The remarkable rise of Vice President Kamala Harris to the top of the Democratic ticket in the United States presidential election raises the question of her foreign policy priorities. This is a concern for the whole of the global community given the primacy of the U.S. in the international system. For the Western Balkans, however, it is particularly consequential, not only because the U.S. has wielded outsize influence in the region since the bloody dissolution of the former Yugoslavia, but because, since 2014, it has been widely perceived as the “next most likely” geopolitical flashpoint in Europe, after Ukraine. This is a region where Russia and China have exploited the waning capacity of the EU and made massive strategic strides, and where the restoration of authoritarian-nationalist rule in Serbia has prompted growing fears of renewed conflict, particularly following the discovery of large lithium deposits in the country. But understanding Harris’ posture toward the Western Balkans is not easy.
During her short tenure in the Senate (2017-21), Harris was not particularly outspoken on matters of foreign policy. Her concern with Europe, for instance, was largely apropos Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. She rose to national prominence as one of the most incisive questioners of Donald Trump’s links to the Kremlin during the then-president’s first impeachment. Upon assuming the vice presidency in 2021, Harris was largely assigned to domestic concerns, above all immigration and the southern border. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Harris did become part of the efforts by Joe Biden’s administration to rally support for Kyiv among European allies but one would be hard-pressed to identify a signature foreign policy issue Harris advanced during this time. And there is virtually no public record of Harris ever having taken an interest in the Western Balkans.
This is not to suggest that Harris was inconsequential in her role. But, ultimately, the most significant aspect of her legacy as vice president, at least with respect to the Western Balkans, may be her inescapable association with Biden’s approach to the region. It is an approach that has left both the regional policy community and much of its public aghast.
In a May 2023 article for Foreign Policy magazine, titled “How Biden Lost the Balkans,” I wrote that the Biden administration had “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,” with especially pronounced negative effects on the security and stability of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and Montenegro. In Bosnia-Herzegovina specifically, the Biden team was convincingly accused by other experts of having doubled down on “ethnic oligarchy” — shoring up the country’s sectarian constitutional regime at the expense of civil rights — during an episode of U.S.-backed election interference in October 2022, thus aiding the country’s institutional dismemberment by nationalist leaders in Zagreb and Belgrade. Even The Washington Post’s editorial board blasted Biden’s regional approach, writing in a Jan. 3 editorial that “Biden’s policy … to embrace Serbia’s authoritarian president, Aleksandar Vucic, in a bid to peel his country away from Russia … increasingly looks like a failure.”
Ironically, the vitriol directed at Biden is likely a product of the dizzying expectations that greeted his election in much of the region. The U.S. president was well known in the Western Balkans, with many — especially in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo — recalling his record as a fierce critic of then-President Bill Clinton’s soft approach to the genocidal regime of Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Serbia. The widely shared expectation was that Biden, as an impassioned Senate champion of the Bosnian independence cause, would reset Washington’s regional policy and perhaps even deliver on the historic task of reforming Bosnia’s failing U.S.-authored postwar constitution.
None of that occurred.
Instead, Biden’s ambassador to Belgrade, Christopher Hill, quickly emerged as almost a part-time spokesperson for the Vucic government. After Serb militants in the north of Kosovo attacked NATO peacekeepers, the U.S. and EU sanctioned the government of Kosovo, absurdly accusing Pristina of having provoked the riots. The sharp turn toward categorical appeasement of Belgrade became so pronounced that a group of 56 senior lawmakers from the U.S., U.K. and EU took the extraordinary step of penning an open letter calling on Washington and Brussels to adopt a tougher, reality-based approach to Serbia. Even senior Serbian opposition figures have complained publicly over an American approach that has left them, and the Serbian public, baffled.
Would President Harris continue her predecessor’s approach to the region? We do not know, and we have few tea leaves to read.
