For three decades, Washington has considered EU enlargement in the Western Balkans as a necessary and fundamental factor to reinforce the stability of the region; nowadays, this rhetoric seems to be changing. A shift that may in fact signal a far deeper reordering of who will be present in the region’s future and how this will be shaped.
The US strategy towards the region used to promote democratic and rule of law reforms as part of the European path; today, a “less European” dimension, more pragmatic and investments/interests oriented seems to prevail. Washington’s attention looks more shifted towards stability, security and economic interests, while the European discourse occupies a more marginal space on the American agenda.
In the latest report that the US State Department submitted to the Congress in late May 2026 – a document mandated under the Western Balkans Democracy and Prosperity Act and meant to set out the American strategy toward a region that, for three decades, had been rhetorically bound to the single destination of EU membership – the term “European Union” does not appear once, not in a passing reference, not in a footnote. This omission is more revealing than any explicit statement could have been.
Since the end of the Yugoslav wars, support for the region’s accession into the EU has functioned as a near-automatic component of the US policy language. Democrats and Republicans, interventionist and restrained presidencies alike, converged on the same formula: regional stability in the Western Balkans runs through Europeanisation. The 2026 report quietly discards that formula, in its place stands a vocabulary built around “stability” and what the document calls “foundational” market access.
As the Atlantic Council has observed, the report effectively declares the end of the era of US-led nation-building, replacing it with a stated commitment to “empowering local actors” to resolve their own challenges, rather than perpetuating what it frames as excessive reliance on international supervision; a sort of disengagement dressed up as respect for local ownership.
Nonetheless, reading this report as a clean break would be a mistake, the document reaffirms several long-standing pillars: formal support for Bosnia and Herzegovina’s territorial integrity, universal recognition of Kosovo’s independence as a stated goal, and an unusually assertive posture on organised crime, which Washington increasingly frames not as a domestic governance problem but as a geopolitical vulnerability that Moscow and Beijing are positioned to exploit.
But the rupture, however, is substantive: the report explicitly abandons the logic of permanent institution-building in favor of what several analysts describe as a colder, more transactional doctrine, organized around three main priorities such as immediate stability, energy security, and strategic competition with Russia and China; democracy, rule of law, and EU enlargement are slightly pushed to the margins.
A clear illustration of this process is visible in Serbia: in September 2025, the Trump administration launched a “strategic dialogue” with Belgrade – the first in the history of the bilateral relationship – built almost entirely around energy and investment, at precisely the moment the European Union was hardening its tone toward the Vučić government over its handling of student-led protests, which Brussels judged increasingly at odds with democratic norms. As the EU raised its voice on Belgrade’s democratic backsliding, Washington opened an economic channel largely stripped of political conditionality.
The US increasingly operates as one bilateral actor among several, negotiating discrete transactions with individual capitals, rather than as the co-architect – alongside Brussels – of a single, rules-based regional trajectory. A practice that increasingly favours bilateral, transactional deals shorn of democratic conditionality. It is precisely this shift from architecture to transaction that raises the sharpest questions for the EU’s own enlargement project, which depends on exactly the kind of sustained, conditionality-driven leverage the American approach now seems to be abandoning.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the shift is more visible in what Washington has stopped doing than in what it has actually done. The decision to ease sanctions on Milorad Dodik – a leader who has spent years threatening secession from the state whose territorial integrity the US officially still supports – is difficult to reconcile with the stability rhetoric that dominates the report. Equally telling is the prolonged impasse over appointing a successor to High Representative Christian Schmidt, whose departure left the Office of the High Representative – the closest thing the Dayton settlement has to an enforcement mechanism – effectively without leadership. Such a vacancy has weakened one of the few instruments through which outside powers, the EU included, have historically constrained Republika Srpska’s secessionist drift.
The third episode concerns energy infrastructure, and it is where the new doctrine’s commercial logic is most exposed. The Southern Interconnection Pipeline — intended to carry US liquefied natural gas from Croatia’s island of Krk into Bosnia, displacing Russian energy influence in the process — has long enjoyed bipartisan support in Washington. What has proven far more controversial is who was awarded the contract to build it: a company linked to Michael Flynn, a figure whose name alone has been enough to trigger public unease in a region. The pattern echoes the backlash Jared Kushner’s proposed luxury resort has provoked in Albania, where environmental concerns have fused with a broader suspicion that American engagement now looks less like statecraft and more like a hunt for lucrative contracts among elite circles.
Another example is represented by Kosovo: for seventeen years, Pristina’s security and its very legitimacy as a state have rested on an American guarantee more direct than anything Brussels has ever offered; Washington recognised Kosovo’s independence unilaterally in 2008, while five EU member states still refuse to. That asymmetry has always made Kosovo peculiarly dependent on US goodwill, and peculiarly exposed whenever that goodwill becomes conditional or erratic. The land-swap idea – trading northern Kosovo for southern Serb-majority areas of Serbia – illustrates the danger of a transactional Washington operating without European co-ownership. Resurrected in policy discussions after being floated as a template for ending the war in Ukraine, the proposal has virtually no constituency on the ground; surveys found only 11 percent of Kosovo Albanians support it, while 66 percent believe it would generate further instability rather than resolve it.
