Bosnia and Herzegovina is usually introduced to foreign readers as a “post-war success story” held together by the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement — a fragile compromise that ended the bloodshed by freezing the country into a constitutional maze. Two entities, three “constituent peoples,” a rotating tripartite Presidency, layers of vetoes and international supervision: Dayton didn’t build a shared political community so much as it administered a ceasefire in legal form, turning everyday life (jobs, schools, hospitals, housing) into collateral damage of permanent ethnic bargaining.

But in recent years, a different vocabulary has been gaining ground — one that reframes BiH not as a society in need of reconstruction, equality, and economic renewal, but as a border problem. In this language, the country is no longer a place where people live; it is a sanitary cordon. Its institutions become a guardhouse for the EU and NATO, and its internal arrangement is treated as something to be “adjusted” to the needs of frontier management. That is how calls for constitutional and territorial “reform” are increasingly sold: not as democratic repair, but as security engineering.

This is where Trumpist ideology enters the picture.

A policy analyst at the conservative U.S. think tank The Heritage Foundation, Max Primorac — the son of Croatian right wing immigrants from Herzegovina and a man well placed within Trumpist circles — has articulated a view that has largely slipped under the radar in Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, even though it neatly distills the dynamics now unfolding on the ground.

Starting from the familiar narrative of the “sad fate” of Croats in BiH and the demographic decline afflicting both Bosnia and Croatia — a downturn driven, to a significant extent, by prolonged post-Yugoslav social unraveling and economic out-migration — Primorac immediately translates the issue into the language of geopolitics and security borders. In that context, he said the following:

“The last thing Croatia needs right now — or NATO, or the EU, because it’s the same border — is for (the Croatian people in BiH, author’s note) to be left with yet another pro-Kremlin-oriented Serb entity and a radicalized Muslim entity. At this moment, I think the only way to prevent that, and to secure the Croatian and European border, is for there to be a third entity. Otherwise, the Croatian community will disappear.”

What matters most in this statement is neither any real concern for the “Croatian people,” nor the performative anxiety over their alleged endangerment, but the way Bosnia and Herzegovina is coolly reduced to a sanitary cordon and a “border”: as if people, institutions, and an entire political space were nothing more than the EU’s and NATO’s guardhouse. From there, it becomes “logical” to tune the country’s internal architecture to the needs of border patrols, rather than to any idea of coexistence among three indigenous peoples, their equality, or economic renewal.

In that framing, a “third entity” does not appear as a remedy for any concrete, lived problem (wages, schools, hospitals, housing, safety for Croats), but as a geopolitical prosthesis within a new redistribution of power.

The pairing of “a pro-Kremlin entity” with “radicalized Islam” is no accident. It is a textbook example of political racism in the contemporary idiom of the “civilized world”: you don’t need to declare anyone an inferior race to turn them, in public discourse, into a permanent threat — a “security problem” to be handled not through politics and law, but through quarantine and partition. The Serb political space is essentialized as Moscow’s fifth column (even when the reality is that both Belgrade and Banja Luka kneel, as submissively as possible, before Washington and the European Union, offering up territory and resources for next to nothing in exchange for keeping ruling clans in power), while the Muslim political space is cast as naturally prone to extremism — as if the mere existence of a community were itself grounds for suspicion.

The paradox is that both the Serb and Bosniak political establishments actively court precisely that security-racist image of themselves, because in the short term it generates political rent.

The former president of Republika Srpska (the Serb entity in Bosnia) and the self-styled leader of Bosnia’s Serbs Milorad Dodik, has built his power on the nonstop manufacture of an existential threat (“the Islamic danger,” “the Muslim menace”), while simultaneously presenting himself as a geopolitical exception with a “patron” in Moscow — even though this is, in realpolitik terms, largely marketing without backing. Draško Stanivuković, the current mayor of Banja Luka, also stays inside that same frame because he survives on the same electoral market in RS: he criticizes Dodik, yet takes care never to undermine the basic template of “defending the entity” and the supposedly anti-NATO reflex, even though — like Dodik — he ultimately benefits from it.

On the other side, Dino Konaković, as BiH’s pro-Western foreign minister, tries to sell international partners the simplest possible storyline: Republika Srpska as a Russian outpost (“a Russian submarine”). In doing so, he effectively reinforces Primorac’s racist shorthand of a “pro-Kremlin entity,” in which European politics collapses into border security. Konaković’s opposition — the Young Muslim SDA and the ostensibly civic DF — performs essentially the same function: by backing the obscure figure Slaven Kovačević as a candidate for the Croat member of the BiH Presidency in the 2026 elections — a candidate who, if the already familiar pattern of electoral engineering repeats itself, would be elected by Bosniak votes — they produce a new, media-fresh version of the “Željko Komšić case” as proof that the Croatian position can once again be “outvoted.” That, in turn, makes the whole story about imposed changes to the election law by the High Representative — and, ultimately, about a third entity — easier to market as a necessity of self-defense.

The reference is to the recurring controversy around Željko Komšić, who has repeatedly won the seat reserved for the “Croat member” of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s tripartite Presidency thanks largely to votes from Bosniak-majority areas, prompting many Croat parties to argue that the position can be effectively decided by the larger Bosniak electorate rather than by Croat voters themselves; supporters of this arrangement counter that the Presidency is elected on a civic, territory-based ballot and that any candidate who wins under the law has full democratic legitimacy — a dispute that has since become a symbolic shorthand for the broader fight over electoral rules, “legitimate representation,” and demands for a separate Croat political unit (a “third entity”).

