The Tribune

with CHARLIE HARPER

AMID all the tumult of US president Donald Trump’s diversionary war against Iran and a chaotic domestic American political environment where both major parties seek to outdo each other in cheating the system to win legislative advantage, something overseas happened over the weekend that’s likely to prove to be very significant.

Hungarian voters finally rose up and voted out of office prime minister Viktor Orban, their political leader for the past 16 years. Orban was singularly inimical to what most of us have all come to believe are the best interests of the Western world. As his years at the pinnacle of Hungarian politics stretched out, this would-be autocrat aligned himself more and more with Russian president Vladimir Putin, whose fondest hope is to dismantle the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) that he sees as an existential threat to Russia.

Putin is mostly right: NATO is a real threat to Russian expansionism, whether in Ukraine, the Arctic, or elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

NATO has kept the peace and maintained Western stability for 80 years. It has, directly and indirectly, supported a social, political, economic, and military environment that has helped to sustain our security and prosperity even here in The Bahamas. So, Orban’s departure should be a source of relief and satisfaction for all of us.

This result, however, comes as a clear disappointment to Orban’s only ally among the 32 leaders of the alliance’s member nations. US President Trump has openly supported the Hungarian, clearly preferring him and Putin to America’s traditional Western allies.

“I love Hungary, and I love Viktor. I’m telling you he’s a fantastic man,” Trump said before Sunday’s election. “I’m a big fan of Viktor. I’m with him all the way. Orban has done a fantastic job. He has not allowed migrants to storm your country and invade your country.”

US Vice-president J D Vance arrived in Budapest last Tuesday morning, greeted by an honour guard at the airport and then hustled off for talks with Orban, whom he hailed as “one of the only true statesmen in Europe.”

Maybe. Maybe not.

Members of a large group of American and Canadian tourists visiting Budapest this past December reported that in open and wide-ranging conversations with well-informed Hungarian tour guides over several days, the name of Orban was not mentioned even one single time. One tourist confided that the most senior guide said as the group was departing that “we’re all scared to death of this despicable (Orban) regime. We’re afraid that if we even mention his name, the police will somehow hear about it and we will lose our jobs, or worse.”

This is not exactly the customary description of “one of the true statesmen of Europe.”

There is an expectation, especially in Europe, that the European Union and NATO can soon act more swiftly and decisively on agreed policy initiatives, especially support for beleaguered Ukraine, which is still battling--mostly out of the headlines--for its survival against Putin’s Russian army and its reported mercenary affiliates.

On the plus side of this four-year-old war, there have been numerous reports that, for months, American military hardware and other assistance has been arriving in Ukraine despite the bluster of the Trump administration. It’s been coming via a kind of cut-out, through members of the EU, who would have purchased this aid from the US and then transhipped it along to help Kyiv.

Orban had been widely accused of serving as an insidious spy and disruptor in NATO councils, determined to betray allied plans and confidences in order to favour Moscow. Hungary had exercised its veto in recent years to block several measures designed to help Ukraine in its efforts to push out the Russian invaders. So Orban’s defeat does seem like a significant turn of events.

Trump’s fascination with Putin and Orban, whose centralised power he appears to envy, has been interpreted as evidence of his peculiar brand of isolationist, America-first strategic vision. His long-held antipathy to maintaining an American defensive shield for Europe against Russia is well documented. And yet this president was quick – even impulsive – in moving to snatch and imprison the president of Venezuela and to attack Iran, he said, to prevent them from developing nuclear weapons.

One explanation for this appears in a 2003 book entitled The Decline of American Power. “Isolationism and macho militarism are on the surface quite different,” author Immanuel Wallerstein wrote. “But they share the same fundamental attitude towards the rest of the world, namely a mix of fear and disdain, combined with the assumption that our American way of life is pure and should not be defiled by involvement in the miserable quarrels of others, unless we are in a position to impose on them our way of life.”

In this interpretation, nationalistic leaders often can and do go back and forth between isolationist and interventionist policies.

When Trump was first elected president a decade ago, he claimed that America was already in decline due to the failures of Democratic and liberal policymakers. He spoke out about foreign trade imbalances; leaky borders, especially with Mexico; a weakened industrial base; and endless foreign wars. Globalisation had indeed tarnished the ‘old order,’ and Americans’ uneasiness about immigration proved to be politically extremely potent.

But during Trump’s second term, we have seen tariffs raise domestic costs, a net loss of manufacturing jobs during the past year, and startling military interventions on two continents. Inflation has remained uncomfortably high.

Continuing to blame Federal Reserve Bank chair Jerome Powell for the inflation his own policies have exacerbated, Trump this week again threatened to fire Powell if he doesn’t resign.

Trump was not wrong in his diagnosis of many of America’s ills 10 years ago, and a majority of voters agreed with him. But Trump’s remedies have not fulfilled his predictions for them. In some cases, he has made matters worse. 

According to one pundit writing in the New York Times, the US in the past half century has witnessed, but also survived, many shocks to Americans’ image of themselves and the supremacy and legitimacy of their nation and its role in the world.

“The launch of Sputnik in the late 1950s ushered in early Cold War paranoia that the Americans were falling behind the Soviet Union,” he wrote. “In the 1970s — with Vietnam and Watergate and an oil embargo and stagflation and the hostage crisis in Iran — the US was suffering a ‘crisis of confidence,’ as president Jimmy Carter famously said.

“A decade later, Americans were told Japan, Inc. would overtake the US. Then, September 11, 2001 diminished our American sense of physical invulnerability, the Great Recession questioned the premise and the promise of American-style capitalism, and the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021 bared the fragility of the democratic model the US had long sought to export.”

All of that is true. The US remains, nonetheless, at the centre of much that is happening in the world today. Despite the harsh criticism of many prominent Trump allies that the war in Iran is ill-conceived and will end badly, other conservatives contend that this dangerous war may still finally move the Middle East beyond the structural religious strife that has defined its politics for 80 years, and whose solution has proven to be frustratingly intractable for every American president before Trump.

Furthermore, in the economic and financial sphere, the US dollar seems destined to remain the denomination of most of global commerce, despite the apparent rise of alternatives such as the Chinese yuan or some form of cryptocurrency.

Chinese president Xi Jinping has said he wants to replace the dollar with the Chinese yuan as the global reserve currency, but that isn’t about to happen. The yuan presently supports an estimated two percent of world commerce. The dollar supports 57 percent. While the dollar has indeed slipped in the past quarter-century, the main beneficiary has been the euro.

Parenthetically, this is yet another of so many reasons why Trump should tread much more carefully around America’s European allies. There is great economic power within the EU.

The main reason the Chinese yuan won’t replace the dollar in world trade is that China’s economy remains subject to tight, centrally managed controls. The global reserve currency needs to be freely convertible. China won’t agree to do that.