By Rod DREHER

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News that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin will be meeting soon in Budapest for a summit on ending the Russia-Ukraine war is a diplomatic triumph for Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán.

Orbán is perhaps the only world leader who has the trust of both the U.S. and Russian presidents. He is certainly the only European leader who has pushed for peace from the beginning of the 2022 war, and the only one who has been consistently correct about Ukraine’s hopeless prospects for victory against the Russian war machine.

It’s not because Orbán (or any Hungarian) has a special love for Russia. It is difficult in Budapest to find anybody who has erased the memory of 1956, and forty years of Soviet captivity imposed on their country. Rather, it’s because Orbán is a geopolitical realist who has not been misled by the sentimental triumphalism of the Western ruling class.

Similarly, though Donald Trump’s stance towards Russia vis-à-vis Ukraine has been erratic of late, it is impossible to imagine a President Kamala Harris coming to Budapest to talk peace and an end to the war. Harris, like most of official Washington, remains in thrall to an outdated neoliberal view of the world, in which the West retains the right to dictate terms to everyone else, and has the power to make it happen.

The Ukraine war has revealed the limits of Western power. Though not exactly a paper tiger–if not for Western weaponry and military assistance, the Russians would have rolled over the brave Ukrainians long ago–the West has nevertheless suffered a serious blow to its credibility in the war.

The punishing economic sanctions the West leveled against Russia after its invasion failed to bring Putin’s country to its knees. In fact, they pressed Russia to find ways to get around the sanctions, and to build a war economy capable of out-producing military goods. They also pushed Russia and China closer together; now the BRICS countries are a real rival to Western leadership of the global economic order.

Plus, European economies have been seriously weakened by the war’s effects. After Trump signaled a willingness for the U.S. to disengage from the Russia-Ukraine conflict, European leaders announced their intention to go it alone behind Kyiv. This was a sad joke. European militaries do not have the manpower or weaponry to play a meaningful role in defending Ukraine, and everybody knows it.

Nevertheless, U.S. and European support for Ukraine really has prevented a Russian victory–though at a tremendous cost to the West, which to some extent provoked the conflict by working to pry Ukraine out of the Russian sphere of influence. As John Mearsheimer has argued, though Russia inarguably started the war, it did so to defend itself against attempts by NATO and the European Union to bring Ukraine into the West’s orbit. The war has also devastated Ukraine, and cost Russia ghastly losses in manpower.

Nobody wins by this war continuing. Yet it is very much in Europe’s particular interest for the parties to reach a peace deal in Budapest. U.S. vice president J.D. Vance explained why in his Munich Security Conference speech earlier this year.

Vance told the scandalized audience of European security elites that

what has seemed a little bit less clear to me, and certainly I think to many of the citizens of Europe, is what exactly it is that you’re defending yourselves for? What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important?

And I believe deeply that there is no security if you[‘re] afraid of the voices, the opinions, and the conscience that guide your very own people. Europe faces many challenges, but the crisis this continent faces right now, the crisis I believe we all face together, is one of our own making.

None of them wanted to hear it–indeed, the German host of the conference wept over Vance’s words–but it was a painful truth that Europe needed to hear. The ruling class all over Europe faces a legitimacy crisis, one driven in large part by its refusal to gain control over the migration problem. Migration is only the most serious of several factors shredding the social fabric in Europe.

This week in France, the prominent lawyer and security expert Thierry de Montbrial released his new book, France: Le Choc Ou La Chute (‘France: Shock Or Collapse’), in which he argues that his country faces an omnicrisis that its leadership class cannot or will not address.

In a recent speech to European conservatives gathered in Dubrovnik, De Montbrial said the core of the omnicrisis is Europe’s loss of belief in itself and its story. This culture war within European nations is likely to erupt into civil wars. He warned absent radical reform, Western Europe faces internal violence worse than any it has seen since the end of World War II.

De Montbrial’s message aligns with Vance’s: for Europe, the real war is not in Ukraine, but what could be fast approaching within its own borders, as native populations lose faith in their institutional leaders, and lose patience with migrants, especially Muslim ones. A Russia-Ukraine peace deal would give EU leaders the freedom to focus on solving their grave domestic problems.

Not that they will take advantage of such liberty. There remains within the old-guard elites of both Europe and the United States a stubborn refusal to read the signs of the times. In Germany and France, the mainstream parties still believe they can maintain an ideologically incoherent cordon sanitaire against the so-called far right, like the Alternative for Germany and National Rally parties. France is paralyzed politically by this, and the only thing protecting the Labour government and the Tory opposition from total electoral wipeout by the UK’s Reform party is the fact that Keir Starmer doesn’t have to call an election until 2029.

And still, the ruling class believes it can control things by manipulating the access of Europeans to information, via tools like the Digital Services Act, and other illiberal machinations. It won’t work.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., the prominent center-right columnist David Brooks, who is perhaps the best barometer of establishment sentiment, has just published a long essay in The Atlantic, the parish newsletter of the Church of Official Washington, calling for a mass movement to resist Donald Trump and illiberal “autocracy.”

What Brooks–an intelligent and decent man–simply cannot grasp is that Trump’s rise is precisely because of the failures of his ruling-class elites. “All around me, I see civic leaders not saying what’s really on their mind,” rues Brooks, about the supposed fear that Trump has instilled in them.

What Brooks doesn’t get is that MAGA is the movement against illiberal autocracy–of the kind imposed by his own class during the Great Awokening of 2013-24! For at least a decade, civic leaders and ordinary people were compelled to fear speaking out, or be denounced as racist, sexist, homophobic, and so forth–and cancelled. It’s worse in the UK and Europe, where speaking out could earn you a visit from the police, or get you hauled into court on ‘hate speech’ charges.

Trump, Putin, and Orbán are all great villains in the eyes of transatlantic elites. The bien-pensants will no doubt rend their garments and grind their teeth if a real peace deal emerges from that supposed fascist hellhole, Hungary. Even as they stomp back to their hotel rooms to write their sour dispatches, these journalists can take comfort in the fact that Budapest whose is one of the few major European cities where women can walk alone safely, even at night, without fearing sexual violence from migrants.

Funny how that happens. This autumn seems to be a season for peace, guided by that most unlikely of peacemakers, Donald J. Trump. How it must infuriate the Left that Trump and Orbán might be on the verge of ending this horrible war. Oh well. To paraphrase the old Arab saying: The libs bark, but history’s caravan moves on.

Original article:  europeanconservative.com