Why Was Mike Pence Hobnobbing with a Sanctioned Genocide Denier?

Last week, former Vice President Mike Pence became the latest pro-Trump figure to fly to Budapest to speak alongside a range of Central and Eastern European politicians, including a number of anti-democratic leaders. Pence’s visit—where he headlined the biennial “Budapest Demographic Summit,” aimed at promoting supposedly pro-family policies—fit a broader trend of Trumpist figures looking to the region for illiberal inspiration, and for potential help in returning to power in the United States.

Pence’s visit, however, went further than any previous high-level travels to the region—to a shocking degree. While in Hungary, Pence met and schmoozed with Milorad Dodik, a genocide denier directly sanctioned by the United States for his ongoing efforts to break up Bosnia. Photographs from the event showed Pence and Dodik not only sharing the stage but also shaking hands and smiling for the camera:

According to the Facebook page for Dodik’s political party (pictured above), Pence “congratulated Dodik on his speech at the gathering and wished him success and happiness in his further work.” Pence, now a private citizen, has not publicly commented on the meeting, and the Heritage Foundation, where Pence has been named a visiting fellow, did not respond to questions.

While Dodik’s name may not be familiar to most Americans, he’s certainly a familiar figure to the American government, on both sides of the political aisle. When he was sanctioned by the Obama administration in January 2017, a Treasury Department press release said Dodik “poses a significant threat to the sovereignty and territorial integrity” of Bosnia. The Trump administration not only maintained these sanctions against Dodik but even expanded direct sanctions against his closest associates in 2018, accusing them of “significant” corruption.

And it’s not hard to see why. As the former head of the Serb-dominated region of Bosnia, and now as the Serb member of Bosnia’s tripartite presidency, Dodik has spent the bulk of the past few years calling for one clear goal: breaking up Bosnia and upending the fragile political consensus in the Balkans. Dubbed simultaneously as potentially “one of the most dangerous men in Europe” and an “ardent pro-Russian nationalist”—and reportedly recruiting Russian-trained mercenaries to his side—Dodik says that he wants to unite parts of Bosnia with an expansionist Serbia.

Dodik’s ambitions may seem like far-flung desires with little impact on U.S. policy, but he has played an outsized role in a region that just a generation ago collapsed into the worst, most genocidal violence Europe has seen since the Second World War. And regional security concerns are…