Report

A National-Conservative NATO?

Why the emerging ideological alliance between the US, Poland and Hungary matters

When US President Trump launched his Israel-Palestine peace plan this January, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy tried to mobilize a joint EU critique. The EU, he upheld, could not stand idly by Trump’s acceptance of Israeli annexations on the West Bank. The High Representative did not succeed: at least six countries, including Italy, Austria, Hungary and the Czech Republic, refused to support the condemnation.

This event was by no means a stand-alone situation. On a whole range of issues, Budapest and Warzaw, not Berlin, Paris or London, are now the European capitals whose outlook and values come closest to that of the US White House. In a new NUPI policy note, DIIS senior researcher Vibeke Schou Tjalve, and DIIS-NUPI PhD student Minda Holm, explore the nature, strength and tensions of that emerging US-Central Eastern Europe relationship. They describe the expanding US-CEE ‘brotherhood in arms’: growing trade relations, intensified military cooperation, and rekindled diplomatic ties. Further, they unpack the striking and largely ignored dimensions of the US-CEE ‘brotherhood in faith’: the many ways in which the United States and Central and Eastern Europe are tied together by overlapping ideologies of national conservatism and a particular version of Christian ‘family values’. This commitment to what national conservatives in both the US and Eastern Europe now often cast as ’Judeo-Christian civilization’ has made anti-immigration measures, an Israel-centric vision of the Middle East, and the protection of ’Christian minorities’ across the globe key issues that unite the Trumpian White House and the Warzaw-Budapest governments.

Understanding those ties, means addressing the complexities of an increasingly influential and ambitious Visegrád Group, whose key players – Poland and Hungary – may be brothers, but are by no means twins. It also means raising some broader, burning discussions about the future of NATO and the meaning of ‘Europe’. Universalist, multicultural and in some ways ’postnational’? Or conservative, Christian and sovereigntist?
Regions
United States
A National-Conservative NATO? Why the emerging ideological alliance between the US, Poland and Hungary matters
Brothers in Arms and Faith?
The Emerging US-Central and Eastern Europe ‘Special Relationship’