The head of USAID has seen a lot as an adviser to the shell of the Obama administration, and he didn't just come to the Hungarian capital to flame. The Biden administration has been trying to put pressure on the Hungarian government to an extent not seen in a long time in the last few weeks.

The story began when the US ambassador to Hungary, David Pressman, told Politico at the end of January that Hungarian politicians were playing into Vladimir Putin's hands by not supporting the sanctions policy against Russia and refusing to arm Volodymyr Zelensky's Ukrainian government. regime. Pressman said: he agrees with the Hungarian government that peace is needed, but this should be discussed with the Russians rather than trying to persuade the Ukrainians to surrender.

The ambassador's statement caused a stir in Hungary. Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó reacted to Pressman's words in his usual – expected – style, saying that it does not matter what the head of mission thinks about the internal political processes in Hungary, because it is not his task to judge them. Since then, Pressman and Szijjártó have already met once, and this issue was certainly discussed during the meeting.

That Washington is not satisfied with the course of Hungarian politics is beyond dispute.

In the person of Pressman, for the first time in a long time, a career diplomat was appointed to head the American embassy in Budapest - in recent years, his predecessors were mostly political appointees. And the icing on the cake is that the US leadership sent an openly homosexual ambassador to Budapest at the very time when the Hungarian government created several laws that the mainstream international press and political discourse clearly branded as homophobic.

It is also difficult to interpret the visit of Samantha Power, the current head of USAID, to Budapest on Thursday-Friday as a non-American prank. Power is a real strong man (I hope they appreciate this weak pun) in the intellectual backwaters of the Democrats, who has previously reached high levels under the Obama administration - and he also knows Pressman well.

Samantha Power was one of Obama's closest aides on matters related to the Arab Spring. Power has received a lot of criticism for supporting military intervention in, for example, Syria or Libya. In 2013, he was appointed the United States ambassador to the United Nations (here he had a direct working relationship with Pressman). This assignment lasted until 2017. During the narrow years of the Trump era, Power wrote a book about his time in the Obama administration, in which he tried to explain his militant positions on the Arab Spring. Fortunately for the Democrats, they did not forget about him: Joe Biden invited him to head the American aid organization USAID in 2021, where he has been active ever since. He arrived in Budapest in this capacity on Thursday.

Of course, USAID is not just a "plain" aid organization - in fact. Among the declared goals of the agency established in 1961, in addition to post-disaster prevention and catching up with backward and difficult regions of the world, we also find the building of bilateral relations of the United States, based on which you don't need to have a very sharp eye to filter out:

in addition to carrying out noble humanitarian tasks, USAID is also an indirect power tool of the current American government.

So Samantha Power came to see how much the Welsh province is worth, so to speak: in the company of her old acquaintance, Ambassador Pressman, she met with some representatives of the Hungarian civil sphere and "independent" media, ate a good flame, and checked the progress of the American attempt to build power in Hungary, which From the appointment of Pressman to the support of the 2022 parliamentary election campaign of the Hungarian opposition, there are many small moments. Whether Washington is satisfied with the field work in Hungary is unlikely to be revealed any time soon, in any case, it can be guessed that until the Hungarian government is willing to arm the Ukrainian regime and withdraw the pedophile law, it will have to resist further American attempts to exert pressure, which, according to the dream books, usually does not mean good for a government.

This is unlikely to be a short-term struggle.

Source: mandiner.hu

Featured image: mandiner.hu – Jim WATSON / AFP