A joke told often in Budapest says that World War III will be lost by whichever side Hungary is on. Balázs Orbán, the political director for Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (the two are not related), notes in his new book, Hussar Cut, that the political compromise of 1867 that incorporated Hungary into the Austrian Empire “involved the voluntary surrender of our independent foreign policy, so we had no say on whether or not to participate in the first great global military conflagration of the twentieth century.” Hungary had little choice in the Second World War, either: in 1944 it fell under German occupation, followed by Soviet occupation.

Hungary’s national revival is one of the most noteworthy events in the West since the fall of Communism. Balázs Orbán has written an exceptionally transparent account of the thinking behind it. His book is also proof that philosophers—pace Leo Strauss—also can be politicians. Americans, with our vast power, can afford major blunders. Not so with Hungary, which has to walk a tightrope to survive. Hungary’s leaders have no such room for error. Clarity of vision is all the more important.

Hungary’s twentieth century was tragic. It suffered an extremely high death rate in World War I and was stripped of 72 percent of its land and 64 percent of its people, stranding 3 million Magyars (ethnic Hungarians) outside the new borders. A strategic and unreliable ally of the Germans in World War II, Hungary sought a separate peace in 1943; the German army occupied Hungary and installed a puppet regime that deported Jews to the death camps, which the wartime Hungarian government refused to do.

There followed 45 years of Soviet occupation, from the war’s end until the last Russian troops withdrew in 1991. In 1956, Hungary rose against its Russian occupiers, with American encouragement and in expectation of American help. None came, and once again its national aspirations were crushed.

Hungary’s national recovery from the disasters of the twentieth century was tortuous. In 2010, its total fertility rate had fallen to 1.29, and only 0.82 among ethnic Magyars, the lowest in Europe. When I first visited Budapest that year it seemed a city populated by statues, as Strabo wrote of Athens in the first century BCE. It is against this background that one must consider Hungary’s efforts at national revival over the past decade and a half, and it is hard to conclude that they are not a great success. Budapest is a resplendent and charming city, with some of the most magnificent public buildings in Europe. The fertility rate has bounced off a record low, and Hungary has regained a sense of national purpose and a standing in world affairs far greater than its material circumstances might suggest.

It has not come without criticism, ranging from well-meaning concern to outright lies. Much of it has come from polite liberal opinion, which loathes Hungary’s cultural Christianity, its nationalist attitude in an atmosphere of Cuisinart universalism, its stubborn resistance to non-European immigration in an era of porous frontiers, and its buoyant support of the State of Israel. But despite the persistent claims of “democratic backsliding,” there are no political prisoners in Hungary, opposition parties and their media operate freely, and police are nearly invisible on Hungary’s streets.

For those open to a more dispassionate consideration, Hussar Cut presents the case for the Hungarian strategy and the philosophy behind it.

In Hungary, what Hegel called Volksgeist (roughly, “national spirit”) and statecraft have triumphed over experience and adversity. Balázs Orbán cites “a remark by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who claimed that there is a specific motive distinguishing human intelligence from all other natural or artificial intelligences: namely, its ability to simultaneously hold contradictory statements to be true, while preserving its own operating logic.” Culturally speaking, Hungary’s government is the most conservative in the West, promoting traditional values in such matters as childhood sex education, to the outrage of prevailing liberal opinion in the European Union. It defends its national particularity, for example, by refusing to admit Middle Eastern refugees, a source of bitter contention with the European Union. It devotes 11 percent of the state budget to support families. Yet it also maintains good relations with China, a major source of foreign direct investment in Hungary, and proposes a negotiated solution to the Ukraine conflict.

To American eyes, this may seem like ordinary pragmatism. It is nothing of the kind. Mere pragmatism could not have achieved the turnaround that Hungary’s leaders have engineered during the past fifteen years. Pragmatism looks for the main chance and bets according to the odds. Hungary’s leaders eschewed the odds and bet on their distinctive vision of national recovery. That required tactical daring as well as strategic vision—hence the book’s title, Hussar Cut. That translates into French as coup de main, or into German as a Husarenstreich—a light cavalry action. Perhaps the closest English equivalent is “surprise attack.” The hussar was a Hungarian military innovation of the fifteenth century, eventually adopted by all European armies.

