President Donald Trump on Friday afternoon denied any knowledge of a reported 2019 botched SEAL Team 6 operation in North Korea, telling a reporter who asked him for a reaction that he was “hearing it now for the first time.”
Newsweek reached out via email to the White House for clarification and further comment on Friday evening.
Why It Matters
The purported mission would evidence the U.S. failing to achieve an intelligence objective against a country with which officials had engaged in sensitive diplomatic talks.
The Pentagon and White House rarely—if ever—comment on any SEAL Team 6 missions.
The ostensible goal for the talks would entail steps toward a peace deal between North and South Korea, ending a decades-long tense standoff between the neighboring nations.
U.S. President Donald Trump, left, speaks as he stands with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, south of the Military Demarcation Line that divides North and South Korea on June 30, 2019. U.S. President Donald Trump, left, speaks as he stands with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, south of the Military Demarcation Line that divides North and South Korea on June 30, 2019. Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
What To Know
The New York Times on Friday released a report on a 2019 operation to plant a listening device that would have allowed the United States to intercept communications from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at a time when the U.S. was holding high-level nuclear talks with the Hermit Kingdom.
According to the Times, the operation did not pan out as planned once a boat started sweeping the water, prompting fears that the SEAL team had been spotted while heading for shore. The team opened fire, killing everyone on the boat, then retreating without completing the mission, per the report.
Due to the extreme sensitivity of the mission, the Times said, it would have required Trump’s direct approval.
When asked about the mission during a press briefing in the Oval Office on Friday, Trump said: “I don’t know anything about it.”
“I’d have to look, but I don’t know anything about it,” the president replied, adding, “I’m hearing it now for the first time.” The reporter had also asked if Trump had spoken with or engaged with North Korea since the purported incident, which he did not address.
The Pentagon provided Newsweek with “no comment” when reached via email on Friday afternoon.
The SEAL Team 6 Red Squadron—the same unit that killed Al-Qaeda founder and Sept. 11 mastermind Osama bin Laden—had been selected for the mission, and the team had practiced for months beforehand.
What Is SEAL Team 6?
SEAL Team 6 is the nickname given to the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, a component of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). The team often undertakes classified missions on which neither the Pentagon nor the White House will usually offer comment.
The group is the Navy’s equivalent of the Delta Force, emerging to prominent public notice in the aftermath of bin Laden’s killing.
Journalist Sean Naylor, national security reporter for 20 years at Army Times, in 2015 published a book detailing the history of JSOC and some of its missions, like a 2008 mission during which SEAL Team 6 launched a raid from Afghanistan into Pakistan to find Al-Qaeda leaders.
The Times also covered the release of the book, which has proved the most comprehensive, if unauthorized, look at the operations of a team that has “engaged in combat so intimate that they have emerged soaked in blood that was not their own.”
“Around the world, they have run spying stations disguised as commercial boats, posed as civilian employees of front companies and operated undercover at embassies as male-female pairs, tracking those the United States wants to kill or capture,” the Times wrote.
Trump Sought Nuke Deal With North Korea
Trump, during his first administration, attempted to engage in the same kind of deal-making that he has touted throughout his second term. During those first four years, he notched some considerable wins—most notably, the Abraham Accords between Israel and several Middle East nations.
The president initially sought a nuclear weapons deal with North Korea, but settled for a 2018 signed joint statement, which laid out four goals for Kim to achieve: commit to establish new relations with the U.S.; build a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula; commit to work toward a complete denuclearization of the peninsula; and recover POW/MIA remains and repatriate them.
The talks would have potentially proved a vital turning point in negotiations, but the coronavirus pandemic radically altered the trajectory of any such discourse. Once Trump left office, the possibility for any deal with the increasingly reclusive North Korea—which suffered greatly during the pandemic—turned more unlikely.
Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.
TEL AVIV — Do Israel’s Western allies really believe that the country has the right to defend itself?
Israelis aren’t sure.
To varying degrees since the military offensive was launched against Hamas, Western allies have sought to persuade Israel to curtail the campaign, and clearly some would prefer for it to be aborted altogether.
Reeling from the shock at the sheer ISIS-like savagery of the Hamas attack on kibbutzim in southern Israel, Western allies quickly embraced Israel’s right to self-defense. But many hedged this right from the get-go with caveats — some justified — about the lack of a defining post-war end goal.
There was handwringing also about the risks of the war expanding and inflaming the whole region and worry, too, that Israel might allow its anger to push it into over-reaching.
And, of course, as the death toll in Gaza climbed, the shock of October 7 wore off for many Western allies.
France’s Emmanuel Macron was the first major Western leader to call for a cessation of hostilities, making him an unsurprising outlier. But others have not been far behind, and now they hope to stretch the four-day truce for as long as possible, which would provide further time and opportunity to pile pressure on Israel to halt the military campaign for good. Or at least scale it back considerably.
Characteristically, U.S. President Joe Biden has been inconsistent, trying to have it all ways.
Two weeks ago, when asked what the chances were for a cease-fire in Gaza, Biden was in warrior mode and dismissive. “None. No possibility,” he said.
In an op-ed in the Washington Post on November 18, he wrote: “We stand firmly with the Israeli people as they defend themselves against the murderous nihilism of Hamas.” He highlighted how he’d quickly gone to Israel after October 7 to “reaffirm to the world that the United States has Israel’s back.”
“As long as Hamas clings to its ideology of destruction, a cease-fire is not peace. To Hamas’s members, every cease-fire is time they exploit to rebuild their stockpile of rockets, reposition fighters and restart the killing by attacking innocents again. An outcome that leaves Hamas in control of Gaza would once more perpetuate its hate and deny Palestinian civilians the chance to build something better for themselves,” he wrote.
U.S. President Joe Biden speaks as Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu listens on prior to their meeting in Tel Aviv on October 18, 2023 | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
But less than a week later, while in Nantucket, Massachusetts for Thanksgiving, that was all forgotten and Biden struck a different chord saying “the chances are real” that the pause could open the door to a longer cease-fire.
No worries there about how Hamas exploits every cease-fire for war preparations.
Admittedly, Biden hasn’t talked yet of a permanent cease-fire and he’s linked any truces to the release of hostages. But the change in the mood music was striking and has been noted in Israel, where there’s rising anxiety that the Biden administration is making electoral calculations swayed by progressive Democrats, Arab leaders and Europeans.
The problem with that is Hamas doesn’t really want a permanent end to hostilities, Israelis argue. Just ask Ghazi Hamad, a member of Hamas’ political bureau and a man some once suggested was a moderate, they say. Speaking on Lebanese television in October he applauded the slaughter of October 7 and promised that Hamas “will do this again and again.”
“There will be a second, a third, a fourth,” he added. “Israel is a country that has no place on our land. We must remove that country, because it constitutes a security, military, and political catastrophe to the Arab and Islamic nation, and must be finished,” he declared.
Israelis question whether the United States — as well as most other Western allies — really understand that Hamas isn’t interested in political negotiations about a two-state solution. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” means what it says. No Jewish state.
In fact, the quip doing the rounds in Tel Aviv is that “Biden is your best friend, until he isn’t.”
Others note the U.S. leader tends to go by his gut instincts when making decisions. “Does that mean we’re hostages to the fortunes of his digestive tract?” an aide to a member of Israel’s security cabinet remarked to me last week. He asked not to be named, not wanting to impact his boss’s relations with the White House.
While some Israelis fault Netanyahu for reaching too easily for Holocaust comparisons and of failing to define a day-after governance plan for Gaza when Hamas is no more, the one overwhelming message from most is that this time Hamas must be defeated comprehensively, and that a truncated military campaign would in effect be a win for Hamas.
Opinion polls bear that out with Israeli attitudes towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict more hawkish than at any time in recent memory. Only 24.5 percent of Israeli Jews favor peace negotiations with the Palestinian Authority – a fall from 47.6 in favor in September.
In a survey conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute before the current pause, only 10 percent of Israeli Jews said they would support a pause in fighting to exchange hostages.
A woman holds an Israeli flag and a portrait of a hostage during a protest asking for the release of Israeli hostages in Tel Aviv on November 25, 2023 | Gil Cohen-Magen/AFP via Getty Images
Meanwhile, 44 percent said they wanted the government to negotiate for the hostages’ return without any pause and 27 percent said there should be no negotiations, only fighting. And 12 percent said hostage talks should only take place when Hamas has been defeated.
Israelis do worry that international pressure will mount to such an extent that they are compelled to stop the war on Hamas far short of the war aims. A halt now or before the goal has been accomplished would be “for Yahya Sinwar [Hamas’ leader in Gaza] a victory,” says Michael Milshtein, a former head of the Department for Palestinians Affairs in Israel’s Defense Intelligence agency.
“If this war ends with Hamas’ survival, it will further weaken the PLO-led Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and we can kiss goodbye to any serious talks in the future about a two-state solution or a political settlement with the Palestinians. Hamas isn’t interested in a political resolution – it wants to extinguish the state of Israel,” Milshtein adds. The only question will be when the next war will begin, he and others say.
