How to Keep Putin — and Xi — Out of the Balkans
Serbia is becoming a focus of great-power conflict, and the EU and NATO can bring it into the Western fold.
By Retired Admiral James Stavridis, Fletcher Dean Emeritus, and former supreme allied commander of NATO
The Balkans are complicated. And the tendency is always to ignore those nations — until they erupt, as they have done reliably over recent decades.
The explosions of the 1990s were particularly ugly, culminating in the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys by ethnic Serbian paramilitary forces at Srebrenica, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. At the time, I was captain of a destroyer operating as part of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization blockade in the Adriatic Sea preventing advanced weapons from reaching Serb fighters. To prepare for the assignment, I had read Robert D. Kaplan’s extraordinary account of the bloody history of the region, “Balkan Ghosts.” I came away with a healthy respect for the bitter hatred that drives all sides.
In the early 2010s, when I was supreme allied commander of NATO, we had 15,000 troops from 20 countries helping keep an uneasy peace between Serbia and Kosovo — the latter a breakaway region of the former that the US recognizes as a sovereign state. The animosity stemmed from centuries of conflict between Serbian Christians and Muslim Kosovars — dating back to the fall of the Byzantine Empire and the rise of Ottoman Turkey. I felt the deep-rooted loathing every time I visited the region, which I did dozens of times. “Too much history,” one Kosovar leader said to me.
Unsurprisingly, the Balkan Peninsula remains full of tensions, notably on the Serbia-Kosovo border and in Bosnia, where an awkward tripartite government composed of Orthodox Serbs, Roman Catholic Croats and Muslim Bosniaks teeters along. Bosnia and Herzegovina is still a mess, but to some extent when an potentially explosive event occurs, the parties don’t reach for their hunting rifles, but rather look to the EU for mediation. A much smaller NATO mission there helps keep the lid on (unfortunately, nearly 100 of those peacekeepers were injured in rioting by ethnic Serbs in Kosovo last year).
In a smartly argued recent piece in Politico, Matthew Kaminski lays out a persuasive case that Serbia is a crucial point of 21st century geopolitical competition. On one side is the West, particularly the European Union and NATO; and on the other side is not only Russia but increasingly China, which sees Serbia as a convenient strategic point of entry into southeastern Europe. Kaminski says of Serbia, “Its fate will help determine which Great Power comes to dominate this century.”
That may be a bit hyperbolic, but the democratic world should be extremely concerned about Russia and China making major inroads into what is otherwise becoming a NATO peninsula.
Serbia is the most conflicted country in the region. On one hand, the Serbs have significant cultural and historic affinities to Vladimir Putin’s Russia. They share a powerful religious connection through the Russian and Serbian Orthodox churches and are significant trading partners. And in May, President Xi Jinping of China made a high-profile trip to sign a trade deal with Belgrade.
On the other hand, the Serbs look at next-door Croatia and see how cooperation with Western Europe can lead to economic improvements in everything from tourism to infrastructure. Serbia applied for European Union membership in 2009. French President Emmanuel Macron had a splashy visit last month, and locked in the sale of a dozen French Rafale jets to the Serbian Air Force. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz went to Belgrade over the summer to wrap up an EU-Serbia mineral deal.
The Serbs have also seen several Balkan countries attaining membership in NATO (Albania, North Macedonia, Croatia, Slovenia and Montenegro) and the EU (Croatia and Slovenia). This provides impetus to the idea of Serbia, essentially the inheritor of the old Yugoslavia, coming toward the West.
The key may well be the president of Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic. I met Vucic (which means “wolf” in Serbian) during my time at NATO and was impressed. At 6’6” he towered over my compact frame, but we got along. His English is excellent, and after we got past the obligatory NATO-bashing (the alliance fired a number of Tomahawk missiles into Belgrade during the Balkan wars), Vucic struck me as smart, strategic and an effective communicator.
Washington is wisely putting a full court press on Serbia, starting with sending one of its most experienced career ambassadors, Chris Hill, to Belgrade. Hill, who has been posted to four other nations including North Macedonia, is the ultimate steady pair of hands to gently pull Serbia toward the West.
Of particular note, Serbia has been largely supportive of Ukraine. While Belgrade has not joined the sanctions regime against Russia, Vucic has condemned Putin’s aggression and said that Russian-occupied Crimea and Donbas are Ukrainian sovereign territories. Belgrade has also allowed nearly $1 billion worth of Serbian ammunition — purchased by the US — to find its way to Kyiv. As Hill recently told me, “We need all hands on deck for Ukraine, and Serbia is definitely helping.”
Greater NATO engagement across the Balkans would be a smart way to court the Serbs. This should include robust training exercises led by Balkan NATO members such as Greece and Bulgaria; more sales of Western military technology across the region, including better armor and artillery; sending US officers to Serbian war colleges and their senior officers to ours; and approaching the Serbs for participation in NATO missions outside the Balkans, especially involving cyber-defenses and special forces in counternarcotics.
Some may say the Serbs are too traditionally close to Moscow, but as I look at the pragmatism of Belgrade under Vucic and our success of courting other Balkan states into NATO, I think that over time bringing both Serbia and Bosnia into the alliance is both possible and wise. It would further calm a restive peninsula, and help block an important part of Putin’s plans in a strategic corner of Europe.
(This post is republished from Bloomberg Opinion.)