Since NATO’s intervention in the 1998-1999 war in Kosovo, the U.S. has been an important player in Kosovo’s politics and society, for better and for worse. But for many years, who the U.S. president was and which party they belonged to did not matter much for Kosovo. Under Bill Clinton, a Democrat, the U.S. led NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign in Kosovo to halt Serb forces’ killing and ethnic cleansing campaign of Albanians. Subsequently, George W. Bush, a Republican, pushed for Kosovo’s independence during his presidency, which spanned 2001 to 2009.

Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 — to which a promise to withdraw U.S. troops from an increasingly disastrous war in Iraq was key — brought important changes to U.S. foreign policy. Obama argued that “the tide of war is receding, and America is looking ahead to the future that we must build,” a future, he believed, that lay across the Pacific rather than Atlantic. This meant a deprioritization of the Middle East and especially Europe. Articulating an integrated diplomatic, military and economic strategy aimed at checking China’s rise while still cooperating with it in areas of mutual interest, commonly referred to as the “pivot to Asia,” became one of Obama’s main foreign policy objectives.  

This emphasis on Asia came on the heels of Kosovo’s independence, and in 2012, Obama celebrated the International Steering Group’s decision to end its supervision of Kosovo’s independence, stating that Kosovo now assumed “full responsibility” for ensuring that the rights and values expressed in its declaration of independence would be accessible for all citizens. This came soon after the beginning of the European Union (EU)-mediated Kosovo-Serbia dialogue in March 2011, a process that the U.S. has supported while emphasizing that it is not a direct party to. 

One can imagine Obama hoping, around that time, to never have to think too much about Kosovo again. He had pledged to reduce the number of U.S. troops in Europe and entrust U.S. allies in Europe to take a larger role in efforts like the NATO-led intervention in Libya. Despite the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia, the threat of Russia was deprioritized. Even after Russia seized parts of Ukraine in 2014, Obama referred to Russia as “a regional power” whose incursion into Ukraine was a sign of its weakness rather than strength. 

Donald Trump’s 2016 win over Hillary Clinton, secretary of state under Obama, jarred the U.S. political and foreign policy establishment. While Trump’s foreign policy instincts towards transactional bilateralism rather than coalition-based multilateralism couldn’t have been more different than Obama’s, he maintained a geographic focus on Asia, specifically China. On Kosovo, Trump’s presidency was characterized by a harsh tone toward Kosovo in the dialogue with Serbia personified in Richard Grenell, Trump’s bombastic former special presidential envoy for Serbia and Kosovo peace negotiations. 

Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 promised a return to a previous era of U.S. foreign policy, when transatlanticism reigned unchallenged and close partnerships with European allies like Germany and the U.K. were prioritized. Biden’s history as a strong supporter of Kosovo during the 1990s and personal link to the country — affirmed in a 2016 visit with his family to commemorate a stretch of highway in Kosovo between Gjilan and Ferizaj being named after his son, Beau Biden — led some to believe that his presidency would bring renewed attention to Kosovo. Ahead of the election, Biden himself pledged to “reverse the Trump Administration’s imbalanced approach toward Kosovo and Serbia.” 

Yet despite the rhetorical change from the White House, many fundamentals in the U.S.-Kosovo relationship did not change; indeed, annoyance with Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti became a rare point of bipartisan agreement in Washington. U.S. Ambassador Jeffrey Hovenier, in the role since January 2022, has also been a frequent critic of Kurti’s lack of communication with the U.S. and populism. 

The main objective of U.S. policy in Kosovo still seems to be avoiding any sort of heightening of tensions or angering of Serbia that may push Belgrade into Moscow’s arms and endanger U.S. troops deployed to Kosovo as part of the KFOR mission. That priority does not always align with the Kosovo government’s. The next U.S. president will be tasked with solving this challenge: how to move forward as close partners in contexts where Washington’s interests simply do not align with Prishtina’s. 

The September 10, 2024 debate between Trump and current Vice President Kamala Harris did not provide much fresh insight into how the two candidates see Kosovo or foreign policy more broadly. Yet by combing through both candidates’ pasts, a clearer picture begins to emerge. K2.0 explores the election’s significance for Kosovo through three lenses: how Harris or Trump winning may impact high-level foreign policy and transatlanticism, how the Kosovo-Serbia dialogue would be impacted by either candidate’s victory and how the election’s result will impact U.S. soft power and foreign aid in Kosovo. 

