My interview with IAI's InCLUDE podcast about Trump and the Western Balkans

Is the US a "malign actor"?

Monument to Byzantine Emperor Justinian I (front); the Museum of Macedonian National Struggle and the New Macedonian National Theater (back). Photo taken: 25 December 2011. Image by Petar Kajevski via ArtMargins. The photo is not directly related to the topic of discussion; I just thought it was spiritually very Trump.

I was recently invited on the Istituto Affari Internazionali’s (IAI) InCLUDE podcast, a huge honor. It’s the latest episode and it’s titled The Theory of Change: Is the Trump Administration Making It Harder for Countries in the Western Balkans to Join the EU? I thought it was a great discussion, and it was nicely framed by host Dušan Reljić’s first question: is the US now a malign influencer in the Western Balkans? Of course, when people use the term “malign” in the Balkans they are most often referring to countries like Russia, China, and perhaps Turkey. I really liked the provocation and I thought it was entirely warranted. We went on to discuss a range of Trumpian interventions in the region, from Jared Kushner’s garish real estate projects to the transient resurrection of the dreaded “land swap” proposal for Kosovo that everyone hates, to the Trump administration’s lectures about personal responsibility (“solve your own problems”) and how Turkey’s concept of “regional ownership” attempts to answer it. There’s a lot of competition and tension in the US-EU relationship that gets expressed in the Balkans, so I think the conversation might be of interest to anyone following the evolving state of trans-Atlantic relations.

Thanks so much to Dušan, Matteo Bonomi and everyone at IAI and Open Society Foundations Western Balkans for the opportunity to have this discussion.