The Treaty of Peace between the United States of America and Hungary was signed in Budapest on 29 August 1921, in duplicate. Plenipotentiaries: Ulysses Grant-Smith, Commissioner of the United States to Hungary, and Count Miklós Bánffy, Royal Hungarian Minister for Foreign Affairs. Article III: ratification in constitutional form and effect immediately on the exchange of instruments in Budapest — 17 December 1921. It is not the Treaty of Trianon of 4 June 1920, nor the US–Austrian peace of 24 August 1921, nor the US–German peace of 25 August 1921.

The preamble recalls the armistice of 3 November 1918, the disappearance of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the fact that the United States had not ratified Trianon, and the Congressional Joint Resolution of 2 July 1921, which declared the state of war at an end and reserved American rights. Article I: Hungary accords to the United States the rights, privileges, indemnities and advantages specified in that resolution, including those stipulated in Trianon, even without American ratification of the multilateral treaty.

Article II specifies, at a high level, which parts of Trianon apply to the United States (V, VI, VIII–XII and XIV) and which do not bind it (the League Covenant in Part I, and Parts II, III, IV and XIII). Participation in the Reparation Commission is optional. The time periods in Article 364 of the multilateral treaty run, for the United States, from the coming into force of the bilateral peace.

The instrument was registered in the League of Nations Treaty Series on 8 May 1926 (vol. 48, p. 191; TS 660). A supplementary treaty, signed in Washington on 26 November 1924, established a mixed claims commission. The official text consulted is that in FRUS 1921, not the register’s LNTS volume.

Cover: the Parliament on the Danube in Budapest, the capital of signature; we do not claim the hall. Wikimedia Commons, free licence.

Sources consulted: U.S.–Hungarian Peace Treaty; FRUS 1921, volume II, document 253.