No one could wish for kinder or more constant friends than those Viktor Orban has in America. It isn’t just the soft interviews he gets from them, though Tucker Carlson gave the Hungarian premier one of particular tenderness on Fox News once. It isn’t just the speaking offers from the Conservative Political Action Conference – a sort of counter-Davos – or even the praise from JD Vance.
No, the real mark of comradeship is that US populists do all this for Orbán even as he defies them on the largest topic in the world. For them, the rise of China is a historic menace to be resisted at all turns. For him? Well, let us go through some events in 2024 alone. He has hosted and visited Xi Jinping. China has upgraded its relations with Budapest to an “all-weather” partnership. Orbán has hailed China as a pole in a “multipolar” (that is, non-US-led) world. All of this goes on in plain sight, as does vast Chinese inward investment, and still the Carlson-Vance wing of US conservatism shows him an almost canine faithfulness.
Don’t count on there being a clever ruse at work here. The Republican right is a confused mess on foreign affairs, that’s all. Two of its strongest instincts – an aversion to China and a taste for strongmen, several of whom are pro-China – stand in hopeless conflict. Orbán isn’t even the most glaring case in point. That, since the invasion of Ukraine, has been Vladimir Putin. In 2021, it was just about possible, at an extreme stretch, to be neutral or even obliging towards Russia while confronting China. But in the era of “no-limits” partnership between the two states? When the one reinforces the other diplomatically and materially? The Republican line isn’t tenable. To oppose China necessitates a certain firmness on Russia.
So what are US populists thinking? How might we square their venom for one autocracy with their indulgence of its chief partner? Well, if the aim were to woo Russia from China over time – in a repeat of the Sino-Soviet split, but with Moscow rather than Beijing as the focus of US overtures – that would be rational at least. But there is no sign of that at all. The view of the CPAC-attending classes is that Russia is, at worst, an exaggerated threat, and at best, a fortress of Christian certainties against the tide of liberal relativism. Either way, the idea of some Nixonian scheme to decouple the Eurasian giants doesn’t come into it. Given the extent of Putin’s avowed commitment to China, how could it?
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And so we are left with the simplest, most bathetic conclusion. I don’t think Vance and his ilk are even aware of the contradiction in their worldview. They haven’t thought about it enough.
The hardest thing to convey about modern politics to intelligent readers, who tend to assume that ideas drive events, is the tribal shallowness of it. People take a certain position because the opposing side doesn’t. Once the defence of Ukraine became a liberal consensus, then the right was going to tilt the other way. This was not at all ordained by conservative dogma. (Remember, at the start, top Republicans outflanked Joe Biden in wanting sanctions on Russia an invasion.)
News reaches me here in the foothills of middle age that “edgelord” is the online slang for someone who seeks to shock and offend the liberal herd. Well, there is an edgelord spirit even at the highest reaches of Republicanism. One result is a dog’s breakfast of a foreign policy. It goes like this. China is an unprecedented threat to US interests, values and amour propre. But Russia, its main enabler? Relieve pressure on it by stinting Ukraine. Orbán, its bridge to Europe? A victim of liberal slander.
I wish I were traducing a more nuanced position. But the line of, say, senator Josh Hawley is literally that resources spent on Ukraine against Russia are resources denied to Taiwan against China. (As though the materiel for a land war in Europe would serve in East Asian waters.)
This is the geopolitics of the abacus. What might a craftier Republican say? That nothing has done more for the American cause against China than backing Ukraine. The US has shown all nations that hedge between the superpowers that it can tie down one of the world’s largest armed powers, on a distant continent, for an indefinite period, with donations from the Pentagon. There hasn’t been a more effortless show of strength since the first Gulf War. After the Afghanistan debacle, the advantages of being in the US orbit weren’t clear. That has changed. What a thing for American nationalists to oppose.
– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024