On the one hand, Harris’ camp has signaled that, as president, she would look to replace both Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. Presumably such a move would accompany additional staffing changes within the U.S. foreign policy and defense apparatus. If these alterations indicated a desire by the new president to break with the policies of the Democratic foreign policy establishment since 2008, then they would potentially represent an opportunity for the Western Balkans. That is, if Harris has a critical view of this period, and wishes to chart her own course, the Western Balkans should quickly feel the effects (and benefits) of such a decision.
On the other hand, Philip Gordon, Harris’ national security advisor and the man expected to play the dominant role in shaping her foreign policy in the event that she becomes president, served previously under both Clinton and Barack Obama. Unusually for an Obama-era official, however, the U.S. media has presented Gordon as a Europhile. Worryingly, according to the Financial Times, he appears to share Obama’s skeptical view of America’s power to shape events and his “willingness to negotiate with autocratic regimes and suspicion of idealism in foreign policy.” Given that Obama presided over a dramatic decline in American interest and capacity in the Western Balkans, the continuation of such an approach, especially following the punishing Biden years and the chaos of the Trump administration, would erode the last tethers of stability (or “stabilocracy”) in the region.
In the absence of more detailed information about Harris’ likely disposition toward the region, it might be safest to assume that she would continue her predecessors’ policy of viewing the Western Balkans as peripheral to U.S. foreign policy. In practice, that would mean that those directing Washington’s policy in the region would continue to be career diplomats in the State Department, a smattering of political appointees, and even a handful of influential ambassadors, like Hill, who have dominated regional policy to date. Given the corrosive nature of the U.S. status quo in the region, this is not an optimistic scenario.
None of this is to say a second Trump presidency would be preferable for the Western Balkans, not least because of the Trump family’s now-transparent links to Vucic, as revealed by recent New York Times and Politico reporting concerning multibillion-dollar real estate ventures in Serbia (and Albania) by the former president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his daughter Ivanka Trump. Trump’s close associate Richard Grenell, the former head of U.S. National Intelligence, also has direct ties to the Vucic regime. Grenell is a frequent visitor to Belgrade and a stalwart defender of Vucic on social media. In 2023, the Serbian leader awarded him the Order of the Serbian Flag, one of the country’s highest state honors. Grenell’s relationship to Vucic is also widely speculated to involve ties to the hard-line Bosnian Serb secessionist Milorad Dodik. The latter, for his part, hired two ex-Trump aides in 2018 to lobby on behalf of his government in Washington, D.C. The consultancy that brokered this arrangement was registered to the home address of Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager.
Yet to many in the region, at least, the Biden years were seen as little different and, in some crucial ways, as worse than the Trump era. Trump, at least, did not shore up Bosnia-Herzegovina’s failing sectarian constitutional regime, nor did he particularly strengthen the hand of anti-state elements in the country. Biden did. Grenell was credibly accused by Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti of having orchestrated a coup against his first government but the U.S.-backed Washington Agreement of 2020 secured Kosovo’s recognition by Israel. Under Biden’s watch, during the 2023 Banjska paramilitary attack, militants linked to the Belgrade regime enacted the worst violence against Kosovo since the 1998-99 war.
Democratic stalwarts may dismiss such characterizations but they should recall that the sizable Western Balkan diaspora in the U.S. is largely concentrated in a string of key swing states. Republicans are unlikely to secure the Bosnian-American or Albanian-American vote but Harris’ fortunes in states like Georgia and Michigan may well depend on their turnout. Harris’ team would do well to speak directly to these communities, stinging from Biden’s perceived betrayal over the past four years, and offer them a compelling reason to head to the polls in November, especially with respect to their core issue: U.S. policy toward the Western Balkans and Kamala Harris’ hitherto-unarticulated view on it.
The most urgent priority for a Harris administration’s foreign policy in the Western Balkans would be a comprehensive retooling of Washington’s posture toward Serbia. The Harris administration should recognize that the Trump- and Biden-era policies of attempting to pull Belgrade out of Moscow’s orbit have failed and, worse, have only further emboldened the most hard-line, militant elements in Serbia in their growing pretensions against neighboring states — above all, Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The U.S. should categorically decouple its regional policy from Serbia and refocus its efforts on shoring up the security and democratic integrity of states and governments that have proven pro-Western track records.
