Bonus: Hungary-- Always On The Wrong Side Of History
The white flag the Russo-Republicans in the House have been carrying around the Capitol for Putin is being increasingly taken up by Senate Republicans as well, and not just by the Putinistas like J.D. Vance, Josh Hawley and Rand Paul. On Tuesday, Anthony Adragna reported that lots of them “are openly saying a negotiated settlement will be necessary to end Ukraine's ongoing war with Russia.” Marco Rubio is a hawk, the ranking Republican on the Intel Committee and he’s the latest to give up hope and tell Ukraine to give Russia some provinces— the way the West forced Czechoslovakia to give up the “German-speaking” Sudetenland in 1938, emboldening Hitler to devour the whole country a year later and leading directly to WW II. Maybe if Rubio hadn’t dropped out of Tarkio (Bible) College in Arkansas and moved back to Miami to work as a male prostitute he would have learned how appeasement doesn’t work.
On Wednesday, Hakeem Jeffries offered MAGA Mike a deal to save his speakership if Trump spokesperson and Putin lickspittle Marjorie Traitor Greene goes through with her threat to introduce a motion to vacate the chair in response to a House vote on Ukraine aid. Jeffries, no doubt prodded by Biden, said “a reasonable number” of House Democrats would vote to let him keep his gavel.
Freshman Blue Dog Wiley Nickel was gerrymandered out of his seat by the North Carolina GOP legislature; he’s not running for reelection. Yesterday, he sent all his House colleagues— presumably just the Democrats— that flag above, along with a “dear colleague” letter. He should have included Anne Applebaum’s Atlantic piece, Why Is Trump Trying To Make Ukraine Lose, as well. “Trump,” she wrote, “who is not the president, is using a minority of Republicans to block aid to Ukraine, to undermine the actual president’s foreign policy, and to weaken American power and credibility. For outsiders, this reality is mind-boggling, difficult to comprehend and impossible to understand. In the week that the border compromise failed, I happened to meet a senior European Union official visiting Washington. He asked me if congressional Republicans realized that a Russian victory in Ukraine would discredit the United States, weaken American alliances in Europe and Asia, embolden China, encourage Iran, and increase the likelihood of invasions of South Korea or Taiwan. Don’t they realize? Yes, I told him, they realize. Johnson himself said, in February 2022, that a failure to respond to the Russian invasion of Ukraine ‘empowers other dictators, other terrorists and tyrants around the world … If they perceive that America is weak or unable to act decisively, then it invites aggression in many different ways.’ But now the speaker is so frightened by Trump that he no longer cares. Or perhaps he is so afraid of losing his seat that he can’t afford to care. My European colleague shook his head, not because he didn’t believe me, but because it was so hard for him to hear.”
She also noted that Trump Jr “routinely attacks legislators who vote for aid to Ukraine, suggesting that they be primaried [and] has also said the U.S. should ‘cut off the money’ to Ukrainians, because ‘it’s the only way to get them to the table.’ In other words, it’s the only way to make Ukraine lose.”
Many also understand that Trump is less interested in “fixing the border,” the project he forced the Senate to abandon, than he is in damaging Ukraine. He surely knows, as everybody does, that the Ukrainians are low on ammunition. He must also know that, right now, no one except the U.S. can help. Although European countries now collectively donate more money to Ukraine than we do (and the numbers are rising), they don’t yet have the industrial capacity to sustain the Ukrainian army. By the end of this year, European production will probably be sufficient to supply the Ukrainians, to help them outlast the Russians and win the war. But for the next nine months, U.S. military support is needed.
