If Europeans truly had the best interests of themselves and the rest of the world at heart, they would be sincerely thanking Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban for his actions since his country took over the six-monthly rotating presidency of the EU last month.
These are words I never imagined writing. While always defending the right of the Hungarian people to vote for whoever they wanted, I regarded Mr Orban as part of a wave of right-wingers of a type that most European countries had tried to keep beyond a cordon sanitaire, and mostly succeeded until the early 2000s.
Two years ago, I condemned Mr Orban’s evident distaste for mixed-race unions in these pages and asked – given the adoring reception he receives in US Republican circles – if it was now “acceptable in mainstream conservative circles to argue for racial purity?”.
Well, plenty of EU politicians are criticising Mr Orban right now. The European Parliament passed a resolution that said his recent trips abroad constituted a “violation” that “should be met with repercussions for Hungary”; the European Commission barred commissioners from attending meetings in Hungary; and Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski called Mr Orban “someone” who “exudes selfishness” and “irritates everyone else”.
What had Mr Orban done that caused such offence? He had the effrontery to launch a peace mission to end the war in Ukraine, and in the service of that he went to China to see President Xi Jinping, Kyiv to see President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, met President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, and flew to Florida to have a talk with former US president Donald Trump, who Mr Orban says has “detailed and well-founded plans” to act as a peace-broker if he is re-elected to the White House this November.
The Hungarian Prime Minister, at least, sees it as a success.
“Despite all the criticism, let us remind ourselves that since the beginning of our peace mission, the US and Russian [defence] ministers have spoken to each other, the Swiss and Russian foreign ministers have held talks, President Zelenskyy has finally called President Trump, and the Ukrainian Foreign Minister has been to Beijing,” Mr Orban said in a lecture last weekend. “So fermentation has begun, and we are slowly but surely moving from a pro-war European policy to a pro-peace policy.”
I wish he was right, but I’m not sure I share Mr Orban’s confidence in such a transition. A top Nato official warned of all-out war with Russia in the next 20 years in January. Only two weeks ago, the head of the UK Labour government’s strategic defence review, George Robertson, said that China posed a “deadly” challenge. And last week, the head of the UK army said Britain must be prepared to fight a war within three years.
And it’s precisely because so many voices in the West have been predicting cataclysmic clashes, to the extent that there is a real worry they could become self-fulfilling prophecies, that I come to praise Mr Orban, not bury him. For it is becoming increasingly clear that the most urgent question in geopolitics today is a simple one. Are you in the party of peace, or are you for the party of war?
Everything else is secondary. As tensions rise, and with leaders anticipating flashpoints from Eastern Europe to the South China Sea setting off a Third World War, those of us who wish for peace must take our allies where we find them. In fact, there are plenty, given that they include most of the Global South, a China that is stepping up its role as a mediator, both potentially in Ukraine but also in the Middle East, the likes of Mr Orban and, I would say, Mr Trump.
The reason I can confidently place Mr Trump in that list is that he has made it clear he has no intention of fighting wars for ideological purposes. If he returns to the presidency, as Mr Orban said last weekend, “the export of democracy” will be “at an end”.
This is a very important point. All the countries that are constantly forecasting devastating armed conflict are run by governments of the mainstream left and right that still believe that their values and their model of governance are not only the best, but that it is morally incumbent on them to export them near and far; and they are not afraid to use coercive means, from sanctions, to internal interference, to the threat of armed conflict (over Taiwan, for instance) to do so.
Perhaps they assume that everyone else is like them; and so, they must be desperate to spread their systems far and wide too. Hence the conflict and the need or risk of confrontation.
But where is the evidence that China, for instance, has the slightest desire to try to force other countries to adopt “socialism with Chinese characteristics”? To give another example, Malay nationalists in Malaysia, where I live, are very concerned about the way ethnic Malays dress, worship, seek entertainment and generally live their lives. But it would never enter their heads to try to get anyone else outside of their country to behave the same way.
Neither are Singaporeans, Indonesians, Cambodians or, I believe, Russians, seized by the imperative to remake the world in their own image. They may want influence and increased trade, and they may be assertive in pursuit of what they feel are their justified territorial and security claims, but it is primarily their own countries’ welfare that preoccupy them.
This is a paradigm difference, and it is no surprise that these states are all signed up to the principle of non-interference. It is western countries that still go “abroad, in search of monsters to destroy”. Mr Orban recognises that. He, too, is focused on his country’s future – not on making others like Hungarians – and believes that it has suffered economically from the Ukraine conflict. If that is what has fuelled his mission, that’s good enough.
On the most urgent question of the day, he has chosen to be in the party of peace. So, for once, and despite my severe disagreements with him, I salute Mr Orban. Rather than lambasting him, Europeans should join him. They may discover that most of the rest of the world is, on this, already on his side.
