MADRID – Few world regions are more culturally and politically complex than the Balkans. And there may be no clearer illustration of the region’s freighted past and present than the life and legacy of one of its exceptional sons: the physicist and inventor Nikola Tesla.

Born into an Orthodox Serbian family in 1856 in a town that is now part of Croatia, Tesla’s nationality remains an object of debate in the region. Tesla believed that scientific advances should be used to build bridges between countries, and ultimately to achieve universal peace. But there are some in both Croatia and Serbia who want to appropriate his legacy in ways that do not do it justice.

Even Tesla’s contributions to the field of physics have evoked the complicated political dynamics of his native land. In the International System of Units, a tesla is a measurement for the flux density of a magnetic field. And as Federica Mogherini, the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, pointed out a few months ago, “The Balkans can easily become one of the chessboards where the big power game can be played.” Indeed, the region has always been situated between competing poles, each projecting power through interwoven economic, political, historical, and cultural links.

For the EU, the wars that accompanied the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s signified an utter failure. After the violence subsided, the EU tried to use its own magnetic pull to bring the former Yugoslav territories together through a process of reconstruction and reconciliation. But this strategy has produced uneven results.

Although some Eastern Orthodox-majority countries – Greece, Bulgaria, and Romania – have acceded to the EU, the only post-Yugoslav countries to join – Croatia and Slovenia – are predominantly Catholic, a reality that feeds a counterproductive narrative. When Germany and the Vatican quickly recognized Croatia and Slovenia in 1991 and 1992, they reinforced the sense of what the late political scientist Samuel P. Huntington subsequently called a “clash of civilizations.” For Huntington, the Yugoslav wars fit his simplistic paradigm perfectly, with Western Christianity – Catholicism and Protestantism – on one side, and the rest of Europe’s religions on the other.

Croatia and Slovenia have both demanded that the “Western Balkans 6” – Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia – be incorporated into the EU as well. But progress has been hampered by a congeries of bilateral political disputes between Western Balkan and EU countries, similar to when Slovenia, taking advantage of EU membership, temporarily blocked Croatia’s accession.

Moreover, circumstances within the EU itself – economic crises and the rise of xenophobic political parties in recent years – have put its enlargement policy on the back burner, with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker announcing in 2014 that no new members would be accepted before 2019.

At the same time, democratic norms and institutions in the Western Balkans have been eroding. Other countries with a strong influence in the region – not least Russia, Turkey, and Hungary, where the EU has failed to prevent a drift toward authoritarianism under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán – are offering alternative political models for Western Balkan countries to follow.

Consider the relationship between Serbia and Russia. During a visit to Belgrade in 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin went so far as to say that, “Russia, just as it was in the past, will always see Serbia as our closest ally.” In addition to its longstanding cultural ties with Russia, Serbia depends on Russian energy supplies, as well as Russia’s veto power as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. As long as Serbia remains in Russia’s good graces, it can block Kosovo from joining the UN.

These factors explain why Serbia did not join the EU in imposing sanctions against Russia after it annexed Crimea in March 2014. Bosnia and Macedonia also chose not to participate in the EU sanctions, while NATO members Albania and Montenegro did.

Still, the Balkan countries are not simply particles drawn passively toward the magnetic poles around them. Serbia, for example, finds inspiration in the legacy of Marshal Tito, who was president of Yugoslavia for much of the Cold War. Far from being the Soviet Union’s closest ally, Tito was a founder of the Non-Aligned Movement, and excelled at playing the United States and the Soviet Union off against each other.

Similarly, Serbia today is officially designated as a neutral state. But it collaborates closely with NATO through its Partnership for Peace, while at the same time hosting military exercises with the Russian army. Likewise, while Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić claims to be firmly in favor of European integration, he has displayed no willingness to distance himself from Russia.

Of course, in addition to Russia, China has also opposed recognizing Kosovo. Through its “Belt and Road Initiative,” China has flexed its economic muscle, investing millions of dollars in infrastructure projects in Serbia and other parts of the region. One initiative is a high-speed rail line between Belgrade and Budapest, which is meant to connect the Greek port of Piraeus with Central Europe.

The European Commission is currently investigating the Belgrade-Budapest line for possible violations of EU tendering rules. The inquiry hints at an underlying trend: though China does not harbor Russia’s disruptive ambitions, its actions may well leave the Western Balkans questioning their incentive to converge with the EU’s institutional model and accompanying rules.

Despite these challenges, the EU maintains a favorable position vis-à-vis the Western Balkans. Excluding Croatia, 74% of Western Balkan countries’ total trade is with the EU, compared to only 6% with China, 5% with Russia, and 4% with Turkey. In this context, the EU should not permit current challenges to weaken its overall enlargement strategy. TheWestern Balkans Summit last month was a positive step, provided that the countries still eager to join the EU do not lose sight of the need to enact deep reforms.