“We have to end their capability of threatening Israel ever again,” Ophir Falk, Benjamin Netanyahu’s top foreign policy adviser, told me. “This can’t be just another cycle of violence. Almost everybody in Israel is fully united. The people in the streets and the government and the cabinet and everybody understands that this is a must thing for us to do,” he added.
So, what if the pressure mounts from Western allies for a cessation of hostilities? “No, that’s not an option,” Falk told me. “We are going to destroy Hamas. And asking us for a ceasefire would be like asking for a ceasefire after 9/11 or Pearl Harbor. It’s just not going to happen,” he added.
Pretty much across the board, Israelis from all walks of life are unequivocal: There should be no let-up in the campaign to uproot Hamas from Gaza. “This isn’t Bibi’s war; it is Israel’s war,” I have been told time and again the past month.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell recently said former President Ronald Reagan would “turn over in his grave” at the current GOP’s views on helping Ukraine win its war against Russia.
McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, has been a vocal supporter of Ukraine since Russia invaded the Eastern European country in February 2022. Most recently, he has shown a willingness to work with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, on President Joe Biden‘s request of nearly $106 billion worth of aid, which includes $61.4 billion for Ukraine and $14.3 billion for Israel to support its war with Palestinian militant group Hamas following their surprise attack on October 7.
However, other members of the Republican Party do not see an importance to keep funding Ukraine’s war. Newly-elected House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, decoupled the president’s aid package and pushed a standalone aid package of $14.3 billion to Israel, which the House passed on November 2. The bill was blocked by the Democrat-controlled Senate on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, Senate Republicans released a proposal on Monday regarding policy changes on immigration, mainly focusing on limiting migrants’ ability to enter or stay in the United States once they are apprehended. Senate Republicans will demand that the proposal be attached to any funding package for Ukraine.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell speaks to reporters at the U.S. Capitol on October 24 in Washington, D.C. McConnell recently said former President Ronald Reagan would “turn over in his grave” at the current GOP’s views on helping Ukraine win its war against Russia. Drew Angerer/Getty Images
“Honestly, I think Ronald Reagan would turn over in his grave if he saw we were not going to help Ukraine,” McConnell told The Associated Press this week.
McConnell was first elected to the Senate in 1984, at a time when the now-late Reagan was fighting the Cold War against the now-dissolved Soviet Union.
The senator told the AP that cutting off aid to Ukraine would be “a huge setback for the United States,” and its reputation as the leader of the free world.
McConnell also explained how the U.S.’s foreign policy shifted after the Cold War to focus on terrorism. However, as tensions grow between the U.S. and its adversaries, China and Russia, and Israel continues its operation in Gaza following Hamas’ attack, the senator said “what we have now is both the terrorism issue and the big power competition issue all at the same time, which is why I think singling out one of these problems to the exclusion of the others is a mistake.”
Newsweek reached out to McConnell and Johnson via email for comment.
Some senators, meanwhile, believe that Johnson is more aligned with their views.
“I think the fact that Speaker Johnson has a little bit more agency is in part because he is the Speaker of the House,” Senator J.D. Vance, an Ohio Republican who is against a combined aid package for Ukraine and Israel, told the AP. “But it’s also important because he has a membership that is much, much more in tune with where Republican voters actually are.”
Senator Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican who has also criticized Ukraine funding, told the AP that “nationally, the Republican leader right now is the speaker of the House of Representatives.”
However, there are Republican senators who disagree with Johnson’s efforts to decouple the aid package.
Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina recently told reporters, “I support the package staying together. I think Secretary [of State Antony] Blinken and [Defense Secretary Lloyd] Austin gave a good answer why we should not break it apart. At the end of the day, I think all of these conflicts have to be dealt with strongly, and they should be dealt with together.”
Senator Mitt Romney, a Utah Republican, told CNN, “My view is that the substantial majority of members of the House, as well as the substantial majority of senators, support for Ukraine and Israel, combined.”
Meanwhile, Make America Great Again (MAGA) supporters criticized Johnson for aiding another country while there are issues domestically.
“MIKE JOHNSON PUTS ISRAEL 1ST KNOWING THERE ARE 4 MILLION ILLEGAL RIDING TRAIN CARAVANS THROUGH MEXICO,” Rumble personality Ryan Matta said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, late last month.
“Politicians are incapable of putting America First!” Donald Trump supporter Cynthia Holt wrote about Johnson.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump appeared to confuse the leaders of Turkey and Hungary in a campaign speech in New Hampshire on Monday.
“There’s a man, Viktor Orbán, anybody ever hear of him?” Trump said, referring to the Hungarian prime minister.
“He’s probably, like, one of the strongest leaders anywhere in the world. He’s the leader of Turkey,” the former president said. Turkey’s president is Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Trump added that Orbán has a “front” with Russia. Neither Turkey nor Hungary has a border with Russia.
Trump has previously praised Orbán, who opposes migration and LGBTQ rights, and refers to his governing style as an “illiberal democracy.” Trump hosted him at the White House in 2019.
In turn, Orbán was the first European leader to endorse Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and urged him to “keep fighting” after the former president was hit with a criminal indictment.
“Come back, Mr President. Make America great again and bring us peace,” Orbán told a meeting of the U.S. Conservative Political Action Coalition earlier this year.
Ben Cohen wasn’t talking about ice cream. He was talking about American militarism.
At 72, the co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is bald and bespectacled. He looks fit, cherubic even, but when he got going on what it was like to grow up during the Cold War, his tone became less playful and more assertive — almost defiant.
“I had this image of these two countries facing each other, and each one had this huge pile of shiny, state-of-the-art weapons in front of them,” he said, his arms waving above his head. “And behind them are the people in their countries that are suffering from lack of health care, not enough to eat, not enough housing.”
“It’s just crazy,” he added. “Approaching relationships with other countries based on threats of annihilating them, it’s just a pretty stupid way to go.”
It wasn’t a new subject for the famously socially conscious ice cream mogul; Cohen has been leading a crusade against what he sees as Washington’s bellicosity for decades. It’s just that with the war in Ukraine, his position has taken on a new — morally questionable — relevance.
Cohen, who no longer sits on the board of Ben & Jerry’s, isn’t just one of the most successful marketers of the last century. He’s a leading figure in a small but vocal part of the American left that has stood steadfast in opposition to the United States’ involvement in the war in Ukraine.
When Russian President Vladimir Putin sent tanks rolling on Kyiv, Cohen didn’t focus his ire on the Kremlin; a group he funds published a full-page ad in the New York Times blaming the act of aggression on “deliberate provocations” by the U.S. and NATO.
Following months of Russian missile strikes on residential apartment blocks, and after evidence of street executions by Russian troops in the Ukrainian city of Bucha, he funded a 2022 journalism prize that praised its winner for reporting on “Washington’s true objectives in the Ukraine war, such as urging regime change in Russia.”
In May, Cohen tweeted approvingly of an op-ed by the academic Jeffrey Sachs that argued “the war in Ukraine was provoked” and called for “negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality and NATO non-enlargement.”
Ben Cohen outside the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington this month, before getting arrested | Win McNamee/Getty Images
I set up a video call with Cohen not because I can’t sympathize with his mistrust of U.S. adventurism, nor because I couldn’t follow the argument that U.S. foreign policy spurred Russia to attack. I called to try to understand how he has maintained his stance even as the Kremlin abducts children, tortures and kills Ukrainians and sends thousands of Russian troops to their deaths in human wave attacks.
It’s one thing to warn of NATO expansion in peacetime, or to call for a negotiated settlement that leaves Ukrainian citizens safe from further aggression. It’s another to ignore one party’s atrocities and agitate for an outcome that would almost certainly leave millions of people at the mercy of a regime that has demonstrated callousness and cruelty.
Given the scale of Russia’s brutality in Ukraine, I wanted to understand: How does one justify focusing one’s energies on stopping the efforts to bring it to a halt?
Masters of war
Cohen’s political awakening took place against the background of the Cold War and the political upheaval caused by Washington’s involvement in Vietnam.
He was 11 during the Cuban missile crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Part of the reason he enrolled in college was to avoid being drafted and sent to the jungle to fight the Viet Cong.
When I asked how he first became interested in politics, he cited Bob Dylan’s 1963 protest song “Masters of War,” which takes aim at the political leaders and weapons makers who benefit from conflicts and culminates with the singer standing over their graves until he’s sure they’re dead.
“That was kind of a revelation to me,” Cohen said. Behind him, the sun filtered past a cardboard Ben & Jerry’s sign propped against a window. “I hadn’t understood that, you know, there were these masters of war — essentially I guess what we would now call the military-industrial-congressional complex — that profit from war.”
Cohen saw people from his high school get drafted and never come back from a war that “wasn’t justified.” As he graduated in the summer of 1969, around half a million U.S. troops were stationed in ‘Nam. Later that year, hundreds of thousands of protesters marched on Washington, D.C. to demand peace.
It was only much later, while doing “a lot of research” into the “tradeoffs between military spending and spending for human needs,” that Cohen came across a 1953 speech by Dwight D. Eisenhower, which foreshadowed the U.S. president’s 1961 farewell address in which he coined the phrase “military-industrial complex.”
A Republican president who had served as the supreme allied commander in Europe during World War II, Eisenhower warned against tumbling into an arms race. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” he said.