A Washington perceived as unreliable is already pushing Pristina toward alternative guarantors: Kosovo’s deepening defence cooperation with Turkey makes straightforward sense for a government watching its principal security patron talk openly about troop withdrawals from Europe. The more Kosovo hedges away from an unreliable US and an enlargement process that offers no fixed timeline, the less leverage either Washington or Brussels retains over its choices.
EU enlargement, indeed, has never been a policy the Union pursued alone. For thirty years, the credibility of the accession process rested on an implicit division of labour: the EU supplied the institutional framework and the promise of membership, while the United States supplied the security guarantees and the diplomatic weight that made backsliding costly for regional elites. Removing the second element, the first is left to carry a burden it was never designed to bear on its own.
Enlargement remains the EU’s principal – arguably its only – genuine point of leverage over governments in Belgrade, Sarajevo or Skopje. But leverage of this kind is not static, it depends on being perceived as credible, and credibility erodes with every year the process visibly stalls. Without tangible progress, the promise of membership loses force among the very public and elites it is aimed at.
Once that persuasion fails, governments have every incentive to look elsewhere for validation and support: to Washington’s newly transactional offer, to Ankara’s “regional ownership” framing, or, more worryingly, to Moscow and Beijing. Washington’s partial retreat from democratic conditionality removes what had functioned, however informally, as an external ally to Brussels’ own conditionality: reinforcing the EU’s message, by pressing Belgrade or Sarajevo on rule-of-law benchmarks, even if inconsistently or for its strategic reasons. A United States’ strategy that instead opens sanctions-free, condition-free bilateral channels with the same governments effectively offers local leaders an alternative patron, one who asks for market access and energy cooperation rather than judicial reform or media freedom. For some Balkan leaders, managing simultaneous scrutiny from Brussels over the handling of protests and a transactional relationship with Washington, is not a contradiction to be resolved, but a gap to be exploited.
The deepest danger is not that the United States is abandoning the Western Balkans outright – nothing in the report suggests total disengagement – but that its selective, transactional re-engagement removes exactly the kind of quiet reinforcement that had allowed Brussels’ slow-moving accession machinery to function as effective leverage rather than empty promise. An enlargement process that once had an implicit American co-signatory now increasingly stands alone, at precisely the moment its credibility can least afford to be tested.
The possibility is a Western Balkans region where the EU and the US are no longer running parallel tracks toward the same terminus, but competing, or at best uncoordinated, centres of gravity.
Nevertheless, It is also worth entertaining, with due scepticism, the argument that this American recalibration could ultimately serve the EU’s own interests. The logic here runs as follows: American disengagement, precisely because it removes a comfortable external safety net, could force Europe to finally exercise the geopolitical agency its own rhetoric has long promised but rarely delivered in its immediate neighborhood.
But this “blessing in disguise” thesis carries a significant caveat, it assumes that Brussels will actually seize the opening rather than simply absorb the shock. Nothing in the EU’s recent record – the unresolved unanimity issue, the sporadic and often reactive political attention devoted to the dossier, the persistent gap between enlargement’s stated urgency and its practical pace – offers strong grounds for confidence that a reduced American involvement will translate automatically into more decisive European leadership. It is equally possible that Washington’s retreat produces not a more assertive EU, but simply a slower, more contested, more exploitable one, with Ankara’s “regional ownership” framing, or Beijing’s non-interference model, filling whatever space Brussels fails to occupy.
Which of these two futures materialises will likely be decided less by what Washington does next, and more by whether Brussels finally treats enlargement as the geopolitical instrument its own analysts have long insisted it is, rather than just a technical process that can be indefinitely deferred.
This scenario is leaving European institutions facing, without cover, the contradictions they have long been able to defer: an unanimity rule that lets any single capital hold six countries hostage to unrelated grievances, an enlargement rhetoric routinely outpaced by enlargement practice, and a credibility with regional publics that has been drawn down for years without being replenished.
None of this is unrecoverable. The tools the EU would need to convert this moment into genuine leadership already exist, at least on paper: a Growth Plan and Reform and Growth Facility designed to deliver tangible economic benefits ahead of full membership; an Enlargement Commissioner publicly committed to accelerating Montenegro’s and Albania’s negotiations; and, not least, a geopolitical rationale (Russia’s war on Ukraine, the contest with China and Turkey for regional influence) that has never been more legible to European electorates than it is now.
What has been missing is not the instruments but – as always – the political will to use them with the urgency the moment demands, and a preference for treating enlargement as a distant technical milestone rather than as the strategic asset it actually is.
The Western Balkans have spent thirty years being told that their future runs through Brussels, with Washington as a reliable co-signatory to that promise. That co-signatory seems now to be stepping back, not entirely, but enough to matter. Whether the promise itself still holds is now a question only Europe can answer, and the answer will not be found in any report to Congress. It will be found in whether the EU treats this moment as the confirmation of an old fear, that it cannot act decisively in its own neighborhood, or as the overdue occasion to prove that fear wrong.