The United States has threatened to reconsider its role in international peacekeeping in Bosnia and Herzegovina after a deepening rift with European allies over the appointment of a new High Representative for the country.
The US embassy in Sarajevo issued the threat after European states refused to back Washington's preferred candidate, Italian diplomat Antonio Zanardi Landi, during a meeting of the Peace Implementation Council (PIC) this week. Instead, the UK, France, Germany, and most European states supported France's envoy to the Western Balkans, René Troccaz.
The PIC is a multinational body tasked with overseeing the implementation of the 1995 Dayton peace agreement, which ended a war that cost 100,000 lives but has done little to heal Bosnia's ethnic divisions. The Trump administration also argued for weakening the High Representative's power to enforce Dayton's principles.
In a post on X, the US embassy in Sarajevo stated: "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 a small EU peacekeeping force operates, but it has continued to play an influential role through the PIC and bilateral relations. The PIC is expected to try again to achieve consensus on the High Representative role later this month, when compromise candidates may emerge.
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, the US dropped sanctions on Milorad Dodik, the Moscow-backed Serb secessionist leader, after a reportedly multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign in Washington. The US also pressured 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 pursued business interests in Bosnia. This 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 the Trump administration appeared to have miscalculated its influence over the Europeans in the PIC. "The Americans seemed to think it was irrelevant what the Europeans thought and assumed they would 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 selecting Mr Landi. It raises the question why they are so insistent on him. We don't know what understandings exist between Landi and the Americans."
Reports from the PIC meeting indicated that the US promoted Landi more enthusiastically than Italy itself. Kurt Bassuener, co-founder of the Democratization Policy Council thinktank, said: "This isn't just a personnel decision. This is a strategic decision that must be integrated with a regional strategy. It seems the American position is driven not only ideologically but also by business interests. It looks like job number one is to get concessions, get contracts, and extract, extract, extract."
