Celebrating a missing text

Every year, American presidents have congratulated the Serbian president on Statehood Day, and in recent years, each time there has been an obligation for mutual recognition or at least for the normalization of relations. As of this year, there is none.

These are not the best days for Serbian President Vučić. To date, he has not found an effective way to respond to the student protests. He initially tried to neutralize them by threatening them. When that didn't work, he tried to smear them as political pawns controlled by opposition parties. When that didn't work either, he tried to denigrate them as mercenaries of foreign agents intent on harming Serbia. 

To date, none of these strategies have worked, and Vučić finds himself in a new situation where he is unable to control the public discourse, which is now being led by student movements. So for the first time, Vučić is a follower, not a leader, of public discourse in Serbia. 

And in this regard, every attempt by him to regain control over the public discourse has failed. Initially, he thought that by dismissing several ministers and senior officials, the situation would be brought under control. Then he tried to regain trust by removing Prime Minister Vučević and the mayor of Novi Sad, Đurić. Now he has started a “fierce fight against corruption” with the arrests of several low-ranking officials of his party. But none of these have managed to restore public trust to Vučić to date. Student movements remain in control of the public discourse. 

What started as an internal problem in Serbia is now taking on the dimensions of a political crisis with international implications for Serbia. The EU Commissioner for Enlargement, Ms. Marta Kos, has also had to react to them. This is happening at a time when Serbia is waiting for the opening of negotiations for the Chapter 3 group. Now even Vučić himself has complained that the internal political crisis has begun to cause consequences in reducing foreign investments in Serbia. In order to promote his version of the student protests, Vučić has distributed diplomatic letters to all European chancelleries. But apparently all this is not working. Yesterday, the European Parliament discussed the political crisis in Serbia in a plenary session. During the plenary session, a large number of deputies called for a tougher European stance towards Serbia. And the protests are showing no signs of stopping. 

In the midst of all this, seeing the need for a victory, however small, at least on the international level, yesterday President Vučić published on Instagram President Trump's letter addressed to him on the occasion of the Day of Serbian Statehood. There, President Trump praised the ever-increasing cooperation between the two countries, especially in the fields of technology and energy. President Trump also thanked Vučić for his "significant contribution" in supporting Ukraine and for the efforts to integrate Serbia into the Euro-Atlantic community. However, Vučić did not publish this letter to boast about what was in it, but to celebrate something that was not there. For the first time, it lacked any specific reference to the recognition of Kosovo's independence. 

Every year, American presidents have congratulated the Serbian president on Statehood Day, and in recent years, each time there has been a clear reference to the normalization of relations with Kosovo. Sometimes the US has called for “normalization of relations,” and sometimes for “mutual recognition.”

The term “mutual recognition” was first introduced by President Trump. In 2019, President Trump emphasized to President Vučić that “mutual recognition should be a central element of the normalization of relations”. However, in 2020 Trump lowered the bar by speaking only about normalization of relations. In 2021, in his first letter as the new US president, President Biden shocked Serbia when he returned to the formulation of “mutual recognition”. President Biden called for a “comprehensive agreement on the normalization of relations with Kosovo, which is focused on mutual recognition”. The escalation of the vocabulary from “normalization of relations” to “mutual recognition” led pro-government media in Belgrade to treat President Biden’s congratulations as a “provocation” and “scandalous” vocabulary. Vučić himself recognized this shift in the American position and at the time underlined that he “told them to their faces in the White House what he thinks about mutual recognition”. Whatever Vučić may have told them in the White House, the American position did not change. Again in his 2022 congratulations, President Biden reminded Vučić that “Serbia’s EU aspirations depend on progress towards normalizing relations between Belgrade and Pristina, which, as you know, I believe should be based on mutual recognition”. Although in 2023 and 2024 President Biden’s congratulations again explicitly include reference to Kosovo, he now returns to the vocabulary of “normalization of relations”. This period coincides with the beginning of the war in Ukraine, and we can only speculate that Serbia's compromises with the US in order to support Ukraine and expand the US energy presence in Serbia were the reasons behind the softening of the US administration's vocabulary. 

However, now in 2025, President Trump's letter for the first time breaks a tradition where he no longer mentions the normalization of relations with Kosovo in his letter to President Vučić. Although the letter is a symbolic act, in politics symbolism is important. The President of Serbia will receive one or two letters from an American president during a calendar year. Every word in that letter is written, discussed, rewritten and checked to ensure that it accurately represents the American position. And the fact that the American president decides to no longer refer to the normalization of relations with Kosovo is a worrying development. And this development is not an isolated one. It occurs against a background of the new positioning of the American administration in the region. President Vučić himself has praised himself that thanks to business cooperation with people close to Trump, he expects a more constructive approach from the Trump administration. Vučić is referring to Serbia's decision to grant Trump's son-in-law the right to build a giant business complex in the center of Belgrade. This project was facilitated by President Trump's current representative for special missions, Mr. Richard Grenell. It was Grenell himself who has since supported Vučić's every narrative, whether related to Kosovo or the recent student protests in Serbia. Recently, Mr. Rod Blagojevich, the former governor of Illinois and rumored to be the new American ambassador to Serbia, also visited Belgrade. 

There are reasonable voices that say that there is no need to worry and that the Trump administration will continue to protect Kosovo's interests against Serbia and that all this hysteria and Grenellophobia is an exaggeration, which will have no consequences for official American policy. This view may well turn out to be correct. Time will tell. However, in the meantime, we must be vigilant and recognize the first signs of a changing reality before our eyes. What happened with the letter was a change of position in favor of Serbia. Small, but not insignificant. In 2021, Vučić was frustrated with the harshness of the language of "mutual recognition". Today, in 2025, he celebrates the victory of a missing text.