Why America Is Blind to Serbia's Bright Future

Gordon N. Bardos

Security, Eurasia

Belgrade offers many opportunities that the Washington foreign-policy establishment appears unwilling to recognize.

Vladimir Putin’s visit to Belgrade on January 17 poses an interesting question—are China and Russia making inroads into Serbia due to Washington’s neglect?

The numbers speak for themselves. The last U.S. president to visit Belgrade was Jimmy Carter in 1980. Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, is making his fourth trip to Serbia since coming to power in 2000 (in addition to which Dimitri Medvedev paid an official visit to Belgrade in 2009 during his tenure as Russian president). Moreover, Putin has met with the current Serbian president, Aleksandar Vucic, at least fourteen times so far.

And the Russians have not been alone in courting Belgrade over the past few years. Chinese president Xi Jingping paid an official visit to Serbia in 2014 and has another visit planned for later this year. All told, Jingping has had five official bilateral meetings with his Serbian counterpart since 2014.

In contrast to what the Chinese and the Russians are doing, there has never been an official bilateral meeting between a president of the United States and a president of Serbia (or its predecessor, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia).

Several factors explain this difference in approach the major powers have towards Serbia. First, much of American policy towards the Balkans is a legacy of the 1990s, when policymakers such as President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore decided that supporting “Muslim causes” in the Balkans would improve America’s standing in the Islamic world.

Unfortunately, the 9/11 attacks—several of whose organizational, financial, and operational executors were Bosnian jihad veterans—revealed the intellectual facileness and paucity of such naïve beliefs. Indeed, from the 1990s through to today public opinion surveys across the Arab/Muslim world consistently show large disapproval ratings for the United States, despite the U.S. military interventions in the Balkans.