The two candidates

On one hand, there is Trump, who served as president from 2017-2021 and faced two separate impeachments while in office. During his presidency, Trump pursued a highly unilateral approach to foreign policy, pulling the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement and the Iran nuclear deal. On the domestic front, his three appointments to the Supreme Court — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — were instrumental in overturning the constitutional right to an abortion, which had previously been defined by the court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Since his rather eventful departure from office, he has been convicted of 34 felony counts for falsifying business records and fined over $500 million for sexual abuse and defamation, plus financial fraud.

Way back in October 1999, Trump critiqued the NATO intervention in Kosovo, saying it wasn’t a success because “They bombed the hell out of a country, out of a whole area, everyone is fleeing in every different way, and nobody knows what’s happening, and the deaths are going on by the thousands.” His solution? Putting more U.S. troops on the ground in Kosovo to avoid “the havoc and the terror that you’ve got right now.”

Some 25 years later, Trump and people in his orbit seem fundamentally less sympathetic to Kosovo’s cause, particularly so long as Kurti remains prime minister. Coincidentally, the judge who in 2020 indicted former Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) leader and President of Kosovo Hashim Thaçi — along with Kadri Veseli, Rexhep Selimi and Jakup Krasniqi — is Jack Smith. Smith left his post in The Hague in November 2022 to become a Special Council for the U.S. Department of Justice, and has been tasked with overseeing the two federal cases against Trump. One is for allegedly mishandling classified documents and the other is for allegedly plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Grenell, Trump’s conduit to the Balkans, linked criticism of Smith’s case against Trump to the indictment of Thaçi. 

On the other, there is Vice President Harris, who quickly became the Democratic nominee after Biden withdrew from the race and endorsed her on July 21, 2024. Thrust into the spotlight following a failed 2020 primary campaign and lackluster tenure as vice president, Harris’ campaign has centered vague ideas of freedom and foregrounded rhetoric about abortion rights and character over detailed policy proposals. It has focused on a patriotic message aiming to frame her and vice presidential nominee Tim Walz as normal freedom-loving Americans who care about their neighbors. Harris and Walz have aimed to contrast themselves with Trump and vice president pick JD Vance, who Walz memorably called “just weird” and likened to people “running for ‘He-Man Women-Haters Club’ or something.” 

Harris would be the first female president in U.S. history, though she has not foregrounded gender in her campaign. Her background as a prosecutor, a liability in her flame-out campaign in the 2020 Democratic Party primary, is now an asset in the general election, as the crime spike during the COVID-19 pandemic and other factors shifted Democratic Party politics on law enforcement. Her focus on winning over voters in the center rather than responding to her most vocal critics on the left — on issues like immigration and U.S. support for Israel — reflects her message’s fundamental conservatism. Trump’s Republican Party thus seeks to become the disruptor, claiming that the country is in crisis and in need of immediate action, while Harris and Walz aim to rekindle the Obama-like idea of a U.S. population less divided than its politicians would lead one to believe.

High-level foreign policy

If there is anything clear about Trump’s foreign policy instincts, it is that conventional wisdom and decades of establishment conventional thinking do not compel him much. In his first term, he committed to disregarding advice from the U.S. foreign policy establishment and ran through an array of cabinet members and foreign policy advisors, many of whom later spoke to his erratic nature and lack of knowledge or interest in matters abroad. 

Harris, as a former prosecutor and district attorney, first of San Francisco and then California, also does not come from a foreign policy background. Her foreign policy instincts seem to fall in the same Democratic Party mainstream in which Biden lived: global engagement on climate change, commitment to multilateralism and foregrounding democracy and human right, except for when such values clash too much with other U.S. interests, in which event they are negotiable, as seems to be the case with the U.S.-Saudi Arabia relationship. 

The differences in Trump’s and Harris’ foreign policy visions have led some to argue that not since 1952 has the U.S. seen a presidential election in which the two candidates and their parties have offered such starkly different worldviews. Trump, his takeover of the Republican Party complete, is fully committed to the “America First” message, while Harris, along with most other Democratic elected officials, is thoroughly an internationalist. These differences mean that the election’s outcome both in terms of who is president and which party controls Congress, has enormous implications for the U.S.’ NATO allies, Ukraine, Taiwan and more. But where does Kosovo fit into this?  

