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
-
The Sound of Munich: Autonomy, Anxiety, and the Twilight of Transatlantic Order
Commentary
This article was originally published in War on the Rocks. Munich was warmer than Washington this weekend, both in weather and in sentiment. Neither development was widely fo...
By Richard Fontaine
-
Commentary
Transatlantic Security / Middle East Security
Migration Can Provide the Manpower for European DefenseThis article was originally published in Foreign Policy. Europe faces parallel challenges that policymakers have yet to connect: a pressing military recruitment shortage and a...
By Adham Sahloul
-
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
