Once again belying his carefully cultivated status as a conservative friend of America, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban threw another wrench into U.S. foreign policy on Tuesday.
Unsatisfied with turning Hungary into the Chinese Communist Party’s primary European outpost, Orban apparently now intends to cripple Ukrainian and European security amid the approaching winter.
As a result of high demand and politically motivated Russian supply restrictions, gas prices across Europe are soaring hundreds of percentage points higher than this time last year. This is causing massive harm to European households and businesses — which is the exact point. The price war underlines Russian President Vladimir Putin’s effort to force the European Union into suspending its support for Ukraine’s resistance against him and abandoning the Western sanctions imposed since the war began in February.
If highly belated (see Angela Merkel), top European leaders are, at least for the moment, standing firm against Putin’s energy war. They recognize that Moscow’s attempt to eliminate Ukraine as a sovereign state and turn its people into serfs is utterly incompatible with the foundation of post-1945 European stability and prosperity: namely, the right of peoples to live free and at peace. Ukraine’s increasingly effective resistance to Russia has consolidated European attitudes. But as bitterly cold winter temperatures approach, Putin intends to use the cold to cultivate European political currents in his warmer favor. A new Italian government skeptical of EU sanctions is highly likely to take office following elections on Sept. 25. But whatever happens in Rome, Putin has his buddy Viktor to rely upon.
Evincing as much, a Hungarian government minister optimistically claimed on Tuesday that winter temperatures would cause the EU to reconsider its Russia sanctions. Tamas Menczer added that “if Brussels and the European Union change their sanctions policy, the energy shortage and high prices could be stopped soon.”
Ukraine and Western security are irrelevant, it seems. Note, here, that Menczer is not discussing the idea of an EU price cap on Russian gas imports. That idea is legitimately controversial. Instead, Orban’s man is talking about the EU’s sanctions policy at large. His rhetoric reflects Orban’s belief that Ukraine and Western security can go to hell as long as Hungary gets cheap gas and Putin is kept happy. If such a deal with the devil rewards Putin’s war of aggression, sees Ukrainians sacrificed, and encourages Chinese leader Xi Jinping to believe that Western security architecture is in name only? Well, so be it.
Orban may be a friend of the Conservative Political Action Conference. But a friend of America’s closest non-freeloading British, Polish, and Eastern European allies, he is not. Comrade Viktor stands with communist China and imperial Russia.
