Five signs of Trump's unrequited love

Each new administration coming to power in Washington it is an opportunity to consider the previous assumptions on which the relations of other countries are based the most powerful country in the world. This year's overview was particularly important because someone who was already president in the period from January 2017 to January 2021 was returning to the White House.

The question of how Donald Trump will behave when he once again takes over the reins of American foreign and security policy has captured the attention of both the Serbian political scene and the wider public, who, almost as a rule, were overly hopeful or too afraid of changes in government in Washington. Namely, there is a very often used figure that compares the American foreign and security policy to a large aircraft carrier that sails across the wide ocean and changes its course very slowly and with difficulty, despite changes in administrations. However, with Donald Trump, especially the "other" version of him, who was supposed to no longer have any institutional and personal restrictions on his power, as was the case in most of his first term, we could expect what we did not hope for.

The day after Trump's victory in the US presidential elections in 2024, the President of the Republic of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, in his own style, confidently - which traditionally goes well in our political culture - said that "we have good relations with Donald Trump and his entourage. I believe that the voice of Serbia will be heard better, that those people will listen to us. We maintained friendly relations with them even when they lost their mandate. And that is a somewhat more favorable situation for us". Nevertheless, he preserved a dose of skepticism, stressing on that occasion that "for people who expect tectonic changes in the American relationship towards Serbia", he is sure "that there will not be any".

Reality very quickly confirmed his concern. Namely, as low as the expectations were for the relations between Serbia and the USA during the time of the Biden administration (due to the well-known baggage from the 1990s and the role of Biden himself and people from his closest environment and the foreign policy establishment in the events during all those years), and the results in the end were relatively good, the expectations were so high now, but the results after nine months of the second Trump administration - somehow meager, and more in the announcement and potential than they experienced any concretization of their own.

photo: ap photo

Despite the two meetings of the highest Serbian officials with the US Secretary of State Mark Rubio (first with the Minister of Foreign Affairs Marko Đurić at the State Department at the beginning of August, and then with President Vučić during the annual session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York) and the announcement of the launch of a strategic dialogue between the two countries by the end of the year, everything is somehow, what the people would say, "I'll come to you", with burning fires that need to be extinguished such as huge tariffs on our goods or stepping on strength of sanctions against NIS. Although it is not solely the result of our mistakes, but to a certain extent the result of the fragility of the global context as well as the unpredictability and uncontrollability of Trump himself and his agenda, the consequences are still the same and must be managed. When you add to that the deep internal crisis in Serbia that leaves little room for foreign policy, things become even more complicated for the current leadership of our country.

CHANGED INTERNATIONAL AND DOMESTIC CONTEXT OF SERBIA'S FOREIGN POLICY

Since internal and external policy are no longer separated in theory, let alone in practice, it is almost impossible, especially for the small and medium-sized countries to which Serbia belongs, to make decisions isolated from the international and internal context in which politics takes place. The influence of the international context as a determinant of foreign policy is of great importance, especially in times when the world is in a state of transformation, which many analysts believe is the case right now. Trump's departure from the foreign policy of his predecessors as president of the USA and the questioning of the basic assumptions of the liberal international order open up doubts about how small and medium-sized countries should position themselves in such an order "in a state of formation" and how to preserve and advance their national interests in the best way.

The long-term orientation of Serbian foreign policy, ever since the economic crisis in 2008 and the unilateral declaration of independence of Kosovo and Metohija, on the so-called The "four pillars of foreign policy" and the attempt to maintain balanced relations with all the world's leading powers are becoming increasingly difficult to execute and maneuver. Although Serbia is largely forced to act in this way because it needs good relations with all the world's leading centers of power because it is more or less dependent on each of them, it seems that it is increasingly difficult to implement the foreign policy of "multi-alignment" (multi-alignment) and "wrongdoing", i.e. attempts to reduce the risk of excessive attachment to only one side, i.e. one center of power (hedging), which Serbia has been conducting for 18 years, when military neutrality was declared in the National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia. Because if we have entered the "age of great power competition" into the "age of redistribution of spheres of interest", as some theorists of international relations claim, it will be very difficult to implement a foreign policy that looks at all sides of the world equally if the "big" have already placed us in a certain sphere, whether we resisted it or not. Of course, this does not mean any automatism, defeatism and fatalism - simply, things should be viewed rationally and as they are and react accordingly, adequately and on time.