Yet Trump wants Congress to block it. Why? This is the part that nobody understands. Unlike his son, Trump himself rarely talks about Ukraine, because his position isn’t popular. Most Americans don’t want Russia to win
Often, Trump’s motives are described as “isolationist,” but this is not quite right. The isolationists of the past were figures such as Senator Robert Taft, the son of an American president and the grandson of an American secretary of war. Taft, a loyal member of the Republican Party, opposed U.S. involvement in World War II because, as he once said, an “overambitious foreign policy” could “destroy our armies and prove a real threat to the liberty of the people of the United States.” But Trump is not concerned about our armies. He disdains our soldiers as “suckers” and “losers.” I can’t imagine that he is terribly worried about the “liberty of the people of the United States” either, given that he has already tried once to overthrow the American electoral system, and might well do it again.
Trump and the people around him are clearly not isolationists in the old-fashioned sense. An isolationist wants to disengage from the world. Trump wants to remain engaged with the world, but on different terms. Trump has said repeatedly that he wants a “deal” with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and maybe this is what he means: If Ukraine is partitioned, or if Ukraine loses the war, then Trump could twist that situation to his own advantage. Perhaps, some speculate, Trump wants to let Russia back into international oil markets and get something in return for that. But that explanation might be too complex: Maybe he just wants to damage President Joe Biden, or he thinks Putin will help him win the 2024 election. The Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee was very beneficial to Trump in 2016; perhaps it could happen again.
Trump is already behaving like the autocrats he admires, pursuing transactional politics that will profoundly weaken the United States. But he doesn’t care. Liz Cheney, one of the few Republicans who understands the significance of this moment, describes the stakes like this: “We are at a turning point in the history not just of this nation, but of the world.” Once the U.S. is no longer the security guarantor for Europe, and once the U.S. is no longer trusted in Asia, then some nations will begin to hedge, to make their own deals with Russia and China. Others will seek their own nuclear shields. Companies in Europe and elsewhere that now spend billions on U.S. energy investments or U.S. weapons will make different kinds of contracts. The United States will lose the dominant role it has played in the democratic world since 1945.
All of this could happen even if Trump doesn’t win the election. Right now, even if he never regains the White House, he is already dictating U.S. foreign policy, shaping perceptions of America in the world. Even if the funding for Ukraine ultimately passes, the damage he has done to all of America’s relationships is real. Anton Hofreiter, a member of the German Parliament, told me in Munich that he fears Europe could someday be competing against three autocracies: “Russia, China, and the United States.” When he said that, it was my turn to shake my head, not because I didn’t believe him, but because it was so hard to hear.
Another fascist leader and Putin ally, Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister will be making a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago a week from today. “Orbán,” reported Maggie Haberman and Andrew Higgins “has been at odds with the leaders of other NATO and European Union nations over the war in Ukraine and has been assailed by critics as steering Hungary toward authoritarianism. Like Trump, he has sometimes appeared sympathetic to or admiring of Putin… In a speech earlier this month, Orbán effectively endorsed Trump, casting the election in the United States as part of a global referendum on what kind of government democracies should choose.”
A lesser known fact about the Western betrayal of Czechoslovakia in the 1930s, mentioned earlier: When the country was being dismembered, starting with the Germans seizing the Sudetenland, Hungary took the opportunity to grab another part of the country, Carpathian Ruthenia. Going back a ways, starting with its catastrophic defeat by the Ottomans at the Battle of Mohács (1526), Hungary has been a mess, partitioned and occupied and always picking allies on the wrong side of history. During WW I, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was part of the Central Powers, suffering a massive loss of lives, economic devastation and social upheaval. As a result of the Treaty of Trianon (1920) Hungary lost two-thirds of its territory and more than half of its population to Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. The treaty is still viewed in Hungary as a national tragedy and a symbol of unjust treatment by the victorious Allied powers, helping to shape a fucked up national identity.
They made the same kind of stupid decision in the 1930s, climbing right into bed with Nazi Germany. Leading, once again to widespread devastation and loss of life, particularly during the Hungarian Holocaust, when hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were deported and killed in concentration camps. The alliance with Nazi Germany resulted not just in defeat but in Soviet occupation and communist rule. And now they’re back under a fascist-type government with Orbán.