OPINION:
We all know how former President Biden and other Democrats weaponized the justice system during the past presidential election season and used lawfare against President Trump, but what most people don’t know is that Mr. Biden used his power to impose economic sanctions against people in other countries who cheered for Mr. Trump.
In the wake of the Democratic defeat at the polls in November, Mr. Biden issued a series of sanctions on citizens from foreign countries who celebrated Mr. Trump’s electoral victory.
The sanctions came fast and furious. One was imposed the week after, one two months later, and one the very next day.
In the weeks after the election, reports said the Biden administration had attempted to impose further sanctions on West Bank settlers in Israel (it had already imposed multiple rounds in 2024) after some of these Israelis held parties celebrating Mr. Trump’s win.
In January, Mr. Biden imposed sanctions on Antal Rogan, a top aide to pro-Trump and outspoken Hungarian President Viktor Orban.
In Bosnia, in the autonomous Serbian majority of the Republic of Srpska, longtime pro-Trump President Milorad Dodik was slapped with sanctions the day after the election, the day he held a rally celebrating Mr. Trump’s victory. It didn’t help the Serbian president’s cause when he publicly donned a red MAGA cap.
This wasn’t the first time an American president had sanctioned Mr. Dodik. In 2017, President Obama sanctioned him two days before he was scheduled to leave for Washington to attend Mr. Trump’s first inauguration.
It is standard practice for American presidents to issue sanctions for various reasons: to address human rights violations, deter nuclear proliferation or promote democracy. Sanctions have been used in counternarcotics activities and to resolve conflicts between nations. They are frequently and correctly imposed against countries such as Russia that invade nations such as Ukraine.
However, Messrs. Obama and Biden followed an ugly and petty course. They imposed sanctions on people in other countries to punish them for celebrating their rivals’ victories.
Sanctions have never been intended as payback against foreign leaders or citizens rooting for a president’s political opponent.
Fortunately, Mr. Trump has lifted the sanctions against the Hungarian president’s top aide and the sanctions leveled against Israeli settlers. Unfortunately, the sanctions against Mr. Dodik remain. Why? Because few people in America know that they exist.
Bosnia captures the world’s attention only when the people there are at war. Otherwise, what happens in Bosnia stays in Bosnia.
Thirty years ago in Dayton, Ohio, the Clinton-era Dayton Accords established a governing framework that cobbled together three warring ethnic groups, each with its own religion, into a country that could fit into less than half of Ohio. Today, this tiny European nation bumbles and stumbles along under a political system in which an unelected bureaucrat from Germany exercises power like an English viceroy ruling over a neocolonial India.
In his recent speech in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Mr. Trump castigated the “so-called nation builders, neocons or liberal nonprofits like those who spent trillions failing to develop Kabul and Baghdad.” He praised “the birth of a modern Middle East that has been brought about by the people of the region themselves, developing your own sovereign countries, pursuing your own unique visions and charting your own destinies in your own way.”
The continued persecution of Mr. Dodik by the holdovers from the Biden State Department and the nation builders of the European Union through their unelected representative, Christian Schmidt, is precisely the sort of nation-building Mr. Trump condemned in Riyadh and what Vice President J.D. Vance criticized in his Feb. 14 speech in Munich. There, Mr. Vance assailed the cancellation of elections by European courts and the practice of senior European officials threatening to cancel others.
Mr. Vance went on to say: “It looks more and more like old, entrenched interests hiding behind ugly, Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion or, God forbid, vote a different way or, even worse, win an election.”
Like Iraq and the Russia-Ukraine war, Bosnia-Herzegovina is a construct of the same nation builders whom Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance condemned.
Today, elected leaders across Europe who stand up for the sovereignty of their people are getting deplatformed, banned and sanctioned.
Mr. Dodik is one of them. The democratically elected president of the Republic of Srpska is being persecuted and sanctioned by those same powers. As in the case of Mr. Trump, weaponized officials have used lawfare to bar Mr. Dodik from holding office. In an abuse of presidential power, Mr. Biden, borrowing a page from his predecessor’s playbook, sanctioned him on the day he celebrated the Trump election victory.
I hope someone gets word to Mr. Trump that what was done to Mr. Rogan in Hungary and the settlers of the West Bank in Israel is still being done to Mr. Dodik in Bosnia. I also hope that, just as Mr. Trump lifted sanctions in Hungary and Israel, he will one day soon do the same and lift the weaponized sanctions imposed on Mr. Dodik in Srpska.
• Rod Blagojevich served as governor of Illinois from 2003 to 2009. In February, he was pardoned by President Trump for his conviction on corruption charges.
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