“Promoting stability and advancing U.S. economic interests in the Western Balkans makes the United States safer, stronger, and more prosperous.” That is how the Trump administration’s recently released report on US policy toward this Southeastern European region begins. At just seven pages, its brevity belies both its complexity and its importance for Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia. The report argues for continuing many aspects of US engagement in the region while also signaling a shift in perspective—expecting these countries to do more for themselves. It addresses local issues, such as organized crime, while also outlining a larger geopolitical vision involving Russia and China. Reading between the lines of the administration’s new report, Atlantic Council experts explain below what it means and why it matters.
1. How does this policy compare to past US approaches to the region?
In some areas, the Trump administration is charting a new and different course in the US approach toward the Western Balkans. But is also notable how much of the report calls for continuity in US foreign policy toward the region. For example, it furthers several long-standing US policy positions, including support for Bosnia and Herzegovina’s territorial integrity, universal recognition for Kosovo, the stabilizing influence of transparent institutions, and continued US partnership to dismantle transnational criminal networks.
As for what is new in this report—which was required of the administration by Congress in this year’s appropriations law—in many ways it just says the quiet parts out loud, acknowledging realities that have been increasingly clear but not formally declared. There has long been friction between maintaining a heavy US (or European) hand in regional affairs versus making clear that Balkan countries are capable and encouraged to capitalize on their own regional power as a major transport corridor, supplier of skilled workers, and abundant source of natural resources.
That said, the report’s phrasing that “The United States is ready to support where our involvement is wanted” should encourage US policymaker engagement to reform Bosnia’s current illogical constitutional structure, which was crafted thirty years ago with a heavy US hand in Dayton, Ohio. Washington has a special mandate to engage with Bosnian leaders to effect positive constitutional reforms—especially from a security perspective to enable Bosnia’s membership in NATO.
—Amanda Thorpe is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center
The Western Balkans may be witnessing a quiet but historic transformation in US foreign policy.
Buried within the latest State Department report to Congress is a message that, in another era, would have dominated diplomatic headlines: The United States is effectively abandoning its long-standing policy of nation-building and permanent international supervision in the region. In its place emerges a colder, more transactional doctrine focused on strategic stability, energy security, and geopolitical competition with Russia and China. Just as important, it also includes a far more aggressive campaign against organized crime, which has metastasized through the weak institutions of the Balkans for decades.
For those who have followed the region since the wars of the 1990s, the significance of this shift is enormous. For nearly three decades, Western policy toward the Balkans rested on the assumption that the region required permanent external management—political, institutional, and even psychological. Bosnia and Herzegovina became the clearest symbol of that doctrine: an internationally supervised state sustained through a complex architecture of foreign oversight, imposed reforms, and diplomatic interventionism. The new rhetoric coming from Washington suggests that the United States no longer believes such a model is sustainable, effective, or even strategically relevant.
The United States remains deeply embedded in the security architecture of Southeastern Europe through NATO, intelligence cooperation, and strategic infrastructure. Yet the focus is clearly moving toward hard geopolitical interests: liquefied natural gas terminals, gas interconnectors, transport corridors, cybersecurity, defense capabilities, and limiting Russian and Chinese influence.
It is important to highlight the report’s concerns about organized crime, too. Washington increasingly appears to view corruption, smuggling networks, political-underworld alliances, and captured institutions not merely as local governance problems, but as major geopolitical vulnerabilities for the West itself. In the eyes of the US administration, organized crime in the Balkans is no longer separate from foreign influence; it is often one of its principal instruments.
—Ratko Knežević is a member of the Atlantic Council board of directors and previously served as Montenegro’s chief of mission in the United States.
2. What’s the practical impact of its focus on great power competition?
The US no longer views the Western Balkans simply as a fragile post-conflict region. It is also an important geopolitical space where influence is actively being contested among the United States, the European Union, Russia, and China. Washington is making it clear that its engagement in the region will now be driven less by open-ended nation-building or a values-based approach and more by strategic interests tied to security, energy, trade, and infrastructure.
In practice, this means that infrastructure projects, energy corridors, security cooperation, and trade agreements are becoming part of a broader geopolitical strategy. The United States is trying to reduce the region’s dependence on Russian energy and limit the influence China has gained through what are considered as debt-trap loans, infrastructure projects, and political partnerships. At the same time, the policy encourages local governments to take greater responsibility for resolving their own political and institutional problems rather than relying indefinitely on outside intervention.
One of the most important shifts in this document is the emphasis on giving local actors more responsibility for solving their own problems, instead of continuing the long-standing dependence on international supervision. In many ways, that approach makes sense. For years, political leaders across the region have been able to shift responsibility outward, blaming Brussels, Washington, or the United Nations for problems that are ultimately rooted in domestic political failures. That dynamic has weakened genuine democratic accountability, and it has allowed local elites to avoid making difficult political decisions.
