Milorad Dodik Will Regret Interfering in America’s Domestic Politics

Milorad Dodik has broken a cardinal political rule. When seeking to engage a foreign interlocutor, never seek to influence – directly or otherwise – their domestic politics. Yet by hiring Republican political consultants James Blair and Chris LaCivita that is precisely what the long-time Bosnian Serb secessionist leader has done. And now, Dodik, his SNSD regime in Banja Luka, and the entire RS entity have become the focal point of a widening American political scandal. A domestic political scandal. 

Ovaj tekst dostupan je i na bosanskom jeziku.

President Trump is facing as difficult a mid-term election as any American president in living memory. Polling suggests his own popularity has cratered, and what were once seen as safe Republican seats in the “deepest red” states in the country are now very much in play for the Democrats. The President is actively campaigning in Texas, Oklahoma, and Tennessee, apparently attempting to stem the tide of what U.S. election observers increasingly expect will be a historic rout of the incumbent Republican establishment.

Amid this, an existential electoral campaign, Mr. Blair and Mr. LaCivita, as one Republican operative interviewed by Politico put it, are in an obscure administrative unit “no one has ever heard of,” whose name is “made up of too many consonants…taking hundreds of thousands of dollars while telling all of us to chill out because they’ve got it.”

Milorad Dodik already made a grave error in so overtly aligning himself exclusively with the hardest right of the contemporary American conservative movement, naively believing that the U.S. had permanently decoupled from its traditional political, small-l liberal, and small-d democratic norms. That traditional American bipartisan commitments to the Western Balkans, even Europe more broadly, were definitively an artefact of the past.

He quickly raised the ire of Democrats, who have signaled clearly that they intend to make his lobbying efforts in Washington a matter of some concern after they – as they assume they will – take control of at least the House of Representatives, and possibly the Senate too. More quietly, but no less clearly, his grotesque, vulgar politics and his pompous posturing, especially in Washington, began to register on the radars of leading Congressional Republicans too. 

He may have “gotten away with it,” as it were, if lobbying had been the extent of his forays into American domestic politics. Many political actors lobby U.S. officials, after all. Nor is Dodik the first foreign official to have secured sanctions relief from Washington after a sustained advocacy campaign, or some diplomatic bargain. The Trump administration’s decision to relieve him of U.S. sanctions in October 2025 was always controversial, and Congress has maintained a bipartisan pressure campaign on the White House to restore these measures, but one can imagine a scenario in which a smarter politician would take the hint. He would quietly take the bargain and scuttle off peacefully.

But not Milorad Dodik. He wanted more. He wanted the President’s son in Banja Luka. He wanted his former National Security Advisor, already once criminally prosecuted, in Banja Luka. Visits to Banja Luka by Rudy Guliani too, podcast appearances, trips to Washington, DC, and honorary degrees from little known private universities. He wanted the U.S. to push out High Representative Christian Schmidt out of office for him. He wanted to be in the U.S. Congress one week, and in the Kremlin the next. And then he wanted two of the most senior Republican operatives in the country to come assist in his own party’s re-election campaign in Bosnia, after twenty years at the helm and not a single meaningful indicator that his SNSD was in serious danger of losing power, even as the American President faced an existential, historic legislative election of his own.

It was too much, simply too much.

Especially for a politician with no official function, presiding over a shrinking populace and a shrinking economy, and whose party’s total winning vote at its most recent election to the state parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina is less than the average vote of the average winning candidate to the U.S. House of Representatives. In fact, there are many, many candidates who have lost elections to the U.S. House that have won more total votes than Dodik’s entire SNSD bloc secured on Sunday. And such a middling crew thought they were entitled to interfere in the re-election campaign of the entire Republican Party, to undermine an American president? Miscalculation does not begin to describe it.   

President Trump has already categorically distanced himself from Mr. Blair and Mr. LaCivita, as Democrats and Republicans alike continue to fume. The SNSD will likely instruct its Washington lobbyists to pursue aggressive damage control in the coming weeks. They may find, however, that there are certain kinds of errors after which no amount of money can buy relief.