Joaquin Flores
The official state visit of Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić to Beijing has predictably outraged the London-Berlin-Paris axis
Those defiant Serbs are at it again. How dare they? ! The official state visit of Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić to Beijing from May 24 to 28, 2026 has predictably outraged the London-Berlin-Paris axis, for it shows Belgrade is capable of steering its own destiny. In truth the visit is significant in its own right, signifying the further development of a mutual relationship between one of the world's largest countries and one of the smallest. This unfolds against a fascinating backdrop of multiplying failures across the formerly Atlanticist periphery. The "Ukrainian" zombie state deteriorates by the day, becoming a volatile sinkhole on Europe's eastern flank. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has changed tack in the Pacific, indicating to Beijing that Washington will not interfere with the integration of Taiwan, provided it is achieved through Taiwanese democratic elections. Compounding this, Israel's campaign to push the U.S. to destroy Iran has met failure.
Faced with these realities, Brussels desperately maintains a necessary fiction, a fiduciary responsibility to its own investors that Ukraine can somehow still be salvaged for the European project. Yet, as the absolute unlikelihood of that project becomes impossible to ignore, a deeply neurotic Europe heats up its age-old predatory focus on Serbia.
This runs parallel to what's playing out in the Middle East. Just as Israel's failure to achieve a victory against Iran causes it to redirect its bellicosity toward a weaker, closer target in Lebanon; the EU, unable to contain Moscow or compete with Washington, views Serbia as its compensation.
If London and Berlin have its way, Serbia would become Europe's Lebanon: targeted for economic, political and military aggression simply because the collapsing hegemon needs an easier theater in which to project strength and reassure investors. This vulnerability is precisely why Vučić's meeting with Xi Jinping is more than just diplomatic posturing, it is a matter of basic, civilizational survival.
President Vučić pays tribute to China's national heroes ahead of meeting with Xi Jinping
Serbia, entirely unperturbed either by the humiliating conditionalities of Brussels or exploitative and usurious British finance, has triggered the European media machine with this trip, from which we can learn more about their own narcissistic neuroses than we can about anything Serbian or Chinese. Within the arrogant realm of European commentary, the five-day summit, complete with the signing of over thirty bilateral agreements, is framed by EuroNews as "controversial and defiant"; and while no reason is really given for this characterization, we can only imagine that it is due the initiative of this Balkan nation remaining at a distance from its assumed European orbit. It is a view driven by an underlying European chauvinism which dismisses Serbia as the primitive children of a lesser God. Indeed, Europe's collective message to the Serbs over the countless decades has remained as abusive as it is incoherent: "You are not European enough, therefore we must force you to join Europe so that you may be one day."
Beijing vs. Brussels: Day and Night in treatment of Belgrade
Unlike typical European condescension, the bilateral relationship between Serbia and the China is fundamentally respectful and based on a win-win approach; here is where the difference is understood. Nowhere does Beijing attempt to insert some bizarre and hypocritical set of ethical or moral hoops for Belgrade to jump through, absent is the patronizing language or strange German BDSM master and servant dynamic which dominates EU discourse. Where the European Union offers an endless treadmill of accession chapters aimed at subordinating Belgrade to the diktats of Brussels, while simultaneously funding a Color Revolutionary quasi-insurgency and pushing for the recognition of Kosovo, Beijing delivers infrastructure, capital, and technology. The revitalized Smederevo Steel Mill under the HBIS Group, alongside massive industrial investments in Bor and Zrenjanin, has defined China as Serbia's second-largest individual trading partner, with every indicator suggesting it will soon claim the top spot.
Crucially, these economic links are tied directly to the state's survival. This is what matters perhaps most: alongside the Russian Federation, China acts as a main global guarantor of Serbia's survival. Downtown Belgrade remains visibly scarred, its landscape littered with ruined buildings left completely unreconstructed as a permanent monument to NATO's vicious assault some twenty-seven years ago.
