Vice President JD Vance was in Budapest this week, visiting Viktor Orbán’s government and fielding questions about the Iran situation from abroad.

On the drone incident in Iranian airspace — which Tehran cited as a ceasefire violation — Vance offered: “Ceasefires are always messy.”

He also reaffirmed the US position that Iran should not be allowed to enrich uranium, and clarified that any ceasefire covering Lebanon was not part of the agreement. Which is a message that directly contradicts what Iran’s leadership has been saying publicly.

The fault line running through the European identity debate is not north-south or creditor-debtor. It is east-west, and it is older than the EU.

Eastern European nations spent decades under Soviet occupation during which their national identities — languages, cultures, borders — were systematically suppressed or redrawn. The recovery of those identities after 1989 was not incidental to their post-communist project; it was central to it. Nations like Poland, Hungary, and the Baltic states did not experience national identity as a retrograde force to be overcome on the way to liberal modernity. They experienced it as the thing that survived when everything else was taken.

Hungary votes April 12, and for the first time in years Orbán’s Fidesz party is trailing in polls. The center-right opposition Tisza party, led by Péter Magyar, has pulled ahead in several surveys, making this the toughest electoral test Orbán has faced since consolidating power.

JD Vance is in Budapest today for meetings with Orbán — a visit timed conspicuously close to the election and widely read as a signal of continued U.S. support for Orbán’s government. The Trump administration has maintained warm relations with Orbán throughout his tenure, treating his nationalist model as philosophically compatible with their own direction.