If Donald Trump wins the U.S. presidential election in November, all sorts of hell will break lose. Mexico will face a huge border crisis. China will be hit with a new wave of tariffs. Ukraine will begin preparing itself for abandonment.

And Milorad Dodik will tear apart Bosnia.

Perhaps you’ve never heard of Milorad Dodik. He is the leader of Republika Srpska, the predominantly ethnic Serbian entity inside Bosnia. For years, he has threatened to declare his enclave an independent state. In December, in an interview to a Serbian TV station, he said that he’d intended to make this move when Donald Trump took office in 2016 but “got scared and didn’t do it.”

Should Trump get re-elected, he promises, finally, to take the leap.

If I had a blowhard troublemaker living in my house and he declared that he was moving out, I’d be overjoyed to get rid of the jerk. Dodik has been nothing but an obstructionist who has almost single-handedly prevented Bosnia from functioning as an effective state. So, good riddance.

But geopolitics doesn’t work that way. The Balkans remain a volatile region, and Russian interference has only made matters worse. The break-up of Yugoslavia was a disaster. The break-up of Bosnia could be a tragic sequel.

With Ukraine, Europe is already struggling to deal with a major war on its borders. Can it handle two?

In the 1990s, Milorad Dodik cast himself as a reformer who could provide level-headed leadership in Republika Srpska. This was in contrast to the ultranationalism of Radovan Karadzic, who led the enclave from 1992 to 1996 but then went into hiding with a war criminal’s bounty on his head. Backed by the West, which surrounded administrative buildings in the capital of Banja Luka to counter forces loyal to Karadzic, Dodik took over as regional prime minister in 1998.

It didn’t take long for Dodik to pull an Orbán.

Like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Dodik saw opportunity on the right-wing side of the political spectrum and slid right over. Also like Orbán, it was a political loss that made him wake up and smell the nationalism. In 2000, Dodik was crushed in his bid to become president of Republika Srpska, capturing only 25 percent of the vote against the nationalist candidate. Soon Dodik was gravitating to where most voters congregated.

By the early 2000s, Dodik was rallying audiences with his promises to snatch Bosnia from the clutches of international authorities and........

© Eurasia Review