First, I've lived in five EU countries for nearly 40 years and Latvian is my 8th European language. So I'm more European than almost anyone. I watched fascism die in Carnation Revolution Portugal in 1974 and post-Franco Spain in 1976 and 1980-81 and saw decaying and dying communism up close in Hungary in 1980 and 1988 and Yugoslavia in 1980 and 1986. https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/history-is-fascinating-but-stay-out-of-the-way-part-two-95e680efb92e
What's your claim to know Europe and its interests as well as I do?
"China's growing dominance in East Asia"--Ask the Japanese, Taiwanese, South Koreans, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Australians and Indonesians how they like this. All of them prefer the distant bully over the local one and its artificial islands built to enforce spurious territorial claims to the entire South China Sea.
"Pan-European partnership": Ask the Baltics, Finns, Swedes, Germans, Poles, Slovaks, Czechs, Romanians, Bulgarians,Norwegians and Turks if they prefer to partner with the nearby bully, Russia's openly genocidal authoritarian kleptocracy, or the more distant bully. The verdict is already in. The flawed democracy that is the American empire at least has to pay lip service to a set of values constitutionally embedded in the EU's acquis communitaire. The idea that all these peoples who have experienced Russian aggression might prefer Russia's spurious anti-western crusade for "traditional values" against gays, trans and globalists is laughable useful idiocy, to use KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov's term.
"proxy war"--pure neo-colonial bigotry that says Ukraine is a pawn that has no agency. Watch Tim Snyder's online Yale course "The Making of Modern Ukraine" to get cured of this prejudice.
So is the idea that Orban was elected fairly and legitimately. Or do you agree with tiki-torched Tucker in his kleptocrat fawning 2021 pilgrimage to Budapest? https://medium.com/extra-extra/tiki-torcherer-tuckers-hungarian-rhapsody-8ffdd7c4e81c contains the story of Orban's kleptocracy.
His election was as legitimate as Milosevic's last victory in Serbia and Putin's 2012 election and his staged Crimea and Donbass referenda.
https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/russia-ukraine-and-unrealistic-realists-8e5e73d262ea
