Last
week, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán made waves by flying to the United
States to meet with Donald Trump—but not with sitting president Joe Biden. It
was, at a minimum, a severe breach of diplomatic protocol, and one that threatens
to unravel Budapest’s strained relations with Washington even further. Even
Biden himself commented on the
meeting,
saying that Orbán—an authoritarian who has effectively unwound Hungarian
democracy—was “looking for dictatorship.”
But
there was one other meeting that Orbán took while in the U.S. that hasn’t
received enough attention—and points directly to how Orbán has
cultivated American conservatives to his cause and created a beachhead for
Hungarian influence in Washington. On Friday, he spoke at a closed-door meeting
at the Heritage Foundation’s headquarters in the nation’s capital. Joined by
Heritage president Kevin Roberts and failed presidential candidate Vivek
Ramaswamy, Orbán spoke, according to a readout, in front of an audience
that “included renowned U.S. right-wing politicians, analysts and public
personalities.”
The
event was, on paper, a somewhat dull affair, with Orbán covering matters ranging
from Hungary’s “conservative family and economic policies” to the state of the
war in Ukraine. Pulling back, however, the talk was nothing short of shocking. Instead
of meeting with the White House, Orbán traveled to Washington to sit with the
leadership of a think tank, using them as a platform to access and influence
conservative Americans about both foreign and domestic policy.
All
of which leads to one question: How, and why, did the Heritage Foundation
become the go-to vehicle for Budapest’s budding autocracy to target Americans?
The
answer follows several different tracks. On the one hand, Hungary has been
shedding lobbying outfits for the past few years, dropping a range of P.R. shops
and Twitter influencers to focus solely on Heritage. On the other hand,
internal transformations at Heritage—and a willingness to shred its
reputation as a bastion of Reaganite, and even democratic, credentials—led
the think tank’s leadership directly into Orbán’s lap, allowing it to become
little more than a mouthpiece for a strongman and a leading proponent for Orbán-style rule in the
U.S.
During
the Trump era, Orbán’s government ran one of the most prominent lobbying
campaigns in the U.S., almost all of which focused on forging stronger links
between Washington and Budapest. This was to some degree understandable: With Trump
ensconced in the White House, Hungary became America’s preferred partner in
Europe—not least for the authoritarian model Orbán
set for Trump.
(As Trump said of Orbán last week, “There’s nobody
that’s better, smarter, or a better leader than Viktor Orbán. He’s fantastic.…
He’s a great leader.”) According to the Department of Justice’s Foreign Agents
Registration Act, or FARA, database, Budapest inked deals with eight separate
American law or communications firms during Trump’s presidency—an
unprecedented burst of activity.
Not
that all of these lobbying efforts were traditional, or even successful. In one
contract, Budapest signed a firm called Strategic Improvisation, Inc. As part
of the arrangement, the firm’s president, a Twitter reactionary named David Reaboi,
began pumping pro-Orbán content on social
media. While Reaboi made tens of thousands of dollars from working as a foreign
agent, it’s unclear what, if any, impact his tweets actually had. (Reaboi did,
however, produce arguably the most unintentionally
hilarious filing FARA has ever seen, revealing that a tweet in which he said he
supported Hungary and was “not in this for the money” was, in fact, paid for by
Budapest.)
But
with Biden’s election, Hungary’s lobbying efforts collapsed. Some of the
contracts ended after only a few months, while others—including the deal with
Reaboi’s firm—were canceled the day before Biden entered the White House. As
of this week, Hungary is one of the few nations without a single active firm
represented in the FARA database.
But
that doesn’t mean Hungarian influence has waned. If anything, it’s simply
shifted—using loopholes and workarounds to dodge disclosure requirements,
while nonetheless wooing conservative Americans and staking its ties in
Washington almost wholly on a Trump victory this November.
Enter
the Heritage Foundation. While Heritage grew to prominence in the 1980s as a
font of Reaganite policy, in recent years the organization has undergone a
monumental shift in terms of both policy and priorities. Rather than persist in
its stolid dedication to conservative values, Heritage has swung in a far more
reactionary—and far more authoritarian—direction in recent years. Across
the policy landscape, Heritage has become little more than an intellectual
breeding ground for Trumpist ideas.
While
much attention has understandably focused on Heritage’s so-called “Project 2025,” which provides a
roadmap for Trump to seize as much power as he can, such a shift has extended
to foreign policy. This has been seen most especially in Heritage leading the
effort to gut funding for Ukraine. But it’s also evident
in the way Heritage has endeavored to anchor its relations with Orbán, making
Budapest once more America’s preferred partner in Europe—regardless of the
cost.
Much
of that shift is downstream from Heritage’s leadership, overseen by Kevin
Roberts. Appointed as Heritage’s president in 2021, Roberts immediately began
remaking
Heritage’s priorities with a distinctly pro-Orbán bent—and began opening up
Heritage as a vehicle for Hungarian influence in the U.S.
