On American gas, the manufacture of abandonment, and a compromise that has already been paid for.
By Albatros Rexhaj | 23 June 2026
A chargé d'affaires sets a clock. Connect to the American gas grid, she says, or watch the supply commit elsewhere and find yourself the only country in the region left outside it. Within hours the opposition recites the catechism: this is not energy, it is geopolitics, it is the alliance itself, and the man who hesitates is selling the country to the East. By the next morning the word that always arrives has arrived. Abandonment.
Let me state my own position plainly, because I have one and I will not hide it inside analysis. As a citizen I want Kosovo connected to the wider grid Washington is building across the Balkans. I would route the primary line through Albania and the secondary through North Macedonia. But I am not the Prime Minister. I do not hold the full ledger of Kosovo's economic interests, present and future, and I will not pretend to. He will decide. He will carry the political responsibility for deciding. That is what the office is for, and that is where the decision belongs.
What I refuse is the weather they are building around the decision.
You cannot keep a people in permanent existential dread and call it foreign policy. Consider what the dread actually is, underneath the editorials and the alliance vocabulary. It is the man who puts off repairing his roof because he is not certain there will be a country beneath it in five years. It is the shopkeeper who reads a deadline issued by an embassy and hears, correctly, that his life is a chip in a game settled above his head. It is a whole generation raised to understand, without ever being told it outright, that its state is provisional, that the flag is flown on sufferance, that the entire arrangement can be revoked if the wrong man stands in Pristina at the wrong hour. We teach our children the founding, the war, and the independence, and somewhere in the same breath we teach them to suspect that all of it is on loan.
The fear is not a residue left over from the war. It is renewed on a schedule. Every election it is injected fresh: choose correctly or lose your protector. Every incident in the north tops it up. Every round of dialogue returns it with the diplomats. It never resolves, because resolution was never its purpose. An anxiety that gets answered stops being useful, and this one is far too useful to answer. A frightened people is a governable people. It flinches before the blow lands. It weighs its choices not on their merits but on the anticipated mood of whoever is thought to hold the insurance, and a nation that governs itself by flinching in advance never reaches its majority. It stays a ward.
It works on us because the wound it presses is real. We were abandoned once already, in the early nineties, when the maps of a dissolving Yugoslavia were redrawn around every people but ours. The reflex that abandonment left behind is now a handle, and there are hands in Pristina and Belgrade and well past them glad to take hold of it. Here is the part the alarmists never enter on their own bill. Each time they warn a Kosovar that the state is one wrong decision away from being abandoned, they perform Belgrade's labor for free. Serbia's deepest aim was never the column of derecognitions. It was always this: to convince the Albanians of Kosovo that their country is conditional, that it stands on permission, that they are guests on their own ground. Every prophecy of abandonment hands that conviction to the people intact, at no cost to the man who profits from it.
The anxiety is a collective trauma, and it cannot remain the standing price of every sentence the country tries to speak in its own voice.
So let the ledger be read aloud, because someone keeps pretending it is blank.
Kosovo is not a gift that was handed down to the Albanians of the Balkans. It is a compromise, and a punishing one. The Ahtisaari settlement asked a country whose population is nine in ten Albanian to write into its own constitution a body of protections, reserved seats, minority vetoes, and decentralizations that no majority in Europe has ever been required to accept. Kosovo accepted them. It entered the Brussels framework knowing the framework would harden the very ethnic lines a young state most needs to dissolve, and it entered anyway. It accepted the Specialist Chambers, a court convened to prosecute the leadership of the side that was hunted during the war, and it watched the men who led its liberation taken to cells in The Hague by a process that put the victims of the war in the dock as though they had been its authors. It swallowed each of these. It did not riot. It did not walk.
A country that has paid that much is not a supplicant. The buck has to stop somewhere, and it stops here.
Understand also what Kosovo is, structurally, before anyone threatens to withdraw its insurance. The Ahtisaari republic is a buffer held between two nationalisms that would otherwise grind directly against one another, the Serbian and the Albanian. It is the device that keeps the Albanian question in North Macedonia inside a stable frame instead of an open one. It absorbs pressure so that the region does not have to. This is not a favor the West performs for Kosovo. It is a service Kosovo performs for the West, daily, by continuing to exist as the disciplined and restrained state, faithful to its commitments, that it agreed to become. That restraint is the Albanian people's serious contribution to the stability of this region, and it deserves to be named as such rather than taken as the natural order of things.
And Kosovo has been the reliable one. It hosts the exercises when it is invited and is excluded from them as punishment when it is not. It raised defense spending to the alliance's own target without being given a seat at the alliance's table. It commits its people to the missions it is asked to support while its statehood is still treated as an open question. Whatever has been asked of Kosovo as an ally, Kosovo has delivered. An ally that delivers is owed a voice in its own decisions. That is the entire bargain, and it is not an extravagant one to ask honored.
No one in Pristina is waiting for Belgrade's blessing. We do not expect Serbia to recognize Kosovo, and Serbia is free to withhold that recognition forever. But let no one convert the refusal into a debt that Kosovo is meant to pay down in concessions. Serbia's permanent no does not oblige Kosovo to become a little less itself each year in the hope of softening it. The recognition is not coming. We built a state without it. We will keep the state without it.
Which leaves only the honest version of the threat that hovers over all of this. If abandonment is genuinely the plan, then proceed. End the performance. Reduce the contingent, suspend the dialogue, file Kosovo under settled and walk. At least then we will know where we stand, which is more than the present theater permits.
But before anyone mistakes the removal of a few hundred soldiers for the removal of a country, a reminder from very recent history. Moscow was also certain. Kyiv would fall in three days. The burned columns are still rusting on the roads north of the city. If Belgrade nurses the same arithmetic about Pristina, it is welcome to test it. We are not afraid of the test. We are simply tired of being instructed to fear it.
