Serbia’s ex-foreign minister Vuk Jeremic on China’s rise in a ‘geopolitical recession’

This was an extraordinary development, one that very few people saw coming. Most pollsters’ projections turned out to be very different from the actual results.

It will take some time for the new government to be formed and the new governing structures to be established. I expect there will be elements of continuity, although we may see very different approaches to the domestic issues, particularly when it comes to governance and fighting corruption.

When it comes to foreign policy, however, I anticipate a significant deal of continuity. There is not exactly a consensus but certainly an overwhelming majority in Serbia supporting the foreign policy that recognises our country’s European identity and the importance of the European [Union] accession process, which has been under way for a very long time and will undoubtedly continue.

At the same time, Serbia has maintained particularly close historical relationships with Russia and, especially over the past few decades, with China.

Serbia has experienced changes of government before, including some truly profound political transformations – in 2000, in 2012, and now in 2026. Yet none of these changes fundamentally altered our special relationship with China. Every successive Serbian administration has carefully nurtured and strengthened that relationship.

I do not expect this to change under the new government.

The concept of a “Group of Two” consisting of the US and China – which Trump has repeatedly cited – is re-emerging. How does a smaller nation like Serbia perceive this “G2” framework? How can smaller powers navigate this rivalry to safeguard their strategic autonomy and interests without being reduced to geopolitical bargaining chips?

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Our history and our geography are such that we have always been caught up in the affairs of the big powers. At times, the Balkans have been a theatre of confrontation between them, both during global conflicts and in peacetime.

This is not new for us – we have always had to navigate these circumstances as a small country.

So when it comes to the big power competition, a country like Serbia has little choice but to carefully manage its relations with each of the major players and avoid picking sides in global rivalries and conflicts whenever possible … Historically, whenever we have been compelled to choose sides in a major international confrontation, the consequences for our country have been severe, despite being on the winning side in two world wars, for instance.

As for the “G2” concept, I certainly believe that the United States and China will remain the two most consequential poles of global power. However, I do not believe that the coming decades will be defined exclusively by these two countries. Other important actors will emerge and exercise considerable influence.

Nevertheless, America and China will undoubtedly be the two most significant powers. From Serbia’s perspective, this is a welcome development.

Until recently, the United States occupied a uniquely dominant position in the international system, and our relations with Washington have not always been particularly good over the past few decades. The emergence of China as a power of comparable global significance creates a more balanced international environment.

For Serbia, this is particularly positive because we enjoy an exceptionally close partnership and friendship with China.

China and the European Union remain closely engaged commercially and diplomatically, but trade tensions continue to mount. How effective is Brussels’ current China strategy in navigating this tension, and can this dynamic hold as a stable, manageable equilibrium? Where will this relationship head?

Europe’s China policy suffers from a fundamental contradiction: it recognises China as an indispensable economic partner while increasingly treating it as a systemic geopolitical adversary. De-risking is a legitimate objective, but it becomes counterproductive when risk management is confused with the systematic reduction of interdependence. The European Union should remember that interdependence, properly managed, can be a source of stability rather than merely a vulnerability.

I do not believe the current equilibrium is particularly stable, because it reflects a deeper uncertainty about Europe’s own place in the emerging international order. The EU cannot credibly aspire to be an autonomous global pole while allowing its relationship with the world’s second-largest economy to be defined primarily through the prism of American strategic competition. Europe and China will certainly continue to disagree on important questions, but disagreement need not become antagonism.

The real question is whether Europe can rediscover the strategic imagination to build a relationship with China that is competitive where necessary, cooperative wherever possible and independent in its political judgment. Europe should not have to choose between its transatlantic alliance and a constructive relationship with China. The capacity to maintain both is precisely what strategic autonomy should mean.

How would you evaluate the evolving transatlantic relationship between Europe and the US, particularly now that US President Donald Trump’s administration has entered the second half of its term?

I think the transatlantic relationship has experienced a profound shock, although the underlying changes have been developing for many years. It took Donald Trump’s second term to make these shifts unmistakably apparent. I believe it is highly unlikely that things will ever return to the way they were.

