How Biden lost the Balkans Analysis by Foreign Policy

The Foreign Policy magazine has published an article claiming that the United States has deepened its commitments to Serbia’s near-autocratic president and reoriented its regional posture to center Belgrade’s foreign-policy priorities. Caliber.Az reprints the article.

Of the myriad predictions about the impacts of Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, one of the most pronounced in the Western Balkans—Europe’s other major geopolitical borderland—was the hope that it would mark the definitive end of Western illusions about the possibility for accommodation with authoritarian and chauvinist regimes.

In Sarajevo, Pristina, and Podgorica, in particular, the anticipation was that the United States and European Union would finally see Serbia and Aleksandar Vucic’s regime for what they are: a Kremlin satellite state sowing discord through a network of regional proxies with the aim of expanding its own quasi-imperial machinations and, in coordination with Moscow, halting the NATO and EU membership aspirations of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Montenegro. And, as a result, consequences would finally follow for Belgrade.

That has not happened. In fact, over the past year, the United States, even more so than the EU, has aggressively deepened its commitments to Serbia’s near-autocratic president while simultaneously reorienting its broader regional posture to center Belgrade and its foreign-policy priorities. While in the Ukrainian context the Biden administration insists on the principle of “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine”—meaning that Ukrainians must be involved in any and all negotiations related to the war—and has framed its support for Kyiv as an expression of the US president’s broader pro-democracy agenda, neither principle applies to its forays in the Western Balkans.

Here, US ambassadors to Sarajevo and Belgrade meet with Vucic to discuss the antics of the Serbian president’s secessionist lieutenant Milorad Dodik in Bosnia. They do so while touting the “importance of supporting [Bosnia’s] sovereignty, territorial integrity, and multiethnic character and functional state-level institutions”—but without a single Bosnian official present.

The US ambassador to Serbia, Christopher Hill, routinely lambasts the government of nearby Kosovo for what he claims is its failure to abide by the 2013 Brussels Agreement—which was intended to create a pathway toward mutual recognition and diplomatic normalization between the two states—to the delight of Serbia’s notorious regime tabloids. Hill has little to say, however, on Serbia’s refusal to realize core provisions of that deal and several more recent ones, too. In fact, Belgrade is so intransigent regarding Kosovo that the recent Brussels-Ohrid agreement, brokered by the European Union to (re)start the normalization process, saw Vucic refuse to even sign the document. Instead, he claimed to have agreed to it verbally but then made clear within hours that he had no intention of abiding by any aspect of the document.

In Montenegro, meanwhile, the United States has emerged as the chief foreign patron, along with Serbia, of a heterodox coalition of purported reformers whose most significant members are a bloc of Serb nationalist and clericalist parties that even Washington recognizes as being directly on the Russian payroll. The country’s incoming president, Jakov Milatovic, has presented himself as a pro-European moderate, and his newly formed party, Europe Now, is widely projected to dominate the upcoming parliamentary elections in June.

But Milatovic previously served as minister of economic development in the short-lived cabinet of Zdravko Krivokapic, a hard-line Serb nationalist with close ties to both Belgrade and Moscow. When Krivokapic’s government collapsed in 2022, Milatovic was replaced in the portfolio. His subsequent presidential campaign was backed by the entirety of the Serb nationalist establishment in Montenegro and even by convicted Serbian war criminals such as Vojislav Seselj. When it came time for his supporters to celebrate his eventual victory, they did so with a preponderance of Serbian flags and sectarian hymns about Kosovo.

Why has Washington found itself in league with Belgrade? It’s not hard to explain, but it is a policy completely at odds with the Biden administration’s posture toward Ukraine. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration correctly recognized that the overall political and security situation in the Western Balkans had become untenable. Bosnia, Kosovo, and Montenegro were the most likely flash points, all of which could easily be co-opted by Moscow to create a proverbial second front in Europe—maybe not in the kinetic sense but certainly politically. As such, it was in the United States’ interest to quickly lock down the Western Balkans after two decades of having largely left the region’s administration to Brussels—with abysmal results.

To accomplish this, the Biden State Department, the public record would suggest, has concluded that it needs partners who can deliver on their promises. In the Western Balkans, that generally means relying on the least pluralistic regimes in the region. As Majda Ruge, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, has observed: “Western governments consistently treat Belgrade as the indispensable player on the major questions facing the Western Balkans. Whatever the issue at hand, Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vucic, is the first person they call. Part of this is understandable: power in Serbia is concentrated with Vucic, who has accrued considerable control to himself.”

