As the U.S. courts Central Europe, the battle over who defines ‘the West’ moves to the center of transatlantic politics. What surfaced in Munich was not simply policy divergence but a philosophical dispute over the meaning of the Western alliance. At a panel discussion, Gladden Pappin of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs said that the West’s freedom, common heritage and civilization “have come under threat recently”. For years, conservative and nationally oriented voices were excluded from elite institutions. After the Cold War, decisions increasingly shifted to being made “less and less in national governments speaking for their citizens, and more and more in transnational bodies.” The result was a distortion of the postwar system: family structures weakened, borders blurred, industrial capacity eroded—developments that ultimately affect the ability to sustain NATO’s commitments.
For years, certain Central European governments have been treated in Brussels as outliers—too nationalist, too skeptical of supranational authority, too resistant to prevailing ideological trends. Yet from Washington’s perspective under the current administration, these governments represent interlocutors aligned on migration control, national sovereignty, and a more restrained approach to cultural transformation. Hungary, in particular, has positioned itself as a defender of what it describes as Christian civilization, family policy, and border integrity. That framing has long irritated segments of the European Commission. But it now finds a more receptive audience in parts of Washington.
The emerging pattern suggests a recalibration: transatlantic ties may increasingly operate through bilateral relationships grounded in perceived value alignment rather than exclusively through Brussels-centered frameworks.