Part
of that involved things like last week’s confab, one of many meetings between
Roberts and Orbán. (After one 2022 sit-down, Roberts—who, among other things,
has said he doesn’t think Joe
Biden won the 2020 election—posted that it was an “honor”
to meet with Orbán, praising his “movement that fights for Truth, for
tradition, for families.”) But the relationship is structural as well: Heritage,
in an atypical move, finalized a formal partnership last year with the Danube
Institute, a Hungarian think tank that appears to exist only to praise Orbán’s
government.
The
Budapest-based Danube Institute is largely unknown in the U.S., but it has
transformed in recent years into one of the premier mouthpieces for propagating
Orbánist policies. While it is technically independent, it is, as Jacob
Heilbrunn notes in his new book on the American right’s infatuation with dictators, located “next to the prime minister’s
building and funded by Orbán’s Fidesz party.” Indeed, the Hungarian think tank
is overseen
by a foundation directly bankrolled by the Hungarian state—meaning that
the Danube Institute is, for all intents and purposes, a state-funded front for
pushing pro-Orbán rhetoric.
The Danube Institute claims it is dedicated to
“advocat[ing] conservative and national values and thinking,” which almost
always ends up with the institute praising Orbán’s pronouncements. It has
become, according to Hungarian
journalists
at Atlatszo, “one of the main tools of the Orbán government’s
ideological expansion abroad”—and one of the “main vehicles” to “building a
political network in the United States.”
Such
focus makes sense in terms of the Danube Institute’s personnel. For instance, the
institute identifies arch-reactionary
Rod Dreher
as the “director of [its] Network Project.” The Southern Poverty
Law Center obtained Dreher’s contract, which described him as an “agent” who would connect
with a “circle of Christian-conservative contacts” on the institute’s behalf,
while also writing publicly in praise of the Danube Institute’s “achievement[s].”
Along the way, the Danube Institute began doling out
significant grants to a range of other American conservatives, such as provocateur
Christopher Rufo, who received tens of thousands of dollars, as well as a
number of writers published in The American Conservative.
Most
important, however, is the man currently running the Danube Institute: John
O’Sullivan, a British conservative who once served as the director of studies at—you guessed it—the
Heritage Foundation. “With his extensive connections in the conservative
universe, [O’Sullivan] became Orbán’s conduit to the American Right,” Heilbrunn
noted.
Unsurprisingly,
the key to O’Sullivan’s and the Danube Institute’s outreach to American
conservatives has been the Heritage Foundation. A post in early 2023 from the Hungarian Conservative noted that the Danube
Institute and the Heritage Foundation had “signed a landmark cooperation
agreement, deepening Hungary’s transatlantic relations.” While the formal
cooperation agreement hasn’t yet been published, the summary noted that “each
year four researchers from the Heritage Foundation will visit Budapest and work
with the Danube Institute as visiting researchers” and that Heritage “will
also organize more joint events” with the Danube Institute in the future.
The
two have already begun operating closely, co-hosting the Danube Geopolitical
Summit
last September. Featuring both Heritage and Danube Institute leadership, as
well as a number of Hungarian officials, the conference centered on many of the
aforementioned themes Orbán routinely highlights, railing against so-called
“wokeness” in Western democracies. At the conference, James Carafano, Roberts’s key adviser at
Heritage, “stressed the importance of building transatlantic connectivity,” saying he was “so proud to be associated with the
Danube Institute.”
While
the arrangements with Americans like Dreher appear to contravene America’s foreign
lobbying laws, the relationship between Heritage and the Danube Institute
unfortunately appears to fall outside of the purview of things like FARA. All
of which means that we have no idea how much funding may be flowing directly
from Orbán’s regime to the Heritage Foundation—and what this “landmark
cooperation agreement” between Heritage and the Danube Institute actually
entails.
But
we’ve already seen what the arrangement looks like in practice. While the
entire relationship between Heritage and the Danube Institute—and between
Budapest and American conservatives writ large—can seem like an overwrought,
overly complicated series of agreements and associations, zooming out, the
links become clear.
In
Hungary, a state-funded organization that serves as little more than a
propaganda arm for Orbánist policies—and which has already directly funded a
number of American conservative writers—has formally partnered with an
American think tank that’s collapsed into little more than a bastion of
Trumpism. Both have thus provided platforms for one another,
reinforcing each other’s efforts and reaching mutual audiences on both sides of
the Atlantic. All the while, they’ve done so in a manner that hasn’t required
any transparency about finances or expectations and that skirts America’s
current foreign lobbying laws—keeping both Americans and Hungarians in the
dark about the relationship.
It
is, in many ways, unprecedented. While American think tanks have seen a range of dodgy funding
streams
in recent years, we’ve never seen anything like the partnership unfolding between
Heritage and the Danube Institute. All of which makes Orbán’s equally
unprecedented trip—when he visited the former president, as well as a
pro-Trump think tank, but not the current White House itself—last week that
much less surprising. As Orbán himself said an interview with Hungarian media
after his talk in Washington, when it comes to the Heritage Foundation,
“Hungary has an honored place.”
Source: newrepublic.com
