Recent quotes:
"The Hungarian people must recognize what has been lost in placing these bets to begin with."
Prime Minister Orbán treated this election like a card game at a casino. And he placed a very big bet. Whether he believes that he won or lost this hand, he was gambling not with money, but with the U.S.-Hungary relationship. A relationship that has been altered by his gamesmanship. The damage caused runs deeper than a four-year term of a President, because it is rooted in an impulse to transform something big and lasting, a relationship between Allies – between strong nations – into something smaller and fleeting. For the past several years, Hungary’s Prime Minister has told his people that seemingly all of their problems would go away when one political party wins one election … in another country. Were you to believe him, you might think his gamble on American politics was a good bet. Go all in on one foreign political ally and if he wins, you win big – or so the story goes. So Prime Minister Orbán chose to take his alliance with the United States of America into a casino – and he let it ride.
In 1999 it was not a small, symbolic tripwire of U.S. troops that Putin was willing to risk confronting, but a NATO peacekeeping force of five brigades and more than 10,000 soldiers. NATO’s 79-day Kosovo air war had just wrapped up, and defeated Serbian troops were withdrawing from the region. Putin, then the Kremlin's intelligence chief and national security adviser, assured U.S. officials of Russia’s full cooperation in stabilizing the situation. Instead, he knew a convoy of Russian peacekeepers in Bosnia was deploying to Kosovo in advance of NATO forces to seize the Slatina airfield, where they would soon be reinforced by air transports carrying hundreds of Russian paratroopers. General Wesley Clark, the supreme allied commander, wanted to block the runways with Apache helicopters, and he sought authorization to turn back the Russian planes by force. British General Michael Jackson, who was the commander on the ground, famously rejected the orders, stating, “Sir, I’m not starting World War III for you.”