- The Washington Post
The Republican Party must rein in its mercenaries in the Balkans
Jasmin MujanovicAugust 13
Milorad Dodik, president of Bosnia’s Republika Srpska entity, in 2016. (Dado Ruvic/Reuters)
Jasmin Mujanovic, a political scientist specializing in the politics of southeastern Europe, is author of “Hunger and Fury: The Crisis of Democracy in the Balkans.”
Correction, Aug. 13: An earlier version of this piece misstated that Corey Lewandowski has worked as a lobbyist for the Dodik government in Republika Srpska.
U.S. policy in the Balkans is shifting, and the implications are ominous.
The U.S. ambassador in Pristina recently made statements suggesting that Washington is now, at the very least, open to considering the partition of Kosovo as a means of resolving a protracted dispute with Serbia over the country’s status. And in nearby Bosnia, Republican Party lobbyists and former high-ranking figures in the Trump campaign and administration have begun working on behalf of the government of Milorad Dodik, the secessionist, genocide-denying and Kremlin-backed chief of the country’s Republika Srpska entity, and who enjoys also the backing of the government in Serbia. What’s more, Dodik is still formally sanctioned by the Treasury Department for “actively obstructing” the U.S.-brokered Dayton Accords.
It is difficult to overstate the implications of this shift in American policy toward the region. It was the United States, above all, that secured peace in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The first step was its intervention against Slobodan Milosevic’s genocidal war in Bosnia, and the subsequent authoring of the Dayton Accords in 1995 (Annex 4 of which still functions as Bosnia’s constitution). The second came in 1999, when the United States and its NATO allies moved to end a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing orchestrated by Milosevic’s security services against Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian population.
Since 9/11, the United States has largely given up the lead position in regional affairs to the European Union. But Washington has shown itself willing to return to the fray whenever Brussels’ foreign policy muscle was found wanting, as has so often been the case. Only the United States, for instance, saw fit to sanction Dodik in early 2017 for holding an unconstitutional referendum on the founding of the Republika Srpska, despite repeated warnings against such a move by virtually the entire international community.
The United States has remained, in short, the lone effective arbiter in a region defined by complex and, often, volatile politics. The benign neglect that characterized the approach of the George W. Bush and Obama administrations largely coincided with a protracted downturn in regional stability. But even so, there was never any doubt about the official U.S. position on the region. Washington supported E.U. and NATO enlargement, and it insisted on the need for dialogue and diplomacy rather than nationalist brinkmanship. Crucially, it also stood firm on the territorial integrity of all existing states in the region.
Now the Trump administration’s apparent disregard for each of these principles threatens to unravel the hard-won peace in the Balkans. While the Republican lobbyists’ entanglements with the Dodik government may appear comical — a case of American con men profiting from the naive hopes of provincial strongmen — it is part of a familiar pattern. Yet once more, members of Trump’s entourage are working closely with regimes and movements that are linked to Russia and which explicitly oppose and seek actively to undermine U.S. and E.U. interests.
The implications are troubling. If the government in Belgrade is permitted to revisit the post-Yugoslav bargain on Kosovo, will it be allowed, once more, to attempt to annex eastern Bosnia, as it did in the 1990s and as the extremist Dodik insists that it should? And if Serbia is permitted to patch together a “Greater Serbia 2.0” from Bosnia and Kosovo, will the same right be extended to irredentist nationalists in, say, Albania, who lay claim to large swaths of Kosovo, Macedonia and Serbia?
Or let us make the stakes still more stark: What is the Trump administration prepared to do about the inevitable bloodshed that will erupt when, in the wake of these proposed partitions, large minorities in each of these territories decide they will not be removed from what they consider to be their ancestral homelands? And how will it respond to European accusations that it is fomenting war?
Trump has repeatedly shown that he is opposed to virtually all the core pillars of the post-1945 liberal international order and America’s leading role in establishing this system. He was elected on a virulently nationalist platform and is deeply sympathetic to the “Russian view” on world affairs. It is a combination of features that makes the Balkans uniquely attractive to those, like the president, who hope to make league with fellow anti-liberal reactionaries.
Yet sober policymakers in Washington cannot allow recalcitrant extremists in the Balkans to believe that their hour has come again. They will interpret any ambiguity as license for the worst kind of adventurism. The White House, the State Department and Congress must urgently clarify their positions on the territorial integrity of Kosovo and Bosnia, but also on the broader post-Yugoslavia state system.
GOP leaders, for their part, must rein in their mercenaries. If U.S. foreign policy is now — as it appears — truly for sale, then Republican officials will soon have to explain to mothers and fathers why they are asking their children to redeploy to a region most Americans last heard of nearly two decades ago.