“That is a foundational thing for me, very inspiring for me, and captures the essence of what I believe,” Cohen said.
“If we weren’t wasting all of our money on preparing to kill people, we would actually be able to save and help a lot of people,” he added with a chuckle. “That goes for how we approach the world internationally as well,” he added — including the war in Ukraine.
Pierre Ferrari, a former Ben & Jerry’s board member who was with the company from 1997 to 2020, said Cohen’s view of the world was shaped by the events of his youth.
“We were brought up at a time when the military, the government was just completely out of control,” he said. “We’re both children of the sixties, the Vietnam War and the new futility of war and the way war is used by the military-industrial complex and politics,” Ferrari added, pointing to the peace symbol he wore around his neck.
Jeff Furman, who has known Cohen for nearly 50 years and once served as Ben & Jerry’s in-house legal counsel, acknowledged that his generation’s views on Ukraine were informed by America’s misadventures in Vietnam.
“There’s a history of why this war is happening that’s a little bit more complex than who Putin is,” he said. “When you’ve been misled so many times in the past, you have to take this into consideration when you think about it, and really, really try to know what’s happening.”
Ice-cold activism
Politics has been a part of the Ben & Jerry’s brand since Cohen and his partner Jerry Greenfield started selling ice cream out of an abandoned gas station in 1978.
The company’s look and ethos were pure 1960s; they named one of their early flavors, Cherry Garcia, after the lead guitarist of the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia, whose psychedelic riffs formed the soundtrack of the hippy counterculture.
Social justice was one of the duo’s secret ingredients. For the first-year anniversary of the gas station shop’s opening, they gave away free ice cream for a day. On the flyers printed to promote the event was a quote from Cohen: “Business has a responsibility to give back to the community from which it draws its support.”
In 1985, after the company went public, they used some of the shares to endow a foundation working for progressive social change and committed Ben & Jerry’s to spend 7.5 percent of its pretax profits on philanthropy.
In the early years, the company instituted a five-to-one cap on the ratio between the salary of the highest-earning executive and its lowest-paid worker, dropping it only when Cohen was about to step down as CEO in the mid-1990sand they were struggling to find a successor willing to work for what they were offering.
Most companies try to separate politics and business. Cohen and Greenfield cheerfully mixed them up and served them in a tub of creamy deliciousness (the company’s rich, fatty flavors were in part driven by Cohen’s sinus problems, which dulls his taste).
In 1988, Cohen founded 1% for Peace, a nonprofit organization seeking to “redirect one percent of the national defense budget to fund peace-promoting activities and projects.” The project was funded in part through sales of a vanilla and dark-chocolate popsicle they called the Peace Pop.
It was around this time that Cohen opened Ben & Jerry’s in Russia, as “an effort to build a bridge between Communism and capitalism with locally produced Cherry Garcia,” according to a write-up in the New York Times. After years of planning, the outlet opened in the northwestern city of Petrozavodsk in 1992. (The company shut the shop down five years later to prioritize growth in the U.S., and also because of the involvement of local mobsters, said Furman, who was involved in the project.)
Cohen, with co-founder Jerry Greenfield, actress Jane Fonda and other climate activists, in front of the Capitol in 2019 | Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images
Even after Ben & Jerry’s was bought by Unilever in 2000, there were few progressive causes the company wasn’t eager to wade into with a campaign or a fancy new flavor.
The ice cream maker has marketed “Rainforest Crunch” in defense of the Amazon forest, sold “Empower Mint” to combat voter suppression, promoted “Pecan Resist” in opposition to then-U.S. President Donald Trump and launched “Change the Whirled” in partnership with Colin Kaepernick, the American football quarterback whose sports career ended after he started taking a knee during the national anthem in protest of police brutality.
More recently, however, the relationship between Cohen, Greenfield and Unilever has been rockier. In 2021, Ben & Jerry’s announced it would stop doing business in the Palestinian territories. Cohen and Greenfield, who are Jewish, defended the company’s decision in an op-ed in the New York Times.
After the move sparked political backlash, Unilever transferred its license to a local producer, only to be sued by Ben & Jerry’s. In December 2022, Unilever announced in a one-sentence statement that its litigation with its subsidiary “has been resolved.”Ben & Jerry’s ice cream continues to be sold throughout Israel and the West Bank, according to a Unilever spokesperson.
Cohen himself is no stranger to activism: Earlier this month, he was arrested and detained for a few hours for taking part in a sit-in in front of the U.S. Department of Justice, where he was protesting the prosecution of the activist and WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange.
Unilever declined to comment on Cohen’s views. “Ben Cohen no longer has an operational role in Ben & Jerry’s, and his comments are made in a personal capacity,” a spokesperson said.
Ben & Jerry’s did not respond to a request for comment.
The world according to Ben
For Cohen, the war in Ukraine wasn’t just a tragedy. It was, in a sense, a vindication. In 1998, a group he created called Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities published a full-page ad in the New York Times titled “Hey, let’s scare the Russians.”
The target of the ad was a proposal to expand NATO “toward Russia’s very borders,” with the inclusion of Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. Doing so, the ad asserted, would provide Russians with “the same feeling of peace and security Americans would have if Russia were in a military alliance with Canada and Mexico, armed to the teeth.”
Cohen is by no means alone in this view of recent history. The American scholar John Mearsheimer, a prominent expert in international relations, has argued that the “trouble over Ukraine” started after the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest when the alliance opened the door to membership for Ukraine and Georgia.
In the U.S., this point has been echoed by progressive outlets and thinkers, such as Jeffrey Sachs, the linguist Noam Chomsky, or most recently by the American philosopher, activist and longest-of-long-shots, third-party presidential candidate Cornel West.
“We told them after they disbanded the Warsaw Pact that we could not expand NATO, not one inch. And we did that, we lied,” said Dennis Fritz, a retired U.S. Air Force official and the head of the Eisenhower Media Network — which describes itself as a group of “National Security Veteran experts, who’ve been there, done that and have an independent, alternative story to tell.”
It was Fritz’s organization that argued in a May 2023 ad in the New York Times that although the “immediate cause” of the “disastrous” war in Ukraine was Russia’s invasion, “the plans and actions to expand NATO to Russia’s borders served to provoke Russian fears.”
The ad noted that American foreign policy heavyweights, including Robert Gates and Henry Kissinger, had warned of the dangers of NATO expansion. “Why did the U.S. persist in expanding NATO despite such warnings?” it asked. “Profit from weapons sales was a major factor.”
Cohen andGreenfield announce a new flavor, Justice Remix’d, in 2019 | Win McNamee/Getty Images
When I spoke to Cohen, the group’s primary donor, according to Fritz, he echoed the ad’s key points, saying U.S. arms manufacturers saw NATO’s expansion as a “financial bonanza.”
“In the end, money won,” he said with a resigned tone. “And today, not only are they providing weapons to all the new NATO countries, but they’re providing weapons to Ukraine.”
I told Cohen I could understand his opposition to the war and follow his critique of U.S. foreign policy, but I couldn’t grasp how he could take a position that put him in the same corner as a government that is bombing civilians. He refused to be drawn in.
“I’m not supporting Russia, I’m not supporting Ukraine,” he said. “I’m supporting negotiations to end the war instead of providing more weapons to continue the war.”
The Grayzone
I tried to get a better answer when I spoke to Aaron Maté, the Canadian-born journalist who won the award for “defense reporting and analysis” that Cohen was instrumental in funding.
Named after the late Pierre Sprey, a defense analyst who campaigned against the development of F-35 fighter jets as overly complex and expensive, the award recognized Maté’s “continued work dissecting establishment propaganda on issues such as Russian interference in U.S. politics, or the war in Syria.”
Maté, who was photographed with Cohen’s arm around his shoulders at the awards ceremony in March, writes for the Grayzone, a far-left website that has acquired a reputation for publishing stories backing the narratives of authoritarian regimes like Putin’s Russia or Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. His reports deny the use of chemical weapons against civilians in Syria, and he has briefed the U.N. Security Council at Moscow’s invitation.
When I spoke to Maté, he was friendly but guarded. (The Pierre Sprey award noted that “his empiricist reporting give the lie to the charge of ‘disinformation’ routinely leveled by those whose nostrums he challenges.”)
He was happy however to walk me through his claims that, based on statements by U.S. officials since the start of the war, Washington is using Kyiv to wage a “proxy war” against Moscow. Much of his information, he said, came from Western journalism. “I point out examples where, buried at the bottom of articles, sometimes the truth is admitted,” he explained.
He declined to be described as pro-Putin. “That kind of ‘guilt-by-association’ reasoning is not serious thinking,” he said. “It’s not how adults think about things.” When I asked if he believed that Russia had committed war crimes in Ukraine, he answered: “I’m sure they have. I’ve never heard of a war where war crimes are not committed.”
Still, he said, the U.S. was responsible for “prolonging” the war and “sabotaging the diplomacy that could have ended it.”
‘Come to Ukraine’
The best answer I got to my question came not from Cohen or others in his circle but from a fellow traveler who hasn’t chosen to follow critics of NATO on their latest journey.
A self-described “radical anti-imperialist,” Gilbert Achcar is a professor of development studies and international relations at SOAS University of London. He has described the expansion of NATO in the 1990s as a decision that “laid the ground for a new cold war” pitting the West against Russia and China.