photo: vladimir sporčić / tanjug

When it comes to the internal context, it is definitely clear after almost a year since the fall of the canopy at the Railway Station in Novi Sad and the beginning of student blockades and mass protests that the President of Serbia can no longer "deliver" foreign policy promises in the way that is expected of him and that he spends most of his time on internal policy issues. Despite the long duration of these events, external actors are still somewhat confused by everything that is happening here and sometimes not knowing how to react, they do some things by "default", and for others they simply have no idea and wait for the situation to unfold. However, no matter how this crisis is resolved, it is quite clear that the marked political and social polarization will reduce Serbia's ability to deal with accumulated foreign policy problems and we will increasingly find ourselves in a situation where, to paraphrase former American President Dwight Eisenhower, "what is urgent will override what is important."

WHY DO YOU SAY LOVE?, WHAT DO YOU THINK? (SAMO) ON YOURSELF

High expectations for a new era of Serbian-American relations after the return of Donald Trump to the White House, although they were not unfounded (taking into account his first mandate), still turned out to be a kind of "unrequited love", at least for now.

The first sign of the expected breakthrough in mutual relations and the first disappointment was the nomination of Marko Brnović, the former state attorney of Arizona, by President Trump as the new ambassador of the United States of America to the Republic of Serbia. Very often, his Serbian origin was emphasized and the expectation that with such an ambassador in Belgrade, things in mutual relations will improve at a meteoric speed and that Serbia will become a kind of "rubbish" for American interests in the Western Balkans region. However, the months-long wait for the Senate to confirm this nomination finally ended in early October with the White House withdrawing this proposal. Brnović himself blamed the American "deep state" for that, while some believe that there is something controversial in his biography that is an insurmountable obstacle. But however one interprets it, it is clear that there were strong indications that the confirmation process was deadlocked and that this was the only solution.

Another sign was the connections with people from Trump's immediate environment through whom President Vučić tried to meet with him in early May. What really happened in Florida during the president's attempt to meet with Trump at the spring gala dinner of the Republican National Committee in Mar-a-Lago remained unclear, but it is clear that some procedures and some instances were skipped (both ours and the American one) and that despite Trump's breaking the rules, Susie Wiles, his powerful chief of staff, still managed to create a system in Trump's second term in which the 47th American president is still harder to come by "bypassing rules" or that "it is across the road, but still closer around".

The third sign was the customs duties on goods produced in Serbia, which, after the announcement of rates of as much as 37 percent in April, were finally "reduced" to 35 percent when they came into effect at the beginning of August, which is still one of the highest customs rates that the Trump administration has introduced for a country (and certainly the highest in the Western Balkans). Although the relevant ministries in our country are working intensively to somehow resolve this with the American side, it seems that it is still a long way off, although with Trump you should always "expect the unexpected" and so it is in this case. However, it seems that despite Trump's undoubted "sympathy" for Serbia, this with customs is in line with the motto from his favorite movie "The Godfather" - "it's nothing personal, just business".

The fourth sign was Trump's claim, which he made several times (according to "Blic", as many as six times) that during his second term he prevented seven wars, including the war between Serbia and Kosovo*. He repeated the same during this year's speech at the United Nations General Assembly, stressing that "no president or prime minister, no other country has achieved anything close to that, and I achieved it in just seven months. It's a shame that I had to do it, instead of the United Nations doing it, they didn't even try to help in any of them". The reaction of our authorities was absent every time, as well as a more detailed explanation from the American side, but it is not an isolated case in which some things are left "hanging", without the hope that we will understand and figure them out in due time.

The last, fifth sign is the sanctions against the Serbian Oil Industry, which, after several delays, came into effect on Thursday, October 9. Even though the sanctions are directed against the Russian Federation, i.e. Russian companies (and NIS is majority owned by Russia), Serbia suffers (obviously will suffer in the foreseeable future) enormous damage. It is true that our country has been trying to solve this problem all the time, but in the end the result on the scoreboard shows that we are in a deep deficit here as well.

In any case, things are still unfolding before our eyes and how it will all end remains to be seen. Although with Trump you are never completely sure what you are in for, the first nine months of his second term in Serbian-American relations are characterized by a lot of uncertainty and too many expectations.

Dragan R. Simić is a professor at the Faculty of Political Sciences of the University of Belgrade, the founder and director of the Center for United States Studies and the head of the USA Master's program; Dragan Živojinović is an associate at the Faculty of Political Sciences of the University of Belgrade, secretary of the Center for United States Studies and secretary of the USA Master's Studies.