correspondent, Power served on Obama’s National Security Council and was later appointed as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Like many others, she fell out of grace after President Trump took over the Oval Office, but Biden gave her the executive leadership of USAID four years later. During her time in office, Power was known for her hawkish positions when it came to military interventions throughout the Middle East, and her name—along with Clinton’s and Obama’s—became semi-synonymous with democracy export.
As The American Conservative wrote, “It’s never a good thing when Samantha Power says she’s in town, and ready to help.”
“I think the word ‘democratic’ in Power’s formulation is a synonym for ‘anti-Orban’,” the writer says, after reminding readers that contrary to what Power makes it seem in her tweets, Hungary is a democratic country that’s led by a government that won re-election in a landslide “that was widely recognized as free and fair.” The problem of USAID—and by extension, of the Biden administration—is not that Hungary wasn’t democratic enough, but that it’s not liberal enough.
Hungary “does not support the United States-led strategy to prolong the Russia-Ukraine war; does not believe in globalist principles on open immigration; does not support same-sex marriage, and will not permit LGBT propaganda to presented to minors,” the article says. “Clearly it is ripe for a Color Revolution.”
Never mind the democratic will of Hungarians, who repeatedly voted—for Viktor Orbán—against these policies, or the fact that U.S. Democrats were caught red-handed trying to influence the outcome of last year’s parliamentary election in Hungary, with the illegal infusion of millions of dollars.
Sending in USAID and Samantha Power is just another step in hijacking Hungarian democracy under the guise of saving it.
To the Democrats in Washington, “the fact that Hungarian voters keep choosing, in free and fair elections, the candidate that Washington and Brussels dislike, means that democracy is deeply flawed in Hungary,” The American Conservative says.
Frank Füredi, the executive director of the Brussels-based political think tank MCC, also wrote a commentary in Spiked in which he described USAID’s new program as an attempt to export woke ideology and undermine the government’s authority. As Füredi wrote,
No doubt Central European nations need to have good relations with the U.S. But if they want to preserve their sovereignty and way of life, they must resist attempts by the Biden White House to impose its ideology on their societies.
The European Conservative contacted USAID for comments but received no response so far.
