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ALEX’S WEEKLY RANT!
We are witnessing the most dramatic shift in the international order since World War Two.
This week, Italy refused to allow US planes participating in the war in Iran to use the Sigonella military base in Sicily. France refused to allow them to use French airspace. Switzerland followed suit. Spain had already put the kibosh on the US using military bases in the country for this purpose. The United Kingdom has limited some information sharing with the United States. It is likely others have, too. While Trump huffs and puffs about how Europe should fix the mess he has created in the Middle East, the Europeans have been clear: They want nothing to do with this war.
Maybe the Europeans finally learned that flattery of the emperor still leads to debasement and fury (Pam Bondi learned that this week). He cannot be appeased. It’s a shift I have long called for. Still, it is astounding to watch as it unfolds.
I’ve argued for a year now that NATO is functionally dead. It still exists as an organization, and Trump may not be able to legally pull the US out of it (it would require an act of Congress, and last I checked, we no longer have a Congress). But it is clear the US under Trump would refuse to assist its allies in crisis. Quite the contrary. Trump’s threats to invade Greenland were perhaps the final nail in the coffin. NATO might exist on paper, but not in practice.
This seems particularly true given the initial raison d’être of NATO. The organization was founded to serve as a defensive alliance against Russia, the very country that started the biggest war in Europe since World War Two and which poses the biggest threat to Europe, mostly by destabilizing its democracies. It also posed the biggest threat to US democracy, but Trump is now working together with Putin to dismantle democracy across the globe.
Hungary As A Road Map
Trump and Putin are both helping Viktor Orban win his upcoming election in Hungary, which has played a pivotal role in Russia’s destabilization efforts in Europe and the US. Hungary has consistently played the spoiler in European attempts to supply aid and weapons to Ukraine.
As I’ve written, Russia uses Hungarian organizations to help feed its messaging into right-wing networks. Orban has twice visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago and Hungary’s state-funded Danube Institute has forged an alliance with the US’s Heritage Institute, home of Project 2025, the policy blueprint Trump has been enacting. Hungary has funded US influencers and journalists, including Lauren Chen, who was implicated in setting up Tenet Media, a media platform funded by the Kremlin and featuring right-wing American influencers like Tim Pool and Benny Johnson. Pool now has a Pentagon press pass. Johnson is a member of the White House press pool.
Last week we learned that Hungary’s Foreign Minister, Péter Szijjártó, has been supplying sensitive EU information to Russia. This week, a joint investigation by The Insider, VSquare, Frontstory, Delfi Estonia, and Investigative Center of Ján Kuciak revealed that Szijjártó did more than hand over intelligence. He was in regular contact with Russian officials who tasked him to carry out certain actions.
Among those was Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. One of these requests to Szijjártó was to get Gulbihor Ismailova, the sister of oligarch Alisher Usmanov, removed from the EU sanctions list. “I’m calling on the request of Alisher,” Lavrov told Szijjártó. Ismailova was put on the EU sanctions list in 2022, in part because Usmanov had claimed his yacht Dilbar was actually owned by her, not him. You may recall, Dilbar is the largest Russian oligarch yacht by volume, which is appropriate because Usmanov is the largest Russian oligarch by volume.
Usmanov’s sister was removed from the EU sanctions list seven months later, after Hungary and Slovakia threatened to block the extension of all EU sanctions against Russian entities and individuals.
Lavrov’s ask is proof that there is a close connection between the Kremlin and the oligarchs. Russia’s foreign minister doesn’t call in favors like this for just anyone. Then again, the oligarchs are very generous with the Kremlin. When Putin “asked” his oligarchs last week to contribute money to the war effort, several of them complied. (If you’ve taken my Foreign Influence Operations course, recall Class 2: Putin, Oligarchs, and Russian Intelligence, when Putin brought his oligarchs to Stalin’s dacha to pass on a little message.)