Even before Trump, American strategic interests and priorities had been steadily shifting to other parts of the world – Asia in particular. This trend was already evident under [former] president Barack Obama, whose administration popularised the concept of the “pivot to Asia”.

In other words, America’s gradual reorientation away from Europe predates Trump. However, under Donald Trump, this structural shift has entered an acutely painful phase for the Europeans, leaving a deep fracture in transatlantic trust. I do not believe this trust will be easily restored, even if American politics undergoes a significant change.

That is very interesting because many believe that transatlantic ties could recover if, say, a Democrat becomes president in the next term. Could you elaborate on that?

I think this particularly painful phase of transatlantic relations may eventually give way to something less confrontational. But I don’t think that the relationship is going to fully recover, or that the fracture will heal like a broken bone returning to its original state, regardless of who wins the next presidential election in America.

Indeed, the next president could be someone who goes even further than Mr Trump in redefining the transatlantic relationship.

For instance, Mr J.D. Vance, who might run and win the American presidency. I would not really expect him to be particularly interested in restoring the transatlantic relationship to what it was before his Munich speech. Even if someone else wins, America’s structural priorities have changed. Europe is unlikely to return to the elevated position it once occupied on Washington’s strategic agenda.

This is fundamentally a structural transformation with Trump being an extraordinary accelerator. I think this development is closely connected to the broader geopolitical conclusions that I discuss in my teaching. I’m a professor now at the Paris School of International Affairs at Sciences Po, as well as a visiting professor at Tsinghua University. I teach the same course, both in Paris and in Beijing, and it is called Contemporary Geopolitics.

I begin the course with the proposition that geopolitics, much like economics, is cyclical. There are periods of geopolitical expansion, cooperation and relative stability, followed by periods of contraction, confrontation and disruption.

We are now in a negative geopolitical cycle – or, as I call it, in a “geopolitical recession”. The geopolitical recession hasn’t started because of Mr Trump, but he has become a remarkably powerful accelerator, contributing to its deepening almost by the day.

You mentioned witnessing this recession of geopolitical trust. The world is probably going to become more like a jungle. And in this new reality, you have the big two – China and the US. But what is your evaluation of Europe’s situation?

I think that Europe will face exceptionally serious challenges … in the coming couple of years. Some important political elections are coming up in major European countries. I don’t think that the European economic situation is going to improve dramatically in the immediate future, particularly against the backdrop of the negative geopolitical cycle I have described.

Europe therefore needs, in my view, to fundamentally rethink its strategy and its approach to navigating this emerging international environment.

Right now, the results are hardly encouraging. And starting with the big powers, China and America, but also Russia … It seems that they have difficult relations with all three. With Russia, it is effectively engaged in a confrontation over the war in Ukraine. With America, we already discussed the profound deterioration of transatlantic trust. And with China, Europe appears to be moving towards an increasingly contentious relationship, particularly in trade and economic affairs.

And obviously, the current strategy is not delivering particularly satisfactory results. My hope is that the political changes we may see across Europe in the coming years will create an opportunity for a strategic reassessment and a more effective approach to international affairs. And then Europe could be one of the significant poles in the multipolar world of tomorrow. It certainly possesses the necessary scale, human capital, economic resources, technological capabilities and historical experience.

What remains to be seen is whether Europe can translate these considerable assets into genuine geopolitical influence. I sincerely hope that it will ultimately emerge as a major strategic actor in its own right, alongside the other great powers we have discussed.

Europe’s reliance on the US for defence and energy has deepened as it doubles down on its position on the Ukraine war, with increasing security anxiety. Against this backdrop, do you see strategic autonomy as a genuine trajectory for Brussels? What benchmark or indicators would you look for to evaluate whether Europe is truly moving towards autonomy?

Europe’s predicament is that it speaks increasingly about strategic autonomy while becoming, in several critical respects, more strategically dependent. The war in Ukraine has accelerated this paradox. Europe is spending more on defence, but increased military expenditure does not automatically translate into greater geopolitical independence, particularly when much of the additional spending reinforces existing technological and military dependencies.

