Thanks to the Trump administration, for the first time in its 35-year history, the southeastern European country of Bosnia-Herzegovina had free and fair elections last week without aggressive interference from international bureaucrats. This puts a dagger into the global nation-building industry that sucked dry the country’s national sovereignty.
Emerging from the violent breakup of communist Yugoslavia during the 1990s, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s three constituent peoples—Bosnian Muslims, Orthodox Serbs, and Catholic Croats—agreed in 1995 at Dayton, Ohio, to cease hostilities, put aside their weapons, rebuild a devastated land, and forge a common but decentralized state of three self-governing peoples.
International bureaucrats had other plans. Soon after the Dayton Peace Accords were signed, global elites awarded themselves total executive power “to remove from office public officials who violate legal commitments” and via an Office of the High Representative, “impose laws as he sees fit if Bosnia and Herzegovina’s legislative bodies fail to do so.”
Hundreds of elected officials were removed from office since 1997, effectively rendering supposedly free elections a fiction. Add to that the indignity of the Brussels-based European Court of Human Rights having the power to place three foreign judges on the country’s seven-member constitutional court, making a mockery of the country’s judicial independence. The most egregious effort was to impose a fictional common Bosnian identity that would favor the slight majority of Muslims in a deeply ethno-religiously divided country.
But why should we care about Bosnia-Herzegovina? Because, over the decades, it was there that a European infrastructure of international organizations, NGOs, and woke foreign aid programs was forged, giving thousands of American and European officials a taste of unaccountable power to trample upon the sovereignty of nation states. These skills are now being used against other European countries that dare to criticize the European Union’s growing power, most notably Hungary, Romania, and Poland.
The re-election of President Donald Trump is putting an end to it.
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Early last year, during a trip to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, President Trump denounced “so-called nation-builders [who have] wrecked far more nations than they built—and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.”
The following week, Deputy Undersecretary of State Christopher Landau presented to visiting officials from Bosnia-Herzegovina that the U.S. government was no longer “interested in imposing a vision of society that reflects the preferences of distant bureaucrats and narrow activists.” The woke global coalition was severed.
At the United Nations Security Council meeting later that year, the U.S. announced it would “no longer pursue nation-building or heavy-handed international intervention” in Bosnia-Herzegovina in favor of “local solutions.”
Continued U.S. funding of the Office of High Representative was threatened, an arrogant German High Representative working beyond his mandate would resign due to U.S. pressure, and the administration blocked European Union efforts to replace him with another strong advocate of untrammeled global control over the country—prompting it to reiterate just weeks before the elections that “the era of externally imposed nation-building is over.”
As a result, the citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovina could for the first time freely elect their own representatives without fear of reprisal by foreign bureaucrats, strengthening voter trust in the democratic process and stabilizing a fractious country.
In November, these elected leaders will form a new and truly representative government. The newly elected 39-year-old Croat member to the presidency summed it up best, saying Bosnia-Herzegovina can be a state “not where we are all the same—because we are not, and never will be—but a country where we all have equal worth.”
The nation-builders have not given up just yet. Under the guise of election transparency, left-wing radicals successfully took over international election-observer missions. The U.S. delegation was led by the former radical Slovene foreign minister who previously led her government’s decision to recognize a Palestinian state and accused Israel of genocide.
Meanwhile, the international OSCE delegation was led by an Italian journalist, an anti-Israel zealot who doubles as president of the Italian branch of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNWRA), a U.N. agency accused of diverting millions in foreign aid dollars to Hamas.
The Trump administration will have to remain vigilant.
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Today, even with President Trump’s victory, leftist elites have their tentacles in every aspect of our government.
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In this book, O’Neil reveals how the Left’s NGO apparatus pursues its woke agenda, maneuvering like an octopus by circumventing Congress and entrenching its interests in the federal government.
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