Pressman in a china shop

Tucker Carlson is sadly mistaken. The ambassador who arrived a year ago is not just an appalling, dull little grey suit.

Budapest Pride Fotó: Kovács Tamás

They were newcomers to the world of diplomacy, but Pressman is an anti-diplomat, which is quite a feat considering the fact that he had served in high office as a diplomatic commissar. He had also passed through the oft- mentioned American revolving door between the private sector (in his case, law firms) and a commissar’s post. He has never served abroad as a career diplomat and has not learned to work from the bottom up in the way that, say, a charge d'affaires would; a disadvantage because it can make a man who is already prone to posturing overconfident. In Budapest, he piles provocation on provocation, acts smart, and he even enjoys it, as political scientist Zoltan Kiszelly remarked. In most of his photos he grins like a loon.

It would not be surprising if he were to see his relative lack of experience as a diplomatic skill, although combined with his personality traits, it has a destructive effect. It also limits his own room for maneuver: unlike his predecessors, he has been trying in vain to get in touch with the prime minister for a year, so he has contented himself with mere window-dressing. He is very active on social media, and he is traveling around the country to endear himself and the United States to the people.

Pressman had learnt to bake bread by 20 August, the celebration of the foundation of Hungary, and has recently visited the Herend Porcelain Manufactory. It's all very nice, as Stirlitz learned in chemistry school, but we would have preferred it if the US hadn't tightened the conditions for all of us to enter America. Not that we want to go there, but it is not a nice thing to do among allies, which we are supposed to be. Not very nice. If our information is correct, Pressman played a key role in the US State Department making the decision to tighten the entry rules. But that hardly bothers him: he is very fond of Hungary.

There were times, of course, when we longed to go to America, if not all of us and not necessarily in fact, then quite a few of us, at least in spirit. We remember the scene in the cult film of our generation, Time Stops, when Paul Anka's 1958 song You Are My Destiny plays as an interlude and Magda Szukics looks suggestively into the camera. Perhaps, of course, such references, or the first US presidential visit of George Bush senior to Budapest in July 1989, can only be truly appreciated by those who were already adults during the pre-1990 regime. In any case, in 2019, the same Paul Anka was brought to Budapest not just to sing, but to dine with the prime minister by Pressman's predecessor, David Cornstein. A few months earlier, Mr Corstein had prepared the ground for Viktor Orban's visit to Donald Trump's White House.

We live in different times.

Hungary's anti-migration, anti-gender and anti-war policies are at odds with the current US administration's pro-migration, pro-gender and pro-war policies. The question is how long.
The Hungarian government makes no secret that it would be happy to see Donald Trump re-elected president next year. America is no longer its old self, a country people would long to go to. Replacing the statues of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr - the Republican presidents who won the Cold War against the Soviet Union -  in Budapest's Szabadsag  Square with statutes of two Georges, Soros and Floyd, would be a move that would better express the spirit of our times.
 By the way, cold war! In the 1980s, the  US Ambassador to Budapest was Nicolas Salgo, named as Miklos Salgo at birth in Hungary. He came from a similar background to George Soros, being  a wealthy, though not billionaire, businessman. Unlike Soros, however, he did not seek tomeddle with Hungarian society, but enriched it with "small" things: for example, he established a professorship in the English language department of ELTE, enabling the university to host an American guest lecturer on his money. And as a diplomat - just like Pressman, Salgo was also a political appointee, but a Republican one - he did what he had to do: he sought common interests between our countries, and didn't dig the existing trench even deeper, with a big grin on his face.

By the '80s, Washington's focus on Hungary has grown stronger. President Reagan received Deputy Prime Minister Jozsef Marjai, and the visit of Janos Kadar and Karoly Grosz to the United States was also considered.  Although our countries were enemies in the Cold War at the time, and relations were complicated by the activities of double agents, Salgo was able to talk  to Kadar in confidence. But now that we are NATO allies, the ambassador cannot even get to see Viktor Orban because of his behavior.

In the past, it would have been unthinkable for an ambassador - like Pressman - to berate the government and the Hungarian press at a public event, to provoke Hungarian public figures by inviting an anti-Semitic politician to dinner, and to denigrate his host country on the cover page of The New York Times. He would have instantly given the sack!

Pressman, of course, rightly assumes that his provocations will be tolerated and expelling him is out of the question. Such a move would only further worsen Hungarian-American political relations, and the possible response would dramatically reduce the room for manoeuvre of Hungarian diplomacy in the United States. Furthermore, now that the issue of Sweden's NATO membership has been resolved, it would only lead further tensions within NATO. Pressman's arrival was already a provocation; true, though, it didn't come from him, but from those who appointed him.

Accrediting a 'diplomat' who is not only married to a man but also has underage children to a country that does not recognize same-sex marriage is like sending a wine merchant to Saudi Arabia. Nevertheless, our country put on a good face and issued the necessary prior diplomatic approval for the appointment. So that Pressman, more at home in his role as a radical liberal activist, could deliver an extremely impertinent speech at the next Pride - the last but one he was able to attend in Hungary, if we count correctly.

On behalf of Americans, Tucker Carlson has apologized for Pressman. It's kind of him, but he  is sadly mistaken: the ambassador who arrived a year ago is not a horrific little gray suit. Instead, he's frighteningly colorful - in the rainbow sense.  He has direct ties to the opposition and to social groups around the opposition in the same way as one of his predecessors, Mark Palmer, who was described behind his back as the ambassador accredited to the Free Democrats. How carefully he went around at the Herend Porcelain Manufactory, only those present there can tell. But he goes about diplomacy like a bull in a China shop. However, one day - perhaps sooner than later - it will be him leaving our country. And we will stay. 

Cover photo: US Ambassador to Budapest David Pressman at the  Pride parade in June 2023 (Photo: MTI/Tamas Kovacs)