Problems facing the world demand statesmanship from serious leaders who simply don’t exist in the West, Milorad Dodik, the Serb member of the Bosnia-Herzegovina presidency, complained on Thursday. Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Chinese leader Xi Jinping – and Turkish head-of-state Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to some extent – are the only leaders who can currently influence global affairs, Dodik said.
“There’s a serious deficit of leadership on the global scene. There are few leaders who can make decisions. Don’t tell me there are powerful persons in the West who can solve global issues with their involvement. I think there are maybe two or three serious leaders – President Putin, Xi, and maybe Erdogan,” Dodik said at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF).
Problems currently troubling the world require “a strong response from strong leaders,” Dodik argued, “statesmen who can ignore the everyday noise to make far-reaching decisions whose benefits may only be felt by future generations.”
Dodik, a social-democrat who has shaped Bosnian politics since 2006, brought to Russia some of the lessons of the 1990s Balkan wars, which carved up Yugoslavia and established Western-backed protectorates in its stead.