It turned out to be the perfect game for mapping out the Trumpist agenda.

When Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenković — following right-wing attacks on Serbs in Croatia — came to Banja Luka, the administrative center of Republika Srpska, he was welcomed by virtually the entire political “front row” of Serb politicians. Both Milorad Dodik and Draško Stanivuković were present, and that is symbolically crucial: it shows how internal feuds are instantly suspended the moment it is time for “inter-state” photo ops and for legitimacy brokered through Zagreb. In TV studios they call each other traitors, foreign mercenaries, and grave-diggers of the nation; but when the Croatian prime minister arrives — the financial inspector, not to say the gauleiter of the Balkan tavern — everyone leaps to their feet: “Welcome, please, just tell us where to stand so it shows up on the evening news.”

We witnessed the identical pattern in Zagreb, at the conference marking 30 years since Dayton (“30 Years After Dayton: Seeking Local Solutions”), where the host axis of Plenković and Grlić Radman convened the regional elite, and Konaković appeared as the “constructive partner,” advancing the thesis of the biggest crisis since Dayton and “Russian influence” as the principal obstruction.

In other words: at home, inside the humiliating Dayton protectorate, Bosniaks and Serbs accuse and smear one another, turning the other side into an apocalypse in human form — but when it is time to demonstrate seriousness and “stability” before the external arbiter, they all collectively switch into a mode of theatrical, almost pathetic submission.

What is really unfolding is a slightly revised version of the 1990s script, with the same underlying logic of “using one side to break the whole.” Just as Croatian policy in the early phase of Yugoslavia’s disintegration primarily capitalized on Bosniak interests and energy directed against Yugoslavia — thereby strengthening its own position in the wider process of dismantling and redefining the political space — today, under new circumstances, it is capitalizing on the Serb factor as a lever for reengineering the Dayton protectorate.

The Serb “disruptive” role — whether real or amplified through media framing — becomes a convenient argument for presenting demands for a deeper internal redesign of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a matter of “stability” and “border protection.” And once that redesign is set in motion, it can easily slide into a process that, in practice, undermines the existing order and leads either to its breakdown or to a radical transformation.

How Serbs might fare in such an outcome is hardly a mystery: it is enough to look closely at the fate of Bosniaks who, in 1992–1993, largely counted on Croatian and broader European partnership as protection from the “barbarians from the East,” only to discover later that an alliance lasts precisely as long as its usefulness within the broader strategy of breaking and redrawing the map.

When it comes to Montenegro, the fit into Zagreb’s racist templates works in exactly the same way.

Over the past few years, Croatia has dealt with Podgorica from the position of an EU member state armed with a veto — and willing to wield it as a disciplinary baton. Already during the debate over the Jasenovac resolution, signals from Zagreb warned that this would “certainly slow down” Montenegro’s European integration; and Croatia then did, in fact, block the closing of Chapter 31 (foreign, security and defence policy). Throughout, the handy pretext is the current Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić’s warped Radical-style caricature of aggressive “Serbdom” — which, in reality, is little more than a reality-show paper tiger, perfectly prepared to carry out whatever tasks are demanded: from opening lithium mines to erasing the last traces of Serbian statehood in Kosovo, while Republika Srpska and Serbs in Montenegro are treated as small change.

In that atmosphere, a segment of anti-Serb Montenegrin nationalists and self-declared “anti-fascists” instinctively go looking for an external patron and a stamp of symbolic verification in Zagreb (as the “European address”). They accept a language and a frame in which Montenegro is useful as the antithesis of the “Serb World” and as a bridge to Croatian interests in the region. At times this spills into caricature: Croatian far-right figures (such as Velimir Bujanec) openly call for an alliance of “true Montenegrins” and Croats against the “Serb World” — a reminder of how easily ideological labels (“anti-fascism”) can be converted into geopolitical cheerleading for someone else’s interests.

Paradoxically, this lands them on the same objective side as Dodik. He manufactures and feeds the narrative of a “Russian/Serb disruptive zone” inside Bosnia; they amplify it as a regional “threat”; and Zagreb, in both cases, constructs the same conclusion — that new mechanisms of control and redesign (electoral, constitutional, territorial) are needed in order to “secure the border.” However much they despise one another inside the region, their moves fit perfectly into the same external template of pressure and reengineering.

The way out of this nightmare labyrinth is not another “salvational” Croat entity in Bosnia, nor a fresh round of mutual accusations, but a conscious break with the racist imposition — both external and internal — that reduces Serbs to a “pro-Kremlin zone” they are not, Bosniaks to a “radicalized Islam” that scarcely exists in BiH, and Montenegro to a protectorate disciplined through vetoes and brutal humiliation. In terms of imperial strategies, it is a classic method of managing the periphery: the center produces caricatures, local elites accept them as a currency of legitimacy, and politics is reduced to who can play their assigned role more skillfully in someone else’s script.

As long as Serbian, Bosniak, and Montenegrin politics (whether led by Serbs or by national Montenegrins) accept that language and that borrowed frame — and then quarrel inside it — they work together toward the same outcome: the abdication of real politics and the preparation of terrain for “solutions” that, when needed, will be delivered from outside — in the form of a ‘joint investigation,’ a formulation that functions here as a euphemism for extermination.