The EU must not fall short of the expectations that Tesla undoubtedly would have had for it. All Europeans should be afforded the opportunity to participate in the European project and benefit from its transformative potential. That is precisely what a large segment of the Balkan population still wants. EU leaders cannot guarantee that the process of joining the bloc will be quick and easy. But only they can ensure that the journey will be worth it.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/balkans-eu-russia-china-by-javier-solana-2017-08

DENVER – Earlier this month, North Korea went a couple of weeks without launching any missiles or testing nuclear weapons. That short interval, which has since ended, was enough to inspire US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to declare that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was showing “restraint.” Perhaps, Tillerson concluded, Kim is ready to engage in dialogue. To some extent, he may be right.

To be sure, claims that the North was showing restraint were clearly premature: North Korea has since fired three short-range ballistic missiles from its east coast into the sea, and, more ominously, launched a ballistic missile over northern Japan. Tillerson’s optimism about such a short pause reflects the pressure diplomats face in reassuring allies – and, in Tillerson’s case, his boss, President Donald Trump – and easing tensions with enemies.

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Nonetheless, Tillerson is probably right that North Korea is ready to talk to the United States – but only as one nuclear-weapons state to another. What the country’s leaders are patently not ready for is to meet America’s own requirement: that negotiations are based on the international commitments made in 2005, at the end of the fourth round of the so-called six-party talks.

Chief among those commitments, enshrined in a joint statement released at the end of the talks, is North Korea’s abandonment of “all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs.” In exchange, the other five participants in the talks (China, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the US) were supposed to provide North Korea with energy and economic assistance, respect its sovereignty, and pursue the normalization of diplomatic relations. The five participants stood by their commitments, but North Korea repudiated its own in 2009.

According to critics, creating the “precondition” that the North stick to its original commitments amounts to a death blow to new talks. And, indeed, the Kim regime has shown no interest in resuming the six-party process, the stated purpose of which is to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula. In its 2013 constitution, North Korea for the first time even referred to itself as a “nuclear state.”

Tillerson rightly refers to a two-track policy toward North Korea. One track is dialogue; the other is pressure, applied through sanctions and other measures aimed at isolating North Korea and convincing its leadership that it has no future with nuclear weapons.

After North Korea’s tests of its new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) last month, Tillerson and the US ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, focused on the second track, working with other Security Council members to impose the toughest sanctions ever against the North. Those sanctions could erode much of North Korea’s trade with China, the Kim regime’s economic lifeline.

But the US cannot rely excessively on other countries to constrain the North Korean regime, whose pursuit of nuclear weapons is not a symbolic quest. As its ICBM tests show, the goal is to threaten the US explicitly, in order to compel it to reduce its presence in Northeast Asia – and perhaps even reconsider its alliances with Japan and South Korea.

This ambitious goal is not without tacit support in the world: Russia and China have proposed that the US suspend its annual military exercises with the South, in exchange for a freeze of North Korea’s nuclear program. This supposedly fair-minded “freeze-for-freeze” proposal would do more to weaken the US-South Korea alliance than it would to impede North Korea’s development of a deliverable nuclear weapon.

The proposal highlights how difficult it is to mount an international response to the North Korea nuclear issue. Though China agreed to the recent sanctions in the Security Council, there is widespread skepticism about whether there is an internal consensus about the future it wants for the Korean Peninsula. Russia, for its part, seems to be pursuing a foreign policy guided more by spite than national interest.

America’s allies in the region, meanwhile, are under serious pressure. South Korea’s new government is stuck between the need to manage its relations with the US and the desire to open a dialogue with the North. And, as the North’s latest missile launch shows, Japan’s hosting of US military assets puts it on the front lines of the crisis.

This complex situation would require careful and precise diplomacy in the best of times, with the US using the various levers of its power. But this is not the best of times. Trump has been mercurial, given to making unscripted pronouncements on the topic. This has called for assurances from Tillerson, Secretary of Defense James Mattis, and others eager to mitigate the impact of bellicose exclamations – incongruously issued off the cuff from the clubhouse of a golf course – about “fire and fury.”

Trump’s statements about China’s role in addressing the problem don’t help, as they imply an interest in effectively outsourcing the job of reining in the Kim regime, in exchange for vague economic and trade assurances. The result is a perception of American unseriousness about this most serious of challenges.

The Trump administration has assembled before it all the components of an effective North Korea strategy: cooperation with China; pressure on North Korea through sanctions and isolation; reassurance of allies, including by providing the most up-to-date anti-ballistic missile defenses; and a willingness to talk. But for any of these instruments to have an impact, they must be used in concert and with precision in tone and substance – a quality of statecraft that the Trump administration has been slow to master.

In this sense, the challenge in North Korea is not just a nuclear crisis. It is a crisis of the quality of US leadership. Many see the problem, but no one knows yet how to overcome it.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/north-korea-missile-japan-trump-strategy-by-christopher-r-hill-2017-09