Much ado has been made about Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s peace missions to Kiev, Moscow, Beijing, and DC, the last of which saw him meet with Trump, with the EU disavowing him as a result and its top diplomat childishly wanting to snub his planned informal foreign affairs summit. The Eurocrats are upset that he did all of this while his country is serving as the rotating president of the Council of the EU, believing that it discredits the bloc’s support for Ukraine, but their fears are misplaced.
Orban just published the full text of his peace mission report after fragments thereof surfaced and gave a misleading impression of his observations and recommendations. They aren’t anywhere as scandalous as some might think since he just concludes that the Ukrainian Conflict will worsen without serious external diplomatic involvement. Accordingly, he suggests discussing the modalities of the next peace conference with China; resuming dialogue with Russia; and launching a political offensive in the Global South.
That’s it, nothing more, nothing less. Nothing contained therein can credibly be described as “pro-Russian” or even “Russian-friendly”, but simply pragmatic since he argues that the failure to act could entail higher financial and other costs for the EU, especially if Trump wins the election and shifts the burden for supporting Ukraine onto the bloc. None of what Orban wrote is controversial, but it’s being deliberately misportrayed that way due to the ruling liberal–globalist elite’s warmongering interests.
They want to continue “fighting until the last Ukrainian” for purely ideological reasons related to the dogmatic belief that their worldview will inevitably prevail over Russia’s conservative-nationalist one. Moreover, exploring the possibility of jointly hosting the next peace conference with China would lend credence to the latter’s growing diplomatic role in global affairs, while resuming dialogue with Russia would amount to tacitly recognizing that it can’t be isolated and is indispensable to the peace process.
These supplementary outcomes are “politically unacceptable” to the Eurocrats, but the third proposal might be implemented even if they don’t give him the credit that it deserves. He specifically called for the “launch of a coordinated political offensive towards the Global South whose appreciation we have lost concerning our position on the war in Ukraine resulting in the global isolation of the transatlantic community”, which makes perfect sense, but must be done with care.
Doubling down on the same discredited narratives blaming Russia for the latest phase of the already decade-long Ukrainian Conflict and fearmongering about its supposed “imperialist motivations” in the Global South will only make soft power matters worse for the EU. What’s needed is a more pragmatic approach which finally acknowledges the conflict’s complexity, stops attacking Russia, and presents the EU as a reliable partner for optimizing Global South countries’ balancing acts in the New Cold War.
None of this is likely to come to fruition anytime soon, but the point is that the EU could theoretically implement the last of Orban’s recommendations, even if it still makes the same mistakes as before. It’s the least relevant to the Ukrainian Conflict though, but that’s why it might pursue it in some form. As for the other two recommendations, the first is comparatively more acceptable than the second if push comes to shove, but it would likely be rendered irrelevant if Trump returns to power.
There’s no way that he’d want to hand his country’s systemic rival the global diplomatic victory of jointly hosting the next peace conference together with most of NATO, but he might accept it as a fait accompli on the off chance that this happens before his possible inauguration. As for the second proposal of resuming dialogue with Russia, they might feel coerced to implement it if he does so first as part of his promise to mediate a solution to the conflict shortly after he wins.
It’s therefore in the EU’s objective interests to heed Orban’s recommendations, which aren’t scandalous at all, though the most that can realistically be expected given the Eurocrats’ attitude towards him and this conflict is that they make another botched political offensive in the Global South. They lack the humility to bring China on board as an equal diplomatic stakeholder in peace and it’s ideologically anathema for them to talk to Russia so they’ll likely miss the opportunities presented by his proposals.
