Will the Balkan Tinderbox Ignite, Again?

By David Kanin

David B. Kanin is a Professorial Lecturer at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, and an Analytic Director with Centra Technology. In 2010 he retired as a senior analyst after a 31- year career with the Central Intelligence Agency. He spent much of his last decade at the Agency as founding member of the Red Cell, an alternative analysis and brainstorming group. Dr. Kanin’s responsibilities included challenging Agency judgments on topics worldwide and presenting alternative worldviews to senior policymakers. From 2007-2009, Dr. Kanin served as Director of Long-Range Identity Studies on the National intelligence Council. He served as senior political analyst on the Director of Intelligence’s Interagency Balkan Task Force during the wars that followed the collapse of former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. From 1993-1996 he was Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Europe, in which capacity he managed the production of National Intelligence Estimates and other Community products on Balkan and wider European issues. Before then Dr. Kanin worked as an analyst on European security issues, Yugoslavia, North Korea, and counterintelligence. He was a member of the US delegation to the Madrid Review conference of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in 1981 and the Rambouillet peace talks on Kosovo in 1999. Dr. Kanin holds a Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University.

There are many differences between the Balkans and the Middle East, but they have two things in common. Both regions are former pieces of the Ottoman Empire that have not found stability since that empire receded in the late 19th century. Both also have been objects of serial intrusion by outsiders who impose their interests and then flounder as their policies fail and hegemonies decline. 

The Balkan region – a fluid concept with changing “membership” over the past two centuries – continues to struggle to orient itself in the wake of the collapse of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. The shards of that country are going in different directions. Slovenia and Croatia have acceded to the European Union (EU) and now give casual advice to EU and U.S. officials on how to stem the West’s serial failures in the region.

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