President Trump’s America First foreign policy asks a simple question of every foreign engagement: What does it do for the American people? A trifecta of developments in July 2026 highlights a threefold answer to this question in regard to Bosnia and Herzegovina, the central European country formed by the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement, which ended the Balkan War and created two legal entities: Republika Srpska, consisting mostly of Serbian Orthodox Christians; and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, consisting mostly of Muslims (called Bosniaks), with a significant minority of ethnically Croat Roman Catholic Christians.

First, on July 1, 2026, as we were celebrating 250 years of independence from a tyrant named King George III, a non-elected German “High Representative” in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Christian Schmidt, who, like George III, has been enacting what our July 4, 1776, Declaration called “Acts of pretended Legislation,” resigned.

Second, our 250th commemoration of the beginning of our Revolutionary War reminds us that wars happen, and our security can never be taken for granted.

Third, on July 13, 2026, leaders of two political parties in Bosnia and Herzegovina, one representing Serb Orthodox Christians (the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats, also known as “SNSD”) and one representing Croat Roman Catholic Christians (the Croatian Democratic Union, also known as “HDZ”), in a joint public statement essentially agreed with the February 13, 2026, Opinion of the Constitutional-Law Committee of the House of Representatives of the Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina that “the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina does not possess constitutional authority to enact laws.” According to one press report, “SNSD leader Milorad Dodik and HDZ BiH leader Dragan Čović stated in Mostar that they agreed all decisions imposed by the High Representatives should be annulled.”

Apropos this first-of-its-kind Serb Orthodox-Croat Roman Catholic joint statement, the first encyclical by the first American-born pope, Magnifica Humanitas: Humanity In Its Grandeur by Pope Leo XIV, highlights one of the keys to solving 30 years of failed nation-building in Bosnia and Herzegovina: “The principle of subsidiarity…encourages us to move beyond any form of paternalistic or welfare-based management of social life, but instead to promote a culture of shared responsibility in a State that values citizens’ initiative, and…decisions are made at the closest level possible to the persons involved.”

To elaborate on why Bosnia and Herzegovina matters to the American people, American security is at stake: according to The 9/11 Commission Report, two of the 19 terrorist hijackers on September 11, 2001, were Saudi nationals who “had traveled together to fight in Bosnia in a group that journeyed to the Balkans in 1995.” According to Giorgio Cafiero’s article, “In the Rearview Mirror: The Case of Iranian Influence in Bosnia”: “During the 1992-95 Bosnian War…Iran’s government intervened to stop the carnage. Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati coordinated assistance to the Bosniaks and justified the intercession as keeping with the Islamic Republic’s concept of defending the mostazafan (oppressed) across the world, from Palestine to South Africa.”

Today, the three distinct peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina offer three strategic relationships waiting to be cultivated: Catholic Christian Croats, kinsmen of our NATO ally Croatia; Orthodox Christian Serbs, who have repeatedly elected a pro-Trump leader named Milorad Dodik; and the Muslim Bosniaks, whose prosperity is better secured by American trade and investment than by the patronage of Turkey, the Gulf states, or Iran. A sovereign, self-governing, and prosperous Bosnia and Herzegovina means new markets for American energy and capital, new sources of the strategic minerals the American people need, and one less breeding ground for Islamic terrorists.

For nearly three decades, this European country of three distinct peoples has been governed not by the leaders those peoples elect, but by a non-elected foreign bureaucrat known as the High Representative—for the last five years a German former politician—wielding the same model of unaccountable, top-down bureaucratic rule that has given Europe stagnant economies, energy dependency, de-industrialization, and the managed decline of its middle class. The results are predictable: the U.S. State Department’s 2025 Investment Climate Statement describes a country whose “complex and fragmented legal and regulatory framework,” weak judiciary, and political instability drive away investors, while a single 2005 decree of the High Representative freezing the disposition of “state property” has locked up an estimated “$15 billion in potential investment…a sum approaching half of the country’s 2026 GDP.” American taxpayers have underwritten this failed nation-building experiment since 1995; they are entitled to ask what it has bought them, and what’s in it for Americans going forward.

Bosnia and Herzegovina is a place where American economic and strategic interests converge. Republika Srpska, according to Mining Weekly, holds one of Europe’s richest deposits of critical minerals, resources essential to America’s industrial and defense base, which Brussels and Beijing are already maneuvering to control.

Most importantly, these developments in Bosnia and Herzegovina have opened the door for President Donald Trump to reciprocate the support he has received repeatedly from President Milorad Dodik; if he does that, America will have in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in our ongoing global competition for critical strategic resources, a new Central European friend and partner.

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