A deepening US-European rift over the future of Bosnia and Herzegovina has broken open with a dispute over a top administrative post, leading to a US threat to “reconsider” its role in international peacekeeping.
The American embassy in Sarajevo issued the threat after European states refused to back the US preferred candidate to become the new High Representative for the international community. At a meeting this week in Sarajevo of the Peace Implementation Council (PIC) – a multinational group tasked with overseeing the implementation of the 1995 Dayton peace agreement – Washington supported an Italian diplomat, Antonio Zanardi Landi, while the UK, France, Germany and most European states backed France’s envoy to the Western Balkans, René Troccaz.
The Trump administration also argued for a weakening of the High Representative’s power to enforce the principles of the Dayton, which ended a war that cost 100,000 lives but has done little to heal Bosnia’s ethnic divide.
In a post on X, the US embassy in Sarajevo wrote: “The United States takes note of the European failure to reach consensus around a European candidate and is disappointed these divisions prevented the PIC from fulfilling its task to elect a new High Representative. European indecisiveness, and the PIC’s abdication of its own duty toward [Bosnia and Herzegovina], is forcing the United States to reconsider our role in the current international presence in Bosnia and Herzegovina.”
The US no longer has a substantial military presence in Bosnia, where there is a small EU peacekeeping force, but it has continued to play an influential role through the PIC and bilateral relations.
The PIC is due to try again to achieve consensus on the High Representative role towards the end of the month, when compromise candidates may have emerged.
One European official suggested that the region might benefit if the US reduced its role, amid growing suspicions over the Trump administration’s motives. Last year, it dropped sanctions on Milorad Dodik, the Moscow-backed Serb secession leader, after a reportedly multimillion dollar lobbying campaign in Washington.
The US also put pressure on the outgoing High Representative, Christian Schmidt, to resign after he imposed punitive measures on Dodik for undermining the Dayton agreement.
At the same time, Trump’s relatives and associates have increasingly been pursuing business interests in Bosnia, which included a visit by the US president’s son, Donald Trump Jr, to the main Bosnian Serb town of Banja Luka in April as a guest of Dodik’s son.
Jasmin Mujanović, a Balkans political analyst and author of two books on Bosnia, said it appeared the Trump administration miscalculated its influence over the Europeans in the PIC.
“The Americans seemed to think it was sort of irrelevant what the Europeans thought and assumed they were going to fall in line, and I think that was a misreading of the moment,” Mujanović said. “It does not seem like the US had consulted particularly widely with its allies in terms of selecting Mr Landi.
“It raises the question in my mind why they are so insistent on Mr Landi. We don’t know what understandings are between Landi and the Americans that make them so enthusiastic for him.”
Reports from the PIC meeting in Sarajevo on Wednesday and Thursday was that the US promoted Landi more enthusiastically than Italy itself.
Kurt Bassuener, a co-founder of the Berlin-based Democratization Policy Council thinktank, said: “This isn’t just a personnel decision. This is a strategic decision and it has to be integrated with a regional strategy. It would seem that the American position is driven not only ideologically, but its also a business push. It seems like that’s job number one: get concessions, get contracts, and extract, extract, extract.”
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