“Our broad policy for Europe should prioritize […] cultivating resistance to Europe's current trajectory within European nations.” With these words, the U.S. National Security Strategy signed by Trump in November 2025 made it clear that the American government would support eurosceptic and illiberal forces in Europe in their opposition to common EU policies. And that the victory of these forces over Brussels is not a mere nice to have, but a matter of national security for the United States.
Is Orbán’s defeat in Hungary, after sixteen years in power, therefore perceived in Washington as a threat to U.S. national security? Many factors point to an affirmative answer. Not only do strategic documents suggest this, but the behavior of the Trump administration does as well, indicating that Orbán was regarded as America’s closest European ally: Vice President Vance personally traveled to Hungary last week to explicitly support Orbán in the final days of the electoral campaign. This circumstance not only highlights the importance of the Hungarian vote for Trump—placed at least on the same level as the talks in Pakistan aimed at resolving the Middle Eastern conflict, in which Vance himself also took part—but now leaves the United States in a particularly awkward position vis-à-vis the new government in Budapest.
The Hungarian government was the only one led by a party belonging to the European Patriots group, now ousted by a party that instead belongs to the European People’s Party. For this reason, Orbán’s ties were extremely strong with those pursuing the strategic objective of weakening the Union: Trump on the one hand, Putin on the other. It is an exceptional fact that a candidate supported both economically and politically by the world’s two main nuclear powers—both engaged in an aggressive and imperialistic foreign policy—should lose so decisively to his main political opponent. This forces us to reflect on the consequences of a vote that displeases both Trump and Putin. If Péter Magyar were to lift the veto on aid to Ukraine, for Russia this would represent a strategic defeat more significant than any military battle: it would mean granting the Ukrainian resistance at least two more years of economic autonomy to continue a conflict in which the factor of time is beginning to work against Putin.
Will Trump and Putin simply stand by and watch? Given what we know about them, it is hard to believe. Putin will likely intensify his efforts at interference, disinformation, and political propaganda, especially in Eastern Europe and in Italy, where he still retains allies who appear even more strategic today after the loss of Budapest. Trump, for his part, will have yet another reason to pursue his personal confrontation with Brussels, deepening the NATO crisis—perhaps through new initiatives in Greenland or by accelerating the American disengagement from the Atlantic Alliance. This prospect, among the various political “fronts of confrontation” with the two nuclear powers, should prompt Europeans to take action.
The problem of a NATO without American leadership is extraordinarily difficult to solve: how can an alliance survive when it has always been built around a leader far more powerful than all the other members? Even if EU member states were to act with a certain degree of coordination, what stance would non-EU allies such as Turkey, the United Kingdom, or Canada take? In a system that has always relied on the gravitational pull exerted by an undisputed leader—the world’s greatest military power—centrifugal forces could prevail. And this would mean having to rethink European external security from the ground up.
Before reaching that point, European governments should begin to take seriously the external threats looming over all of us and work toward building a European defense system capable of shaping the so-called “European pillar of NATO”: a political and military actor able to replace American leadership within an alliance that—whether we like it or not—continues to represent the only credible guarantee of Europeans’ external security.
In short, the victory of the center-right in Hungary offers new hope for democracy and freedom in Europe, but at the same time foreshadows new challenges in the broader context of regional security. Challenges that European governments will be able to meet only by joining forces.