Hungary and the United States have been allies since Hungary joined NATO in 1999. President Donald Trump’s reelection augurs well for closer ties on defense policy. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán visited Trump during the election campaign and called him “the man who can save the Western world.” Trump, in return, has said “there’s nobody that’s better, smarter, or a better leader than Viktor Orbán.”
Trump and Orbán both believe that NATO’s deterrence purpose should be strengthened. Broad agreement on NATO policy could lead to other forms of US-Hungary defense cooperation.
At the June 2025 NATO summit in The Hague, all member states agreed to Trump’s proposal to meet the two percent of GDP threshold for defense spending in 2025 and then increase it to five percent (3.5 percent on defense and 1.5 percent on related infrastructure and support facilities) by 2035. Hungary, one of the few NATO members to have already reached the two percent threshold, accepted the five percent commitment ahead of the summit, with Orbán pointing to conflicts in Eurasia and the Middle East in justifying the increased spending.
In recent years, Hungary has sourced most of its military hardware to Germany, its largest trading partner, becoming one of Germany’s biggest military equipment customers. Increasing Hungary’s arms purchases from the US would bind the countries more closely together, enable closer military cooperation, prove a boon to the US defense industry and, if a projected arms plant in Hungary opens, to the Hungarian economy as well.
Hungary’s reluctance to engage the US as an arms supplier has been rooted for years in its suspicion that American authorities might condition arms sales on domestic policies in Hungary. Such conditioning has happened elsewhere in the recent past, for instance in the Biden administration’s dealings with countries in West Africa, where the governments of Niger and Chad expelled substantial US forces based there after Washington suspended military aid owing to domestic political developments.
Hungary has also suffered in this way. In June 2023, Republican Senator Jim Risch, then ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, unilaterally suspended a $735 million sale of M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) units to Hungary owing to Hungary’s then-hesitant policy on Swedish admission to NATO. Hungary subsequently cancelled the order altogether despite approving Swedish NATO admission only eight months later.
Trump, however, is striking a different note. In May, at an investment conference in Saudi Arabia, Trump said he has no intention of “giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs.” With Trump’s commitment to noninterference, there is far less cause for concern that arms deals with the US could fall through. In April 2025 the Hungarian media reported Trump’s “expectation” that Budapest will increase its arms purchases from the United States and further claimed that ongoing trade negotiations include opening a US defense industry manufacturing center in Hungary. Greater defense cooperation has also entered bilateral economic discussions as a potential means to offset the cost to Hungary of Trump’s recent tariff diplomacy.
Closer defense cooperation could also involve increasing deployments of American forces on Hungarian soil. In March 2025 the Daily Telegraph reported that Trump was considering the relocation of some 35,000 servicemen from Germany to Hungary, in part out of frustration with Germany’s lack of cooperation on ending the war in Ukraine. These reports remain unconfirmed beyond general State Department responses that American redeployment options are always under consideration.
Such a move would make strategic sense. Whereas western Germany was close to the Cold War frontlines of two generations ago, Hungary is closer by hundreds of kilometers to today’s conflicts in Eurasia and the Middle East. Moving the bulk of US deployed forces in Europe to Hungary would be in line with the eastern push in NATO’s security architecture.
Hungary has hosted a NATO multinational divisional center, including American servicemen, at Székesfehérvár since 2022. Accepting relocated American assets on a large scale would also offer the discreet benefit of infusing into the Hungarian economy billions of dollars in direct U.S. capital investment and, for years to come, billions more in annual consumer spending by well-paid American servicemen and their dependent family members.
This could prove vital in Hungary’s next parliamentary elections, scheduled for April 2026, in which some early polls show Orbán’s Fidesz party trailing owing largely to economic dissatisfaction. But in any event, the US-Hungarian subset of the transAtlantic alliance, including its military component, is on track to deepen.
