April 04, 2017
Hungary’s Challenge to Trump
A shoe has dropped in Europe. A small shoe, but one with a loud bang on a marble floor. The government of pro-Russian populist Viktor Orban in Hungary has introduced legislation that threatens to end the academic freedom of Central European University in Budapest, a private American-Hungarian graduate institution founded in 1991 by the Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros. The University’s president, Michael Ignatieff, and his network of allies at Oxford and elsewhere in the liberal humanist elite world, will present this potentially tragic affair as a threat to the Western ideal itself. And they are not exaggerating. I would go further, though. Orban’s attempt to place his neo-authoritarian paws on the school is, in a larger sense, a geopolitical event.
Yes, Orban has been expanding government control for years already in many directions: in the media, in the courts, and so forth. But there is a new geopolitical context afoot. The United States has elected a President, Donald Trump, with an avowed transactional approach to Russian relations, shorn of the historical and moral obligations that America has traditionally felt towards Europe since World War II. Trump’s right-hand man in the White House, Steve Bannon, has even championed the cause of anti-European populists in Western Europe of the Orban-Putin mold. Elements of the new Administration are assumed to have had untoward and perhaps compromising ties with the Kremlin. Moreover, Trump’s Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, has no experience in public policy whatsoever and his only moral obligations in the past have been to shareholders at Exxon. Orban knows all this. He knows, too, that Soros, a philanthropist to Democratic Party causes with few equals, is no friend of Trump, to put it mildly. In sum, this is a power grab that Orban must think he can easily get away with.
Read the full article at The American Interest.
More from CNAS
-
Can Europe (Ever) Defend Itself?
Podcast
Today’s Brussels Sprouts discussion follows on from our conversation last week on whether middle powers have the ability to chart a course more independent of the United State...
By Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Jim Townsend & Franz-Stefan Gady
-
There’s a Way Forward for Sovereign European Space Intel, but Is There the Will?
Commentary
This article was originally published in Space News. Germany’s top intelligence officials made waves last year by calling for the creation of a European spy network to lessen ...
By Cameron Olbert
-
Video
Indo-Pacific Security / Transatlantic Security
Top Experts Decode India-U.S. Trade Deal | Questions Loom Over Russian Oil Imports, $500Bn InvestmentIn this episode of India Ascends, amid US President Donald Trump's claim that India has agreed to halt purchases of Russian oil, New Delhi has reiterated that ensuring energy ...
By Daniel Silverberg
-
Commentary
Transatlantic Security / Energy, Economics & Security
Want to Stop Trump Bullying Your Country? RetaliateThis article was originally published in The Guardian. In February of last year, Donald Trump convened the first full cabinet meeting of his second term in the White House. He...
By Edward Fishman
