Europe’s populist ghosts are coming for Biden

Europe is beginning to tatter at the edges, thanks in no small part to the Biden administration’s lack of determination to finish the conflict in Ukraine quickly with a decisive victory against Russia. President Biden is giving oxygen to populist European voices, antiwar in bent, including Geert Wilders in The Netherlands, Robert Fico in Slovakia and Viktor Orbán in Hungary.

Wilders’s unexpected shock election win last week — his Freedom Party won 37 seats in the Dutch House of Representatives — must serve as an immediate wake-up call for the White House. Russia may be losing the war in Ukraine, or at least freezing it; however, Russian President Vladimir Putin is starting to win the war of words across the European Union.

Dredging up ghosts of Europe’s past and present — anti-immigration, anti-Islam, and nationalist sentiment — might well be effective electoral strategy. And the example of The Netherlands shows, it is playing into Putin’s overall design to foment division across the European Union and NATO.

To date, Dutch military support to Ukraine has been robust, including “leading the international effort to supply F-16 [fighter jets].” If Wilders is able to form a ruling coalition, that may soon change. As the pro-Kremlin Orbán gloated on X, “The winds of change are here.” Left unsaid by Orbán, however, is that it is Putin and his Kremlin cronies who are furiously fanning those winds on a global scale to buy time for Moscow’s stagnating “special military operation” in Ukraine. 

The seismic shift in The Netherlands did not occur in a vacuum. The Biden administration’s ever-present escalation fears and incessant slow-walking of the conventional offensive military capabilities necessary for a successful Ukrainian combined arms offensive are directly responsible for creating the conditions for a forever war. Moscow-leaning EU leaders, including Orbán and Fico, are exploiting this reality for political gain.

In short, Biden is playing for a tie, Putin for the win.

The long-term stakes for Washington and Brussels could hardly be any higher. Biden is irrationally averse to helping Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his generals decisively defeat Russia on the battlefields of Ukraine. This hesitation, born of fear of escalation, risks handing significant swaths of the EU over to the dark multi-polar world Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping. 

We are already witnessing in Europe the second- and third-order effects of Biden’s losing strategy in confronting the Kremlin — or as we recently described it, the Biden Effect. Putin needs division in Europe; and while Biden is giving him time, many of the ghosts of Europe’s past and present are giving him multiple openings to create it as populist European politicians exploit historical national grievances. 

Orbán and his ruling political party Fidesz are dispositive. Early in his second term as prime minister, Orbán began embracing the century-old-plus national anger stemming from the Trianon Treaty, which had resulted in the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire losing two-thirds of its territory and one-third of its ethnic Hungarian population after World War I.

While it appeals to Orbán’s electoral base, Fidesz’s calculated resurfacing of old ghosts is seen as divisive within the EU, and particularly in Slovakia, Croatia and Romania, which each gained territory as a result of the treaty. Especially galling was Orbán’s decision to create a National Day of Unity in 2010 and a monument thereto in 2020 on the centenary of the Trianon Treaty — both of which are interpreted as slights against Hungary’s neighbors. 

More troubling, however, is that Orbán’s anti-Kyiv approach is spreading. Miłosz Cordes remarked in early November, at the Australian Institute of International Affairs, that Orbán has served as “a Hungarian contagion on Ukraine [that is] reaching the EU.” “Contagion” is exactly the right word. Biden holds the cure — victory in Ukraine — yet he and his administration refuse to dispense it, persistently balking at the quick provision of key weapons systems. 

Earlier this Fall, we saw evidence of Orbán’s populist mischief spreading elsewhere across Europe. Initially, Orbán was a pro-Putin party of one in the EU as visually evidenced by him being shunned at the European Summit in October. The negative economic impact to Europe of the war in Ukraine is, in part, giving oxygen to Orbán’s arguments. 

Poland’s Law and Justice government had provided substantial support for Ukraine. Yet its leading politicians, including Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, attempted to appeal to the country’s nationalist voters during the run up to October’s elections by accusing Ukraine of dumping cheap grain in its markets. Morawiecki even resurrected the ghosts of 100,000 Polish citizens who had been massacred in Volhynia during 1943 by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.

Orbán is no longer alone at the EU. Robert Fico and his populist SMER political party, were elected in Slovakia on an anti-Ukraine war platform that will prove deeply challenging as the Biden Administration, NATO and the EU work to remain united on support for Ukraine. Fico is essentially pro-Kremlin — and already he is paying dividends to Putin with comments such as, “Ukraine is not our war” and “Slovakia would not send a single bullet to Ukraine.”

Wilders in The Netherlands may soon make it effectively an anti-Ukraine war party of three. The ghosts of Europe’s past and present are quickly threatening to become the nightmarish ghosts of Europe’s future — and the U.S. must act. Biden and his national security team can no longer risk waiting for this anti-war and in effect pro-Putin contagion to spread.

Putin continues to take advantage of Biden’s indecision, additionally fomenting a Middle Eastern and African migrant crisis throughout Europe. Most recently, Moscow has targeted new NATO member Finland by surging immigrants and asylum-seekers to Finland’s borders with Russia. 

Victory in Ukraine is the only way to thwart Putin and Xi’s designs and avoid having Europe fall victim to Moscow and Beijing’s economic and military domination. The contagion represented by Orbán and other pro-Kremlin politicians threatens this entire project.

One-sided negotiated settlements, especially if they result in Ukrainian territorial losses in the Donbas or Crimea, would simply guarantee another future Russian invasion. Neither Poland nor the Baltic States are likely to sit idly by waiting for Russia to reset.

Europe’s ghosts have known far too many wars. It is time for Biden and his national security team to ensure that Ukraine decisively wins this war and brings a conclusive end to this European nightmare that is becoming global in nature.

Mark Toth, an economist and entrepreneur, is a former board member of the World Trade Center, St. Louis. Col. (Ret.) Jonathan Sweet served 30 years as a military intelligence officer and led the U.S. European Command Intelligence Engagement Division from 2012 to 2014.