Viktor Orban goes all in for China
Tom Rogan
Video Embed
He might be a darling of the Conservative Political Action Conference, but Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s true darling is Communist China.
Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has been keen to remind us of that truth during his visit to China this week. Offering Hungary’s support for the Huawei telecommunications firm/Chinese signal intelligence service, Szijjarto stated that “Huawei has a decisive role to play in [Hungary’s digitization].” The foreign minister also played to Beijing’s trope that legitimate concerns over Huawei’s products are simply the result of racism. As he put it, “No one should be excluded from the competition based on their country of origin.”
HOW THE SUPREME COURT COULD BE FORCED TO WADE INTO BIDEN DEBT CEILING FIGHT
This will surely be welcome news to Hungary’s NATO allies, who are somehow supposed to communicate securely with their Hungarian counterparts.
Szijjarto was just getting started. Explicitly distancing Hungary from the European Union’s rather tentative effort to “de-risk” its dealings with China in vulnerable sectors such as the tech field, Szijjarto explained that “we don’t see China as a risk, but as a country with which cooperation offers us immense opportunities.”
Read between the lines: the “immense opportunities” of communist gold.
As the South China Morning Post notes: “Hungary received US$7.6 billion in belt and road investment last year — more than any other country — despite a multiyear downward trend in Chinese investment in Europe.” The foreign minister secured an additional $3 billion of Chinese investment during this trip. Hungary is also playing a central role at an economic exposition in China this week. As Beijing’s Global Times propaganda newspaper noted on Tuesday, “Hungary is the only guest of honor country.”
It’s lucrative for Orban to be Xi Jinping’s European carpet. In return for obstructing EU security efforts focused on China, Orban gets showered with the Chinese leader’s corrupted beneficence.
Hungary, of course, has every right to pursue whatever foreign policy it wishes. The trouble here, at least from the perspective of the United States, is that Hungary is at least nominally a U.S. ally. But by essentially allying himself with Xi and enabling China’s security apparatus via firms such as Huawei, Orban is shredding Hungary’s alliance with the U.S. This is no peripheral concern. The U.S. military expects to be engaged in a war with China over Taiwan before this decade is out. Thousands of Americans are likely to die in any such war. That Orban is so energetically enabling the greatest adversary of his American ally thus tells us something.
Viktor Orban is no friend of the U.S.