The contradictory ideas that Hungary has balanced with a high degree of success are a distinct national identity and openness to the world, or connectivity. Orbán cites academic research concluding that “the more export-driven and open a country’s economic structure is, the higher its growth rate,” and “the more open an economy is in international trade, the faster its rate of productivity increased[,] … [the] more open economies are able to absorb knowledge and innovation at a much higher rate[,] … the more open a nation’s economy is, the more new technology it can acquire.”

Foreign direct investment in Hungary during the past ten years has averaged about 2 percent of GDP, double the proportion of Poland, Croatia, or Romania, and about the same level as the Czech Republic. This is likely to rise due to a number of high-profile projects, including the decision of the world’s largest electric vehicle maker BYD to build a mega-plant in Hungary. The Chinese battery manufacturer CATL is building a $7.9 billion plant in Hungary, expected to employ 9,000 people. Hungary’s openness to Chinese technology reflects a pragmatic response to global trends, mirroring Donald Trump’s recent suggestion that Chinese EV makers would be welcome in the United States if they built plants that employed American workers. And last year, Hungary opened the largest intermodal plant in Europe, the East-West hub linking rail and river container traffic, with 5G communications and AI controls provided by Huawei Technologies.

Making Hungary the premier European venue for China’s world-beating electric vehicle industry was a hussar maneuver. Historically, Hungary’s closest industrial relationship has been with the German auto industry, but in the past decade, it has diversified its economic ties with Turkey, Central Asia, and Israel, as well as Asia.

At the same time, Hungarian identity is a necessity, not a luxury, for this country of 10 million people. With a per capita GDP of only $19,000 compared to Germany’s $52,000, the path of least resistance is a brain drain of skilled Hungarian professionals leaving for higher-income venues. Hungary has a tradition of excellence in mathematics and computer science that survived the depredations of the Communist regime, but many of its best practitioners have emigrated for higher pay overseas. Eighteen million people have left Central Europe since 1989. Although Hungary is the only Central European country with positive net migration between 1989 and 2017, Lili Zemplény wrote in the Hungarian Conservative, “Hungary has been hit especially badly by outmigration as the proportion of highly skilled workers are the highest among Hungarian migrants. Demographically, outmigration for Hungary is not as serious a concern as for neighboring countries, but in terms of the loss of professionals, it is a serious problem.”

Relative GDP in US dollar terms can be misleading, as Orbán observes. The average per capita Gross National Income of the Group of 7 nations is $55,000, compared to Hungary’s $19,000. Nonetheless, “we might choose $40,000 per capita GNI measured at purchasing power parity as a reasonable cutoff point demarcating what could be called the elite club of high-income countries.” By this criterion, Hungary is a high-income country, and its quality of life is closer to Germany than to so-called middle-income countries. Even so, the desire to preserve Hungarian identity is a key factor in the decision of mobile professionals to stay in Hungary rather than emigrate.

Some 250,000 ethnic Hungarians from neighboring countries have emigrated to Hungary since 1985, by one academic estimate, out of the two million Hungarian speakers in the country’s near abroad. Preserving the Hungarian language and culture is a key motivation for immigrants. The Magyar language is grammatically rich and expressive, and notoriously difficult to learn. Persuading Hungarian professionals to work at home and attracting Hungarian-speaking immigrants is an existential issue for a country with a fertility rate well below replacement, despite a remarkable recovery from the 2010 nadir.

Another hussar maneuver was Viktor Orbán’s defiance in the face of the European Union’s demand that it accept its quota of Middle Eastern migrants during the 2015 crisis. While German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared, “We can do it,” and took in a million Muslim immigrants, Hungary refused. By 2018, nearly a third of German schoolchildren had a migration background. One consequence of Hungary’s stance is a growing Jewish presence in Budapest. There are 200,000 Israeli-Hungarian dual citizens, and many young entrepreneurs as well as pensioners have moved to the Hungarian capital. I can report from personal experience that Budapest is the safest city in Europe for Jews. I have walked across the city to synagogue many times wearing a kippah and never got a second glance. In Paris or Berlin, I wouldn’t have gotten 200 yards. There were no antisemitic demonstrations in Hungary after the October 7 attack on Israel, partly because there were few prospective participants, and partly because the government forbade them.

