When two teams take to the World Cup pitch, their national histories and politics take the field with them. Seldom is that weight as present as in Wednesday’s knockout stage game between the U.S. and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The U.S. played a decisive role in ending Bosnia’s nearly four-year war in the 1990s, a conflict that claimed more than 100,000 lives and produced the single worst crime on European soil since World War II — the Srebrenica Genocide, in which more than 8,000 Bosniaks, mostly men and boys, were summarily executed in early July 1995.
“The United States is an indispensable ally,” said Reuf Bajrović, the vice president of the US-Europe Alliance, a nonprofit group that works on mobilizing Americans around key European issues.
Bajrović, as many in Bosnia would, highlights that the existence of an “independent, free and sovereign Bosnia” as the direct result of U.S. involvement in ending the war and brokering a peace deal, widely known as the Dayton Peace Accords — signed in Dayton, Ohio.
Thirty years later, the country faces internal disputes and struggles with a political system that is deeply vulnerable to nationalist manipulation. But reaching this stage and competing against their erstwhile liberator has unleashed a rare moment of collective elation across the Balkan nation.
“A nation which was supposed to be erased from history is competing with the most powerful and influential nation in the world,” Bajrović continued. “The euphoria is absolute,” he continued.
Even the country’s most famous footballing son, former AC Milan star Zlatan Ibrahimović, said he felt “goosebumps” watching Bosnia’s fairytale run to the round of 32. Ibrahimović, who was born in Sweden but embraces his father’s Bosnian heritage, had earlier trolled his fellow Fox Sports co-anchors by playing pop-folk songs by Bosnian singer Lepa Brena as an homage to his roots.
Yet back home, some worry that America’s more recent role in Bosnia’s brittle political order has been anything but benign.
“Until Trump entered the scene, there was bipartisan support for Bosnia… after all, Americans are the founding fathers of the peace deal that became the Bosnian constitution,” said prominent author and political analyst Dragan Bursać, who is based in Banjaluka.
Two Trump administrations have steadily hollowed out that commitment, and some of the most destabilizing figures in Bosnia right now are Trump allies such as Rudy Giuliani and Rod Blagojevich.
Blagojevich, the disgraced former governor of Illinois, has promoted far-right talking points about a “persecuted Serbian Christian minority” — his own background is ethnically Serbian — by a “radicalized Muslim leadership” in the country.
Giuliani promotes the same kind of “Christian victimization” narratives as Blagojevich, and also often draws comparisons between Trump and Milorad Dodik, an ultranationalist pro-Putin Bosnian Serb leader, saying they’re victims of the same “lawfare” movement led by liberal or woke judges. Dodik was stripped of the presidency last year after directly violating the Bosnian constitution and encouraging separatist activity.
The “Christian victimization” rhetoric employs the same divisive logic that produced the war itself. In the 1990s, political and military leaders turned a country praised for its diversity against itself, pitting its nominally Orthodox Christian, Catholic and Muslim populations against one another as neighboring Serbia and Croatia backed forces across the border.
Giuliani’s and Blagojevich’s narratives have particular populist purchase with figures like Dodik, who was, until recently, on a U.S. sanctions and travel ban list. Giuliani is thought to have played a key role in getting the sanctions against Dodik lifted last year.
“Dodik is one of those European leaders who wholeheartedly supports Trump’s beliefs and sees himself as a mini-Trump in Bosnia,” Bursać continued.
Bosnia’s political system rests on intense ethnic power-sharing, which has now turned into one of its key weaknesses. In Banjaluka, the administrative seat of the Serb-majority entity of Republika Srpska, pro-Trump chants now ring out at rallies, including during a visit by Donald Trump Jr. in April.
“Now we’re facing a situation where many people would prefer the current U.S. administration ignore Bosnia as much as possible and not get involved, since they fear that there would be no positive effect,” Bursać explained.
Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, is a registered foreign agent for Dodik. His brother Joseph, along with Jesse Binnall — a former Trump attorney who worked to overturn the 2020 election — runs a company chasing a $1.8 billion investment in Bosnian airports, gas power plants and a pipeline.
The country that saved Bosnia is now, according to some accounts, actively engaged in undermining it.
“The U.S. policy in the 2020s is not something that Bosnians experienced in the past, and the U.S. never previously openly sided with nationalist Serb and Croats at the expense of the Bosniak-majority of the country,” Bajrović said.
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