Rod Blagojevich served as the 40th Governor of Illinois and previously as a member of the state and federal legislatures. He is a representative of the Republika Srpska in the United States.
Thirty years ago this week, the world came to Dayton, Ohio. On a U.S. Air Force base not far from where the Wright brothers first taught humanity to fly, American leadership helped broker an end to one of the bloodiest wars in postwar Europe. The Dayton Peace Accords brought peace to Bosnia and Herzegovina. For that, we should be proud.
But peace agreements are not meant to be frozen in amber—or hijacked by global bureaucracies. Today, Dayton’s legacy is being twisted beyond recognition. And as world leaders gather again in Dayton this week to mark the 30th anniversary, it’s time we ask whether the people of Bosnia are being allowed to shape their future—or whether their sovereignty is being held hostage in the name of progress.
The contrast with what we saw just days ago in Riyadh couldn’t be sharper.
President Donald Trump returned to the Arabian Peninsula last week and reminded the world what real self-determination looks like. “The gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called ‘nation-builders,’” he said, “but by the people of the region themselves—developing your own sovereign countries, pursuing your own unique visions, and charting your own destinies.”
That’s leadership rooted in respect.
Compare that to Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the country’s “high representative” is still—thirty years later—an unelected foreigner with the power to overturn laws, nullify elections, and veto what the people decide at the ballot box. That isn’t democracy. That’s managerial colonialism with a Western accent.
Bosnia’s system was supposed to be transitional. Instead, it became a trap.
The Dayton framework created a tripartite presidency to reflect the country’s multiethnic makeup: one Bosniak, one Croat, one Serb. It wasn’t perfect, but it reflected a balance. Then came the lawyers, the NGOs, the foreign judges, the diplomats who stay long after their welcome—and they’ve tried to rewrite the agreement from afar.
The result? A political system no one fully owns, and an economy that lags behind even some of the poorest parts of the former Soviet bloc. The people of Bosnia and Herzegovina deserve better—and they’re not alone.
Just look at Iraq. As President Trump pointed out, Iraq has the fifth-largest oil and gas reserves in the world. But after two decades of foreign management and “nation-building,” it is still plagued by corruption, instability, and stagnation. Wealth doesn’t fix anything if sovereignty is ignored.
The same forces that failed in Baghdad are failing in Bosnia. The same architects. The same excuses. The same results.
As Vice President JD Vance said earlier this year in Munich: “When we see European courts canceling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask whether we’re holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard.” He called out the elites who hide behind phrases like “misinformation” and “disinformation” to shut down dissent and silence opposition. He wasn’t wrong.
The people of Bosnia are not asking for special treatment. They’re asking for the same rights any free people would demand: the right to vote, to govern themselves, and to shape their own future without being overridden by a foreign veto.
In a speech to lawmakers this week, President Milorad Dodik of Republika Srpska—one of Bosnia’s two constitutional entities—said it clearly: “The Bosnia of 1995 needed peace. We received it. The Bosnia of 2025 needs reform—real, lawful, democratic reform. For that, we must go back to basics, built on the foundations that made Dayton strong in the first place.”
That’s the right idea. “Back to basics” doesn’t mean going backwards. It means returning to the four corners of the agreement that ended the war—not the reinterpretations and expansions added on by unelected outsiders. It means negotiating change through consent, not decree. And it means trusting the people to solve their own problems, just as President Trump urged in Riyadh.
If the world wants peace in the Balkans without endless intervention, this is the only path forward. If we want the Dayton Agreement to survive another thirty years, we must defend what made it legitimate in the first place: consent, balance, and sovereignty.