But while he sees the war in Ukraine as the latest chapter in this showdown, he has warned against calls for a rush to the negotiating table. Instead, he has advocated for the complete withdrawal of Russia from Ukraine and “the delivery of defensive weapons to the victims of aggression with no strings attached.”
“To give those who are fighting a just war the means to fight against a much more powerful aggressor is an elementary internationalist duty,” he wrote three days after Russia launched its attack on Kyiv, comparing the invasion to the U.S.’s intervention in Vietnam.
Achcar said he understood the conclusions being drawn by people like Cohen about Washington’s interventions in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. But, he said, “it leads a lot of people on the left into … [a] knee-jerk opposition to anything the United States does.”
What they fail to account for, however, is the Ukrainian people.
“In a way, part of the Western left is ethnocentric,” said Achcar, who was born in Senegal and grew up in Lebanon. “They look at the whole world just by their opposition to their own government and therefore forget about other people’s rights.”
Cohen, with late-night TV host Jimmy Fallon in 2011 | Mike Coppola/Getty Images for Ben & Jerry’s
His point was echoed in the last conversation I had when researching this article, with Tymofiy Mylovanov, president of the Kyiv School of Economics and a former economy minister.
“It doesn’t really matter who promised what to whom in the 1990s,” Mylovanov said. “What matters is that there was Mariupol and Bucha, where tens of thousands of people were killed.”
Mylovanov taught economics at the University of Pittsburgh until he returned to Ukraine four days before Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“Things like war are difficult to understand unless you experience them,” he said. “This is very easy to get confused when you are sitting, you know, somewhere far from the facts and you have surrounded yourself by an echo chamber of people and sources that you agree with.”
“In that sense,” he added. “I invite these people to come to Ukraine and judge for themselves what the truth is.”
KYIV — Washington is investigating reports that U.S. military vehicles were used in raids on Russia, a White House official said Wednesday, warning Ukraine and pro-Ukraine forces against using U.S. equipment to attack inside Russia.
Two pro-Ukraine Russian paramilitary groups claimed responsibility for an incursion Monday into Russia’s Belgorod region from Ukraine, in which they overran several small villages. Moscow said Wednesday it had defeated the groups, killing more than 70 people and destroying U.S.-made military vehicles.
U.S. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said Wednesday the White House is “looking into those reports that the U.S. equipment and vehicles could have been involved,” hinting at frustration in Washington.
“We’ve been pretty darn clear: We don’t support the use of U.S.-made equipment for attacks inside Russia … we’ve been clear about that with the Ukrainians,” Kirby said. “I won’t get into private discussions that we’re having with them. But I think we’ve been nothing but consistent about our concerns in that regard.”
Pentagon spokesperson Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder on Tuesday said the U.S. had not authorized nor received Ukrainian requests for transferring equipment to paramilitary groups. He also expressed doubts about the Russian reports and images appearing to show U.S.-made vehicles.
“I don’t know if it’s true or not, in terms of the veracity of that imagery,” said Ryder. “You’ll recall [this week] there were some bogus images of reported, alleged explosions at the Pentagon. So, you know, we just — all of us, both within the [defense department] and I’m sure in the … journalistic community, have to take a look at these things and make sure we get the facts before we make assumptions.”
Ukraine has denied involvement in the attack, saying the two groups — Legion of Free Russia and Russian Volunteer Corps — consist only of Russian citizens who are fighting on Kyiv’s side, aiming to create a demilitarized zone on the border with Ukraine.
Andriy Cherniak, a representative of Ukraine’s Military Intelligence or HUR, told POLITICO that military aid provided by the U.S. and other Western allies is strictly limited for use by the Ukrainian army.
“Every bullet is tracked not only by us but also by our Western allies,” Cherniak said, adding he did not know where the paramilitary groups got the U.S.-made vehicles. While he insisted the groups acted on their own, Cherniak said HUR has been in contact with them and has observed increased anti-Putin sentiment among Russians.
“Our main goal is to protect Ukraine. For us, those are Russian citizens who are against Putin and want to shake his regime. So we work with whoever we can to reach our main goal,” Cherniak said. “More and more in Russia understand they don’t want to die for [Putin] at war.”
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu described the groups as Ukrainian “nationalists” during a televised meeting with Russian military officials and displayed images of two severely damaged armored vehicles that look similar to those provided by the U.S. to Ukraine as part of military aid.
“During counterterrorist operations, units of nationalist formations were blocked and defeated by air strikes and artillery fire and active actions. The remnants of the nationalists were thrown into the territory of Ukraine, where the fight continued until they were completely eliminated,” Shoigu said.
The two groups themselves, however, claimed they were able to return to Ukraine with only two killed and 10 injured from the Legion of Free Russia, as well as two injured from the Russian Volunteer Corps.
When asked about how they got U.S.-made vehicles, Russian Volunteer Corps’ Denis Kapustin, aka “White Rex” (the same name as his white nationalist clothing line), joked that his fighters could have purchased them at any military store — mocking remarks from Vladimir Putin about how Russian-backed militants got weapons to fight Ukraine in Donbas in 2014.
Kapustin also claimed his group had taken back military vehicles stolen from Ukraine.
“The goal of our peacekeeping operation into Belgorod region was also to destroy law enforcement serving Putin’s regime and also demonstrate to the people of Russia that resistance is possible,” the Legion of Free Russia said Tuesday.
The Russian Volunteer Corps also claimed they wanted to show Russians they are not protected by Putin.
Alexander Ward reported from and Lara Seligman contributed reporting from Washington.
LONDON — Frost/Nixon it was not. But at least the golf course got a good plug.
Brexit firebrand Nigel Farage bagged a half an hour sit-down interview with Donald Trump on Wednesday as part of the former U.S. president’s trip to his Turnberry golf resort in Scotland.
The hardball questions just kept on coming as the two men got stuck into everything from how great Trump is to just how massively he’s going to win the next election.
POLITICO tuned in to the GB News session so you didn’t have to.
Trump could end the Ukraine war in 24 hours
Trump sees your complex, grinding, war in Ukraine and raises you the deal-making credentials he honed having precisely one meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
“If I were president, I will end that war in one day — it’ll take 24 hours,” the ex-POTUS declared. And he added: “That deal would be easy.”
Time for a probing follow-up from the host to tease out the precise details of Trump’s big plan? Over to you Nige! “I think we’d all love to see that war stop,” the hard-hitting host beamed.
Nicola Sturgeon bad, Sean Connery great
Safe to say Scotland’s former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon — who quit a few months back and whose ruling Scottish National Party now faces the biggest crisis of its time at the top — is not on Trump’s Christmas card list.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever met her,” Trump said. “I’m not sure that I ever met her.” But he knew one thing for certain. Sturgeon “didn’t love Scotland” and has no respect for people who come to the country and spend “a lot of money.” Whoever could he mean?
One Scot did get a thumbs-up though. Sean Connery, who backed Trump’s golf course and was therefore “great, a tough guy.”
Boris Johnson was a far-leftist
Boris Johnson’s big problem? Not the bevy of scandals that helped call time on the beleaguered Conservative British prime minister, that’s for sure.
Instead, Trump reckons it was Johnson’s latter-day conversion to hard-left politics, which went shamefully unreported on by every single British political media outlet at the time. “They really weren’t staying Conservative,” he said of Johnson’s government. “They were … literally going far left. It never made sense.”
Joe Biden isn’t coming to King Charles’ coronation because he’s asleep?
Paging the royals: Turns out Joe Biden — who is sending First Lady Jill Biden to King Charles’ coronation this weekend — won’t be there because he is … catching some Zs. “He’s not running the country. He’s now in Delaware, sleeping,” Trump said.
Don’t worry, though: Trump explained how Biden’s government is actually being run by “a very smart group of Marxists or communists, or whatever you want to call them.” Johnson should hang out with those guys!
Meghan Markle ain’t getting a Christmas card either
Trump found time to wade into Britain’s never-ending culture war over the royals, ably assisted by a totally-straight-bat question from Farage who said Britain would be “better off without” Prince Harry turning up to the weekend festival of flag-waving.
Harry’s wife Meghan Markle has, Trump said, been “very disrespectful to the queen, frankly,” and there was “just no reason to do that.” Harry, whose tell-all memoir recently rocked the royals, “said some terrible things” in a book that was “just horrible.”
But do you know one person who really, really respected the queen? Donald J. Trump, who “got to know her very well over the last couple of years” and revealed he once asked her who her favorite president was.
Trump didn’t get an answer, he told Farage — but we’re sure he had one in mind.
Trump’s golf course really is just absolutely brilliant
Only got half an hour with the indicted former leader of the free world now leading the Republican pack for 2024? Better keep those questions tight!
Happily, Farage got the key stuff in, remarking on how “unbelievable” Trump’s Turnberry golf course is, and how it slots neatly into “the best portfolio of golf courses anyone has ever owned.”
“We come here from this golf course,” Farage helpfully told Trump, from the golf course. “You turned this golf course around. It’s now the No. 1 course in the whole of Britain and Europe. You’ve got this magnificent hotel. You must have missed this place?”