Hungary’s openness to the world has cultural as well as practical foundations, Orbán explains. “Culturally, Hungary is situated in a very special part of Europe. The Hungarian language is unique and difficult to learn, but its culture has free valences in all directions. It can be considered an essentially Western state, but its historical and cultural heritage preserves links to the Eastern world, since the Hungarian tribes came from the East a thousand years ago, and the Hungarian people still maintain this heritage. Kinship relations are also taken into account in the East, and more than one Central Asian country views us as distant relatives, or at least as old acquaintances.” Orbán adds:

When we became part of the Austrian Empire after the expulsion of the Turks, we never completely renounced our independence and our essential otherness: Hungary never became an Austrian hereditary province. We finally came to an agreement with the Austrians in 1867, after many uprisings, two wars of independence, and subsequent periods of oppression.

To be sure, Hungary’s experience with the German-speaking world has been less than satisfactory, and it looks back on its shotgun marriage with the Austrian monarchy without nostalgia. Hungary for some decades, though, was an epicenter of achievement in the German cultural space, producing mathematicians and scientists like John von Neumann, Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner—the leaders of the Manhattan Project—as well as many of the twentieth century’s greatest classical musicians, including the composers Béla Bartók, Ernst von Dohnányi, and Zoltán Kodály, and more conductors and virtuosos than I can name. Orbán notes that Hungary ranks eleventh in the world in Nobel Prizes per capita. Budapest’s Jewish community, which comprised a quarter of the city’s prewar population, was a hothouse of talent, sadly destroyed or dispersed by the war.

Hungary’s extraordinary record of intellectual and artistic achievement sets it apart from its Eastern European neighbors as much as its historic connection to the East. Its best practitioners fled the country before or during the last world war, to the benefit of the United States. Once established, an intellectual tradition is hard to erase. What impresses me most about the Hungarian leaders I have met, including the prime minister, is their intellectual depth. They may have the reflexes of hussars, but they also are thinkers of a quality that is hard to find elsewhere.

Balázs Orbán is also a student of philosophy. Hungary aims for a “dialectical balance between two opposing principles, namely rationality and determinism.” Here the translation is unclear; he clearly means the exercise of Vernunft, or critical reason, as an expression of free will, in Hegel’s sense. He adds:

In Western thought, dialectics—though it has many divergent interpretations—primarily draws attention to the fact that the relational properties of certain things (properties derived from their relationships with each other) can change, and these properties belong to the given thing even if they are not currently present. In Hegel’s example, many believe that life and death are opposite qualities, even though they are closely related concepts: a person’s life also includes his death, and vice versa—only someone who has lived can be dead. Thus, the object under scrutiny is both open and closed at the same time.

Orbán’s most compelling thought is buried in a footnote that explains how materialism undermines the West’s faith in its own values: “We already see it in Plato’s The Sophist, where Plato argues that, from the perspective of atomistic (corporealist, physicalist) philosophies, the virtues cannot exist.” Plato teaches that materialism leads to moral relativism, but it was Hegel, Orbán relates, who completed the thought, noting that when “physicalists enter the realm of values, they are unable to see it in its entirety, treat values too abstractly, and in the process absolutize specific aspects, thereby creating internal contradictions in the foundation of values.” Orbán continues:

Hegel writes that the protagonist of a Greek comedy has to face the fact that he remains on the stage alone, abandoned by the gods (thus becoming a physicalist), since the gods are all dead. In his view, this indicated that Greek culture had reached its peak, and in this process had ultimately become empty. Another important motif is abandonment by the gods, which also finds echoes in Nietzsche, with his famous phrase “God is dead. And we have killed him,” from his book The Gay Science (in the original: Die fröhliche Wissenschaft). It is also important to note that, contrary to the common belief, Nietzsche did not intend his lines as gloating or celebratory, but as a warning: the physicalist and scientific tendencies of Western civilization would in time lead to nihilism.

American conservatives often indulge in nostalgia for the supposed moral certainty of the ancients. Balázs Orbán, in his reflection on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, understands that there is no going back. There is growing appreciation of Hegel as a political thinker, for example by Richard Bourke (reviewed last year in Law & Liberty), and in the new English translation of Klaus Vieweg’s magisterial Hegel biography, which I reviewed at First Things. I hope Mr. Orbán will have the future opportunity to expand on his reading of Hegel. As opposed to Greek contemplation, Orbán’s Hussar Cut embodies a philosophy of action. Whichever side Hungary is on will lose the Third World War. The second part of the joke states: It follows logically that if Hungary is not on any side, then there won’t be a Third World War. That is more than a joke: By rejecting bloc formation and maintaining connectivity with all the important factors in a multipolar world, Hungary has set an example for conflict avoidance that may have profound consequences for many other countries, not least the United States of America.