Belgrade spent thirty years saying Albanians had bought Washington. The retainers on file tell a different story about who was paying. Serbia went shopping there itself, and it now justifies its missiles the same way.
Ngadhnjim Brovina | 9 October 2026
Belgrade has had one explanation for every American decision it disliked: the Albanian lobby. Congress condemned the repression in Kosovo, and it was the lobby. NATO intervened in 1999, and it was the lobby. Washington recognised Kosovo in 2008, and the lobby had done its work again.
The explanation outlived Milošević. In July 2019 Prime Minister Ana Brnabić addressed Congressman Eliot Engel on TV Pink: “Even if you are Kosovo’s greatest lobbyist, without Serbia that ‘baby’ of yours cannot have a future”. In May 2020 President Aleksandar Vučić called Engel “the most prominent Albanian lobbyist” and said Albanians had been “financing the Albanian lobby in America” since 1946 with “horrific amounts of money”. On 11 June Informer announced that “the decades-long monopoly that Albanian lobby groups held in Washington” had suffered a serious fall.
The lobby in that story, a paid machine that bought the decisions of 1999 and 2008, has left no trace in the American registry of foreign agents, where the law requires such work to be declared. What the registry holds is modest. In 1992 Kosovo’s government-in-exile paid the public-relations firm Ruder Finn $5,000 a month, according to Justice Department records examined by Radio Free Europe. A study in Balkanologie found $235,300 for the twelve months to November 1995. The larger sums came later: $360,000 to Bob Dole’s law firm in 2003, four years after NATO intervened, then $50,000 a month to the Podesta Group and $780,000 in 2017, both after independence. Since June 2024 Kosovo has had no registered agent.
No contract in that registry bought the men Belgrade names. Engel held his House seat for three decades because New York voters kept electing him, until Democratic primary voters chose someone else in 2020. Dole took up Kosovo as a senator in 1990, thirteen years before any Kosovo contract carried his firm’s name. Joseph DioGuardi founded the Albanian American Civic League in 1989 with American citizens who voted and gave their own money. Serbian Americans had the same thing in Congresswoman Helen Delich Bentley, whom the Baltimore Sun called “the chief defender of Serbia”. Political science calls this a constituency.
A state that tells itself for long enough that Washington is for sale will eventually go shopping. In October 2003 the Belgrade weekly Vreme reported that the Serbian government had retained the Republican firm Barbour Griffith & Rogers at about $62,000 a month, twelve times what Kosovo had paid in 1992. Another weekly had presented two visiting executives of the firm as “trusted men of the American president”; Vreme found that nobody in the Bush administration had sent them. A source close to the government explained that Croats, Bosnians and Kosovo Albanians had their firms, so Serbia should “bypass official channels and go directly to important people”. When Kosovo’s status reached the negotiating table in 2006, Belgrade signed the same firm again, at $60,000 a month to January 2009.
The sociologists W. I. and Dorothy Thomas wrote in 1928: “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” Belgrade defined Washington as a market in American decisions and then became its customer.
Banja Luka went further. Istinomjer, the Bosnian fact-checker, counted about $17 million paid by Republika Srpska’s government for American representation between 2006 and 2015. A $4 million contract signed last year with the Montreal firm Dickens & Madson states: “The independence of the Republic of Srpska from Bosnia Herzegovina is our ultimate goal.” Last month Bosnia’s Constitutional Court banned all payments under it from the entity’s budget.
This week the purchases reached the president’s own circle. The New York Times reported that James Blair and Chris LaCivita, who run Donald Trump’s midterm operation, had been in Banja Luka days before Bosnia’s election, each paid hundreds of thousands of dollars through a Washington law firm retained by the entity’s government. The Financial Times reported that a partner at Continental Strategy, on $35,000 a month from Banja Luka, had requested the meeting at which the White House chief of staff received Željka Cvijanović two weeks before the vote. A disclosure examined by N1 shows that Valcour, the firm Serbia pays $65,000 a month, helped arrange Vučić’s interview with Breitbart in May and texted Trump about it the day it appeared. Trump shared it that afternoon. Of Blair and LaCivita he said: “They don’t have a conflict.”
The same sequence is running in security policy. On 18 March 2025 the defence ministers of Croatia, Albania and Kosovo signed a declaration in Tirana on training, defence industry and hybrid threats. Its text says it creates no new international legal obligations, and contains no mutual-defence clause. The Serbian foreign ministry answered the same day by calling it a “military alliance” and “a security threat to the Serbian people and the entire region”. Eighteen months of repetition later, the alliance is a premise. On 4 September Vučić said the three would attack Serbia “with ease” if it were weaker: “That is why they made military alliances”. In the same appearance he hoped for “the development of ballistic missiles for the first time in history”.
In both cases the invention comes first. Repetition turns it into an assumption and the assumption into policy: a lobbying retainer in one case, an announced ambition to build ballistic missiles in the other. Whether its authors still remember inventing it matters less each year, because they act as if it were true. Belgrade then calls the action defence.
The filings show spending, stated aims and access. Whether any American decision followed is for Washington to answer, and in Sarajevo on 8 October Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Dick Durbin asked where Milorad Dodik’s lobbying money comes from. Policy on Kosovo changed in 1998 and 1999 because of what Serbian forces did there.
For thirty years Belgrade called a friendship a transaction. The transactions are now in writing, and the signatures are Banja Luka’s and Belgrade’s. The missiles are being justified the same way.
Ngadhnjim Brovina teaches political science at UBT in Prishtina. He writes on enlargement, conditionality, and the institutional politics of the Western Balkans.
