While crises demand immediate decisions and high-level interventions, limbo delays them and quietly yet profoundly reshapes regional incentives, alliances, and risk calculations.
Across the Western Balkan region (including Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia), uncertainty has become the primary strategic condition: uncertainty regarding Europe’s capacity for autonomous action, the US’s long-term commitments, and the nature of power in a European security order unsettled by Russia’s war in Ukraine.
In this environment, the most pressing danger is not political paralysis; it is strategic miscalculation.
Limbo is never a neutral state. It produces specific behaviors among policymakers. When geopolitical outcomes feel contingent and security guarantees appear conditional, political leaders adapt through hedging and insurance-seeking.
The Western Balkans have witnessed this dynamic before. When external signals from the West blur and deterrence weakens, local decision-makers do not wait for clarity. They fill the vacuum themselves, often in ways that increase competition and regional fragmentation rather than reducing them.
For Kosovo and its neighbors, geopolitics is no longer an episodic or external factor; it is embedded in daily decision-making. It manifests in energy prices, defense procurement priorities, sophisticated disinformation campaigns, and the increasingly assertive language senior officials use regarding sovereignty and deterrence
The post-Cold War assumption that Euro-Atlantic integration would steadily dissolve historical geopolitics into a framework of rules and markets now looks remarkably outdated. What replaces this notion is still emerging, and that ambiguity has become a strategic force in its own right.
At the center of this shift sits the war in Ukraine. This is not because a similar conflict is imminent across Balkan borders, but because Ukraine has become the benchmark for the way power, credibility, and international restraint are judged.
In regional security circles, Ukraine is cited as a precedent. The question quietly debated in Prishtina, Sarajevo, and Belgrade is not how the war will end, but what sort of behavior becomes legitimate in the eyes of the international community.
A settlement that freezes Russian territorial gains, even if framed as “pragmatic realism,” would effectively normalize the idea that borders in Europe are contingent on hard power. In the Western Balkans, where borders have been violently contested during living memory, such a normalization would filter into domestic politics, defense planning, and elite discourse.
This explains why officials across the region track diplomatic signals from Washington as closely as developments on the Donbas frontline. They are reading not just Ukraine’s future but the roadmap for their own security.
Language and rhetoric carry immense weight in this climate. When senior Western leaders speak of “fatigue” or the urgent need to “end the war” without clarifying their terms, those words are parsed with forensic detail across Southeast Europe.
They are interpreted as signals about the West’s willingness to defend its red lines. And countries are left wondering if the West possesses the resolve to defend others if the costs of doing so are high and long-lasting.
The US looms large in this calculus precisely because its strategic posture has undergone a fundamental transformation. Washington remains the most consequential power in the region, yet it no longer functions as the system’s unquestioned enforcer.
The shift is not isolationist so much as selective. US policy is increasingly driven by scale and urgency, and China, the Arctic, advanced technologies, and the Indo-Pacific are prioritized. Consequently, the Balkans are often treated less as a vital strategic project than a secondary problem to be managed through transactional diplomacy.
The result is a sense of unpredictability. When American engagement becomes episodic, countries in the region adjust their trajectories.
Some hedge diplomatically by engaging with illiberal powers, while others test the thresholds of international patience. Over time, this erodes the fabric of deterrence, not necessarily through a formal withdrawal of forces but through a perceived inconsistency of purpose.
Long before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine encouraged European capitals to rediscover hard power, Serbia had already done so. Over the past decade, the country has systematically increased defense spending and modernized its forces while diversifying supply chains.
It has invested in advanced combat aircraft, air defense systems, and drone technology at a scale unmatched by its neighbors. By the mid-2020s, its annual defense budget exceeded $2bn, approaching 2.5% of GDP. This was not a reactive surge; it was a deliberate strategy to achieve regional military dominance. Critically, this effort is framed domestically through historical grievance and the “protection of co-nationals,” language that reminds everyone in the region of the wars of Yugoslav succession in the 1990s and perhaps also of Kremlin language before its military adventures in neighboring states.
Elsewhere, responses have followed a different logic. Albania and North Macedonia have focused on meeting NATO benchmarks while Croatia has modernized its capabilities in an alliance framework. Kosovo, lacking NATO membership, has moved incrementally to build its security forces under intense international scrutiny.
In this context, the recent acceleration of defense coordination between Albania, Croatia, and Kosovo in March last year should be viewed as a defensive — and perhaps instinctive — response. It is a form of regional insurance against a future in which external guarantees feel less reliable than they once did.
Europe, meanwhile, remains caught between strategic ambition and institutional inertia. The EU understands that instability in the Western Balkans directly threatens its own security, yet enlargement remains politically constrained, and security engagement is relegated to technocratic processes rather than strategic initiatives.
This gap between rhetoric and delivery creates a space that other powers are eager to fill. Russia opportunistically operates political warfare and narrative amplification campaigns, while China utilizes infrastructure financing and “strategic patience” to achieve a presence without political conditionality.
The Western Balkans remain what they have always been for the transatlantic alliance, a mirror reflecting its strategic resolve. In 2026, the region’s future will be shaped by accumulated signals: who shows up, who follows through, and who looks away.
Ambiguity is not a neutral holding pattern; it is a catalyst for instability.
Dr. Blerim Vela served as Chief of Staff to the President of Kosovo (2021-2023) and as a member of Kosovo’s National Security Council. He holds a PhD in Contemporary European Studies and writes on governance, defense, and security in Southeast Europe.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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