The Republican Party must rein in its mercenaries in the Balkans
Jasmin MujanovicAugust 13
Jasmin Mujanovic, a political scientist specializing in the politics of southeastern Europe, is author of “Hunger and Fury: The Crisis of Democracy in the Balkans.”
Correction, Aug. 13: An earlier version of this piece misstated that Corey Lewandowski has worked as a lobbyist for the Dodik government in Republika Srpska.
U.S. policy in the Balkans is shifting, and the implications are ominous.
The U.S. ambassador in Pristina recently made statements suggesting that Washington is now, at the very least, open to considering the partition of Kosovo as a means of resolving a protracted dispute with Serbia over the country’s status. And in nearby Bosnia, Republican Party lobbyists and former high-ranking figures in the Trump campaign and administration have begun working on behalf of the government of Milorad Dodik, the secessionist, genocide-denying and Kremlin-backed chief of the country’s Republika Srpska entity, and who enjoys also the backing of the government in Serbia. What’s more, Dodik is still formally sanctioned by the Treasury Department for “actively obstructing” the U.S.-brokered Dayton Accords.
It is difficult to overstate the implications of this shift in American policy toward the region. It was the United States, above all, that secured peace in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The first step was its intervention against Slobodan Milosevic’s genocidal war in Bosnia, and the subsequent authoring of the Dayton Accords in 1995 (Annex 4 of which still functions as Bosnia’s constitution). The second came in 1999, when the United States and its NATO allies moved to end a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing orchestrated by Milosevic’s security services against Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian population.
Since 9/11, the United States has largely given up the lead position in regional affairs to the European Union. But Washington has shown itself willing to return to the fray whenever Brussels’ foreign policy muscle was found wanting, as has so often been the case. Only the United States, for instance, saw fit to sanction Dodik in early 2017 for holding an unconstitutional referendum on the founding of the Republika Srpska, despite repeated warnings against such a move by virtually the entire international community.
The United States has remained, in short, the lone effective arbiter in a region defined by complex and, often, volatile politics. The benign neglect that characterized the approach of the George W. Bush and Obama administrations largely coincided with a protracted downturn in regional stability. But even so, there was never any doubt about the official U.S. position on the region. Washington supported E.U. and NATO enlargement, and it insisted on the need for dialogue and diplomacy rather than nationalist brinkmanship. Crucially, it also stood firm on the territorial integrity of all existing states in the region.
Now the Trump administration’s apparent disregard for each of these principles threatens to unravel the hard-won peace in the Balkans. While the Republican lobbyists’ entanglements with the Dodik government may appear comical — a case of American con men profiting from the naive hopes of provincial strongmen — it is part of a familiar pattern. Yet once more, members of Trump’s entourage are working closely with regimes and movements that are linked to Russia and which explicitly oppose and seek actively to undermine U.S. and E.U. interests.
The implications are troubling. If the government in Belgrade is permitted to revisit the post-Yugoslav bargain on Kosovo, will it be allowed, once more, to attempt to annex eastern Bosnia, as it did in the 1990s and as the extremist Dodik insists that it should? And if Serbia is permitted to patch together a “Greater Serbia 2.0” from Bosnia and Kosovo, will the same right be extended to irredentist nationalists in, say, Albania, who lay claim to large swaths of Kosovo, Macedonia and Serbia?
Or let us make the stakes still more stark: What is the Trump administration prepared to do about the inevitable bloodshed that will erupt when, in the wake of these proposed partitions, large minorities in each of these territories decide they will not be removed from what they consider to be their ancestral homelands? And how will it respond to European accusations that it is fomenting war?
Trump has repeatedly shown that he is opposed to virtually all the core pillars of the post-1945 liberal international order and America’s leading role in establishing this system. He was elected on a virulently nationalist platform and is deeply sympathetic to the “Russian view” on world affairs. It is a combination of features that makes the Balkans uniquely attractive to those, like the president, who hope to make league with fellow anti-liberal reactionaries.
Yet sober policymakers in Washington cannot allow recalcitrant extremists in the Balkans to believe that their hour has come again. They will interpret any ambiguity as license for the worst kind of adventurism. The White House, the State Department and Congress must urgently clarify their positions on the territorial integrity of Kosovo and Bosnia, but also on the broader post-Yugoslavia state system.
GOP leaders, for their part, must rein in their mercenaries. If U.S. foreign policy is now — as it appears — truly for sale, then Republican officials will soon have to explain to mothers and fathers why they are asking their children to redeploy to a region most Americans last heard of nearly two decades ago.
