Among American conservatives, Hungary is being recognized more and more these days. It seems scarcely a month goes by without some new coterie winding up in Budapest, hobnobbing with the government of prime minister Viktor Orbán. Earlier this month, for example, CPAC held a conference in Budapest. Attendees included 2022 Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, incoming president of the Hungarian Institute of Foreign Affairs Gladden Pappin, and Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts. It is an interestingly elitist and cosmopolitan pastime, especially given that many of the people who make the trip are Americans who describe themselves as populist and nationalist.

The typical retort to such criticism is that the Hungarian option offers lessons for conservatives in the U.S.: Orbán’s government resists global elites, keeps its domestic opponents on the back foot, enforces a cultural consensus of Christian conservatism, and has even taken steps to combat declining levels of fertility. These things all sound nice. But there are reasons to doubt the image that Hungary projects to conservatives observing from afar in the U.S. and to those it invites on lavish press junkets.

In a recent Washington Post column, Henry Olsen outlines some of the reasons the Hungarian model isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, especially in its supposed applicability to the United States. One of the “massive differences” between Hungarian and American nationalism, Olsen argues, is that the former is “ethnic, not ideological.” The nation has few immigrants (conservative American visitors aside) and remains mostly ethnically Hungarian. This, for Olsen, is an important distinguishing factor. “Orban’s resistance to refugees and pronatalist policies should be seen for what they are: efforts to keep his country an overwhelmingly ethnically Hungarian nation,” he writes. Olsen rightly adds that American conservatives, heir to a tradition that is not bound up in a specific ethnicity, would be better off focusing on “opposing de facto open borders” in a way that preserves the rule of law and the singular value of American citizenship while keeping the latter available to those of any ethnicity who wish to secure it through legal means.

Other complications in applying the Hungary model to the U.S. include the fact that Hungary is far more rural than the United States (Budapest, the cosmopolitan capital in which American visitors tend to spend most of their time while in the country, is the primary political base of the opposition), and the fact that the U.S., as a global superpower, could not adopt anything like what Olsen calls Orbán’s “neo-isolationist foreign policy” (spending less on defense than Germany, as a percentage of GDP, while nonetheless enjoying the NATO security blanket).

Part of that foreign policy includes a degree of accommodation of Russia even as it continues its war on Ukraine. Granted: Russia is at least nearby, so a charitable attitude could acknowledge Hungary’s need to reckon with its presence (though here the Poles seem to have the better of the argument). Hungary has no such excuse regarding China. Yet Orbán’s government has nonetheless gone out of its way to seek the CCP’s favor. In the Washington Examiner, Tom Rogan reports on Hungarian foreign minister Péter Szijjártó’s recent trip to China. Szijjártó welcomed Huawei, a telecom firm the U.S. has banned in this country for national-security reasons, and emphasized that Hungary’s government doesn’t “see China as a risk, but as a country with which cooperation offers us immense opportunities.” As for what those opportunities might be, Rogan notes that Szijjártó’s trip secured $3 billion of Chinese investment in Hungary. This comes atop Hungary’s receiving more funding from China’s Belt and Road Initiative than any other country last year. American conservatives are far warier of the CCP, which, as Kevin Roberts said in his remarks at CPAC Hungary, “has no, no, altruistic aims,” either for Hungary or for the U.S.

These are just a few of the reasons that American conservatives should not overinvest in the Hungarian option. As I wrote earlier this year:

Whatever popularity Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban might have with his people, why should even a good American nationalist be so invested in a European nation the size of Indiana with the population of Michigan? Any honest attempt to compare our national situations or traditions would find little overlap. Yet many conservatives praise Hungary anyway. Such praise often elides the two nations’ distinctions, and it fails to note that Orban’s government has played nice with Russia’s and has invited Chinese investment.

Well-funded press junkets and snazzy photo ops shouldn’t distract conservatives from the realities of Hungary. We would be much better off caring about the interests of the American people, guided by the traditions of the American nation.

That sounds pretty populist and nationalist to me.