Weeks before President Trump takes back the White House, a US ambassador launches a strategic gas pipeline this would increase U.S. natural gas exports to Europe. In doing so, he undermined a country’s national sovereignty and increased instability in the Balkans, all in the name of State Department policy. identify policy.
The Southern gas interconnection pipeline this would make it possible to supply American natural gas to Bosnia-Herzegovina and end this country’s dependence on Russian energy imports. In 2019, the neighboring Croatian government resisted its climate lobby by building a floating liquefied natural gas terminal to free Eastern Europe from energy dependence on Russia. Its strategic value helped make the United States the largest producer of LNG supplier towards Europe. Croatia wants to further expand the pipeline.
Yet the State Department has hamstrung that plan with an aggressive nation-building project that seeks to force the country’s Croats and Catholics to Orthodox Serbs to renounce their national identity and adopt an overall Bosnian identity adopted only by the country’s Muslim leaders. In fact, many Bosnian Muslims took Croatian citizenshipbetraying little real belief in a Bosnian construct.
Bosnia and Herzegovina has not evolved since 1995 Dayton Accordswhich ended the war in the Balkans. Instead, he was saddled with a impracticable constitutional framework within which international diplomats pushed an “anti-nationalist” ideological agenda while enjoying ultimate legal authority over the country. Serbs rule half the country, while Croats and a larger number of Bosnian Muslims jointly rule the other half. Neither entity enjoys sovereignty. Indeed, it is a failed state.
A new law authorizing the expansion of the pipeline offered outgoing US Ambassador Michael Murphy a last chance to impose the State Department’s identity politics on the country by forcing Croatian parliamentarians to hand over control of the pipeline to the operator corrupt and indebted public gas company of Sarajevo in a country whose level of corruption is note worse than that of Ukraine. BH Gas management team is entirely Bosnian, reflecting the systemic employment discrimination that led to the Croatian population being halved. Croatian leaders are looking for a new entity to manage the project. However, the law was adopted without the vote of Croats, which exacerbated intercommunal tensions.
Deputy Speaker of Parliament Mladen Boskovic, Croatian, thunderstruck The result: “This law was written in such a way that Croats were excluded from participation in the process of designing and routing the gas pipeline. All decisions will be left to a single company under the full control of the Bosnian parties.”
Murphy received a harsh reprimand from Croatian President Zoran Milanovic, a pipeline supporter, accusing “foreign governors of humiliation and systematic disintegration of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a state”.
Murphy’s overt intervention to pass the gas bill was unprecedented. He publicly accused Croatian officials of colluding with Russia for opposing it and their elected leader of seeking “personal political and economic interests.” advantage.» However, the previous director of BH Gas had previously resigned to avoid becoming “complicit in (the company’s) criminal actions.”
A dozen US embassy employees harassed Croatian parliamentarians in their offices during the vote, prompting some of them to walk out in protest. According to local media, Murphy threatened them with sanctions. Bosnian parliamentarians, worried about breaking with the tradition of consensus decision-making on key laws, have been threatened with dismissal by our officials.
This region is familiar to millions of American Catholics. The gas pipeline route passes through Medjugorje, a village visited by 40 million Christians pilgrims who believed it hosted apparitions of the Virgin Mary. The combination of Christian fervor and the economic blessing it has generated there is anathema to the Biden administration’s global policies. crusade for abortion and an LGBTQ agenda that Secretary Blinken declared “deeply in our national interest.”
In neighboring Hungary, the American ambassador led a culture war against his conservative government. Nathalie RaysU.S. ambassador to Croatia, one of the most pro-life countries in Europe, was vice president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund.
Who are the winners of this fiasco? First, Russia, as Croatia is unlikely to proceed with the construction of its section of the gas pipeline while its ethnic counterparts in Bosnia and Herzegovina are excluded from the project. Communist China benefit from growing tensions in Europe. Turkey winsgiven its family his relations with the Muslim leaders of Sarajevo and his global ambition to promote political Islam. The losers? Catholic Croats do not see the point of a state that treats them like second-class citizens. For America, Murphy’s Law undermines the prospect of securing American energy domination in Europe.
The gas law is now submitted to the upper house, the House of Peoples, where it must bring together a majority of Muslim, Serbian and Croatian deputies, each with a right of veto. Croats are also expected to lose this constitutional protection, as is the country’s High Representative, a European diplomat empowered by Dayton to have the final say on all laws in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Max Primorac is a senior fellow at the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, The Heritage Foundation. He was acting director of operations at the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Image: BalkansCat / Shutterstock.com.