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Samantha Power, a key member of what John Mearsheimer terms the "liberal interventionist wing" of the US foreign policy establishment, was appointed as head of USAID a few years ago. I was under the impression that USAID was supposed to be helping poor people in disaster zones grappling with famines etc, but perhaps I've been underappreciate of the radically new direction the agency is taking.
She is now in Budapest handing over tens of millions of dollars to "locally-driven" initiatives and "independent media". Perhaps I am far too cynical but this smells like a barely-concealed operation designed to groom a future leadership class to oppose Orban and what he stands for.
While Orban probably knows what's going on, he also can't do much as he's locked into NATO and the EU ecosystem. He did successfully eject Soros a few years ago but USAID is a different beast. It's a governmental organisation of the most important player in NATO. The current US ambassador is also a highly vocal LGBT activist. It's pretty clear what their goal here is and Orban is powerless to stop it.
In a sense, one cannot but admire the sheer audacity of the US foreign policy apparatus. Playing to win.
I'm always skeptical of this type of analysis which places money as the thing of supreme importance. Certainly being the leader of an entire country is more important than being merely rich.
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We've long been at a point politically where multiple Hungarian oppositionists unironically and openly claim that accepting money and assistance from foreign oligarchs, NGOs, funds, intelligence agencies etc. for such purposes is actually a self-evident, practical and wholly justifiable step, as the local populace is too obscurantist, reactionary and retrograde to give tangible support to the opposition, and the regime has full control of the economy (or something). So the ideological groundwork has already been laid.
Have they (Orbáns guys) fucked with people's bank accounts, the way activists in EU fucks with bank accounts of right-wing activists ?
Of course not.
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Let's call it what it is: groundwork for a color revolution. Orban must go.
Happy to take bets on revolution in Hungary in the next few years.
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It’s a bit more complicated than that, I think.
One victim of these attacks is actually the singer of a local skinhead band, whose members apparently go to great lengths to hide their real identities and to avoid media coverage in general. Nevertheless, the press found photos of him in usual skinhead outfits after the attack*. This means that whoever planned and committed this attack had at least some experience in doxxing, carried out recon for a longer period of time, and was savvy enough politically to know that public opinion was going to be rather divided when the identity of the victim is revealed. As far as I know, this is not a level of planning antifa groups normally engage in just by themselves. This makes me suspect that this particular group had some sort of institutional assistance (from German/Italian police, intelligence agencies, NGOs, foundations etc.). This probably puts authorities in a bind (which seems to be the goal from the start), as they can either earnestly investigate these incidents and thus generate potential tension with the German government, or try hushing up the whole thing, which may cause a scandal at home.
On a different note, one difference here is that, unlike in Western countries, in Hungary it’s not only fringe, shunned, relatively obscure right-wing media outlets that are willing to truthfully report antifa violence, but mainstream news sites as well. This was likely the reason why the oppositionist politician who’s the most associated with local antifa, Andras Jambor, decided to explicitly condemn the attacks, which is obviously a normie-friendly tactic, but also surely causes a stir among his supporters.
*see here:
https://old.reddit.com/r/hungary/comments/111y8xp/amikor_n%C3%A1cikat_mosdat_a_korm%C3%A1ny_propagand%C3%A1ja/
Antifa groups dox people regularly, though, and regularly target far-right adjacent people nobody would otherwise have ever heard of.
I know. But again, this particular attack required a substantially higher level of preparation.
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This assumes that the US foreign policy apparatus is entirely directed and sane.
Wouldn't surprised me if some bureaucrat's thought process went Orban was critical of NATO > Orban's removal is good for the Ukranian War effort.
If that bureaucrat's scope of responsibility doesn't include stability outside of Hungary, misaligned incentives will do the work here.
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My first thought as well.
It may be bad, but at least it doesn't have Michael Rubin in it.
https://www.aei.org/op-eds/ukraine-needs-nuclear-weapons-after-the-russia-war-is-over/
Would be far more worrying if the 'give nukes to Ukraine' types were defense or state dept government officials.
He's apparently employed at something called "Foreign Military Studies Office".
/images/16764282167758436.webp
I'm actually kind of in favor of giving nukes to Ukraine, in place of a lot of the aid we're currently sending. We did guarantee their Territorial Sovereignty back in 93 in exchange for them giving up their nukes, seems to me that the simplest and arguably most just path to maintaining that commitment would be to hand them a handful of nuclear-tipped cruise missiles along with an apology.
You didn't 'guarantee' their sovereignty. It was a memorandum, not a treaty.
Also, the Russians maintained that Euromaidan was instigated and helped by western powers, thus the West broke the articles of the memorandum first, and they were merely reacting to defend their strategic interests such as not losing their major naval base, or not having half of their western export routes within anti-ship missile range of rabidly anti-Russian nationalists.
Giving nuclear weapons to a state that has a serious amount of nazi, or nazi adjacent militas that could at any point stage a coup doesn't seem me like the brightest idea.
Also weird hearing it from an American, you know, someone from a nation that almost started WW3 after the government of Cuba, justifiably fearful of US intervention acceded to a Soviet defense pact.
You tell me "that's weird hearing it from an American" I tell you "look to the beam in your own eye". Both of the last two world wars started with Russia deciding it wanted to pick a fight with someone. First with the Serbian intervention in 1914, and then the with invasion of Poland in 1939.
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this did not happen
Ukrainians never had working nukes. The nukes were always in the hands of Moscow-controlled soldiers. The Ukrainians received a huge $$ payout. Anything about "territorial sovereignty" was just fluff language regularly put into these sorts of joint-statements. Calling this an "agreement" at all is pushing it. Not a single person who signed that statement from the US, from Russia, or from Ukraine, thought this was the United States guaranteeing to go to war to uphold the territorial sovereignty of Ukraine.
If it was put in, they have a right to treat it as valid.
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This would be boiling the Russian frog too quickly and would be seen as a direct escalation with unpredictable results. Slowly bleeding out Russia via the open wound of the Ukraine War allows for much better temperature control. Way worse for the Ukrainian people and the region in general, but I'm convinced they are assigned zero weight by U.S. decision makers when making these calculations.
I'm sorry but you seem to have mistaken me for a utilitarian. Please explain to me why I should care more about not "boiling the Russian frog too quickly" and avoiding "unpredictable results" than honoring past commitments.
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You are assuming that the purpose of US Foreign Policy is to provide stability. The US has been using Europe as a sandbox for social experiments for over a century at this point.
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