News that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin will be meeting soon in Budapest for a summit on ending the Russia-Ukraine war is a diplomatic triumph for Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán.
Orbán is perhaps the only world leader who has the trust of both the U.S. and Russian presidents. He is certainly the only European leader who has pushed for peace from the beginning of the 2022 war, and the only one who has been consistently correct about Ukraine’s hopeless prospects for victory against the Russian war machine.
It’s not because Orbán (or any Hungarian) has a special love for Russia. It is difficult in Budapest to find anybody who has erased the memory of 1956, and forty years of Soviet captivity imposed on their country. Rather, it’s because Orbán is a geopolitical realist who has not been misled by the sentimental triumphalism of the Western ruling class.
Similarly, though Donald Trump’s stance towards Russia vis-à-vis Ukraine has been erratic of late, it is impossible to imagine a President Kamala Harris coming to Budapest to talk peace and an end to the war. Harris, like most of official Washington, remains in thrall to an outdated neoliberal view of the world, in which the West retains the right to dictate terms to everyone else, and has the power to make it happen.
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