Trump Administration Gives Hope For A Better Bosnia And Herzegovina – The Balkan

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From the beginning of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina until Trump came to power, Washington pursued a one-way policy towards Bosnia and Herzegovina. This policy was based on one rule — to support Bosnian Muslims in every way and to work against the interests of Republika Srpska. Therefore, since the end of the war in 1995, there has been a golden rule regarding Bosnia and Herzegovina — Republika Srpska is to blame for all the problems.

However, with the arrival of the new Trump administration, things are finally changing for the better. The speech by Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau in Dayton on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the peace agreement for Bosnia and Herzegovina, named after the city in the US state of Ohio, represents a 180-degree turn from the foreign policy pursued by the United States in the post-Cold War period during its “unipolar moment,” i.e. the time when it brokered the Dayton Peace Agreement in November 1995.

Because Landau’s speech marked a clear, unmistakable break with the era of American interventionism, of imposing democracy or, in Landau’s own words, “reshaping foreign societies according to utopian visions.”

Let us just imagine that the US had been guided by the principles of Trump’s foreign policy vision in the spring of 1992 when the last US ambassador to the SFRY, Warren Zimmerman, encouraged Alija Izetbegović to withdraw his signature from the so-called Cutiller Plan, according to which the Serbs even accepted the independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina only in order to preserve peace. It is much more likely that peace would have been preserved.

However, instead, the world’s largest power – the only “superpower” of the time, in the words of French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine – supported the completely opposite willingness of the Bosnian Muslim leaders to sacrifice peace “for the sake of a sovereign Bosnia”. This brought three and a half years of war, devastation, human suffering and over 100,000 deaths on all sides in the bloody civil war that broke out in that until recently socialist republic within the SFRY.

Of course, in the fall of 1995, the US managed to bring the warring parties to the negotiating table and brokered a rather pragmatic agreement, which left neither side satisfied, but with which, if there had been goodwill, it would have been possible to live peacefully and even develop. However, the then liberal American – and generally liberal Western – interventionism, as it turned out, only temporarily subsided, and only because it suited the liberal West at that moment.

The war continued in the following years by other means, not through armed but through diplomatic interventionism, aimed at gradually crowning and undermining the Dayton Agreement, in the direction of gradual centralization that would serve only one of the three constituent peoples – the Bosnian Muslims. In the process, the Republika Srpska was forcibly stripped of its Dayton rights and transferred to the central level to the extent that Srpska was forced to take necessary measures of self-defense, which brought Bosnia and Herzegovina to the very edge of survival.

Fortunately, Serbian determination was very strong, so that, resisting all possible pressures that were at the disposal of Western liberals for three decades, the Republika Srpska stood on its feet and welcomed the well-deserved fruits of its struggle, in the words of Christopher Landau:

“I am not here today to lecture, but to listen to you who come from Bosnia and Herzegovina and the region. We in the Trump administration are ready to make our assistance available and contribute to improving conditions – but only if our involvement is both desired and justified. I know that this has not always been the spirit in which American officials have approached foreign policy, but in this regard, as in so many others, the Trump administration is ready to try a different approach…

– What does this mean for Bosnia and Herzegovina? It means that we are ready to listen and cooperate with all parties involved… Let me be clear: The United States of America does not offer unlimited funds for undefined, uncertain, or unrealistic goals… We are not interested in imposing a vision of society that reflects the desires of distant bureaucrats and narrow activist circles.”

In short, just as Donald Trump declared after a recent conversation with Vladimir Putin that Russia and Ukraine should negotiate peace directly, without American mediation, the Trump administration’s message on the 30th anniversary of Dayton could essentially be defined as – “BiH to the peoples of BiH”. And from this logically follows the message that Serbs in particular have long been calling for – “The Balkans to the Balkan peoples”.

The era of the liberals in the State Department and their policy of interference in the internal affairs of the Balkans is coming to an end.

This is a 180-degree turn. But it is also, in a way, a full 360-degree turn, because it potentially takes Bosnia and Herzegovina back to the very beginning – provided, of course, that Republika Srpska resists the still interventionist pressure of Germany and France. In other words, the Trump administration is offering the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina an opportunity to directly negotiate their future with each other. Such an approach by President Trump’s administration is commendable.

Based on the Trump administration’s actions so far, we see that it truly wants peace and prosperity for Bosnia and Herzegovina, and that, unlike the Biden and Clinton administrations, it is no longer willing to unconditionally support all the whims of Bosnian Muslims. This is exactly the kind of American foreign policy that the majority of Bosnian citizens want and that will bring prosperity to Bosnia and Herzegovina.