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A serious nomination that doesn’t guarantee success

The Biden Administration has announced its intention to nominate Chris Hill as ambassador in Belgrade. This is a clear break with other recent appointments, which have put career officers still in service in Pristina and Sarajevo. Chris is a career officer who retired more than a decade ago, but he is also someone well-known to President Biden and Secretary of State Blinken from his service as ambassador in Iraq, South Korea, and Poland, if not also Macedonia. Chris is a heavy, that is more akin to a personal or political friend of the President and Secretary of State than all the other ambassadors serving in the Balkans currently or Gabriel Escobar, the recently named Deputy Assistant Secretary for the region. If anything, Belgrade is a step down for Chris from his previous positions.

This nomination signals a serious intention on the part of the Administration to try to resolve the remaining war and peace issues in the Balkans, which I would define as the still not universally recognized sovereignty of Kosovo and the dysfunctionality of governance in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Both quandaries will require Belgrade’s positive contributions.

This won’t be easy. Today’s clash betweeen Serbia and Kosovo at the UN Security Council was awful. The two countries are pointed in different directions.

Serbian Foreign Minister Selakovic repeatedly accused Kosovo President Osmani of lying, claimed she represented no one but herself, and asserted she was somehow affiliated with World War II Albanian Fascists. Serbia has in recent years aligned itself far more with Russia and China than with the US and Europe, including through economic cooperation, arms purchases, increased powers for its president, and reduced space for free media, an independent judiciary, and anything but an ethnic nationalist opposition.

The 39-year-old Osmani displayed a map of Albanian mass graves in Serbia and demanded an apology for the Milosevic-era depradations against Kosovo, during which she was displaced and fled to Montenegro before getting degrees from the University of Pittsburgh. Kosovo has a new Prime Minister, Albin Kurti, committed to cleaning up corruption and maintaining the relatively free media and increasingly independent judiciary that he inherited. Kosovo aligns itself entirely with the US and Europe.

The situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina is even worse, as the division splits the country internally. The leader of its Serb entity and member of the tripartite Presdency Milorad Dodik is freezing his loyalists’ participation in the country’s institution, trying to nullify its national laws, and threatening to take command of the Serb soldiers in its army. With Russian and Serbian support, he is inching towards the independence he has declared as his goal, hoping not to provoke an effective American or European reaction before the process is irreversible. He remembers what most Americans have forgotten: even during the unipolar moment, it took NATO 3.5 years to intervene in Bosnia and Herzegoina. The international community High Representative in Bosnia, German Christian Schmidt, is doing nothing visible to fulfill his mandate to protect the Dayton accords.

Neither situation is propitious.

But an ambassador who arrives in Belgrade with ready access to the President and Secretary of State has advantages. He can more effectively claim to speak for his bosses. He can far more easily mobilize all the resources of the US government and even the private sector than less weighty appointees. Chris was a protege’ of Dick Holbrooke, who was particularly effective at pulling all the levers of American power in the same direction at the same time. Chris is also well-known in Europe, which can bring far greater civilian resources to bear than the US. And he will have enormous leverage with Kosovo, for which he served as Special Envoy in 1998 and 1999, when the Rambouillet negotiations failed and NATO attacked Serbia.

I’m not predicting success. Chris knows as well as anyone that failure is a real possibility, as he has experienced it not only in the Rambouillet negotiations but also in negotiations with North Korea while he was an Assistant Secretary of State. His tenure in Iraq during a difficult period was not crowned with glory. But if he is able to solve either the Kosovo/Serbia conundrum or the Bosnia and Herzegovina Rubik’s cube, there will be good reason to applaud. Solving both would mean a standing ovation.