Meanwhile, Beijing recognizes that Kosovo is an integral part of Serbia, and Belgrade recognizes that Taiwan is part of China.
While Vučić has only dropped the occasional hint about future inclusion in BRICS, expertly slow-walking Serbia's path to the EU such that Brussels rightly suspect is halfway fake. Meanwhile the Belt and Road Initiative provides a structural alternative, feeding directly into Serbia's grid, and complementing Russia's energy supplies as a functional model for a balanced multipolar distribution of power, allowing Belgrade to build railways instead of collecting endless European reprimands.
A sad European decline
Europe, for its part, must believe that the Chinese leadership is entirely illiterate or lacks internet access. How else to explain the transparently cynical overtures Brussels routinely makes to Beijing whenever it needs to pretend that having abysmal relations with both Washington and Moscow doesn't leave them utterly isolated ? One moment European leaders are pleading for media drenched photo ops with the Chinese to prove their global relevance, and the next, they define China relations in terms of oncology. A case in point occurred recently at the Lennart Meri Conference in Tallinn. The European Union's High Representative for Foreign Affairs and idiot par excellence, Kaja Kallas, chose to address the bloc's true but also truly deserved economic anxieties by abandoning standard diplomatic prose altogether. In a classless display of medical metaphor, she characterized Europe's economic relationship with China as a "cancer" and warned that it was time to start administering a painful "chemotherapy."
One need only look at its dysfunctional relationship with its internal periphery. Who could forget the gaslighting when Brussels and the ECB attempted some fifteen years ago to lay the blame for the Eurozone's structural insolvency crisis entirely at the feet of Greece ? It was a crisis engineered in the pristine boardrooms of Frankfurt through entanglements with Wall Street. Yet, while ordinary Greeks were subjected to crushing European austerity, their country's greatest gold reserves in Chalkidiki were in fact owned by a British proxy in the form of a Canadian multinational, which then used a slick web of Dutch mailbox shell companies to further strip Greece. Consider the fact that if Greece owned its own resources, it might soon be the economic center of the EU itself. With predatory examples of "European values" like these, what sovereign state would willingly sign up to join the club?
Military threats, military answers
Serbia can see the writing on the wall, and the conflict in Ukraine is no doubt a mine canary. The European bloc's proxy conflict in Ukraine continues to yield decidedly sub-optimal returns, and Brussels is experiencing an acute deficit of military success in the former Ukraine. The Europeans are eyeing Serbia as low-hanging fruit where it might deploy its remaining arsenal of military and economic pressure to secure an easy victory. Pressuring a non-aligned, sovereign Serbia to cut its ties with Moscow and Beijing is seen as a low-cost method for the EU to reassert its relevance and finally "bring the Serbs to heel".
NATO Bombs the Serbs |Time Magazine for Sep. 11, 1995
Charles Krauthammer's infamously war-mad WaPo opinion piece
Yet, because Brussels can offer nothing in the way of equivalent economic stabilization or security guarantees, its demands are received in Belgrade as an exercise in empty moralization. Belgrade's economic diversification is backed by a program of military modernization. Vučić's discussions in Beijing regarding the acquisition of sophisticated hardware, including advanced air-defense and electronic warfare systems, represent a rational defensive posture which the Serbian president assures everyone is aimed at "no one in particular", wink-wink. In reality, this military upgrade must be understood directly against the hostile regional terrain. The overt, Europe-backed military alliance formed between Croatia, Albania, and the temporary administration in Pristina is designed explicitly to project a posture of containment against Serbia in light of failures in Ukraine, and Belgrade's unwillingness to join sanctions against Russia. The integration of Chinese hardware, as previewed already in Serbia's "Power of Unity" Parade on September 20, 2025 was a calculated show of force designed to make Europe's regional proxies understand that any regional adventurism against Serbia would be prohibitively expensive if not outright disastrous.
