What America Needs from the Western Balkans

The Western Balkans have traveled an extraordinary distance from the catastrophic violence of the 1990s, but progress is not permanent, nor inevitable. This tiny region — both mountainous and coastal — has historically been easier for outside powers to occupy than for governance managed from within. For powers like China and Russia, that seemingly geopolitical propensity towards instability in the region has greatly aided their efforts to increase friction along the periphery of the Atlantic community. That latter fact, at least, should be a greater concern for Washington.

This article is available in Bosnian

While not a top US regional priority, our national interests are served and preserved in the Western Balkans by promoting sustained political and institutional engagement that prevents conflict. Promoting security in regions proximate to our core geographic zones of interest (in this case the Eurasian borderlands) should be a permanent component of US foreign policy. Stereotypes about the Balkans as a powder-keg are overstated, but they do allude to an underlying instability which may portend yet another protracted European security crisis. Unrest in this corner of Europe will not remain contained, and the US cannot remain prosperous absent European stability; our chief political and commercial partners. The US must therefore work to improve governance in Europe’s ‘neighborhood’ or risk being forced to react to violence. This, in any case, was the clear lesson of delinquent American and European engagement during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s.

Sustained and beneficial engagement (beneficial, above all, to America’s national security needs) requires a practical and actionable roadmap: first, asserting and granting primacy to US interests in Washington’s approach to the region; second, advancing broader stability and governance measures to achieve the same.

The fundamental interest of the US in the Western Balkans is the region’s security and stability, and its integration into the political and economic space of Europe and the transatlantic community. We do not want the region to undermine our broader interests in Europe, and, ideally, we want to the region to develop as a modest but certainly not worthless site for American investment. Especially with respect to the Western Balkans strategic geographic position, its significant critical raw materials and other natural resource deposits, and its other strategically significant industries, including the region’s burgeoning defense and munitions sectors.

How can the US achieve these aims?   

First, the US should protect US security by advancing regional security. Primus inter pares, extend NATO’s security umbrella. Three Western Balkan countries are not yet members, Kosovo, Bosnia, and Serbia, and that should be remedied, to the extent possible.

Kosovo is seemingly eager to meet NATO membership obligations, bolstered by hundreds of US troops stationed around the country via the Kosovo Force. This is a militarily capable country with an impressive security infrastructure and a longstanding partnership with the Iowa National Guard. Practically, the US can take an active role in Kosovo’s inclusion in the Partnership for Peace. Only when Kosovo is on an irrevocable NATO membership trajectory, firmly ensconced within the Alliance’s broader security and political architecture, should the US troop contribution to KFOR be re-examined.

Bosnia has pursued NATO membership under national law since 2005 and already possesses the bureaucratic and technical elements necessary for consideration. Ostensibly intractable political divisions stall its advancement, divisions that could be dealt with through relatively modest institutional and constitutional reforms, such as insulating defense and security policy from the country’s cumbersome sectarian veto mechanisms. By ensconcing Bosnia (the regional strategic pivot point) in NATO, the US would permanently foreclose threats to the country’s territorial integrity and remove Bosnia from the geopolitical chess board.

Serbia should be considered for membership after the country creates a pattern of productive actions supporting regional defense and demonstrated actions respecting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of its neighbors. At the very least, however, the US should lean much harder on Belgrade to not interfere with the Atlantic aspirations of sovereign, neighboring states.

Beyond NATO enlargement, the US Congress should advance a comprehensive security package through a Balkan Security Initiative, modeled on the framework that has worked well with the Baltic states. There are industries, strategic assets, and defense capability across the region which we have a vested interest in promoting and elevating, especially given the mounting costs of our overseas deployments.

Bosnia has a burgeoning munitions manufacturing sector outpacing much larger European states; Albania and Montenegro offer strategically located Adriatic ports; North Macedonia boasts a decades-long partnership with the Vermont National Guard. Such an initiative deters malign influence, and Washington decision-makers should make no mistake: Russia’s influence in the Western Balkans is malign and nefarious. The 2026 Office of the Director of National Intelligence Annual Threat Assessment notes that Russia fuels instability between Serbia and Kosovo and backs the separation of the Republika Srpska entity from Bosnia and Herzegovina. And in the meantime, China is on pace to very soon supplant both the US and EU in the region’s civil society information spaces and aims clearly to achieve the same with respect to the region’s broader economic orientation.

Second, Washington should be unapologetic about America’s preferred outcomes and partners in the region.

The most stable, prosperous and flourishing Western Balkan countries are pluralistic and multi-ethnic. Exclusionary ethnic administration of territory, property, utilities, or the law should be unequivocally avoided. Full stop. Niche governance structures, benighted and untenable, have not produced rational outcomes anywhere in the region. In fact, in most cases they serve as permanent provocations for conflict.  Detrimental as well is that these niche government structures preclude durable US connection and investment. Montenegro, in contrast, shows that ethnic pluralism is not an impediment to effective governance, but a mechanism for advancement.

Absent the overlay of value-based judgements, the US should unequivocally amplify the message that preferred American partners in this part of Europe are stable governments and individuals who adhere to the rule of law, promote market solutions, and protect minority rights within the framework of existing European laws and norms such as the European Convention on Human Rights and the broader EU acquis.  Anything less will yield unacceptable future uncertainty. 

The US can further promote stability through investment, working through the Development Finance Corporation (which should increase Western Balkan regional operations) and abiding by the transparent processes and rule-of-law regimes that ensure long-term return on investment. American investors and companies who have increasingly recognized the commercial opportunities in the region should likewise be invited to shape Washington’s thinking to the same ends.

Finally, we must address the evident and persistent regional problems. 

Among these, arguably the most significant is delivering on America’s promise within the Dayton Peace Agreement. Bosnia’s constitutional framework is the Balkans’ most acute example of an incoherent governance structure, and it is simply impossible to expect rational actions from an irrational structure. Though Dayton was a categorical success as a narrowly defined peace agreement, it should not define the ceiling of American interests or Bosnian aspirations.

The US should appoint a Special Envoy for Bosnian Constitutional Reform(s) and convene a working-level contact group with local stakeholders and our European partners. With targeted and sustained American involvement, modest constitutional reforms could significantly accelerate the country’s EU and NATO accession hopes, which in turn would create more favorable conditions for US engagement and investment in the country.

The difference between a stable region, which advances US national security interests in Europe, and a volatile Balkans, which depletes already strained American resources, comes down, fundamentally, to the quality of local governance. Finishing the work of Dayton is not merely a favor to Bosnians, it is a direct American security interest.

What Washington requires, and what Americans increasingly demand of their government, is sustainable overseas engagement that more clearly and coherently advances US national interest. For the Western Balkans that means a region that generates its own stability rather than perpetually consuming American resources to maintain it.

The investment to achieve this vision is quite modest, but it cannot be passive. And the return is significant: a self-sustaining, secure, and democratic Western Balkans that closes the door on Chinese and Russian co-option, denying Moscow and Beijing a Southeastern European front.

It is time for US policymakers to amend their often historically opaque perception of the Western Balkans and think clearly about what advances our interests in this strategically consequential region.