Trump, it turns out, certainly had missed the place. He is, after all, a man with “very powerful ideas on golf and where it should go.” A news ticker reminded us Turnberry is the No. 1 rated golf course in Europe.
Legal troubles? What legal troubles?
A couple of minutes still on the clock, Farage danced delicately around Trump’s recent courtroom drama, saying he had never seen the former president “looking so dejected” as when he sat before the Manhattan Criminal Court last month.
Trump predicted the drama would “go away immediately” if he wasn’t running for president. But he made clear there are still some burning issues keeping him going: Namely, taking on the “sick, horrible people” hounding him through the courts and relitigating the 2020 election result.
In an actual flash of tension, Farage delicately suggested Trump won in 2016 by tapping into voters’ concerns rather than reeling off his own grievances. “You brought this up,” the former president shot back.
At least they ended it on a positive note. Trump said a vote for him in 2024 would “get rid of crime — because our cities, Democrat-run, are crime-infested rat holes.” Unlike Trump Turnberry, which is the No. 1 rated golf course in Europe!
BELFAST — He fought for peace in Northern Ireland — and now George Mitchell is fighting for his life.
The former U.S. Senate majority leader from Maine, who became a diplomatic superhero in Northern Ireland after leading years of painstaking talks to produce the Good Friday Agreement, may be visiting his adopted homeland for the final time.
He hopes not. But, as Mitchell reflected in an interview with POLITICO, he simply cannot know.
Welcomed by well-wishers young and old this week as he returned to Belfast and to Queen’s University, where he served as chancellor for a decade following his peacemaking triumph in 1998, Mitchell opened a conference marking the accord’s 25th anniversary.
For nearly 45 minutes, Mitchell argued passionately for the power of compromise, his message leavened with well-timed jokes poking fun at the entrenched attitudes — and tough-to-decipher vowels — that tested him in Northern Ireland.
You’d never have known that Mitchell, 89, was making his first public speech in three years — nor that he had only recently ended years of chemotherapy in a battle with leukemia that came close to killing him.
“This is a gift by the grace of God to be able to come back here. I’ve had a rough couple of years,” he said.
“I retired from my law firm at the end of 2019, planning with my wife a life of travel and doing a lot of things that we hadn’t done. Then COVID hit and I was almost immediately diagnosed with acute leukemia. So I’ve been pretty sick. I haven’t been able to do very much.
“Initially I underwent intensive chemotherapy, which was very severe. I didn’t read a newspaper, I didn’t watch a minute of television. I was bedridden and very, very sick for about three months. Then I was on chemo for about two-and-a-half years,” he said. “The doctors said to me: ‘There’s a limit to how much chemotherapy you can take. We have to take you off.’ The disease may return. It may be six months, it may be two years — or who knows.”
‘Nothing in politics is impossible’
Mitchell now describes himself as pain-free and in remission.
He spoke in a Queen’s office overlooking the university’s entrance, where a bronze bust honoring him has just been unveiled by former U.S. President Bill Clinton and the former British and Irish prime ministers, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern. In April 1998, the two premiers joined Mitchell for the intensive final days of the talks in Belfast, while Clinton cajoled Northern Ireland’s polarized politicians by phone from the White House.
Several other figures who helped deliver that breakthrough are no longer alive, including Northern Ireland’s joint Nobel Peace Prize laureates from 1998, John Hume and David Trimble, both of whom have died since the last Good Friday commemorations five years ago.
George Mitchell (C) attends a gala marking the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement | Pool photo by Charles McQuillan/AFP via Getty Images
In his speech, Mitchell paid equal tribute to Hume, the moderate Irish nationalist leader who opposed Irish Republican Army violence and laid the intellectual architecture for the Good Friday deal; and Trimble, the prickly legal scholar who risked splitting his Ulster Unionist Party by accepting a deal that allowed IRA prisoners to walk free and ex-IRA chiefs to join a new cross-community government without clear-cut guarantees the outlawed group would disarm.
“Without John Hume, there would not have been a peace process. Without David Trimble, there would not have been a peace agreement,” Mitchell said to thunderous applause from the crowd, among them most of today’s crop of British unionist, Irish nationalist and middle-ground leaders.
Left unsaid was that others wanted to see Mitchell himself share that same Nobel prize, given his central role in sustaining hope in the talks after what U.S. President Joe Biden last week described as “700 days of failure.”
Indeed, it has been a common refrain this week among those now seeking to revive Northern Ireland’s shuttered regional government — the centerpiece of a much broader Good Friday package that included police reform, prisoner releases and paramilitary disarmament — that they wish Mitchell was still in the market for one more Belfast mission.
Mitchell offered only raised eyebrows and a wry smile when asked if he’d like to lead one more round of talks at Stormont, the government complex overlooking Belfast.
But he expressed unreserved optimism that the Democratic Unionists — the party that physically tried to block him from taking his chair when the talks began in June 1996, and spent years condemning the peace process as a sellout to IRA terror — will find a way to return to a cross-community government with the Irish republicans of Sinn Féin.
The DUP has refused to revive the coalition government since May 2022 elections, citing its opposition to post-Brexit trade rules that treat Northern Ireland differently from the rest of the U.K.
Mitchell thinks Northern Ireland’s political fundamentals have evolved since he wrote, in his 1999 book “Making Peace,” that the Good Friday Agreement became possible only because the DUP had abandoned the talks the year before.
“Times and circumstances change,” he said. “Nothing in politics is impossible.
“Political parties change and evolve. Does the Republican Party in the United States today reflect the views of the Republican Party of 20 or even 10 years ago? Does the Democratic Party? The challenge of leadership is to recognize that and to deal with change, all in the broader public interest.”
He also rejected any notion that blame for the current Stormont impasse lies entirely with the DUP. “There isn’t any one villain,” he said. “Everybody’s trying to do what they think is best. The question is: What is best?”
Mitchell stressed that “100 percenters” — people who see “any compromise as weakness” — exist in pretty much every political party on earth, including his own Democrats. And he said no American politician should criticize the depth of political division in Northern Ireland given that, today, the divide in U.S. politics has grown arguably even more noxious.
Former Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern and George Mitchell shake hands during a photocall at the BBC studios, in Belfast in 2008 | Peter Muhly/AFP via Getty Images
Leaders in any democracy, he said, must be ready to absorb criticism from within their own ranks and keep striving for common ground.
“You can’t let the first ‘no’ be the final answer,” he said. “Or the second ‘no,’ or the seventh ‘no.’ You just have to treat everyone with respect and keep at it.”
A final goodbye
Mitchell came face to face with his own mortality during Monday’s unveiling of his bronze bust, drawing big laughs from the crowd as he observed: “When you’re looking at a statue of yourself, you know the end is near.”
But the reality of living with leukemia, which makes him more vulnerable to infections and other threats, draws his mind back to one of his great regrets from the Stormont talks.
“We were at a critical early moment in the talks in the summer of 1996. I was trying to get them going, to adopt a set of rules. It was very complicated, unnecessarily complicated,” he recalled.
With a vote on the rules due that coming Monday, he received an unexpected phone call from Maine. His brother Robbie, who had been fighting leukemia for five years, was close to death. If Mitchell hopped on to the next flight, he might make it back to his hometown of Waterville by Friday night — but he’d risk having the talks fall at their first hurdle.
Mitchell called his brother’s doctor, oncologist Richard Stone at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, to be told that although Robbie’s health was deteriorating and it was impossible to be certain, he might well survive for several weeks longer. Wanting to get the first step of the peace talks banked before negotiations broke for the summer, Mitchell chose to stay in the U.K. over the weekend.
That Saturday night, another call from Waterville confirmed that his older brother had just died.
“I came back to Belfast on Monday and we got those rules adopted. I made it home in time to speak at Robbie’s funeral. But I didn’t see him before he passed away. That’s one of the worst decisions I’ve ever made,” Mitchell said.
A quarter-century later, the same Dr. Stone is now treating the younger Mitchell brother for the same disease. Mitchell has been told that if the cancer returns, his advanced age means chemotherapy must be kept to a bare minimum.
“Medical science has advanced very rapidly in the curing of leukemia. But as the doctors explained to me, chemotherapy is poison and if you take enough of that, that will kill you,” he said. “The doctor also explained to me that, on the other hand, I might go a few years and die of something else.”
Bill Clinton shakes hands with George Mitchell in the Oval Office at the White House after naming the retiring senator to be a special advisor for economic initiatives in Ireland | Paul J. Richards/AFP via Getty Images
Mitchell estimates he’s already flown back and forth to Belfast at least 100 times since 1995. He and his wife, Heather, have approached this trip as if it could be his last — that this week might represent his final goodbye to a vexatious land he’s come to love.
“I honestly don’t know if this is the last time I’ll ever be in Northern Ireland. But my wife and I accept the possibility that it is,” he said. “I told Heather on the way over, we’ve really got to enjoy this and take in the sights and sounds of this beautiful place and the people. My fervent hope is that I’ll be able to come back again.”
MOSCOW — Jailed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich is “cheerful” and doing well as he sits in pre-trial detention, a Russian prison watchdog claimed Monday — the first report on his condition since his arrest on espionage charges.