There is also a distinction that Europeans sometimes overlook: strategic autonomy is not merely a question of capabilities; it is fundamentally a question of political agency.

Europe will have achieved strategic autonomy when it can say no to Washington without experiencing an existential crisis and yes to Beijing without having to explain itself. That would not weaken the transatlantic relationship. On the contrary, it could create the foundations for a more balanced and mature partnership.

You once noted that “you cannot fix the roof on a rainy day” – and today’s international geopolitics landscape is “already raining”. Is it too late or too difficult to undergo effective UN reform now?

It is impossible to undergo comprehensive UN reform under the current circumstances because it would require a degree of international consensus that simply does not exist today. It is very difficult to imagine consensus between the big powers, particularly the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, which occupy a privileged position within the United Nations’ decision-making architecture.

It would be exceptionally challenging to bring these five countries, let alone the broader international community, together around a comprehensive reform agenda comparable to the consensus achieved during the negotiations on the Sustainable Development Goals. However, you’ve got to keep working on adapting the UN to better reflect the realities of the moment.

During a geopolitical recession, cooperation among countries, particularly the great powers, becomes increasingly difficult. One inevitable consequence is that international organisations become less effective.

So what can be done? There are three things that I believe you can do.

Number one is to reform. Even if progress is incremental, painfully slow and limited in scope, we must keep striving to reform the existing international institutions.

The second is to build new organisations or double down on cooperation within alternative organisations including those operating at the regional level. If you’re an African country, you may place greater emphasis on the African Union. If you’re in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, you may deepen cooperation through Asean. And if you are a European country, you’re doing more through the EU. Or maybe Brics is another example, through which the members of Brics can do more work. None of these arrangements can fully substitute for the United Nations, but they can provide additional mechanisms for international engagement and collective action.

The third option is unilateral action: countries acting independently when they believe circumstances require it. Of course, unilateralism carries considerable risks, and even the most powerful states can discover that their actions produce unintended consequences.

Russia’s experience in Ukraine and America’s experience in the Gulf offer important examples of these dangers. Looking ahead, I expect the international system to evolve through a combination of all three approaches.

We will see continued reforms of existing international organisations – slow, but moving. We will see growing cooperation through alternative and regional organisations. And, unfortunately, we’re likely to witness more examples of unilateralism.

These three tendencies will coexist and interact throughout the present geopolitical recession.

The precise balance between them will help define the international order that eventually emerges.

During your 2016 campaign for UN secretary general, you put forward a detailed, 53-point proposal for UN reform. How has your thinking evolved over the past decade? Which of your proposals would you fundamentally revise or scrap, and what is the single most urgent unfulfilled reform the international community can no longer afford to delay?

When I ran for secretary general in 2016, I presented a platform containing 53 concrete commitments – specific actions I pledged to undertake if elected. But that was 2016, and the geopolitical circumstances were fundamentally different.

We were not experiencing a geopolitical recession at the time. On the contrary, the international environment was considerably more conducive to multilateral cooperation and institutional reform.

If I ran for secretary general today, in 2026, I would have had a different platform. Some of the reforms that I envisaged a decade ago would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to implement under the current circumstances. And I think that anyone aspiring to lead the United Nations must combine imagination and ambition with a realistic understanding of what can actually be achieved. One of the greatest challenges facing the organisation today is the growing sense of disappointment and disillusionment with its performance.

In many situations, the United Nations simply does not possess the political space or institutional capacity to act effectively, particularly when the major powers are deeply divided.

Recognising these limitations does not mean abandoning the organisation’s ideals. It means being realistic about what can be accomplished.

Therefore, I think that managing expectations will be one of the most important responsibilities for the next secretary general, who I hope is going to be elected before the end of this year. The list of things that he or she could realistically pursue today would, in my assessment, be considerably shorter than the 53 commitments I presented back in 2016.