At the same time, it is difficult to ignore the structural problems that still exist across much of the Western Balkans. Many of the region’s dominant political parties do not function like fully developed democratic institutions in the European sense. In practice, they often operate through patronage networks built around powerful individuals rather than strong internal democratic structures. Internal criticism is frequently discouraged, dissent is treated as disloyalty, and leadership transitions are usually managed from the top instead of being openly contested. In that kind of political environment, expecting local actors to naturally unite around serious reform efforts without consistent outside pressure may be more hopeful than realistic.
—Ilva Tare is a resident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center.
3. How is it being received in the region?
The policy is likely to be received differently across the region. Countries such as Albania, Kosovo, and North Macedonia, which have consistently aligned themselves with the West, will probably see it as both reassuring and beneficial. For them, stronger US involvement means greater security guarantees, more investment opportunities, and stronger integration into Euro-Atlantic structures. Kosovo in particular is likely to welcome Washington’s continued support for NATO’s Kosovo Force (KFOR) and for the development of the Kosovo Security Force, since both are seen as important signals of long-term US commitment to Kosovo’s security and sovereignty.
The language around the Serbia-Kosovo dialogue is equally important. The call for “a negotiated, durable agreement acceptable to both parties” signals that Washington does not support an imposed solution or a settlement that benefits one side at the expense of the other. For Prishtina, that offers reassurance. For Belgrade, it signals that any progress will require compromise from both sides.
The continued US presence in KFOR also reinforces a long-standing commitment. Despite changes in rhetoric across different administrations, American troops have remained in Kosovo since 1999, and this document makes clear that commitment is continuing.
Other countries may react more cautiously. Serbia, for example, has spent years balancing its relationships with the EU, the US, Russia, and China. Because of that, parts of this policy may be viewed in Belgrade as indirect pressure to move further away from Moscow and Beijing. The document openly frames Russian energy influence and Chinese infrastructure financing as strategic vulnerabilities, which raises the political and reputational costs for governments that continue relying heavily on those partnerships.
The timing of the policy was difficult to ignore. Just days after the US report was published, Chinese President Xi Jinping awarded Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić the Friendship Medal of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing, a highly symbolic gesture at a moment of growing geopolitical competition. At the same time, Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik continues to maintain close ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin despite years of tension with Washington. Taken together, the message from both Moscow and Beijing was clear: The Western Balkans remains an active arena of great power rivalry.
More broadly, the region seems to be entering a period where strategic ambiguity is becoming harder to maintain. Governments that have made clear Westward choices are likely to receive this policy as validation and opportunity, while governments that have tried to balance competing powers may increasingly feel pressure to choose a clearer direction. The overall message from Washington is that the Balkans is no longer being treated as a passive recipient of international attention, but as a region whose political, economic, and security orientation matters directly to wider global competition.
At the same time, the policy does not and realistically cannot solve the deeper structural problems that continue to hold the region back. Corruption, weakened institutions, democratic backsliding, and political systems shaped around patronage rather than accountability remain deeply entrenched across much of the Western Balkans. These are not challenges that can be addressed through external policy papers alone. They ultimately require domestic political change, something the document encourages but that many local political structures are still resistant to.
The era of large-scale international nation-building may be over, but the harder task of building genuinely accountable and functional states in the Western Balkans is far from complete.
—Ilva Tare
4. How is it being received in Brussels?
Washington is entering an era defined by China, artificial intelligence, industrial competition, energy supply chains, and Indo-Pacific strategy. In such a world, the Balkans no longer occupies the emotional or ideological place it once held in the Western political imagination shortly after the Cold War.
Meanwhile, Washington is sending a clear message: Europe will increasingly have to manage Europe.
This could carry profound consequences for Bosnia and Herzegovina. The model following the 1995 Dayton Accords was sustainable only as long as the United States remained willing to politically, financially, and militarily sustain international supervision. If Washington is now signaling strategic fatigue with interventionism, Europe may soon discover that it lacks both the unity and the political authority to replace US leadership in the region.
For countries such as Montenegro, Albania, and North Macedonia—NATO members with relatively clear Western alignment—this transition creates new opportunities. Energy diversification, regional infrastructure and security cooperation could move them closer to the center of future transatlantic priorities.
For Serbia and Republika Srpska, however, the environment becomes more delicate. Washington may appear less ideologically confrontational than before, but it remains intensely focused on preventing Russian strategic intrusion, limiting Chinese influence, and dismantling the political-criminal networks that continue to destabilize the region from within.
—Ratko Knežević