US Sledgehammer Diplomacy on Kosovo Won’t Budge Serbia

Congratulating another state on its statehood day while in the same breath negating its perceived statehood - by calling on it to recognize a polity that broke away from that state against its (continuing) firm wishes - is bizarre, to say the least.

From the point of view of successive Serbian governments and most of the Serbian public, US support and that of most European countries for Kosovo's 2008 declaration of independence was an injury. Despite this - in testimony to Serbia's orientation towards "the West" - successive Serbian administrations - from Boris Tadic's to Vucic's - have worked hard to prevent differences over Kosovo from derailing Serbia's EU accession path.

Immediately after Kosovo declared independence, then President Tadic managed to create the illusion within Serbia that Serbia's EU accession path and the dispute over Kosovo were separate processes. Vucic more or less kept up this pretence, albeit with less pro-EU zeal.

The EU has played along with this, often obfuscating the issue of whether Serbia had to recognize Kosovo in order to join. Phrases like "normalization of relations" and "legally binding agreement between Kosovo and Serbia" became EU-speak for a process that was intended to lead to some kind of de facto - if, Belgrade hoped, not de jure - recognition of Kosovo's independence.

This was done in part because five EU member states - Cyprus, Greece, Romania, Spain and Slovakia - also do not recognize Kosovo, but also in part to help pro-Europeans in Serbia prevent the country's EU accession process from being derailed. The EU wanted to avoid making a bad situation worse.

By contrast, the US was always blunter about what it expected from Serbia - recognition of Kosovo. This may have...