Serbia's blind spot

In a previous piece in New Eastern Europe, I argued that the strategy underpinning Serbia's foreign policy - balancing Brussels, Washington, Moscow and Beijing against one another - was built for a permissive international system that no longer exists. Early July supplied the proof twice over, from two directions at once. The weeks since have supplied a third and fourth confirmation, and this time the choices were Belgrade's own.

 

On July 8th, within hours of each other, two institutions that will shape Serbia's future delivered verdicts that looked like opposites and amounted to the same thing. In Strasbourg, the European Parliament adopted its latest annual report on the country, which was drafted once again by rapporteur Tonino Picula. The document warned that Belgrade's deepening security relationship with Beijing sits awkwardly alongside its declared European orientation. The most visible aspect of this is the acquisition of Chinese CM-400AKG air-to-surface missiles and, weeks earlier, the confirmed purchase of the longer-range HQ-9 air defence system, making Serbia the system's first European operator. In Ankara, host city for this year's NATO summit, Alliance leaders spent two days on defence investment, industrial production and support for Ukraine. They did not mention Serbia, or the Western Balkans, once in the summit's formal text.

 

One institution singled Serbia out as a problem. The other did not consider it worth naming. Read together, the two verdicts describe a single condition. Serbia has slipped into the blind spot of European security thinking: visible only when it does something wrong, invisible every time the continent's actual future is being drawn.

 

What Strasbourg said

Picula's report has, by now, a familiar structure, and this instalment does not depart from it. It records that Serbia has made no tangible progress towards opening Cluster 3, despite years of declaring EU membership a strategic goal. The document also ties any further movement explicitly to alignment with EU sanctions on Russia – a condition Belgrade has now avoided meeting for more than four years since the sanctions were first imposed after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

 

The security section is the sharpest part of the text. MEPs voiced concern at the pace and depth of Serbia's defence cooperation with China, treating it as evidence that Belgrade's declared European trajectory and its actual military procurement no longer describe the same country. This is not a form of ritual censure. It is the language usually reserved for describing the rearmament of a rival, not the shopping list of a candidate state.

 

The trajectory matters more than any single vote. The report passed by 468 votes to 116, with 79 abstentions, against a predecessor that passed 419 to 113 in May 2025. The margin has widened, not narrowed; if anything, the file has simply grown thicker.

 

What Ankara did not say

The NATO communiqué from Ankara, built around three narrow themes – investment, industrial capacity and Ukraine – did not mention Serbia, or the Western Balkans, in its formal text. That is a clear departure from earlier summit texts, which at least gestured towards the region.

 

That silence, though, was institutional rather than universal. On the sidelines, the Croatian President Zoran Milanović told reporters he felt it was his duty to raise Serbia's rearmament at the summit – including, he said, long-range Israeli missiles alongside the Chinese systems. He also warned that Croatia would eventually have to arm itself in kind. NATO, in his words, "needs to know about this". But a president's remark to journalists in a corridor is not a line in a communiqué, and the Alliance, collectively, chose not to write down what one of its own members was saying openly. That gap – between what individual allies worry about privately and what the Alliance is prepared to register formally – is itself the more telling silence.

 

The shift has little to do with Serbia specifically. It reflects a wider redistribution under way inside the alliance itself. Washington is withdrawing equipment and personnel from Europe and pressing European allies to take primary responsibility for conventional defence. The entire vocabulary of the summit is the language of an alliance reorganizing around its own core, not one extending its periphery. In that reorganization, a region whose largest state cannot decide whether it belongs to the western defence architecture simply falls out of view.

 

Nobody excluded Serbia from the conversation in Ankara. It excluded itself, years earlier, by declining to update the strategic documents that would tell NATO and the EU it is the reliable partner it says it wants to be. Serbia's national security strategy, still formally in force since 2019, frames cooperation with NATO as a shared interest – a pragmatic necessity. It goes further with Moscow's alliance: deepening ties with the Collective Security Treaty Organization is described not as an interest but as a standing commitment. The distinction is not accidental. One relationship is transactional; the other, on paper, is a choice Belgrade keeps renewing.

 

There is a harder truth buried in Ankara's silence, and it should worry Belgrade more than any resolution. Europe's security order is being rebuilt right now, through joint procurement funds, industrial production targets and permanent financing for Ukraine. It is also being reimagined without waiting for undecided candidates to find their way out of the maze. A continent burdened by hybrid threats, drone incursions, and uncertainty over American commitment is losing patience for holding a reserved seat indefinitely for a country still governed by a security strategy written for 2019. This is especially true as Washington still treats bilateral military cooperation with Russia and China as a relevant reference point.

 

What Belgrade did instead

There was a third data point that week, and Belgrade supplied it itself. On the same two days as the Strasbourg vote, the Serbian National Assembly hosted, together with Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada, the first-ever “Conference of Speakers of Parliament of EU Candidate Countries”. The Serbian portion of this event was hosted at the Palace of Serbia. Addressing the assembled delegations, President Vučić said he does not expect the EU to take any enlargement decisions in the coming years – though, in his telling, that is no reason to stop reforming. The choreography was striking: Belgrade convening the candidates' club at the very moment its own file was being marked down in Strasbourg, seated next to a guest, Ukraine, whose accession is still being actively prised open cluster by cluster while Serbia's, opened a decade earlier, has not added one in years.

