In late June 2022, a small rubber dinghy sailed down the Danube River in Budapest, past the Hungarian Parliament. It displayed a sign: “Mr. Pressman, don’t colonize Hungary with your culture of death.” The same Mr. Pressman was, at the time, preparing for the Senate hearings for his confirmation as ambassador to Hungary, a post for which he had been nominated by Joe Biden. The stunt sent an unambiguous message: David Pressman was not wanted in Hungary. Neither Pressman nor Biden appears to have gotten the message, for Pressman was confirmed as ambassador to this important NATO ally. He then embarked on one of the strangest ventures in the history of American diplomacy. He spent the next two years doing everything in his power to alienate the Hungarian government and the Hungarian people.
But times are changing. In November 2024, soon after the re-election of Donald Trump, it was announced that former director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe would become director of the CIA. Two years earlier, in an opinion essay in The Wall Street Journal titled “How Do Drag Shows Advance U.S. National Security?,” Ratcliffe and former deputy director Cliff Simms had criticized Pressman’s style of diplomacy:
In another cringeworthy example of the State Department’s woke virtue signalling, the U.S. Embassy in Budapest tweeted a “Who said it?” quiz that asked Hungarians to guess whether various statements had been made by Vladimir Putin or a Hungarian politician. . . . These are grade-school antics, not the projection of American power. When the U.S. has issues with foreign leaders, it should deal with them through adult diplomacy.
The appointment of one of the authors of this critique to high office signals a shift in America’s approach to diplomacy, back to longstanding diplomatic norms. Traditional diplomacy seeks an atmosphere of mutual trust and understanding between two countries. Pressman, by contrast, represents a form of diplomacy that we might call “liberal-imperial.” It aims not to create mutual understanding, but to erase the domestic culture of the host country and replace it with the liberal culture represented by the diplomat. If these imperial tactics do not work, the diplomat interferes in domestic political affairs, trying to damage the sitting government.
Before he became ambassador to Hungary, David Pressman was a human rights lawyer involved in LGBT affairs. He was associated in his early career with such familiar partisan outfits as the Southern Poverty Law Center. Since joining the diplomatic corps during the Obama administration, he has sought to bring NGO-style “tolerance” to other countries. In early 2015, he lobbied against Russian attempts to deny benefits to the same-sex partners of UN employees. In 2016, after the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Florida, Pressman told the UN General Assembly that denouncing terrorism was “not enough.” The theme of his diplomatic career is that other countries must accept his values—his “American” values—on questions related to sexuality.
From the moment Pressman landed in Budapest, he construed his mission as one of histrionic activism. He appeared regularly at gay pride marches carrying a US embassy banner and lecturing Hungarians about their supposed mistreatment of LGBT people. “We’ve gathered for a celebration of families, of freedom, and of love—all things that are increasingly under attack for LGBT people in Hungary,” he wrote after marching in the summer of 2024. The fact that LGBT activists may march through Budapest without fear of harassment is an irony lost on Pressman. If Pressman were ambassador to a country that is genuinely oppressive of LGBT activism, such as Uganda, his marching with an embassy banner would risk provoking a crackdown or riot and precipitating a diplomatic crisis. The response in Hungary has been not outrage—after all, Pressman’s fashionable values are familiar to every Hungarian who watches English-language media—but rather bafflement at the ambassador’s cheapening of a high and dignified office. “Mr. Pressman is one of the least classy ambassadors ever to set foot on Hungarian soil,” parliamentary speaker László Kövér stated on Hungarian television.
The liberal press in the West has tried to portray the rejection of Pressman by the Hungarians as due to “homophobia.” When the dinghy carried its message down the Danube, the media focused on its description of Pressman’s values as representing a “culture of death.” But the same media ignored the sign’s charge that the incoming ambassador wished to “colonize Hungary.” No one in Hungary cares if an American ambassador, or any ambassador, has liberal values. But Hungary is a proud nation built on the rejection of colonization, and Hungarians see the activities of Pressman and his allies for what they are: the efforts of a large, powerful country to impose a culture on a smaller, less powerful country. Pressman’s “diplomacy” is the diplomacy of a liberal imperial power.
On its own terms, how did Pressman’s war on the Hungarian government go? Not well. It could even be argued that Pressman inadvertently helped to create the Trump-Orbán partnership that is now emerging. The Hungarian government viewed the appointment of Pressman by the Biden administration as effectively a hostile act. Pressman’s relentless activism in Budapest confirmed this view. The Hungarian government thus concluded that there was no point in dealing with any American government run by the Democratic Party, because the Democrats are no longer viewed as good-faith actors. Hungarian diplomacy with the United States has thus developed into what might be called “political diplomacy.” Given that the American ambassador to Hungary was meeting with opposition activists, the Hungarian government regarded it as within their rights to support the opposition candidate in the United States. In this way, Pressman facilitated the establishment of close ties between the Orbán government and the incoming Trump administration.
Today, liberalism seems clapped out. Its adherents are no longer the cultured, mature, level-headed people of half a century ago. They come across as hotheads, swept up in whatever progressive cause is trending at a given time. They are intolerant of dissent, authoritarian, and eager to resort to war to get their way. Liberals have thus emptied liberalism of much that made it appealing. It is losing its attraction as a political ideology for educated people. Pressman’s failed ambassadorship in Hungary might be seen by future historians as the discrediting of liberalism’s diplomatic arm.
Pressman’s disastrous run reminds us that good diplomats recognize that other cultures exist on their own terms, and the diplomat’s business is not to criticize. A good diplomat understands that other cultures may oppose certain of our values without precluding the establishment of mutual respect. Activists, who tend to be fixated on their own righteousness, could not be less suited for such a role. Some may view activists as heroes, others may find them to be bores, but either way, they should never, ever be considered for diplomatic roles.
Philip Pilkington is a macroeconomist and investment professional.