“At the time of my visit, he was cheerful, there were a lot of jokes during our conversation,” Alexei Melnikov, a member of the Moscow Public Monitoring Commission (ONK), wrote in a post on Telegram late Monday.
Melnikov is the first outsider to have been granted access to the American journalist since his arrest last Wednesday while on an assignment in Yekaterinburg, accused of collecting classified information on a defense company for “the American side.”
No other foreign journalist has been arrested in Russia since the Cold War, and Gershkovich’s case marks a new low for the increasingly fraught relationship between Russia and the United States. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has claimed without evidence that Gershkovich was “caught red-handed,” while the White House has dismissed the case as “ridiculous.” Gershkovich’s employer, the Wall Street Journal, has called the allegations “utter nonsense.”
If found guilty of spying, Gershkovich faces a sentence of 20 years in a penal colony.
The journalist is currently being held alone in a two-person cell while undergoing a period of quarantine to rule out coronavirus infection, according to Melnikov, whose ONK was set up as an independent prison monitoring group, though in recent years it has been purged of its most vocal and Kremlin-critical members.
Melnikov said the cell contains a television with 20 channels, as well as a radio and a fridge. “Meals meet the established standards. Yesterday, for example, for lunch there was cabbage soup, potatoes and chicken, and for breakfast there was porridge,” Melnikov said.
Gershkovich has also been allowed to go for daily walks, according to Melnikov, adding that the journalist had not expressed any complaints and was reading Vasily Grossman’s novel “Life and Fate” from the prison’s library.
The reporter is set to be held in Moscow’s high-security Lefortovo prison pending trial until May 29.
Cases of espionage and treason, their domestic equivalent, are conducted under a veil of secrecy, sheltering them from public scrutiny.
But the general assumption among independent Russia experts is that Gershkovich is being used to boost Russia’s negotiating position in a possible future prisoner swap for Russian citizens jailed in the United States.
In December, American basketball player Brittney Griner, jailed in Russia on drug charges, was exchanged for arms dealer Viktor Bout. Though hailed by Griner’s supporters, the deal brokered by Joe Biden’s administration also drew criticism for potentially encouraging Russia to use American citizens as a negotiating tool.
Earlier on Monday, U.S. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said the government was “pushing hard” for Gershkovich’s release and was following the case closely.
BERLIN — The saga of the Chinese spy balloon has plunged relations between Washington and Beijing into fresh crisis. For European governments, that spells all kinds of trouble.
With relations worsening between the two superpowers, EU leaders seem likely to come under intensifying pressure from the White House to pick sides and join forces against China, just as they were hoping for a thaw in tricky relations with Beijing.
And then there’s the war.
Russia is preparing a major offensive in Ukraine over the next few weeks but EU diplomats fear the balloon incident risks distracting President Joe Biden’s team at exactly the moment when American support for Kyiv will be needed most.
“We never expected 2023 to be easy, but this is off to a really tough start,” one European diplomat said.
On Saturday, the U.S. shot down what it identified as a Chinese surveillance balloon off the coast of South Carolina with an air-to-air missile from an F-22 stealth fighter jet.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken indefinitely postponed a visit to Beijing that had been scheduled for this week, the first such trip planned for a U.S. cabinet-level official under Biden’s presidency.
Images of the incident have circulated in dramatic video footage on social media, taken mostly by excited onlookers cheering the theatrical show of military might.
Beijing insists the giant solar panel-powered object was a “civilian airship” that went off course while conducting “mainly meteorological” research. In response to the missile strike, the Chinese government expressed “strong dissatisfaction” and protested against the use of force by the U.S. to attack the unmanned, civilian craft. It added that it would “reserve the right to take further necessary responses.”
U.S. foreign policy, while still heavily invested in supporting Ukraine militarily, may be distracted by the sharpening clashes with Beijing. Right-wing U.S. politicians have been calling for more attention on China since Russia invaded Ukraine a year ago.
As the “U.S.-China rivalry sharpens, there will be more pressure on Europeans, whose approach to China is very diverse, to pick sides,” said Ricardo Borges de Castro, head of the Europe in the World Program at the European Policy Centre, a Brussels-based think tank. “The reality is, if the world becomes increasingly dominated by two poles — U.S. and China — the EU and Europeans will need to pick sides for as long as Europe’s security and defense depends on the U.S. umbrella.”
Russia, in the meantime, is expected to launch massive offensives in just a few weeks, when the harshest winter season comes to an end, according to Ukrainian officials.
A plane flies past the Chinese spy balloon (top right) | Nell Redmond/EPA
“Washington will be busy with Beijing for some time now,” a senior EU diplomat said on Sunday. “It’s not goodnews for the EU because Russia is still the main concern.”
Bad timing
For Europe, the incident also comes at an inconvenient moment as senior officials have been preparing to re-engage with Beijing.
The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, is understood to be making plans for a trip to Beijing in April, when he would also be expected to travel to Japan for a G7 ministerial meeting. Separately, French President Emmanuel Macron has also announced his intention to meet President Xi Jinping in the Chinese capital early this year; he would be interested in taking a top official from the European Commission to join him, according to an official with knowledge of the plans.
The latest U.S.-China flare-up “means that we would now have to be watching how badly China reacts, and whether these [planned] trips will be treated as a propaganda success by Beijing in splitting up the transatlantic ties,” a diplomat said on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to speak on this subject.
“In the wake of the Ukraine war, the China policy coordination between both sides of the [the Atlantic is] losing steam,” said Reinhard Bütikofer, chair of the European Parliament’s delegation on relations with China. “While Washington D.C. enhances pressure against Beijing particularly on the technological front and in the Taiwan context, Brussels, Berlin and Paris show new hesitancy.”
Further complicating matters is Beijing’s apparent lack of interest in helping the West put pressure on Vladimir Putin to end the war in Ukraine.
Worse, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, China has emerged as the dominant supplier of dual-use goods to Russia, providing technology that Moscow’s military needs to prosecute its invasion. Chinese state-owned defense companies have shipped navigation equipment, jamming technology and fighter-jet parts to sanctioned Russian government-owned defense companies, according to the article.
European leaders have repeatedly warned Beijing not to aid Moscow militarily.
China’s top foreign policy official, Wang Yi, has dropped a plan to visit Brussels even though he would be traveling to Germany for the Munich Security Conference in February, two diplomats told POLITICO.
Europe’s reaction to the balloon incident was muted. The EU merely noted the U.S.’s right to defend its airspace. “Safety and protection of airspace is an issue of national security and therefore a competence, responsibility and prerogative” of the specific state or states involved, an EU spokesperson said on Sunday.
China’s Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu visited Moscow last week to reassure his Russian counterparts | Johannes Eisele/ AFP via Getty Images
Few European countries supported the Biden administration’s decision in public, highlighting a general sense of reluctance to aggravate Beijing. One of the exceptions was Estonia, where Foreign Minister Urmas Reinsalu, retweeting a BBC report about the balloon’s downing, said: “I support USA operation to defend its sovereignty. I fully condemn provocations jeopardising USA national security.”
Other U.S. allies did not hold back. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau praised the operation, tweeting “Canada strongly supports this action — we’ll keep working together … on our security and defense.”
South Korea’s Foreign Minister Park Jin, during a visit to Washington, said “I sufficiently understand the decision to postpone Secretary [Blinken]’s visit to China and I think that China should make a swift and very sincere explanation about what happened.”
Tom Tugendhat, U.K. security minister and a long-time skeptic of Beijing, called for concern over other forms of Chinese threats. “Worried about being spied on from the sky? Look at what some apps are collecting on your phone and consider your cyber security. Some risks are much closer to home,” he tweeted.
EU foreign policy in 2023 may be defined by which of these expires first: European indecision over China, or America’s appetite for providing Europe’s defense.
DAVOS, Switzerland — The World Economic Forum’s annual conclave in the Swiss Alps is the greatest intersection of wealth and political power on the global calendar, but this year the balance is shifting.
Each January, forum organizers became used to announcing another record-setting list of national leaders, global officials and royalty making their way to the exclusive gathering.
WEF would attract even globalization’s strongest skeptics: from U.S. President Donald Trump to former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and climate campaigner Greta Thunberg.
While there are 52 heads of state of government heading to Davos this year, top-tier leaders are missing. U.S. President Joe Biden and his Chinese and Russian counterparts Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are all giving it a miss.
French President Emmanuel Macron, who promised to Make the Planet Great Again, is also skipping the talkfest, along with new British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and re-elected Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Instead, it’s a European-heavy guest list: German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is the only leader from a G7 country, sharing top billing with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, another German.
Even within European royal ranks, the forum this year is attracting the likes of Queen Maxima of the Netherlands — a U.N. financial inclusion envoy — rather than environmental campaigners such as King Charles and Prince William.
Some of the most prominent tech companies are dialing back their participation amid rounds of heavy layoffs.
And the biggest party hosts in town — Russian oligarchs — remain forced out by sanctions levied since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has unrivaled star wattage among the Davos crowd — but even a video appearance from him this year will be treated as below par, given how many of them he now does.
It’s the C-Suite, stupid!
With the global political elite mostly absent, WEF is this year choosing to focus on rising CEO numbers.
