Just hours before President Xi Jinping’s arrival in Prague on Monday for the first state visit by China’s head of state to the Czech Republic, his host, President Miloš Zeman, gave a curious interview to Beijing’s state broadcaster, CCTV. He called the impending visit “a restart” for Czech-Chinese relations, marking a break with a period when Czech governments were “very submissive to the pressure from the United States and from the European Union.”
When he is in Washington this week, the social democratic Prime Minister of the Czech Republic, Bohuslav Sobotka, will be downplaying Mr. Zeman’s quite unambiguous snarl at the closest allies of the Czech Republic. Under the Czech constitutional system, after all, the president plays a ceremonial role and his foreign policy views are largely irrelevant.
Nonetheless, President Zeman has an unfortunate habit of attracting attention – and always for the wrong reasons. Contrary to his own government’s and the EU’s policies, the Czech president has come out in support of Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea and called for the end of the EU-imposed sanctions against Russian regime. In March, he even hosted the editor of Aeronet.cz, a website notorious for disseminating Russian propaganda and conspiracy theories, at a state banquet at the Prague Castle.
No matter how much firefighting Mr. Sobotka does, the bitter effects of his president’s foolishness will linger. But the dissonance between the Czech leaders is just a small morsel of a much bigger problem shared by post-communist countries, most acutely Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic.
Poland, for instance, has been long thought of as one of America’s most dependable allies. Notwithstanding its frequent criticisms of the West, the government of the Law and Justice Party (PiS) keeps reiterating its commitment to Poland’s transatlantic ties. Yet, one of the first steps it took was a review of the decision made by its predecessor in April 2015, to purchase a US-made Raytheon Patriot missile and air defense system, worth some $5 billion.
In December, the PiS government also raised eyebrows by a night raid of offices of the NATO-affiliated Counter Intelligence Center of Excellence in Warsaw, run jointly by Polish and Slovak intelligence staff. Its head, Krzysztof Dusza has been portrayed in the pro-PiS press as a spy working either for Russia or the United States, or possibly both. Incidentally, Lech Wałęsa, the former president and founder of the Solidarity movement, was accused of having worked for the communist secret police just days after he spoke critically of the PiS government.
Polish diplomats and PiS-friendly media dismiss any criticism as a smear campaign orchestrated by the international left. That strains credulity, given that the events in Poland seem to be a part of a broader trend observed in Visegrad.
Hungary and Slovakia, too, are trying to reconcile a nominally pro-Western outlook with domestic rhetoric and actual policies that distance themselves from their allies. Both Viktor Orbán and Robert Fico have been critical of the EU’s sanctions on Russia, lambasted their Western European partners for an accommodative policy towards Syrian asylum seekers, and stressed the primacy of immediate economic interests (say, in Chinese or Russian investment) over geopolitical loyalties to the United States and Western Europe.
Some of it – such as the anti-refugee rhetoric that dominated Slovakia’s election campaign – is just theater played for a domestic audience. But there are also public procurement contracts, such as the €12-billion Paks nuclear deal, awarded by the Hungarian government to Rosatom, Russia’s state-owned nuclear monopoly. Chinese companies, too, are looking for opportunities in Central Europe. CEFC Energy China, a large energy company, and several infrastructure firms from China, are already consolidating their presence in the region.
In normal times, there would be nothing objectionable about Visegrad’s closer economic links with China – or with Russia for that matter. However, vigilance is in order given the nature of both regimes and the proximity of their business interests to the public sectors and government-awarded contracts. The ongoing strengthening of economic ties, furthermore, coincides with an embrace of crude foreign policy realism by some Central European leaders, which raises questions about their geopolitical allegiances.
In some ways, it is difficult to blame Central Europeans for trying to have it both ways. Alliances are delicate, and require constant care and attention. During President Obama’s two terms in the White House, Central Europe has been low on his list of priorities. Instead of providing an impetus for a common European foreign a security policy, the lack of American leadership has created a vacuum that Russia and China are now eager to fill.
Mr. Zeman’s rhetoric, the succession of worrisome news from Poland, and Messrs. Fico’s and Orbán’s defense of the Kremlin are signs of the same problem: a gradual erosion of an international order built painstakingly by generations of Mr. Obama’s predecessors. There is still time to repair it, but it will require a determination, intellect, and strategy that go way beyond what we have seen so far on the campaign trail.
Dalibor Rohac is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He tweets @daliborrohac.
