Opinion | As Serbia drifts into Russia’s orbit, Biden’s policy has failed

Mr. Biden’s policy was to embrace Serbia’s authoritarian president, Aleksandar Vucic, in a bid to peel his country away from Russia. That policy increasingly looks like a failure.

For the past two weeks, members of the Serbian opposition have protested what independent observers have said were massive irregularities in snap elections held on Dec. 17. On Christmas Eve, police violently dispersed a crowd trying to break into the Belgrade city council building. Scenes of police fighting protesters have sadly become commonplace in Serbia. But this time Mr. Vucic and Prime Minister Ana Brnabic claimed that the protests were an attempt to overthrow the government — and implicitly blamed the West for it.

Addressing the nation during the crackdown, Mr. Vucic dialed up the conspiratorial rhetoric. He said Serbian intelligence services knew the opposition was planning an uprising. He darkly intimated that foreign powers, if not necessarily complicit, first dismissed his private warnings about the unrest and were celebrating Serbia’s destabilization. He thanked “those foreign services” that had not only listened but even provided additional intelligence, helping Serbia’s institutions weather the worst.

Ms. Brnabic’s remarks a few days before the crackdown help clarify what Mr. Vucic was gesturing at. She thanked Russian security services for providing intelligence showing the opposition was “getting ready to stage Maidan-type protests in Belgrade to seize power by revolutionary methods.” The day after Mr. Vucic’s speech, Russia’s ambassador to Serbia said on Russian state television that Serbia’s president had told him there was “undeniable information” that the West instigated the protests.

Mr. Vucic, one of the deftest politicians in the Balkans, is surely pleased with himself. Russia is a powerful talisman in Serbian politics, and Mr. Vucic has made good use of it throughout the years. Many Serbs feel kinship with their fellow Orthodox Christians and look to Moscow as a great power patron, especially since NATO bombed Belgrade in 1999. By stirring up resentment against a supposedly untrustworthy West and aligning himself with Moscow, Mr. Vucic gains points with the country’s nationalist majority while painting his democratic opponents as stooges of foreign interests.

In private, however, Mr. Vucic has repeatedly assured his Western interlocutors that he is struggling as best he can to bring his recalcitrant nation into the European Union where it belongs and that he is their only reliable partner.

The Biden administration based its conciliatory policy on testing Mr. Vucic’s private assurances. Even though several dangerous crises this past year in neighboring Kosovo have had Serbian fingerprints all over them, the United States has avoided assigning too much blame to any one side, preferring to call for calm.

Unfortunately, the Serbian strongman has repaid the favor by continuing his balancing act. He has repeatedly refused to join Western sanctions on Russia, even as he has appeased the West by allowing Serbian arms to flow to Ukraine through intermediary purchasers. On occasion, he has edged Serbia even closer to Russia. Notably in light of the latest developments, in 2021 Serbia’s interior minister traveled to Moscow to share wiretaps of Russian opposition figures who had held meetings in Belgrade — and signed an agreement with Russia to jointly fight “color revolutions.” And in 2022, with the war in Ukraine in full swing, Serbia signed an agreement with Russia to coordinate on foreign policy.

The recent protests did not pose some kind of coup-like threat. Opposition leaders have alleged that soccer hooligan agent provocateurs were the main instigators, which then gave the police an excuse to violently crack down. But even if the provocation was not staged, the small crowd was in no danger of seizing power. As for the West cheering the protests, that charge, too, is unreasonable. The Biden administration has gone out of its way to be diplomatic, barely mentioning the allegations of election manipulation.

Behind closed doors, Mr. Vucic is likely reassuring Western leaders that he is still on their side — that all this is for show. But given how little the conciliatory policy has yielded, the Biden administration ought to ask itself whether it’s time to try something new.