Despite Trump’s rhetoric, NATO’s eastward expansion presses on

With the war in Ukraine reshaping regional politics, Washington is applying its transactional approach to the Balkans through energy projects and political alliances, exposing the limits of EU influence.

On 7 April Donald Trump Jr, eldest son of the US president, travelled to Republika Srpska, the Serb-majority entity within Bosnia and Herzegovina (often referred to as Bosnia-Herzegovina). The visit was a show of support for Milorad Dodik, the republic’s former president, who remains highly influential there. Dodik saw it as an opportunity to demonstrate strength to the central government in Sarajevo.

The White House’s favourable stance enabled Dodik to have US sanctions, in place against him for several years, lifted. In September 2023 he was charged with flouting the decisions of international High Representative Christian Schmidt, the country’s de facto governor. Dodik repeatedly contested court rulings.

The autonomous republic’s assembly even passed laws challenging confederal judicial institutions, prompting prosecutors in Sarajevo to open new legal proceedings. In August 2025 Dodik received a one-year suspended prison sentence and a six-year ban on holding office, upheld on appeal. He defied the international arrest warrant against him by meeting Binyamin Netanyahu in Israel and Vladimir Putin in Moscow.

But then tensions suddenly eased. Republika Srpska’s assembly withdrew the controversial laws. Dodik resigned as president and acknowledged the legitimacy of a court he had previously rejected by paying a fine in lieu of a prison sentence. On the eve of his meeting with Trump Jr, Dodik insisted that it was ‘not good to remove a president in this way, but if it serves the long-term struggle of the republic then it is useful.’

Dodik has since made several visits to the US, appearing alongside pro-Trump figures such as Michael Flynn, Trump’s national security advisor (January-February 2017) turned lobbyist. When he got home, he played up his links to MAGA and emphasised the failure to build a state in Bosnia-Herzegovina in order to claim that Republika Srpska ‘can cooperate with the Americans but not with NATO’, which ‘bombed us (…)

Full article: 2 165 words.