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. 

Washington’s current relationship with Budapest is, in a way, based on similar grounds.

The United States and Hungary did not have a particularly special relationship after the latter became free of the communist bloc. American presidents frequently invited Hungarian leaders to Washington, but leaders of Czechia, Poland, and other newly freed countries received similar treatment. These visits all were in the context of seeking to ensure that the newly freed states became firmly ensconced in the West.

But in the past few years, America’s relationship with Hungary has returned to its original basis: Of vigorous support for Hungarian independence.

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán returned to power in 2010 – having governed for a term in the late 1990s and early 2000s – with a two-thirds majority in parliament. His party, Fidesz, kept their majority in each of the next three succeeding elections (2014, 2018, and 2022). Orbán used the power he was given to reshape Hungary. Some of this was a physical reshaping, engaging in massive building projects and restoring historical buildings throughout the country to resurrect his nation’s historical image. Some was societal, passing a series of laws to encourage Hungarians to have children and to protect traditional Hungarian and Western values.

Involved in this was underlining who was not welcome: Primarily the sea of asylum seekers which overran Europe in the mid-2010s and continues to today. Hungary erected a fence around their border in 2015 – roughly around the same time then-candidate Donald Trump was first calling to build a wall on the United States-Mexican border – and, ignoring edicts from Brussels, removed any who managed to get around the barrier.

When Trump came into office, he developed a warm relationship with Orbán, who began investing in the American Right. During Joe Biden’s interregnum between the Trump presidencies, that investment accelerated: scores of American conservative policymakers and activists made their way to Budapest, working to develop policies in absentia which they would take back with them at the onset of the second Trump presidency. Organisations like CPAC began hosting events there, and Hungarian-led initiatives like the Budapest Global Dialogue attracted conservative thinkers and, during the second Trump administration, policymakers like Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers.

The international political atmosphere present at the advent of Trump’s return to power underscored Hungary’s importance to the United States. Since the mid-2010s, Hungary was one of the lone voices resolutely opposed to Brussels’s globalised thinking – from regulations to migration. They also supported and advocated for other concepts as well, like Western civilisation. Orbán’s willingness to take on the liberal international order has also been a major boon for the Trump administration which, like Budapest, sees the liberal international order as a zombified, decaying holdover from the Cold War. Orbán has also sought to turn Budapest into a bridge between the three polar powers: the United States, Russia, and China, a rare reliable country which can provide a platform for differing – and opposed – governments.

All of this was why the Biden administration sought to destroy Orbán’s government at every step. Fidesz keeping their two-thirds majority in 2022 was a major blow to the Biden administration and, with Trump out of power, heartened the Right. It is unsurprising, then, that the next year Biden’s USAID administrator – Samantha Power, who had served as Barack Obama’s United Nations ambassador – found herself meeting with “civil society” organisations in Budapest.  These organisations, of course, were simply anti-Orbán groups, and they unsurprisingly found themselves on the receiving end of large grants.

Now, three years later, those civil society organisations find themselves on the cusp of removing Orbán from power. A win for the opposition would therefore have a similar invigorating effect for the out-of-power liberal internationalists that Orbán’s victory in 2022 had for the nationalist Right.

Which brings us to Vice President Vance’s trip. While Orbán is no longer the only nationalist in power in the West – having been joined by President Trump in 2025, Giorgia Meloni in 2022, Andrej Babiš’ new government in Prague, and Polish President Karl Nawrocki in 2025, among others – he is seen as the “original,” and the centre of Europe’s pro-Western civilisation network of nationalist parties and organisations. The pre-eminent right-wing European Union parliamentary bloc, the Patriots for Europe, was shepherded by Orbán (as the only incumbent leader in the original group of parties). And of course, he is publicly known as a staunch supporter of Donald Trump, having endorsed him for re-election in 2024.

Vance’s visit underlines the importance of that relationship and, two years later, returns the favour. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio – who himself visited Budapest last February – have taken steps to make connections with nationalist parties around Europe, seeking to construct an alternative to the near-dead liberal international order. Orbán is at the centre of those efforts.

The Hungarians have yet to decide. But Washington’s position is clear: Orbán must win.