Among 2,700 participants in official WEF sessions, “we’re likely to surpass the old record from 2020 with 600 global CEOs — including 1,500 C-suite level overall,” said WEF’s head of digital and marketing George Schmitt, who added that 80 of the CEOs are first-timers in Davos.
Those who claim Davos is dead are yet to be proven right, but WEF’s critics now spread beyond the activist world who have long disparaged the juxtaposition of private jet opulence with hand-wringing panels about global poverty.
WEF would attract even globalization’s strongest skeptics: from U.S. President Donald Trump to former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and climate campaigner Greta Thunberg | Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
The U.S. delegation includes cabinet members such as climate envoy John Kerry, who will camp out in Davos for most of the week, but others such as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen are skipping.
Nobel Peace Prize winner Beatrice Fihn, who campaigns to eliminate nuclear weapons, said she “genuinely had forgotten that Davos is still happening.”
“The format seems slightly dated now. The private jets and oligarch parties are no longer in step with modern biz [business] life,” said Scott Colvin, a Davos veteran who is now public affairs director at Aviva. “The events around COP [the U.N.’s annual climate summit] now feel a bigger deal, given their focus on a specific global policy objective,” he added.
WEF is a victim of its own success and stuck in a demographic bind.
The forum’s operating model requires it to provide a place for the world’s most powerful and influential people to talk.
WEF’s efforts to bring the uber-elite together is a stark annual reminder that they don’t look like the rest of us.
The best ratio of female participants in WEF’s 52-year history of in-person gatherings was 24 percent, in 2020.
Despite years of exhortations and incentives for members to bring more female colleagues, the number often hovers in the range of 18 percent to 20 percent. A WEF spokesperson said that 42 percent of speakers this year will be women.
WEF aims for global reach — but often lands in the middle of the Atlantic instead.
This year Europe is supplying the most political leaders, while the U.S. corporate delegation will once again massively outweigh the others. The 700 Americans participating this year outnumber the Chinese delegation roughly 20 to 1.
DUBLIN — U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday appointed the late Robert Kennedy’s grandson Joe to be the next U.S. envoy to Northern Ireland, setting the stage for an increased American focus on the divided U.K. region in the run-up to the 25th anniversary of its troubled Good Friday peace agreement.
After the news of his appointment — first reported by POLITICO — Joe Kennedy III pledged to “reaffirm U.S. commitment to Northern Ireland and to promote economic prosperity and opportunity for all its people.”
Kennedy previously served as a Massachusetts congressman before losing a Senate bid in 2020. In his new role, he will have, in historical terms, big shoes to fill. The 1998 Good Friday deal was overseen by former U.S. Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, the first and by far most important U.S. envoy to Northern Ireland. Mitchell was appointed by Bill Clinton, the only U.S. president to adopt a hands-on interest in ending a three-decade conflict that left more than 3,600 dead.
American envoys have wielded progressively less influence since the days of President George W. Bush, when his State Department appointees Richard Haass and Mitchell Reiss focused on pushing the outlawed Irish Republican Army to disarm and renounce violence and its allied Sinn Féin party to accept the lawful authority of Northern Ireland’s police force.
Those once unthinkable moves, achieved in 2005 and 2007 respectively, paved the way for the revival of a power-sharing government uniting British unionists and Irish nationalists — a core goal of the Good Friday accord that once again has collapsed amid Brexit-driven divisions.
But Barack Obama’s envoy, former Senator Gary Hart, and Donald Trump’s man, former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, both came and went without recording any tangible gains. The position has been idle for nearly two years, during which the breakdown-prone Northern Ireland Executive has fallen apart again.
U.S. officials briefed that Kennedy would avoid the political stalemate and focus on economic matters, particularly the prospect of wooing more U.S. corporate investment and jobs to Northern Ireland.
That was also the initial line taken when Clinton — facing British opposition to any direct U.S. intervention within a part of the United Kingdom — first appointed Mitchell to a Belfast role in December 1994. Gradually, Mitchell won enough cross-community trust to become the chairman of the talks, a role that required disciplined and patient diplomacy, including for years after the Good Friday breakthrough.
Officially, all sides welcomed the much-leaked news of Kennedy’s appointment, which is widely seen in Washington circles as a Biden effort to give Kennedy a new political platform following his failed Senate bid.
“The U.S. has been pivotal in supporting peace, stability and prosperity for Northern Ireland. We will continue working together to make Northern Ireland a great place to live, work and do business,” said Chris Heaton-Harris, Britain’s secretary of state for Northern Ireland. “I look forward to welcoming Joe to Belfast in the near future.”
Behind the scenes, some in unionist and British government circles said the Biden administration hadn’t learned a key lesson from the high-profile triumph of Mitchell and low-key effectiveness of the Bush-era envoys — to avoid appointing figures firmly rooted in Irish America and the Catholic side of the traditional divide.
“We seem to be getting one of these classic Irish-American envoys who has no idea what we’re about — that we’re British, not Irish,” one unionist politician involved in the Good Friday negotiations told POLITICO. “We will be polite, even if we have to grit our teeth at times.”
Northern Ireland’s main pro-Brexit party, the Democratic Unionists, offered no comment. The party, which spent a decade opposing the Good Friday deal, has refused to revive power-sharing since May’s Northern Ireland Assembly election, which left them trailing Sinn Féin for the first time.
DUP leaders insist their veto on cooperation has nothing to do with this election setback and everything to do with the post-Brexit trade protocol, which keeps Northern Ireland subject to EU goods rules and makes it harder to receive shipments from Britain. The party recently denounced a visiting U.S. congressional delegation as biased against them.
Unsurprisingly, Sinn Féin and the Irish government offered fulsome praise for Biden’s appointment of a Kennedy.
“I want to thank President Biden and his administration for this appointment. It is a clear demonstration of the president’s direct engagement with Ireland as well as the enduring U.S. commitment to supporting peace in, and building the prosperity of, Northern Ireland,” said Micheál Martin who, until this past weekend, was Ireland’s prime minister. He has just been appointed foreign minister — responsible for leading diplomatic efforts in Northern Ireland — as part of his government’s coalition agreement in Dublin.
“Joe Kennedy has a strong record in promoting the interests of the north and I look forward to working with him,” said Sinn Féin’s would-be first minister of Northern Ireland, Michelle O’Neill.
The DUP’s moderate rival for unionist votes, Ulster Unionist Party leader Doug Beattie, said his community needed to keep an open mind and see Kennedy’s arrival as an opportunity, not a threat.
“Unionism has suffered from not engaging fully with the U.S.A. and this has been something my party has been keen to rebalance,” said Beattie, who welcomed Kennedy’s stated “focus on economic ties.”
BUDAPEST — On an early morning drive from his residence to the U.S. Embassy, David Pressman kept a close eye on his surroundings.
Look, the new U.S. ambassador to Hungary said, pointing out the government-funded billboards dotting Budapest’s streets.
“The Brussels sanctions are ruining us!” they declared, the word “sanctions” emblazoned across a flying bomb.
One by one, the posters whizzed by, blaring the same ominous warning.
These types of signs have been a feature of the Budapest landscape for years, spinning up a conspiratorial gallery of foreign enemies Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has used to instill fear and anger in the Hungarian population as he vies to keep his grip on power.
But historically, the U.S. — like many of its Western partners — has stayed relatively quiet in public about these targeted messaging campaigns and the rise of anti-Western government rhetoric, which often reflected the country’s democratic backsliding and the local influence of Russian propaganda.
With Pressman, that has changed. Pressman’s presence alone is an implicit rebuke of Orbán’s strongman, culture wars agenda. Pressman is a human rights lawyer, has a male partner and has worked closely with George Clooney, a totem of the Fox News-caricatured “Hollywood liberal elite.”
And in just two months on the job, the new American ambassador has become a household name in Budapest for his willingness to call out — and even troll — the Orbán government’s overtly propagandistic and conspiratorial bombast.
There is, Pressman said in his first interview since taking his post, a “need to be both respectful and more candid about what we’re seeing.”
Recently, the U.S. embassy posted a once-unthinkable video quiz challenging people to guess whether quotes came from Hungarian public figures or Russian President Vladimir Putin. The answer, of course, was never Putin.
“I’m concerned when I see missiles flying from Moscow into children’s playgrounds in Kyiv — and see the foreign minister of Hungary flying into Moscow to do Facebook Live conferences from Gazprom headquarters,” the ambassador told POLITICO.
For this approach, Pressman has become the latest foreign enemy in Budapest.
In a country that recently banned the portrayal of LGBTQ+ content to minors, Pressman has put his personal life on display | Janka Szitas/U.S. Embassy Budapest
The newspapers cover him regularly — “Clown diplomacy,” one declared. State-owned and Orbán-friendly TV channels are similarly obsessed, portraying the American ambassador as a secretive colonial overlord sent to meddle in Hungary’s internal affairs.
And in a country that recently banned the portrayal of LGBTQ+ content to minors, Pressman has put his personal life on display, posting photos of his partner and their two kids as they arrived to present his diplomatic credentials.
“I think it speaks for itself,” Pressman said. “Sometimes the power of example,” he added, “is the most powerful way we can communicate about shared values and concerns.”