When you said the more realistic items, could you give us some examples that you think are workable for UN reform?

I believe preventive diplomacy is one of the most important areas in which the United Nations, and particularly the secretary general, can still make a meaningful difference.

Once an armed conflict is raging, and especially once major powers find themselves supporting opposing sides, the possibilities for effective UN intervention become severely constrained.

This is particularly true during a geopolitical recession, when many regional conflicts risk becoming proxy confrontations between larger powers.

Under such circumstances, there is often very little that the secretary general can realistically accomplish.

There are already dozens of active conflicts around the world. But there are also many more potential conflicts that have not yet erupted, even though the risk of escalation is substantial.

It is precisely in these situations that preventive diplomacy can play a critical role.

The secretary general can use quiet diplomacy, political engagement, mediation and the moral authority of the office to help prevent disputes from escalating into open conflict.

Of course, preventing a war rarely attracts the same attention as attempting to negotiate peace in Ukraine, Sudan or the Gulf.

Successful preventive diplomacy is often almost invisible, because its greatest achievement is ensuring that something disastrous never happens.

But if we are serious about realism and effectiveness under today’s circumstances, this is precisely where the United Nations should concentrate a greater share of its diplomatic efforts.

02:35

Going Global 100: China’s massive overseas multinationals expansion

Beijing has consistently advocated for UN Security Council reform through expanded non-permanent regional rotation seats. At the same time, critics often argue that the veto privileges of the five permanent members – China, France, Russia, Britain and the United States – remain a foremost obstacle to progress. What responsibilities and roles should or could China take on to move the reform from rhetoric to reality?

The reform of the Security Council and the composition of the Security Council is probably the single most consequential institutional change needed to ensure that the UN continues to be the most relevant international organisation well into the future.

That is exceptionally hard under the circumstances. Any meaningful discussion would eventually have to address the composition of the council’s permanent membership: which countries occupy permanent seats, and on what basis. But I do not believe that a fundamental restructuring of permanent membership is politically realistic in today’s international environment.

That said, I believe China has made a great contribution to the future of global governance by launching the [Global Governance Initiative], which comes as a fourth important document in a series, in which we had the Global Development, the Global Security and the Global Civilisation Initiatives.

The Global Governance Initiative provides an overarching framework that, in my view, offers a clear and compelling vision of how international cooperation and global governance might evolve.

I would encourage people to read it carefully. So far, I have yet to encounter anyone who could convincingly identify what, specifically, is objectionable about its fundamental principles. I believe it can serve as a valuable starting point for constructive international discussions. There is a great deal that countries can accomplish together, and I believe China’s Global Governance Initiative offers a useful blueprint for such cooperation.

Specifically on UN reform, the current debate is divided between creating new permanent seats and expanding non-permanent, regional rotational seats. Having presided over the UN General Assembly, what realistic institutional formula do you see that could bridge this divide? What could be the potential pathway forward?

The Security Council suffers from a widening gap between its formal legitimacy and the geopolitical realities of the world it is supposed to represent. We cannot indefinitely expect an institution whose permanent membership reflects the outcome of the second world war to command unquestioned legitimacy in the 21st century. Yet we must also acknowledge an uncomfortable truth: those with the greatest power to prevent reform are precisely those whose privileges would be affected by it.

My experience presiding over the General Assembly taught me that institutional reform rarely proceeds through ideal solutions. It advances through politically achievable compromises. One possibility worth seriously exploring is an intermediate category of longer-term, renewable seats, with regional representation and mechanisms of accountability, combined with an expansion of elected membership. Such an arrangement could improve representativeness without immediately forcing the international community to resolve the almost intractable question of new permanent members and veto privileges.

We should be ambitious about the destination but realistic about the journey. The greatest danger is not that Security Council reform will proceed too slowly. It is that the legitimacy of the institution will erode faster than our capacity to reform it.

You have warned that we are already in a multipolar world, but we still lack a multipolar world order. What are the major structural challenges of forming the order?