The Insider and partners got audio of some of the conversations between Szijjártó and Lavrov, and it’s worth listening to it, rather than just reading the transcript. The listener comes away understanding: this is a conversation between an asset and his handler.
Szijjártó is trying to please Lavrov. When Lavrov tells him he’s been all over the Russian media, Szijjártó gets nervous, thinking he has said something wrong. You can almost hear his internal monologue, wondering if he should ever dare go next to a window above the ground floor again. Lavrov reassures him he is doing fine. When Lavrov tells him Russian media is saying Szijjártó is “pragmatically fighting for the interests” of Hungary, Lavrov laughs at this diplomatic description. Taking orders from Russia is not Hungarian sovereignty. Szijjártó declares the diplomatic description is “fair,” as if trying to convince himself he truly is acting in Hungary’s interest even though he knows he is not.
In a different, conversation, Szijjártó asks Russia’s Deputy Energy Minister, Pavel Sorokin, for talking points to help Szijjártó make his case to the Europeans to remove some entities from the sanctions list. He asks for wording from a Russian official that he can use with the EU to make it sound like the removal of certain sanctions is in Hungary’s national interest, not a task asked for by Russia. Szijjártó becomes the Hungarian face for a Russian action. Hungary becomes a puppet.
The Hungarian State Also Interferes In Elections
Orban isn’t relying on Russian help alone, though. Among the many dirty tricks we’ve seen in the run up to next week’s election, Hungary’s secret services reportedly targeted the IT systems of Tisza, the political party whose leader, Peter Magyar, is running against Orban (and who is leading in the polls, which is why Orban and his cronies are pulling out all the stops).
Here’s what happened, according to an investigation by Direkt36, an independent Hungarian investigative outlet: Hungarian officials opened an investigation into two IT specialists who ran the IT servers and networks for Tisza. They launched the investigation after they got an anonymous tip accusing the two of possessing child sexual abuse material. Hungary’s internal intelligence service, the Constitution Protection Office, was in charge of the investigation. Authorities took servers, discs, computers, and other material from the political party, but found no evidence of anything illegal. But now they have all kinds of information about the political party and its campaign.
Direkt36 further reported that the anonymous tip and follow on investigation came shortly after one of the IT specialists refused an approach from an unknown individual asking him to breach the party’s IT system and carry out hacking attacks just before the election. Probably just a coincidence.
Orban is also trying to enlist his own election observers. Having your own election observers can help decide which votes get counted and which don’t. It can also cast doubt on whether an election was fair, or make it sound fair when it was not.
What is happening in Hungary is important to understand because it provides an open map of what we can expect in the US as midterms approach. But it also serves as a good example of Trump and Putin working together to protect and support an illiberal political system that is actively working against the US’s traditional allies, Europe, as well as against the US’s traditional priority of defending democracy at home.
Taken together, it is impossible not to conclude we are in the midst of a radical shift in the international order.
THE WEEK’S LINKS
A roundup of things you should be reading
EROSION OF NORMS IN THE US
Trump Is Doing Structural Damage to American Intelligence (The Bulwark)
FOREIGN INFORMATION OPERATIONS
Trump Officials Try to Fight Foreign Disinformation They Once Dismissed (NYT)
EXCELLENT RESOURCES!
Just Security has launched WHAT JUST HAPPENED? as well as a litigation tracker to help readers keep up with the chaos
Alex Finley is a former officer of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, where she served in West Africa and Europe. She writes and teaches about terrorism, disinformation / covert influence, and oligarch yachts. Her writing has appeared in Slate, Reductress, Funny or Die, POLITICO, The Center for Public Integrity, and other publications. She has spoken to the BBC, MSNBC, CNN, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, France24, and numerous other media outlets. She was also invited once to speak at Harvard, which she now tells everyone within the first ten seconds of meeting them. She is the author of the Victor Caro series, satirical novels about the CIA. Before joining the CIA, Alex was a journalist, covering Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and the Department of Energy. She reported on issues related to national security, intelligence, and homeland security. Did she mention she was invited to speak at Harvard?
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