Trump’s frustration at perceived insufficient military spending by most NATO members in Europe was shared by generations of U.S. policymakers. His insistence, on the other hand, that countries like Germany rip off the U.S. by not paying their “fee” of 2% of gross domestic product (GDP) — a target the alliance set in 2014 — reflected a lack of understanding of or interest in how NATO functions. That default hostility to many of the U.S.’ closest allies in Europe also extends to the EU, which Trump says takes advantage of the U.S.. In June 2024, he told Bloomberg that the EU “sounds so lovely” and that “We love Scotland and Germany. We love all these places.” Yet “once you get past that,” he opined, “they treat us violently.” Scotland, of course, is neither an EU member nor even an independent state. 

Trump’s overall approach to foreign policy is perhaps best embodied by Grenell, the controversial former Kosovo-Serbia envoy and ambassador to Germany. Earlier in 2024, he declared that “you better have a son of a bitch as the secretary of state” to avoid war. He reportedly hopes to ascend to that role himself — seeing himself as just the “son of a bitch” Trump needs — and one way or another will likely hold a key job in the administration. 

Grenell, who as ambassador annoyed his German hosts to the point that an Atlantic article observed that politicians in Berlin “still speak of Grenell as if they’re processing some unresolved trauma,” has spent his last years investing in real estate projects in Albania and Serbia with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. “No one should ever apologize for wanting to make money,” he told Top Channel Albania in 2023.

More concretely, though, Trump has repeatedly brought up his dissatisfaction with NATO members who don’t spend 2% of GDP on defense, saying that he would “encourage” Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to those countries. This makes the idea that the U.S. would withdraw from NATO, an institution in whom membership has been the pillar of all post-World War II foreign policy, not implausible. Congress has taken the threat seriously, passing a law in December 2023 that would prohibit a president from withdrawing from NATO without congressional approval, although it remains unclear who would have the standing to challenge Trump or any other president carrying out such an action.  

A U.S. withdrawal from NATO would rock the organization and its members to the core, not least because NATO members — Kosovo’s neighbors Albania, Montenegro and North Macedonia among them — have integrated U.S. security guarantees through Article 5 of NATO’s North Atlantic Treaty into their foreign and defense policies. For Kosovo, the impact would be no less severe, although even harder to predict. 

Kosovo remains a protectorate of sorts of the international community, some combination of the U.S., EU, NATO and the U.N. more specifically. That means that any change to U.S. involvement in NATO would reverberate throughout the country. Per U.N. Resolution 1244, NATO leads KFOR, the international military presence in Kosovo. That current number of troops sits just above 4,600, roughly 600 of which are U.S. personnel. 

But even if Trump did not seek to pull the U.S. out of NATO, there is reason to believe that the U.S. troop commitment to KFOR would be reconsidered in a second Trump term. Grenell and Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s son and key advisor, have floated the idea of a U.S. withdrawal from KFOR for years. Such proposals have come in the context of seeking to punish Kosovo’s government for actions perceived as inflaming tensions with Serbia and thus endangering U.S. soldiers. Grenell’s long-standing personal animosity with Kurti, which includes Kurti accusing Grenell of bringing down his first government, not to mention the long history of strained relations between Kurti and the U.S. government, mean that the threat of U.S. troops leaving Kosovo would continue to linger over relations between the U.S. and Kosovo in a second Trump presidency. 

At a high foreign policy level, a Harris win would be more significant for what it is not — a Trump win — than what it actually is. Harris brings a Biden-esque promise to engage in global efforts to combat climate change, support Israel, Taiwan and Ukraine and to stand up to authoritarians like Russian President Vladimir Putin, North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman. Such objectives contrast sharply with the upending of many foreign policy pillars that a Trump win would bring. 

For Kosovo, this would mean a general continuity of U.S. involvement and engagement with NATO and other multilateral institutions. Harris’ views on the Balkans are “anyone’s guess,” as one commenter from the U.S. has put it, but her ascension to the presidency is an opportunity to break with the Biden administration’s general appeasement of Vučić. Moreover, Harris could make examples of figures like Vučić, President of Republika Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina Milorad Dodik or Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, defining her approach to autocrats while avoiding direct further provocation with China or Russia.

