Vučić sells the same balancing act to four capitals at once

Serbia's signature balancing act stopped being a slogan this spring and started looking like a survival strategy. President Aleksandar Vučić ran his trademark multi-vector posture harder than usual, hosting NATO troops on Serbian soil for the first time, accepting China's highest honor for foreigners a few days later, and using both trips to argue at home that he is the only person who can keep all of those doors open at once. The pitch was aimed less at any foreign capital than at the protesters who have been on the streets for eighteen months and at an early election he has now signaled for the autumn.

The NATO exercise was the most visible break with old script. About six hundred troops from Italy, Romania, Turkey and Serbia spent two weeks training together at a base in the country's south, with observers from France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States watching. NATO officials took pains to call it consistent with Serbia's stated military neutrality, but the symbolism was the point: thirty years after the alliance bombed Belgrade, Serbian soldiers were drilling with it. Within days Vučić was in Beijing on his first state visit, signing more than twenty cooperation documents and receiving the Friendship Medal from Xi Jinping. He called the relationship an "iron friendship" and bracketed it against Europe.

The Russian leg of the act is the one that is fraying. United States sanctions on the Serbian oil company NIS, where Gazprom Neft held a controlling stake, finally forced the Russian owners to agree to exit, ending a near-monopoly Moscow had built in Serbian downstream energy. A senior Serbian diplomat described relations with Moscow as reaching an impasse. The Kremlin signaled its displeasure by inviting a Vučić rival, the deposed politician Aleksandar Vulin, to the Victory Day parade in Moscow. To plug the gap, Belgrade locked in expanded Azerbaijani gas deliveries and a joint power-plant project with SOCAR.

The regional picture darkened in parallel. Croatia, Albania and Kosovo signed a trilateral defense declaration in Tirana in mid-March, prompting Vučić to talk publicly about Chinese hypersonic missiles and to file formal protests in Zagreb and Tirana. He skipped Montenegro's twentieth independence anniversary, calling it a secession he would be ashamed to celebrate. At home, tens of thousands returned to Belgrade in late May demanding early elections, and the railways were shut down to keep more from coming.