Do we still need the embassy?

By Ardit Rada

For thirty years Washington taught the Balkans that American policy passed through the American embassy. Now the region has discovered there are other entrances, and is using them.

On 16 September a State Department spokesperson told Radio Free Europe that the United States respected the decision of Kosovo’s Specialist Chambers, supported accountability and due process, and wanted the parties to avoid inflammatory rhetoric. That was the United States’ position. It ran to four sentences and was not published on state.gov.

That same day Richard Grenell called the decision scandalous, attacked the judges and the prosecutor, and demanded that the Department of Justice cut funding to the court and that Kosovo’s Assembly dissolve it. The next evening, on Top Channel, he said he did not believe the United States or President Trump would get involved and that the decision had to be taken by Kosovo’s prime minister and parliament.

Twenty-four hours later pastor Mark Burns appeared via video link in Serbia’s National Assembly. The United States, he said, knew that Christians were being persecuted in Kosovo, received reports every day, and President Trump did not support this. In July Burns had told Radio Free Europe that his visit to Kosovo had not been coordinated with the administration and that he had not come as anyone’s envoy.

Across this whole panorama, there is nothing illegal or unfamiliar.

America has always had lobbyists, former officials, campaign friends, pastors and people who know the right people. Governments around the world cultivate them. The Balkans has simply learned how the system works. Republika Srpska learned it in its most direct form: the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) records list Dickens & Madson Canada as representatives of Republika Srpska, while the agreement filed with the Department of Justice sets as its ultimate goal independence from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Radio Free Europe reported on 23 July that the contract was worth four million dollars. FARA exists precisely so everyone can see who pays whom. The region drew another lesson from that file.

Now there is a secondary market in American authority.

On one side is the embassy: the cables, the notes, the statements, officials with a name and a mandate that can be verified and whose words remain on the record. On the other, proximity. A politician knows someone who knows the President. A pastor has walk-in access to his circle. A former envoy has his own followers. An adviser steps off the plane with no official announcement, a photograph is taken, a sentence is uttered, and by evening the headline is: “Washington says…”

Belgrade understands this. Banja Luka understands it. Pristina and Tirana understand it too. Unconventional diplomacy is not the problem. In April Kimberly Guilfoyle, the US ambassador accredited to Greece, came to Tirana for the signing of a 20-year LNG deal. She was outside the country where she was accredited and was pushing the President’s energy agenda. But there was an ambassador, a public ceremony, named companies, a government representative and a text anyone could read the next morning. The mandate could be verified.

That is why the question a Balkan government asks today is no longer whether Washington supports something. The question is which Washington: the spokesperson, the ambassador, the President’s friend, the former envoy, the spiritual adviser, the registered agent, or the one who promises he can get the message to someone who matters?

These voices do not carry the same weight even though they speak in the same public space, and every political system in the region has an interest in the difference not showing. The embassy statement comes with caveats, negotiated and so late it has survived every verification. The private voice comes immediately and says what an audience wants to hear. Guess which one makes television…

The consequence for American diplomacy is not the loss of influence, but the loss of the authority to say what America has said. The embassy still knows what the policy is. But what the host country believes America has said is now decided elsewhere. This week there was an official American position on the Hague decision. A viewer of the region’s screens could encounter several other Americas before reaching it.

For thirty years an American ambassador walked into every room in the Balkans with one great advantage: when he spoke, everyone knew whose government had spoken. That is no longer certain today. Balkan capitals still need American embassies, of course. The question for Washington is why they think they need so many other Americans too, and what this is doing to the weight of America’s own voice?