Maybe Orban wants to be charged with genocide for taking Putin's side? Yes? I am sure it can be arranged.
August 17, 2020Hungary’s democratic backsliding (click here) and increasingly nationalist rhetoric threatens the stability of the alliance. NATO needs to respond.
On June 6, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Órban visited a small town on the Hungarian-Slovak border to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Trianon. The agreement, signed in the wake of World War I, dramatically shrunk Hungary’s territory from its Austro-Hungarian empire borders, resulting in Hungary ceding two-thirds of its territory and leaving sizable populations of ethnic Hungarians outside of the new boundaries. In his speech, which was imbued with nationalist resentment, Órban described every Hungarian child inside and outside of the country’s borders as a “guard post” to protect national identity. Additionally, he boasted about the speed at which Hungary has increased defense spending and built “a new army,” proclaiming, “We haven’t been this strong in a hundred years.”...
Madrid - Turkey isn’t the only “problem child” of the NATO family at this year’s annual summit. (click here)
The Hungarian government is the lone objector blocking the establishment of a Center for Democratic Resilience within NATO, a yearslong effort by Rep. GERRY CONNOLLY (D-Va.), who serves as president of NATO’s Parliamentary Assembly.
It can sound like a tale out of the U.S. Senate, where one member can grind the chamber’s business to a halt. In NATO, all member-nations must consent to a decree in the Strategic Concept or expansion of the alliance. The center, as billed, would advise governments on best practices for maintaining and building a 21st-century democracy.
Hungary’s anti-democratic slide is no secret, so it’s not necessarily a surprise that its government is objecting to the creation of such an entity within NATO. VIKTOR ORBÁN, Hungary’s DONALD TRUMP-endorsed prime minister, has engineered crackdowns on the press and undermined election laws and the independent judiciary, leading critics to dub him an authoritarian.
“With the horror we’re witnessing in Ukraine, how could you not want to build democratic architecture within NATO to counter what we are experiencing in Ukraine?” Connolly told NatSec Daily here on day one of the summit. “You can’t argue the two aren’t related. Of course, they’re related. What do you think Putin is fighting against?”
Connolly, who leads what is effectively NATO’s legislative body, is pleading with Hungary to harken back to its roots — specifically, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, which was an effort to push back against Soviet influence....
The Yeltsin eruption on December 5, 1994, made the top of the front page of the New York Times the next day, with the Russian president’s accusation (in front of Clinton and other heads of state gathered for a summit of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, CSCE) that the “domineering” U.S. was “trying to split [the] continent again” through NATO expansion. The angry tone of Yeltsin’s speech echoed years later in his successor Vladimir Putin’s famous 2007 speech at the Munich security conference, though by then the list of Russian grievances went well beyond NATO expansion to such unilateral U.S. actions as withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the invasion of Iraq.
The new documents, the result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the National Security Archive, include a series of revelatory “Bill-Boris” letters in the summer and fall of 1994, and the previously secret memcon of the presidents’ one-on-one at the Washington summit in September 1994....
