The Global Baku Forum closed on Saturday with a panel on how to reset the international order, and two of the most pointed contributions came from the western Balkans.
Boris Tadić, former president of Serbia, and Ivo Josipović, the former Croatian president who took his country into the EU in 2013, both used the forum to criticise the US-Israeli campaign against Iran in terms that drew directly on their own experience of great-power military action without UN authorisation.
The framing was not abstract. Tadić invoked the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia during the Kosovo war as a direct precedent for what he described as the ongoing dismantling of international law. Josipović raised the spectre of a wider war, saying that conflicts involving major powers “tend to trigger new conflicts, especially when Russia and China have interests in the developments.”
Both spoke from capitals that were themselves bombed in living memory, and both were making the point that small states tend to pay the costs of decisions made elsewhere.
What the Former Presidents Said
Tadić was direct about the American strategic miscalculation: “The White House and Donald Trump, they are failing, underestimating Iran.
They cannot finish the conflict within a few weeks. This is not possible.” He argued that mediators are essential and that the only exit runs through a return to international law and a UN-led reset. He also widened the frame, arguing that Russia and the United States now find themselves in a symmetrical position: both can be accused of dismantling the same international legal order they were supposed to uphold.
Josipović said he feared the worst-case scenario was “something resembling a world war,” pointing to energy supply disruption, food insecurity, and displacement as the compounding pressures that make escalation harder to contain once it starts. Neither man holds office.
Both retain significant regional credibility, and their intervention signals that the war’s legitimacy is being contested not only in Western European capitals but across a region that has historically been treated as a passive audience for great-power decisions.
Albania Is a Different Story Entirely
While Tadić and Josipović were speaking in Baku, Prime Minister Edi Rama was doing something that no other Balkan leader has done: positioning Albania as an active belligerent ally in the conflict. Rama visited the Knesset in Jerusalem in January 2026, declaring that “Albania-Israel relations are strategically mature and can only strengthen,” and that their foundation rested on “a long moral memory” rather than convenience.
The visit came immediately after Albania joined Trump’s Peace Council. Rama’s position is not ideologically surprising given his background. He severed diplomatic relations with Iran in September 2022 after a major Iranian cyberattack on Albanian government systems, critical infrastructure, and public service databases, making Albania the first country in the world to cut ties with Tehran over a cyberattack. The response was widely praised in Washington and drew immediate expressions of solidarity from the EU and NATO.
The deeper reason for the rupture, however, predates 2022. Since 2016, approximately 3,000 MEK members have lived at the Ashraf 3 camp in Manëz, between Tirana and Durrës, turning Albania into what Middle East Eye described as “an unlikely outpost of a distant conflict.”
The MEK, which the US designated a terrorist organisation until 2012, is Iran’s most prominent exile opposition group. Since the strikes of 28 February, its leader Maryam Rajavi, 72, has declared the formation of what she describes as a provisional government in waiting. Tehran regards the MEK’s presence in Albania as an act of hostility and has previously threatened that Albanian cities are within range of its drones.
The Firewall Nobody Asked For
Germany and several other EU member states reintroduced Schengen border controls for another six months at the start of 2026, with analysts saying the primary motivation was to prevent Iranian operatives and activists from entering the continent through the western Balkans route.
Israel has simultaneously been deepening security and military cooperation with both Serbia and Albania, with Israeli President Yitzhak Herzog visiting the region and political and economic ties with Belgrade expanding significantly. The Balkans, in other words, is being quietly restructured as a buffer zone in a conflict its governments did not choose and cannot fully control.
Serbia is trying to maintain working relations with both Iran and Israel simultaneously, its embassy in Tehran was slightly damaged by a US strike on a nearby military base, and President Aleksandar Vučić was planning Air Serbia evacuation flights from Dubai as soon as the airspace reopened.
The contrast between that operational scramble and the principled speeches in Baku captures the situation precisely: Balkan states are absorbing the consequences of great-power conflict while their former leaders use international forums to argue that great powers should stop producing those consequences.
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