Will America or China Win the Serbian Proxy War?

BELGRADE, Serbia — This Balkan country is one of the most important in-between places in the world today. Its fate will help determine which Great Power comes to dominate this century — and is an overlooked test of American power for whoever takes the White House this November.

Serbia sits in a geostrategic gray zone, pulled between the authoritarian powers of Beijing and Moscow and more recently, after some years of neglect, the U.S. and its European allies. It’s not alone. Moldova and Georgia are two other European states straddling those worlds. The Ukrainians have fought for over two years to stay free. In Asia, the proxy battle between democracy and despotism is over Taiwan.

For now, Serbia’s leaders lean this way and that, depending on the day, without explicitly picking sides. But this struggle is going to come to a head sooner than later.

Belgrade is a testament to life in limbo. Sleek glass and metal towers line the Danube not far from shabby alleys and time-scarred buildings rarely seen anymore in a European capital. Graffiti is everywhere, aggressive and backward-looking: “Fuck NATO,” the alliance that bombed Belgrade during the Kosovo war in 1999, and “Heroes of 1994,” a reference to ethnic Serbs who massacred some 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica that year.

One week, Chinese flags fly across the capital in honor of a visiting parliamentary delegation from Beijing or, as in May, when China’s supreme leader Xi Jinping signed a free trade pact with Serbia . Another week, the German tricolor does when Chancellor Olaf Scholz, whose nation is Serbia’s largest investor, comes to agree a deal on Europe’s behalf to ensure the supply of Serbian lithium . Or make that the French tricolor when President Emmanuel Macron showed up last week to sell the Serbs 12 French Rafale jet fighters . Zara and Hugo Boss headline Belgrade’s pedestrian shopping district. Most foreign goods in stores are from the European Union, Serbia’s largest trading partner. But the local media is full of laudatory coverage of Vladimir Putin, the most popular foreign leader in Serbia.

So why is Serbia in this limbo — outside of the European Union and NATO but not fully in the arms of Putin and Xi? And where does it want to end up?

The Serbs have a big say in their past and future. Yet their place in the world will depend inordinately on Washington’s appetite to wage and win the new Great Power struggle. The U.S. and its allies can shape the outcome here through a combination of soft and harder economic and diplomatic power. There are signs they are awake to the challenge; there’s less evidence that they have a focused strategy here.

The fault for Serbia’s missteps on the way here is widely dispensed. Slobodan Milošević led the country into four bloody and for Serbia disastrous wars in the 1990s — for much of that time with the strong support of his people. Following his ouster in 2000, the pro-democracy Serbian leaders who had led the uprising proclaimed their desire to take the Balkan pariah state into the West. They handed over Milošević to an international criminal court, angering the nationalist voters. They put up with the loss of Kosovo, which took courage and exacted a high political price. Europe and the U.S., distracted by Middle East conflicts and internal dramas particularly in the EU of the aughts, didn’t reciprocate with speedy moves to bring Serbia into the European block. Serbia’s now marginalized democratic parties complain with reason that Brussels and the U.S. let them down.

Sometime in the last decade, Serbia fell off that westward path entirely. Nationalists started to win elections. A former Milošević information minister and radical nationalist named Aleksandar Vučić — a 54-year-old who happens to be Serbia’s most talented politician — won the presidency in 2017 and proceeded to remake Serbia. Economically, it has been for the better; politically, he sought an alliance with Russia and China and, by legitimate means, centralized power around himself and the ruling party.

Before the Ukrainian war, the U.S. and the EU could afford to dismiss Vučić and Serbia. Let them fester in this no man’s land. He’s a little too authoritarian and too ugly of a Serbian nationalist. But Putin’s full-scale assault on Ukraine two years ago makes Serbia — like Ukraine — a prize in the larger contest with China.

Washington and EU capitals started to court Vučić. President Joe Biden picked a respected old Balkan hand, Chris Hill, as ambassador in Belgrade to find openings with the Serbian government. The recent back-to-back visits from President Macron and Chancellor Scholz reflect Europe’s desire to get closer.

It’s not clear where President Vučić wants Serbia to end up. He takes investment and favorable trade terms from China. He knows Russia’s emotional hold on Serbian public opinion going back centuries. He refuses to sign up to international sanctions against Putin’s government. Beijing and Moscow, in turn, spare Vučić lectures about media and political pluralism. But he says he wants Serbia to join the EU.

“The government has the support of the West, Russia, Turkey and China, all at the same time. None of them mind that Belgrade actively engages with any of the others,” said former foreign minister Vuk Jeremić, who led an opposition party that was wiped out in last December’s parliamentary elections.

