Weeks before President Trump retakes the White House, the US ambassador is pumping tanks into a strategic gas pipeline that will increase US natural gas exports to Europe. In the process, he undermined the country’s sovereignty and exacerbated instability in the Balkans, all in the name of State Department identity politics.
The Southern Gas Interconnection Pipeline would supply U.S. natural gas to Bosnia and Herzegovina, ending the country’s dependence on energy imports from Russia. In 2019, the government of neighboring Croatia bucked the climate change lobby by building a floating liquefied natural gas terminal to wean Eastern Europe from Russian energy dependence. Its strategic value has made the United States the largest supplier of LNG to Europe. Croatia wants to further expand the pipeline.
However, the State Department is an active state force trying to force Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs to abandon their national identity and adopt an inclusive Bosnian identity that is only accepted by Muslim leaders. Construction projects are interfering with this plan. In fact, many Bosniak Muslims have acquired Croatian citizenship, but their actual belief in the concept of Bosniak is rarely betrayed.
Bosnia and Herzegovina has not made any progress since the 1995 Dayton Accords that ended the Balkan wars. Instead, it has been saddled with an unworkable constitutional framework that has allowed international diplomats to advance an “anti-nationalist” ideological agenda while enjoying ultimate legal authority over the country. Serbs rule one half of the country, while Croats and a large number of Bosniak Muslims co-rule the other half. Neither subject enjoys sovereignty. It is truly a failed state.
A new law authorizing the pipeline extension would force outgoing U.S. Ambassador Michael Murphy to force Croatian lawmakers to hand over control of the pipeline to Sarajevo’s corruptly indebted state gas utility. It gave the State Department one last chance to impose its identity politics on the country. Its level of corruption is rated worse than Ukraine. BH Gas’s management team is entirely Bosniak, reflecting the systemic employment discrimination that has led to the Croat population being halved. Croatian leaders are seeking a new organization to manage the project. Nevertheless, the law was passed without Croat votes, which exacerbated intercommunal tensions.
Mladen Boskovic, Croatian deputy speaker of parliament, slammed the result. “This law is written in such a way that Croats are removed from the participants in the process of designing and wiring gas pipelines. All decisions are left to one company under the complete control of the Bosniak political party.”
Murphy was harshly reprimanded by Croatian President Zoran Milanovic, a supporter of the pipeline, who said that “foreign governors are humiliating and systematically destroying Bosnia and Herzegovina as a nation.”
Murphy’s overt intervention to pass the Gas Act was unprecedented. He publicly accused Croatian government officials of colluding with Russia against it and that elected leaders were pursuing “personal political and economic interests.” However, the former director of BH Gas had previously resigned to avoid becoming “an accomplice in[the company’s]criminal activities”.
During the voting process, about a dozen U.S. embassy employees chased Croatian parliamentarians around their offices, with some leaving in protest. Local media said Murphy threatened sanctions. Bosniak members of parliament, worried about breaking with the tradition of consensus decision-making on important legislation, had received threats of removal from our country’s officials.
This region is familiar to millions of American Catholics. The pipeline’s route passes through Medjugorje, a village visited by 40 million Christian pilgrims who believe that there was an apparition of the Virgin Mary. The combination of Christian fervor and the economic benefits it has generated has made it the target of the Biden administration’s aversion to the global abortion movement and the LGBTQ agenda, which Secretary Blinken declared is “deeply in our national interest.” There is.
In neighboring Hungary, the US ambassador is leading a culture war against the conservative government. Natalie Reyes, the U.S. ambassador to Croatia, one of the most pro-life countries in Europe, served as vice chair of the Family Planning Action Fund.
Who will emerge victorious from this fiasco? First, Russia is unlikely to allow Croatia to proceed with that section of the pipeline while its Bosnia-Herzegovina brethren are barred from the project. Communist China is benefiting from rising tensions in Europe. Turkey wins, given its family ties to Sarajevo’s Islamic leaders and its global ambitions to promote political Islam. loser? Catholic Croats feel little stake in a state that treats them as second-class citizens. For the United States, Murphy’s Law undermines prospects for securing American energy dominance in Europe.
The gas law now goes to the House of Peoples, the upper house of parliament, where a majority of Muslim, Serb and Croat members will need to veto it. Croats are also expected to lose constitutional protections, as will the country’s High Representative, a European diplomat given by Mr Dayton the final say on all laws in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Max Primorak is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom. He was the acting chief operating officer of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Image: BalkansCat / Shutterstock.com.
