I need to write about David Pressman, the outgoing US ambassador to Hungary. This is an unpleasant job. Pressman is man with a provincial California attitude, described by one Hungarian politician as “unsuccessful and inglorious”. Those of us who live in Budapest are glad he is going.
Hungary is an ally, yet Pressman, a Biden appointee who is red-hot on all things left-wing and woke, ignores that. He is a Democrat lawyer who thinks conservative Hungary should be more like him.
Hungary, most of it, thinks differently.
I will leave it to the parliamentary speaker to sum up Pressman: “Mr Pressman is one of the least classy ambassadors ever to set foot on Hungarian soil.”
On his way out the door, Pressman has landed a final insult on the Hungarian government. In the dying days of the Biden administration, he has convinced some bureaucrat to add Antal Rogán, the minister in charge of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s office, onto the Magnitsky list.
This is lumping Rogán in with thugs who mine blood diamonds in Democratic Republic of Congo and Chinese officials who are running Uyghur slave labour camps in Xinjiang. It is supposed to lead to a worldwide seizure of Rogán’s assets (does he even have worldwide assets?) or some other “sanctions” the State Department can put together because Rogán is “corrupt.”
What has he done that is “corrupt?” Most of what the US State Department has are allegations about Rogán “controlling strategic sectors of the Hungarian economy.” Well, fine if he has, because just as in France or Britain, where the Labour government is going to buy out private rail companies, or indeed America, where the Biden White House has just blocked the strategic buy-out of US Steel by the Japanese Nippon Steel, wise governments guard strategic sectors.
So, bravo Rogán. But putting him on Magnitsky is ridiculous for several reasons. In a few weeks a new Trump-appointed ambassador will arrive in Budapest and Rogán will be removed from the list. It is all what one Hungarian critic has called “a low-level slander.”
Consider the memories of American diplomacy Pressman is leaving behind. Here is the Foreign Minister Péter Szijjarto: “This is a personal act of revenge by the ambassador sent to Hungary by the failed American administration, who is now leaving unsuccessfully and ingloriously, directed against Antal Rogán. How fortunate that in just a few days, the United States will be led by people who see our country as a friend rather than an enemy.”
Or this from a Hungarian parliamentary group leader, Máté Kocsis, whose constituency bumps up against my apartment, so I feel a certain neighbourliness to him. He called Pressman “a vindictive, petty-minded person, just a liberal political activist, who, every minute of your stay here, has put the pursuit of orderly diplomatic relations between the two allied states behind the enforcement of your own worldview.”
“If what you said about Antal Rogán yesterday were true, then I would need to ask whether all this – after four years of being here – it only came to light/occurred to you a few days before your departure?”
“You tried to implement your personal, and the liberal worldview expected by the American ‘deep state’, in our country, you tried to change the government, which is exclusively the right of the Hungarian people.”
“You brought shame to American diplomacy.”
Yes, he has, and it has nothing to do with his personal antipathy to all things linked to the conservative nature of Hungarians. It has to do with his failure as a diplomat. He did not understand how the job should work.
Compare him with Peter Mandelson, who has been appointed the new British ambassador to Washington. Mandelson’s politics could not be more different from those of Trump and Trump’s Cabinet. His political creation came through Tony Blair, where his political influence led him to be known as “the Prince of Darkness.” He was later a European Commissioner for Trade. Now he is in the House of Lords.
I suspect none of this will inhibit his diplomatic moves toward the Trump administration. He will be smooth, his humour will be dry, he will put his hand on a resisting Republic arm and say, “We should talk about this, old boy. Sherry?”
He will slide his way into the right dinner parties (Washington, everybody home by 9 pm, but still, a dinner party) with charming stories, self-deprecating tales on his political career.
I hate every part of his politics, but I know he is dead-dangerous. That is because he was born a diplomat. He will play the Trump administration as well as any left-wing Briton could.
Of course he will. Every part of him is built to be His Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador to the United States of America.
Whereas Pressman? Every part of him is built to be forgotten.
Brexiteers voted ‘Out!’ but are left still tied to foreign regulators they did not elect