Weeks before President Trump retakes the White House, an American ambassador is tanking a strategic gas pipeline that would increase U.S. natural gas exports to Europe. In the process, he has damaged a country’s national sovereignty and worsened Balkan instability, all in the name of the State Department’s identity politics.

The Southern Gas Interconnection pipeline would feed U.S. natural gas to Bosnia-Herzegovina and end that country’s reliance on Russian energy imports. In 2019, neighboring Croatia’s government bucked its climate lobby by building a floating liquified natural gas terminal to wean Eastern Europe off Russian energy dependency. Its strategic value has helped make the U.S. the largest LNG supplier to Europe. Croatia wants to expand the pipeline further.

Yet, the State Department has hamstrung the plan with an aggressive nation-building project that seeks to force the country’s Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs to dispense with their national identity and adopt an overarching Bosnian identity embraced only by the country’s Muslim leadership. In fact, many Bosniak Muslims have taken Croatian citizenship, betraying little actual belief in a Bosnian construct.

Bosnia-Herzegovina has not moved on from the 1995 Dayton Accords, which ended the war in the Balkans. Instead, it has been saddled with an unworkable constitutional framework in which international diplomats have pushed an “anti-nationalist” ideological agenda while enjoying ultimate legal authority over the country. Serbs govern half the country, and Croats and a larger number of Bosniak Muslims rule the other half jointly. Neither entity enjoys sovereignty. Indeed, it is a failed state.