In many ways, Pressman’s story is emblematic of the evolution of the broader relationship between the U.S. and Hungary. For years, an ambassador posting in Budapest was primarily considered a symbolic role, reserved for wealthy political donors with no foreign policy expertise.
Hungary, the thinking went, was a reliable European Union and NATO member that required little extra attention in Washington. But the erosion of democratic norms — combined with Moscow’s influence in Budapest and Russia’s bombardment of Ukraine — has changed the calculus.
“The stakes right now are huge,” the ambassador said. “The politicization and partisanization of the relationship,” he added, “is not sustainable.”
A pragmatic idealist
Pressman, unlike many of his predecessors, is no novice to U.S. foreign policy.
As a young lawyer, he teamed up with Clooney on a campaign to get those in power to pay attention to atrocities in Darfur — later earning the nickname “Cuz” from Clooney. He also made stops as an aide to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, as a Homeland Security Department official and a White House staffer during the Obama years. In 2014, he landed in New York as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations for special political affairs.
Those experiences — and his resulting relationships across government — have given Pressman the backing to make significant changes to how the U.S. approaches Orbán’s government.
Samantha Power, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author-turned-diplomat, was the one who brought the then-32-year-old Pressman to the White House before working closely together in New York when she became U.N. ambassador. Pressman, she said, was her go-to person for tough assignments.
Once, she recalled, her staff needed to convince China to join sanctions against North Korea after a nuclear test.
“David,” she told POLITICO, “is a person that I entrusted in the day-to-day to work with the Chinese ambassador to extract as robust a set of sanctions as possible.”
“When we see insane Kremlin stories being re-propagated in the Hungarian media, we’re gonna call that out, because we have to”, David Pressman said | Attila Kisbenedek/AFP via Getty images
Pressman, Power recounted, was so well-prepared that it was as if he “got a PhD in iron ore trafficking.” His prep work also paid off. “No one had invested more in advance of the nuclear tests in a relationship with his Chinese counterpart that he could then call upon when it mattered for the United States,” she added.
Now, Hungary matters for the United States. In the last 12 years, Orbán’s ruling Fidesz party has taken control of much of the media landscape, placed allies at the helm of independent state institutions, channeled government resources into political campaigning and nurtured ties to Moscow and Beijing. The development has strained the bedrock of the global democratic order.
On a recent fall day, the ambassador invited POLITICO to visit his home at 7:30 in the morning, as his sons were getting ready to leave for school. He then spent the day racing between meetings with anti-corruption experts, a founding member of Orbán’s ruling Fidesz party, Hungarian students and a fellow ambassador.
At the discussion with anti-corruption campaigners, Pressman placed a large notebook on the table and began scribbling as he tossed out a flurry of questions: Who is involved? How does this work? How do you know that?
Later, Pressman popped into a graffiti-decorated pub and took his seat among a cluster of high school and university students. Again, the questions came quickly: How do your peers see the U.S.? Is there anyone in the government you trust? What comes to mind on Russia?
Pressman is known as an idealist. As the White House National Security Council’s director for war crimes and atrocities, he decorated his office — no bigger than two large filing cabinets — with photos of indicted war criminals the U.S. was trying to apprehend, Power recalled.
But he still professes a pragmatic approach. His goal, he insists, is to build relationships with the Hungarian government — even as he needles it over anti-democratic behavior. The two sides can work together, he noted.
“When we see insane Kremlin stories being re-propagated in the Hungarian media, we’re gonna call that out, because we have to,” he said.
But, Pressman added, “all of that is with the intent to pull us closer together — not to push us apart.”
A troubled relationship
Even before the ambassador’s arrival, anti-American rhetoric had been on the rise in Hungary.
In the government-controlled press, the U.S. is both the boogeyman behind the invasion of Ukraine and the puppet master of Hungary’s opposition parties. Fidesz-linked outlets even spread paranoid conspiracy theories about a U.S. diplomat who died in a traffic accident.
But in recent weeks, the vitriol — and the personal attacks on Pressman — has reached a fever pitch.
As Orbán’s allies have tightened their judicial system vice grip, the EU and others have made strengthening the council a priority | John Thys/AFP via Getty images
One sharp escalation occurred after Pressman posted a photo of himself meeting with two judges from the National Judicial Council.
The group’s bureaucratic name belies its heated symbolic and political importance in Hungary.
The council is meant to help oversee Hungary’s judiciary. So as Orbán’s allies have tightened their judicial system vice grip, the EU and others have made strengthening the council a priority.
Pressman’s decision, just weeks into his job, to sit down with the council’s representatives sparked dozens of articles attacking him and breathless TV coverage.
“Unprecedented serious interference in the judiciary,” blared a headline in the government-linked Origo news portal. “Today what comes to mind is that if we have such friends, then we don’t need enemies,” the Orbán-adjacent Magyar Nemzet newspaper pronounced.
Even in private, Hungarian officials stewed. “His meeting with two infamous judges,” said one senior Hungarian official, ”was a pretty unfortunate beginning.” A spokesperson for the Hungarian government did not respond to questions about Pressman.
Judge Csaba Vasvári — the council’s spokesperson and one of the figures who met with the ambassador — told POLITICO the public pillorying is fueling a “strong chilling effect” within the judiciary.
Instead of letting it pass, Pressman pushed back — in his own style.
The U.S. embassy posted a host of photos of politicians and senior diplomats meeting with judges — including, cheekily, a smiling younger Orbán standing beside former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy.
“What is inconsistent with normal diplomatic practice between allies,” the embassy said in a public statement, “is the recent coordinated media attack on the spokesperson and international liaison of the National Judicial Council in what appears to be an effort to instill fear in those who wish to engage with representatives of the United States.”
A politicized alliance
Orbán and his government have made no secret of their disdain for Democrats.
Democrats, they say, want to impose their liberal ideology on Hungary. They are the ones who ruined the relationship with Hungary. They lack family values. They are not a Christian government.
“Always great to hear from our good friend @realDonaldTrump. Let’s make US-HU relations great again!” Orbán tweeted recently at the Twitter-banished ex-president | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty images
Republicans are the exact opposite, in the government’s narrative. Orbán himself has personally courted MAGA-ites at their own super bowl — CPAC. He hosted Tucker Carlson in Budapest. He pines on Twitter for Donald Trump’s return.
“Always great to hear from our good friend @realDonaldTrump. Let’s make US-HU relations great again!” Orbán tweeted recently at the Twitter-banished ex-president.
It’s these types of tossed-off comments that no longer pass without a response.
“With Hungary facing economic challenges and Vladimir Putin’s war on its doorstep, the time for a great US-HU relationship? Right now,” Pressman quipped back.
It wasn’t the pair’s first sarcastic Twitter repartee, either. When the Hungarian leader first joined the platform in October and rhetorically asked where Trump was, Pressman also jumped in.
“While you look around for your friend, perhaps another friend to follow: the President of the United States,” he shot back, before offering a sly nod to his critics: “But as the Hungarian media might say: no pressure.”
Such cutting Twitter missives are not to everyone’s liking. Some even insist they are having a boomerang effect, cheapening diplomacy and further deteriorating the U.S.-Hungarian relationship.
Two former Trump-era intelligence officials recently blasted Pressman’s approach in the Wall Street Journal, calling the playful video quiz a “cringe-worthy example of the State Department’s woke virtue signaling.”
“When the U.S. has issues with foreign leaders, it should deal with them through adult diplomacy,” they added. “Instead, our diplomatic efforts under President Biden, a self-styled foreign-policy expert, could be summed up as ‘anyone I don’t like is Putin.’”
The Biden administration batted away any concerns.
When POLITICO asked for comment on the ambassador’s work, the State Department was quick to both express the administration’s “full confidence” in Pressman and to pass along a bipartisan endorsement from Cindy McCain, the widow of Republican stalwart and foreign policy maven John McCain.
McCain, now in Rome as a U.S. diplomat, talked of knowing Pressman for “nearly two decades,” and said he had “earned the deep respect of national security and foreign policy leaders in both the Republican and Democratic parties.”
If there is any overarching goal, it is to call out Russian propaganda, while still paying attention to how Hungary’s government treats minorities at home | Yuri Kadobnov/AFP via Getty images
For his part, Pressman insisted the embassy has no partisan goals and simply wants a better relationship with the Hungarian authorities.
“Our work is not about liberal policies. It’s not about conservative policies,” he said. “But it’s fundamentally about shared core values that are premised upon small ‘d’ democracy, and ensuring that we are able to collaborate together.”
If there is any overarching goal, it is to call out Russian propaganda — while still paying attention to how Hungary’s government treats minorities at home.
“The United States will always engage on behalf of communities that are vulnerable or marginalized, and that are under pressure — and here in Hungary, there are a few of those,” the ambassador said, noting that groups have Washington’s support as “they seek to engage in their own democratic process.”
Principled stances aside, the situation is undeniably strange: A diplomat from an allied country becoming public enemy No. 1 — and the top news story. On a recent Sunday evening, the Fidesz-linked HírTV station spent nearly half an hour on Pressman.
Pressman insisted he doesn’t take it personally. But “do we take it seriously? Absolutely,” he said.
“I’m the representative of the United States of America,” he added. “It’s unusual to find yourself,” he observed with understatement, in “an environment quite like this.”