Kosovo-Serbia dialogue 

The Kosovo-Serbia dialogue has been stagnant since the March 2023 Ohrid Agreement, the implementation roadmap for the Belgrade-Pristina Dialogue: Agreement on the path to normalisation between Kosovo and Serbia. Neither Kurti nor Vučić signed the agreement, although EU High Representative Josep Borrell confusingly said it had been agreed upon by both parties. It has yet to yield meaningful results. The largest current hangup is the Association of Serb-Majority Municipalities, agreed to in the 2013 Brussels Agreement but not yet implemented. Advocates for the association argue that it will mediate relations between Serb communities in Kosovo and the central government in Prishtina, but opponents like Kurti and his Vetëvendosje party oppose it due to fears that it would cripple the Kosovar state, similar to Republika Srpska’s impact on Bosnia and Herzegovina. 

The U.S.’ official position is that it supports the EU-facilitated dialogue between Kosovo and Serbia and encourages both sides to continue their engagement with it. Trump’s return to the White House would shake this up. His hostility to long, complex, detail-oriented foreign policy negotiations and desire to maintain the optics of being a great dealmaker means that his victory could renew efforts toward a grand deal to “solve” normalization of relations between Kosovo and Serbia. 

Trump is reported to have favored the plan — floated by Thaçi and Vučić in 2018 with cautious support from then-EU High Representative Federica Mogherini — to “solve” Kosovo-Serbia normalization by redrawing Kosovo’s borders. Such a deal would have called for Kosovo to cede its Serb-majority northern municipalities in exchange for areas of southern Serbia with predominantly Albanian populations. Kurti was a fierce opponent of the concept, and the international community’s recent focus on the Association makes a return to such a framework anachronistic. 

That being said, a second Trump administration could still revive the idea of economic normalization of relations as per the 2020 Washington Agreement, signed by Vučić and then-Prime Minister of Kosovo Avdullah Hoti. 

In contrast to the potentially dramatic departure from the status quo that a Trump victory would provide, Harris represents a fairly predictable alternative and continuation of U.S. support for the EU-mediated dialogue and encouragement of both sides to take part, regardless of tangible results. This could be critiqued as dead-end support for a flawed dialogue process characterized by an unclear final goal, lack of serious engagement by one or both parties or inherently paternalistic structure and mediation from the EU. 

On the whole, Harris has not indicated that she would meaningfully depart from Biden administration foreign policy, whether on continued military aid to Israel, support for Ukraine and Taiwan, or continuing to push the EU dialogue and offer measured and pointed criticism of Kurti’s unilateral actions through Hovinier and U.S. Ambassador to Serbia Christopher Hill. Moreover, given the array of global concerns that Harris would be tasked with grappling with, it is unlikely that the Kosovo-Serbia dialogue would attract new attention. 

Foreign aid 

Another key difference between Trump and Harris in relation to Kosovo is their diverging perspectives on how and for what U.S. foreign aid should be allocated. Much of the foreign aid distributed by the U.S. comes through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which has invested over $1 billion in Kosovo since 1999. Its aim in Kosovo is to partner with Kosovars “to advance Kosovo-led reforms that will further the country’s progress towards full European and Euro-Atlantic integration.” 

Though the first two 21st century presidents, Bush and Obama, held different views on the nuance of foreign aid practices and what the U.S.’ role in the world is and should be, both oversaw increased funding for USAID and invested in reforms in the organization. As with so many other things, Trump upended this, submitting budget proposals to Congress with a 30% reduction of funding for both USAID and the State Department.  

Trump, notoriously uninterested in details and nuance in foreign affairs, did not personally engage much in discussions about foreign aid allocation. Yet the people around him — many of them right-wing ideologues who sought to graft a coherent philosophy onto Trump’s erraticism — were and remain fundamentally hostile to the notion of spending on global development or improving the lives of global populations inherently being in the U.S.’ interest. 

Previously supported issues such as promoting LGBTQ+ rights were scorned, and the administration sought to cut USAID programs aimed at HIV/AIDS prevention and combating climate change. Moreover, the Trump White House reportedly sought to shift foreign aid provision from countries most in need to countries deemed to be the U.S.’ “friends.” Given the strained ties between Kurti and the U.S., which would only grow more acrimonious were Trump and Grenell to return, this division of friend/foe could come into play as an administration gambit to withhold aid from Kosovo.

Congress pushed back on proposed cuts to foreign assistance during Trump’s first term, appropriating more money than Trump budgets called for. Nonetheless, Trump and those around him have continued to push plans that would dramatically alter foreign aid provision. This can be seen in Project 2025, a roughly 900-page policy roadmap for an incoming conservative president published in April 2023 by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. 

Though Trump has publicly tried to distance himself from Project 2025 due to its broadly unpopular Christian nationalist ideas, 140 people who worked in the first Trump administration were involved in producing Project 2025, including six cabinet secretaries and four people he nominated as ambassadors. 

