Why JD Vance is travelling to Budapest

Tomorrow American Vice President JD Vance will be travelling to Budapest for two days. There he will hold bilateral meetings with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and “deliver remarks on the rich partnership between the United States and Hungary.” It sounds milquetoast: Your standard bilateral in which leaders meet and niceties are exchanged.

It’s not. Vance’s trip is central to the Trump administration’s approach to Europe.

Hungary has a rather long relationship with the United States. In the late 1840s, Hungarian freedom fighters – struggling to gain independence from Vienna – toured the country, receiving a rapturous welcome and even a meeting with then-Secretary of State Daniel Webster. While the United States, then an ardently non-interventionist country, could not formally intervene, they made clear that their sympathies lay with Budapest, an independently-minded people seeking independence from one of the major power centres of Europe. 

Read more at Brussels Signal.