It also means immediately discounting Sarajevo, Pristina, and Podgorica, despite all three being avowedly pro-Western in orientation and Montenegro being a NATO member state. That is because the politics of all three states are internally far too fractious, in large part because of the direct meddling of outside powers: Serbia, first and foremost, but also Croatia, at least in the case of Bosnia. Evidently, the Biden administration believes that peace in the Balkans requires centering the interests of the strong over the weak, centering the interests of those most likely to engineer instability over those seeking to defend themselves.

It is the kind of realpolitik calculus that has driven decades of US policy in volatile regions. It is what Washington has attempted to do with Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and even Russia in years prior. The track record speaks for itself. As Daniel Serwer, a former US diplomat and foreign-policy scholar, noted last month, the “basic analysis” of those pushing these policies “is flawed.” He continued: “They have been relying on Serbia as the pivotal state in the region to bring stability, in cooperation with Croatia and Albania. But Serbia is a revisionist power. It wants to govern all Serbs in the region. Croatia and Albania have lesser ambitions, but in the same direction: to control their compatriots in neighboring Bosnia and Kosovo.” To what extent Albania is part of this triumvirate remains debatable, but few seasoned observers question Serbia and Croatia’s centrality in the scheme.

Yet the real trouble is that even if the Biden administration were to reconsider its policies, it’s unclear whether that would make much of a difference at this juncture. US President Joe Biden’s missteps in the region have been so consequential that he may be unable to salvage his reputation among the communities most affected by his decisions, which also happen to be the most pro-American populaces in the region. That is especially the case in Bosnia, where Washington’s authorial role in the brazen, illiberal, and partisan gerrymandering by the Office of the High Representative on behalf of the Croat nationalist HDZ BiH, and its partners in secessionist Dodik’s SNSD, has reduced trust in the United States to a postwar nadir.

Evidently, though, neither the White House nor the State Department is concerned. On April 27, the United States again supported a second round of democratically dubious constitutional changes in Bosnia’s Federation entity after High Representative Christian Schmidt’s initial amendments from Oct. 2, 2022—imposed only minutes after the polls had closed in the country’s general election—failed to produce their desired outcome (i.e., a government dominated by the HDZ BiH). Any pretense of working to realize sustainable, democratic, liberal reforms in Bosnia (and its US-drafted constitution) has evaporated. Washington is now purely acting in the interest of its commitments to Belgrade and Zagreb and thus the political interests of their respective Bosnian and regional proxies.

In a curious historical turn, if the Biden team comes to regret its posture toward the Balkans, it will, at least in the short term, be because of US electoral realities. The small but electorally significant pockets of Bosnian Americans, for instance, in swing states such as Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, and Arizona, among others, are numerous enough to throw the next US presidential election to the Republican candidate. As of 2015, for instance, an estimated 10,000 Bosnians were living in the US state of Georgia, which Biden won by fewer than 12,000 votes in 2020. There are a similar number of Bosnians in North Carolina. In Michigan, which has a proximate number of Bosnian Americans in the state, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer declared March 1 as “Bosnian American Day.” The city of Phoenix, Arizona, alone accepted some 7,000 Bosnian refugees during the 1990s and early 2000s, and the community has grown significantly since. All these figures are on top of the approximately 50,000 to 70,000 Bosnian Americans who live in just the greater St. Louis area in the battleground state of Missouri.

The Republicans are unlikely to deliver on the core interests of these voters with respect to their regional priorities (notwithstanding strong community champions such as Missouri’s Rep. Ann Wagner). But in speaking with Bosnian American community leaders across the country, the sense of betrayal at Biden’s turn on Bosnia and the Balkans is palpable. Bosnians need not vote Republican to scuttle Biden’s chances at reelection. They need only stay home.

Even so, that will be cold comfort to those vulnerable regional populaces now left at the mercy of nationalist governments in Serbia and Croatia and all the historical and political memory that comes with their renewed primacy. As so often before in the Western Balkans, the grand ideological promises of our age—in this case, the hope of a categorical, normative commitment by the political West to the defense of democracy and the right of small nations to be free—have turned to ash. One must only travel less than 1,000 miles southwest of Bucha, Ukraine, to find the United States wheeling and dealing with known Russian proxies in the name of hollow and cruel stability.