In practical terms this means, in conjunction with the EU, lifting the “restrictive measures” (that is, the downgrading of diplomatic ties) against Kosovo that the U.S. and EU imposed in the spring of 2023 after Serb militants attacked NATO peacekeepers, for which Washington and Brussels blamed Kosovo. The U.S. should now work with its European partners to solidify Pristina’s place in the international order. The Harris administration should also stress to its European partners that it considers Kosovo’s admission to the Council of Europe a priority because Serbia cannot be allowed to unilaterally obstruct Pristina’s participation in the international system indefinitely. The present asymmetry in the countries’ international standing has only further incentivized Serbia to engage in maximalist posturing. Relatedly, the EU should no longer wait to formalize its relationship with Kosovo as a future candidate and member state until the resolution of the Serbia-Kosovo dispute. Instead, Brussels should grant Kosovo immediate candidate status and use the accession process to create the political and institutional framework for an eventual agreement between the two sides.
Because it is likely that the five countries within the EU that oppose Kosovo’s recognition — Cyprus, Greece, Romania, Slovakia and Spain — may seek to derail this process, the Harris administration should communicate to each of these respective capitals that any such decision on their part would result in a significant bilateral rupture with the U.S. The same should be communicated to Bulgaria concerning its ongoing blockade of North Macedonia’s EU path. And the same should, especially, be stressed to the right-wing government in Croatia, whose interference in Bosnia-Herzegovina’s domestic politics has become brazen and overtly malign. The U.S. should respond with a sharp rebuke of Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic’s recent rejection of the centrality of the European Convention on Human Rights in Bosnia-Herzegovina’s postwar constitutional regime. The White House should also promptly and categorically clarify that neither Croatia nor Serbia will be permitted to play any meaningful role in the process of constitutional reform in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which is a political and legal priority.
Moreover, as president, Harris would also preside over the 30th anniversary of the signing of the same U.S.-brokered Dayton Peace Agreement which ended the Bosnian War. As the architect of the Dayton Agreement, and the Bosnian Constitution embedded within that agreement, the U.S. has a particular responsibility to the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina, especially in the wake of a succession of rulings by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which have struck down large segments of the Bosnia-Herzegovina Constitution as discriminatory. Especially given Harris’ own multiracial and multicultural background, her administration should commit to delivering substantive constitutional reform in Bosnia-Herzegovina during her first term, in line with the decisions of the ECHR, ensuring that all Bosnian citizens, regardless of their ethnic or religious identity — or lack thereof — are afforded equal democratic rights in all parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina. A relatively modest set of reforms, proximate to those previously endorsed by significant portions of the Bosnia-Herzegovina political establishment in 2006, could then also clear the path for Bosnia-Herzegovina’s NATO accession. A forthcoming policy report from the New Lines Institute will further detail the actual mechanics and substance of such a U.S.-led constitutional reform process in the country. To wit, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s inclusion in NATO could be realized before the conclusion of a hypothetical second Harris term, assuming a successful round of constitutional reform.
In short, if Harris has the will, she could help deliver a remarkable political renaissance in the Western Balkans, during which the U.S. would, finally, adopt a reality-based security posture, buttressed by a commitment to shoring up genuine democratic regimes in the region.
Such a development would also clearly signal to our beleaguered friends in Kyiv that America delivers on its promises. Understandably, after the Obama administration’s shocking capitulation to the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, Trump’s four-year rampage against the post-Cold War settlement, Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and his administration’s continued handicapping of Ukraine’s offensive capabilities, fears about U.S. commitments to the liberal democratic order remain pronounced among America’s friends and allies. Harris could do much to shore up U.S. credibility as the keystone polity of that order, through a succession of small but transformative moves in the Western Balkans.
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