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.
Putin cozying up to Vucic.
Photographer: Oliver Bunic/Bloomberg
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.