Multipolarity is a description of how power is distributed; a multipolar order is an agreement about how that power should be exercised. The first has already emerged, while the second remains conspicuously absent. This distinction is essential because the existence of multiple centres of power does not automatically produce equilibrium, much less stability.

We are confronting what I would call the “geopolitical many-body problem”. In a bipolar system, strategic interactions were extraordinarily dangerous but comparatively easier to calculate. In a genuinely multipolar system, relationships are more fluid, alignments more contingent, and the consequences of individual decisions potentially much harder to anticipate. The complexity of the system increases faster than our capacity to govern it.

There is a further contradiction: economic and technological power has become substantially more dispersed, while the institutional architecture of global governance remains disproportionately anchored in the distribution of power that prevailed eight decades ago. Meanwhile, major powers increasingly approach international institutions as instruments of geopolitical advantage rather than as mechanisms for managing their common vulnerabilities.

I believe the central challenge is therefore not simply to accommodate rising powers, but to develop a new understanding of coexistence among powers that have different political systems, historical experiences and conceptions of international legitimacy. A multipolar world without a multipolar order is not a new equilibrium; it is a prolonged transition with an unusually high potential for disorder. The task of diplomacy is to prevent that transition from becoming a succession of crises.

Beijing has put forward its major global initiatives – spanning from development to security – as a blueprint for world order. What other efforts must a big power like China spearhead if it intends to be recognised as a responsible systemic architect? What roles can middle powers and smaller nations play in this process?

I view China’s Global Governance Initiative very favourably, particularly because it recognises that the international system is experiencing not merely a redistribution of power but a crisis of institutional legitimacy and effectiveness. Together with the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative and the Global Civilisation Initiative, it represents a serious effort to articulate principles for international cooperation at a time when the intellectual foundations of multilateralism are increasingly contested.

What I find especially significant is the emphasis on sovereign equality, respect for different political and civilisational traditions, and the centrality of the United Nations. These principles are indispensable to any viable multipolar order.

The distinction between a great power and a genuine architect of international order is that the former seeks influence within the system, while the latter helps create a system in which others also have a stake.

Here, middle and smaller powers are absolutely indispensable. They should not be regarded as passive beneficiaries of an order designed by the major powers. Their diplomatic flexibility, regional knowledge and capacity to build coalitions can help bridge geopolitical divisions that the largest powers find difficult to overcome. Indeed, some of the most important innovations in multilateral diplomacy have come from countries that possessed neither overwhelming military strength nor exceptional economic weight.

Twenty years ago, you mentioned Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems” principle during talks over Serbia and Kosovo. Today, Serbia also occupies a unique position, just like Hong Kong, as China’s special administrative region, serves China. Hong Kong is the connecting point between China and the rest of the world. Do you think that Serbia can also serve as a connecting point for Europe, connecting with China and Russia in particular?

I think that there is a fascinating parallel that can be drawn between Serbia and Hong Kong, in the sense that both have the potential to serve as important connectors. Hong Kong is already an established international connector, with exceptional capabilities and considerable potential to strengthen its role as China’s superconnector with the rest of the world.

Serbia, in its own way, can play a similar role.

We are a European country that will continue to pursue close cooperation and engagement with Europe. At the same time, we enjoy exceptionally strong relations with China, built on a long-standing partnership and genuine friendship.

This places Serbia in a particularly favourable position to facilitate greater connectivity between China and Europe.

In that sense, Serbia could serve as an important connector on the European side, complementing Hong Kong’s role on the Chinese side.

But I believe we can go considerably further than simply acknowledging this parallel.

Hong Kong and Serbia could work together in very practical terms, building direct jurisdiction-to-jurisdiction cooperation and developing concrete initiatives in connectivity, investment, trade, innovation and sustainability. There are numerous promising avenues to explore, and I believe that closer cooperation between Hong Kong and Serbia could make a meaningful contribution to strengthening the broader relationship between China and Europe.

Ultimately, this is about turning our respective comparative advantages into opportunities for greater connectivity, sustainability and shared prosperity.