Analysis
Democratic Security
The Open Question of Rumen Radev
23 April 2026
The Visegard countries should pay more attention improving relations with Japan, a democratic and reliable partner, and whose trade deal with the EU has meteoric potential with the combined markets accounting for a third of the world’s GDP.
Back in 2012, at the inaugural summit of the so-called “16+1” grouping – China plus sixteen Central and Eastern European countries – Beijing proclaimed that the continent’s emerging markets had a “golden opportunity” to share in the riches of China’s then-newly launched trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
Not long after, Czechia described itself as the “gateway” for Chinese investment into Europe and, while on a state visit to Beijing in 2016, President Miloš Zeman said he had come to “learn how to increase economic growth and how to stabilise society” for his country. (Just 20 years earlier, he had asserted that anyone who sought closer ties with Beijing was “ready to go under plastic surgery to slant their eyes.”)
Hungary, under the illiberal Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, also offered itself as the ideal location for China to extend its BRI projects into Europe.
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