But Vučić is sending some more subtle but unmistakable signals in one direction — toward the West. His government has, without saying so publicly, turned a blind eye to some $900 million in Serbian arms going to Ukraine to support its war effort against Russia. The Rafal purchase was a political more than a military call to buy European. In a broiling dispute with Kosovo over a Serb ethnic enclave, Western officials note Serbia has been more restrained. The U.S. last week sided with Belgrade after the Kosovars shut down local Serb government offices.

The EU process of enlargement has largely stalled. Blame the lack of appetite in Brussels for new members a bit more than Serbia’s own mixed record of economic progress and political backsliding. When I asked a senior minister here about the free trade agreement with China signed with Xi last month, which would complicate any future Serbian members in the EU free trade bloc, this person — who didn’t wish to be named — shouted back: “What would you do!?” Serbia met EU demands, starting in 2001 by arresting Milošević to adopting new procurement rules and much in between, all without seemingly getting any closer to membership, this person said. “We are a small country. What would you like us to do? Stay idle.

“It’s not about us trying to get to the West,” the minister continued. “It’s whether the West wants us.”

The Serbs have good reasons to wish to get closer to Europe and America. No one who matters in Belgrade wants to vacation or send their money and kids to Moscow or Beijing.

While the country has had strong economic growth (almost 5 percent a year) and lower unemployment (down from 26 percent to 9 percent), Serbia has underperformed in this no man’s land. Neighbors like Croatia, Romania and Bulgaria that joined the EU are doing better, and the Serbs see that. “At the end of the day, Vučić wants a successful country,” said a Western diplomat here.

“We in Serbia have a map and we definitely know where we belong, and we belong in the European community,” Marko Djuric, Serbia’s 41-year-old foreign minister, told me. “Serbia is not a piece of the chessboard.”

As a student, Djuric took part in the Otpor movement against Milošević. This summer, following an invitation from Secretary of State Tony Blinken, Djuric was in Washington for the NATO summit, the first Serbian foreign minister to ever attend. Coming 25 years after the alliance fought a war with Serbia, his presence got little attention but was remarkable. “The Serbian leadership has deliberately decided to invest in the U.S.,” he said. “We opened to cooperation on all spheres.”

The Serbs don’t make it easy. Publicly, Vučić plays to the crowds, bashing the U.S. and Europe regularly. In recent weeks, as thousands of protestors have taken to the streets against the proposed lithium mine project, he blamed Western-backed “hybrid” warfare against his government. The deal, sealed by Germany’s Scholz, is wholly in Europe’s interest and will better anchor Serbia in the West — making Vučić’s claims politically convenient and disingenuous. The protestors are a mix of anti-Vučić opposition, environmental and nationalist groups.

But neither Washington nor Brussels has leaned in on Serbia. Their main goal seems to be to keep Serbia from becoming a Russian satellite like Belarus. “Our greatest concern is the malign influence of Russia,” said a Western diplomat who asked not to be named. “We want Serbia aligned with the West, part of a system that opposes Russian expansionism.”

That’s a low bar to clear. There are people on both sides of the Atlantic who want more. “Strategically, we need Serbia on our side,” a French diplomat told me, saying that Paris wants to speed up European efforts to bring Serbia into its fold. By this logic, concerns about democratic freedoms are misplaced. “Europe has changed a lot since the Ukraine war started,” this person said. “Places like Serbia and Moldova are in between big players and you have to cope with the realities of them as they are.”

Serbs eager to head westward look above all to Washington. The senior minister said the U.S. should be using its voice and influence to help Serbia, as it did Poland and other Central European countries over 20 years ago, to get into the EU. Many Serbs remember that the last U.S. president to visit Belgrade was Jimmy Carter in 1980. China’s Xi has been here twice and Putin three times. A little more focus on Serbia in Washington could make a difference on the ground here — to give this government a path to get closer to the free world and, along the way, make them less predisposed to autocrats and autocratic habits.

2024 isn’t the 1990s: You can’t turn back the clock to when Tony Blair or Bill Clinton could remake the European map by ramming through membership in the EU or NATO for groups of countries. Those clubs have changed as well. But the places that today exist in gray zones don’t accept that in “a post-American world” it doesn’t matter whose sphere of influence you end up in. Russia and China believe these places are worth fighting over — in Ukraine bloodily, in Serbia with influence and pressure.

People who work with Vučić insist he would be open to a Western embrace. Look at what he’s doing on Ukraine, in the Balkans and with Europe — not what he’s saying domestically, they say. The EU remains an appealing goal.

At the very least a carrot that promises Serbia genuinely closer ties and the benefits that come with being part of the free world might alone pull this Balkan state away from Russia and China. The anchor of democracy and prosperity has brought stability in Europe. Gray zones have not. A hundred and ten years ago this summer, Serbia found itself in one that provided the spark for the First World War. The Serbs know this history. Do we?