The Chinese-made HQ-22 surface-to-air missile system makes an appearance at Serbia's military parade held in front of the Palace of Serbia on September 20, 2025. Photo: VCG
Oh yes, that color revolution thing
This capacity for external strategic autonomy is entirely dependent on domestic stability. The Vučić administration enters these high-level negotiations as a leader and statesman steeled by protracted internal consolidation. Belgrade has recently all but neutralized a highly coordinated color revolution attempt masquerading under the guise of student-led youth activism, even while on May 23rd a protest of some fifteen-thousand temporarily shut-down some intersections at Slavia in downtown Belgrade.
The irony here lies in the protestors' anti-democratic methodology. While promoted in Atlanticist media as popular protest, the movement explicitly demanded the invalidation of a constitutional, electorally verified government in favor of installing an unelected, unaccountable technocratic "government of experts" in order to bypass the ballot box and install a compliant, European-aligned administration. The mitigation of this operation is being achieved through a comprehensive, dual-layered approach: the top-down authority of the state working in tandem with a bottom-up mobilization of civil society. By reasserting the legitimacy of the constitutional order, Serbia demonstrated that it possesses genuine sovereign durability, making its long-term industrial, finance, and military agreements with Beijing reasonably secure.
Washington vs. Brussels over Belgrade
Another mechanism behind Europe's desperate targeting of Serbia is the shift occurring within the U.S. The recent news from Bosnia and Herzegovina highlights this, where the abrupt removal of Christian Schmidt from the Office of the High Representative (OHR) was engineered via intense diplomatic pressure from Washington. By forcing out Schmidt, installed on the basis of his commitment to disenfranchise the Serbian autonomous Republika Srpska within B&H, signaling a desire to dismantle the sweeping, quasi-imperial "Bonn powers" of the OHR, the United States effectively removed a highly volatile administrative anomaly that was stoking regional instability. This caused further panic in Brussels, which viewed the loss of their guardian in Sarajevo as an overt attack by the U.S. on European interests in Serbian lands.
The 1999 NATO destruction of Yugoslavia is traditionally framed as a unilateral exercise in American hegemonic power. However, viewed through a structural lens, that campaign was an operation where American kinetic power was effectively harnessed within the rubric of trilateralism and transatlanticism to also serve British and German geoeconomic, financial, and industrial interests during the high-point in the short-lived unipolar world of post-Soviet American global hegemony.
The dismantling of Yugoslavia successfully cleared the path for Berlin's industrial hegemony and London's speculative financial engineering. Washington provided the raw firepower and secured some lucrative contracts for its own political elites personally involved, ensuring it became the focal point of a well-deserved, long-term Serbian resentment, while the European core swallowed the lion's share of the geopolitical advantage through the deconstruction and vassalization of formerly Yugoslav industrial might.
Yet, as internal divisions fracture the contemporary West, with the U.S. is revising its old transatlantic commitments, a strategic pivot toward Belgrade does not cut against core American national interests. Yet, it is unclear how lasting these changes will be. In the case of Pristina and Banja Luka, have yielded some results, but they are hardly something to hang one's hat on.
Vučić in China has made Europe's eyes bleed
Ultimately, Vučić's state visit to Beijing demonstrates the limits of European containment strategies. When Kallas resorts to comparing trade with China as cancer, she quite audibly proves the exhaustion of the EU's power. As the EU flounders in Ukraine, they ramp up pressure on Serbia. Serbia's strategy demonstrates that in a fragmented western order, a state that can defeat a foreign funded internal subversion and maintain its internal cohesion can successfully transform its geographic position from a point of vulnerability into an asset. In connecting itself visibly to Moscow, Beijing, and to a lesser extent Washington, in bringing Yugoslav levels of investment and industry back to the country, and in modernizing its armed forces, Belgrade has shown that sovereignty is not a matter of mere punditry or political quacking, but a real and viable policy achievable by knowing the difference between European dysfunctional psychology versus the emergent multipolar world. Is Vučić's "controversial" meeting with Xi Jinping evidence of Serbian "defiance" ? According to whom - Europe ? Fine, let their eyes bleed.
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