File photo of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and U.S. President Donald Trump
The first year of Donald Trump’s new presidency has brought revolutionary changes to global politics, fundamentally reshaping the liberal, UN-centered international order, speakers said at a panel discussion hosted by the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs (MKI) on Tuesday in Budapest.
Márton Békés, Director of the 21st Century Institute, believes that in the year since the U.S. president took office, the United States has returned to the Monroe Doctrine of the early 19th century, prioritizing the reinforcement of American power and strategic autonomy. This shift, he said, has acted as a catalyst for broader transformations in world politics.
This has been accompanied by a rift in Western civilization, namely a distancing between Europe and America, which is not good news for Europe, as it will lose its competitiveness as a result.
Tamás Baranyi, strategic director at MKI, believes that Donald Trump projects aggression as a kind of negotiating tactic, but recent events have shown that he is willing to compromise and reach agreements. At the same time, one of the most striking things is how little resistance this aggressive approach has encountered over the past year, whether from Russia, China, or Europe.
Sebestyén Horváth, an analyst at the Oeconomus Economic Research Foundation, believes that Trump brought about change by recognizing the crisis facing global international organizations and spearheading changes to institutional frameworks and the international legal system.
According to Byrappa Ramachandra, senior researcher at MKI, Donald Trump’s rise to power has strengthened the United States’ imperial ambitions, which are not only taking the form of territorial expansion, but also increasingly dominating the digital, cultural, and financial spheres, with customs policy also serving these imperial ambitions. The panel participants agreed that
Hungarian-American relations are exceptionally good, primarily due to the personal relationship between the two leaders, Donald Trump and Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
Sebestyén Horváth emphasized in this regard that it is a major diplomatic achievement that the leader of a country of ten million people can negotiate as a direct partner with the most powerful man in the world, which cannot be said of any other European country of similar size. According to Márton Békés, the Hungarian government made the right move when it prioritized personal relationships in Hungarian-American diplomacy, because personal relationships are crucial for Donald Trump.
Tamás Baranyi believed that
99 percent of the exceptionally good Hungarian-American relations were thanks to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
The participants in the discussion also agreed that it was in Hungary’s interest to maintain good relations with both Brussels and Washington. Experience has shown that after World War II, the countries that became successful were those that had trade relations spanning multiple blocs.
“That is why connectivity is the way forward for Hungary as well,” the participants concluded.
Via MTI; Featured photo: MTI/Miniszterelnöki Kommunikációs Főosztály/Fischer Zoltán
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