'NATO Must Remain a Peace Project'

Hungary's experience of war shows a military alliance's purpose is defense, says its prime minister

- VIKTOR ORBÁN

NATO IS APPROACHING A watershed moment. It is worth remembering that the most successful military alliance in world history started as a peace project, and its future success depends on its ability to maintain peace. But today, instead of peace, the agenda is the pursuit of war; instead of defense it is offense.

All this runs counter to NATO's founding values. Hungary's historical experience is that such transformations never lead in a good direction. The task today should be to preserve the alliance as a peace project.

On those occasions when we need to make statements about NATO, we Hungarians are in a special position. Our accession to NATO was the first time in several centuries that Hungary had voluntarily joined a military alliance. The significance of our membership only becomes clear in light of Hungary's history.

The history of 20th-century Hungary is also, unfortunately, a history of defeat in wars. Our collective experience is one of wars periodically fought within alliance systems of which we did not originally want to be a part, and which were established with some form of conquest in mind or at least with some explicitly militaristic goal.

However much we sought to stay out of the two world wars, and however vehemently we tried to warn those countries we were forced into alliances with, each occasion brought a defeat that almost erased Hungary from the face of the Earth.

Although the worst did not happen, our losses were still colossal. These wars left Hungary with no control over its future. After 1945 we became an unwilling part of the Soviet bloc, and thus also of the Warsaw Pact: the then-Eastern bloc's military alliance. Hungarians protested with every fiber of our being. We did our utmost to bring about the downfall of the Warsaw Pact.