Orban's been a regular interview for Tucker Carlson for years, and Hungary is a poster child for a big slice of the right wing base.

And literally nobody cares. Once Tucker lost his show, his relevance started going with it. The other thing he started doing was launching a lot of weird stuff about Israel.

They know who he is the way you know who Meloni is. He's the foreign leader that was their first and favorite example of the type of conservative anti-globalist nationalism that the MAGA base loves.

YOU know who Orban is. *I* know who Orban is. We only know that because we're politics junkies. Your average MAGA person isn't. That's the difference. And as a political junkie, I haven't the faintest idea who the Prime Minister of Slovakia is and certainly couldn't pick them out of a lineup.

Overall the EU have successfully cut their gas imports by about two thirds - and even more if you take out Hungary and Slovakia, again. This effort to zero out Russian imports is fraught with legal peril - it's a kludge that's going to send many of their energy companies into court battles that they'll likely lose, because the absence of sanctions means that many (most?) won't be able to invoke force majeure to stop their legal obligation to continue imports. They've moved pretty quick, all things considered.

Buying or not buying Russian oil and gas doesn't necessarily need to be a "sanctions" kind of a thing. The European model of business - just ask anyone connected to Boeing or Airbus - revolves around them subsidizing businesses they like and want to protect. And that's purely a business decision rooted in long-term continental economic strategy.

They could, for example, decide to start shunting dollars to (Dutch Royal) Shell or British Petroleum to effectively lower the cost of oil below what Putin is offering Slovakia and Hungary. They could do the same thing with respect to LNG terminals, if they're not already.

Yep. The EU framework requires unanimity to impose sanctions like this. Weird, right? Despite the caricature of Brussels as an uber-powerful "One World Government in the wings" type of leviathan, they actually have a discrete remit of authority and can't just do anything they want.

Actually, it plays into the stereotype very well: A collection of inept bureaucrats who are very good at meddling with stupid stuff like the design of teapots - things that mean absolutely nothing in the Grand Scheme of Things - but who fail completely at solving pressing issues that Actually Matter. The EU is one of the perfect, living embodiments and examples of why large bureaucracies crash out: they can't active decisively on a fine enough scale to matter.

It's why proponents of Big Government always lose the argument around agility. There's no possible way to simultaneously be that Big and be agile.

This is not Trump's "problem to solve," but me trying to explain to you why it has been nearly impossible for the EU to stop Russian oil shipments entirely.

And you're doing an excellent job of demonstrating why their half-assed Federalism concepts over there aren't getting the job done.