 

Two more moves followed, both unforced. In mid-July, Minister Boris Bratina travelled to Tehran as Vučić's special envoy for Ayatollah Khamenei's funeral, standing among foreign delegations alongside senior Russian and Chinese officials - days before Belgrade's own Strategic Dialogue with Washington. On July 16th, Serbia signed on as a founding member of the World AI Cooperation Organization in Shanghai, alongside Russia, China and some two dozen other states - a broad coalition rather than a narrow bloc, but its signature came one day before the Washington dialogue opened. Tehran, Shanghai, Washington: three moves in three weeks, none imposed on Belgrade by anyone else. That is no longer the balancing of four pillars. It is their dispersal.

 

 

What Washington asked in return

Washington's attention, when it came, arrived in a register Serbia knows well: conditional and bilateral, not structural. The joint statement from the July 17th Strategic Dialogue in Washington included a 50 million US dollars Eximbank guarantee to Telekom Srbija for 5G network development using what the statement called "trusted suppliers" - language Washington uses globally to separate allied, vetted networks from Chinese equipment in critical infrastructure. It is not a technical phrase. It is a security test dressed as a procurement standard, and it does not sit comfortably next to a minister who, months earlier, discussed 5G rollout, smart cities and AI cooperation with Huawei on the margins of the Mobile World Congress.

 

A second bilateral gesture followed within days. On 24 July, President Vučić announced that the 35 percent US tariff imposed on Serbian goods the previous year had been reduced, for now, to zero - even as Washington simultaneously imposed new tariffs of 10 to 12.5 percent on roughly eighty other trading partners over forced-labour concerns. Vučić described it as a temporary arrangement pending negotiations, with a return to something like 10-12 percent expected later.

 

Both gestures confirm the same pattern as the trusted-suppliers language: Washington is willing to engage Belgrade directly, on terms it sets and can withdraw, without writing Serbia into any shared architecture. A tariff can be reset overnight by one phone call; a line in a NATO communiqué cannot. That asymmetry is the point. Serbia is being transacted with, not integrated - attended to as a bilateral counterparty whose behaviour can be priced and adjusted, not as a partner whose place in the system is settled.

 

This is not only Serbia's dilemma. A state of seven million at the geographic centre of the Western Balkans, holding air-defence systems bought from Beijing and a security strategy that still treats Moscow as a standing partner, is not a peripheral curiosity for European planners. It is a gap in the middle of the map - a corridor through which Chinese, Russian and Gulf interests can move with little friction, precisely as the continent hardens its eastern and southern flanks. Serbia's ambiguity is not merely a national failing; left unresolved, it is a standing vulnerability in Europe's own security architecture.

 

Neither threat nor partner

Put the risk, the institutional omission and the transactional attention side by side and Serbia's position comes into focus. It is judged consequential enough to warrant criticism - hence the language on missiles in Strasbourg, and Milanović's aside in Ankara - and consequential enough to be quietly courted with a tariff reset and an Eximbank guarantee. But it is not consequential enough to be treated as a strategic partner worth naming in either institution's formal record. That combination is worse than hostility. States write strategies for their enemies. Serbia gets neither the recognition of an adversary nor the trust of a partner. It gets omission, punctuated by transactions.

 

This is the trap awaiting any state without an updated national security strategy, without a clear position on the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy, and without a coherent answer to its own doctrine of "four pillars". Balancing between Brussels, Moscow, Washington and Beijing worked as long as the system rewarded ambiguity. It stops working the moment every other actor starts building concrete budgets and alliance commitments and simply moves on without asking where Belgrade stands, or whether it is coming at all.

 

The instruments to close this gap exist, and Serbia is still not using even the basic ones. SAFE and ReArm Europe remain open to candidate countries: Albania and North Macedonia signed a security and defence partnership with the EU as far back as November 2024, giving them access to the European Defence Agency and PESCO projects. Serbia has managed none of it – not for lack of capacity, but for a lack of will to put the question on the agenda at all.

 

Ambiguity was once Serbia's instrument. It is fast becoming its verdict. Strasbourg still bothers to write about the country; Ankara no longer bothers to mention it, even as one of its own members raises the alarm in the corridors; and Washington, for now, prefers to deal with Belgrade one bilateral favour at a time rather than write it into anything permanent. Between an accusation, an omission and a transaction, Belgrade has spent a decade insisting it was choosing none of the three. This summer, for the first time, it looked as though the choice had quietly been made for it. Europe is no longer waiting for Serbia to choose. It is simply learning to build its security without it.

 

Nikola Lunić is a Serbian geopolitical and security analyst and retired Navy Captain. He previously served as Serbia's Defence Attaché in London and Oslo and as Executive Director of the Council for Strategic Policy. He is currently a Strategic Affairs Consultant and a regular guest lecturer at the Faculty of Law, University of Osijek. He is the author of numerous analyses and media interviews on geopolitical, security and international affairs topics published in Serbia, across the Western Balkans region, and in international outlets including CEPA and Kyiv Post.