In fact, the USAID chapter of Project 2025 was written by Max Primorac, a senior USAID official from Trump’s first term. Primorac’s chapter opens by saying the Biden administration “deformed” USAID by using it to forward “a divisive political and cultural agenda that promotes abortion, climate extremism, gender radicalism, and interventions against perceived systemic racism.” It then proceeds to call on the next conservative presidential administration to “rescind all climate policy policies from its foreign aid programs,” ban funding for abortion providers and increase funding for faith-based organizations. 

Though Congress, which ultimately controls federal spending, would have the ultimate say on such matters, a Trump win would still be significant in the aid space in two key ways. 

First, because administration priorities, even if not fully realized, signal what the White House does and does not care about. A Trump win empowers revanchist forces happy to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people and maintain fossil fuel dependence in Kosovo and beyond. 

Second, Trump’s control of the Republican party is much stronger now than it was when he first won election in 2016. Trump winning the presidency would almost certainly also mean that the Republican Party would control Congress. That Republican Party is much more Trumpy than the one that he had to work with upon winning eight years ago, as almost all Republicans who were critical of Trump have retired, reshaped themselves politically, left the party voluntarily or been exiled from it. 

Conversely, a Harris win would be a continuation of Biden-era foreign aid priorities. At a most basic level, this would mean that projects centered on items like green energy transition and LGBTQ+ rights would continue to be supported. For Kosovo, Harris’ victory would extend Biden administration priorities and support for green energy transition initiatives such the National Energy Strategy, passed by the Kosovo Assembly in 2023 and the country’s first renewable energy action, which solicited 100 megawatts of solar energy.

More generally, though, the Biden administration made foreign aid a larger and more visible part of its overall foreign policy, naming Samantha Power — well-known from her time as a journalist covering wars of Yugoslavia’s dissolution and U.S. ambassador to the U.N. in Obama’s second term — as USAID administrator. As a share of overall GDP, U.S. foreign aid reached its highest level in roughly 40 years under Biden, though it is still lower than that of most EU countries. 

Additionally, USAID launched its LGBTQI+ Inclusive Development Policy in 2023 as part of a coordinated whole-of-government effort to integrate specific attention to LGBTQ+ rights across government institutions. Harris winning in November 2024 would mean that such efforts would continue; Trump winning means that they could be eliminated altogether. 

The road ahead

For U.S. voters, the 2024 election presents a stark choice between two candidates whose different positions have immense relevance for the future of U.S. democracy, efforts to combat climate change, secure abortion rights for generations to come and invest in energy transition and many more topics. Though there are some — Democrats and independents critical of U.S. support for Israel, conservatives who deplore Trump’s personality as much as they fear Harris’ politics and various other niche groups — for whom the choice is a challenge, the distinctions between the two candidates and the visions of the future that they offer are clear.  

But whether it is Harris or Trump who ascends to the Oval Office has a global impact as well. Though the unipolar moment of the 1990s is long gone, what happens in U.S. politics continues to impact the world. Kosovo, as a country whose fight for independence had strong U.S. support and whose politics remain entangled with the U.S. in ways good and bad, stands to be particularly impacted by the election’s outcome.   

Barring unforeseen events, Harris winning in November would prolong the status quo of Kosovo-U.S relations. This means high level support for Kosovo eventually joining Euro-Atlantic institutions contingent on success in the normalization dialogue with Serbia and foreign aid funding aimed at promoting good governance, aiding the green energy transition and continued support for LGBTQ+ rights. 

Trump’s return to the White House, this time with a team built on loyalty and nothing else, would embed an deeply isolationist view in the most powerful office in the world. It would threaten NATO cohesion, seek to resolve Kosovo-Serbia normalization in one fell swoop that could undermine Kosovo’s sovereignty and cut back foreign aid, both in overall amount and the types of programs that would receive funding from the U.S.. 

The U.S. electoral system’s quirks mean that Harris, who presently leads in a national poll average by about 2 percentage points, remains a slight underdog to Trump overall. Whether she can increase her lead in the popular vote and secure a more stable path to victory through the Electoral College and key swing states remains to be seen. What is more clear, though, is that the consequences of who wins will hold relevance throughout the world, from Pennsylvania to Prishtina, Michigan to Mitrovica. 

Feature Image: Atdhe Mulla / K2.0 

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