Trump stood before the UN General Assembly in New York and counted out his peace ledger: eight international conflicts that, according to him, his administration ended or stopped from growing into something larger. On that list, between Israel and Hamas, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia, India and Pakistan, Rwanda and Congo, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Cambodia and Thailand, sits one item that sounds rather different in the Balkans than it does in the hall - Serbia and Kosovo.

The hall was silent. Not because anyone was surprised, but because for a global audience it is just one more item on a list. For us it is an open account nobody has closed - only moved into a different drawer.

What was actually "resolved"

In his first term, in 2020, Trump gathered Aleksandar Vucic and Avdullah Hoti, then prime minister of the interim institutions in Pristina, at the White House. They signed documents on economic normalisation. The American administration of the day presented it as a step towards easing tensions and firmer economic ties. Economic normalisation - not status, not recognition, not a border, not the Kosovo Serbs in the north. Economics.

Six years later, that same signature is filed as a finished war before the General Assembly. For months the White House has listed the case among Trump's diplomatic successes. And here is the trick worth noting: a conflict does not need to be resolved to be declared resolved. It just needs to stay quiet long enough for someone to claim the peace.

Why this concerns us too

Macedonia knows this mechanism by heart. You sign something with an American or European mediator, the host declares it a historic breakthrough, and then you spend ten years explaining that not even the thing you signed for actually got settled. Prespa was concluded as a ticket to NATO and to the EU. NATO arrived. The rest is still waiting, and the name has already been changed.

So a list of eight items is not merely somebody else's campaign. It is a reminder of what the region looks like seen from a podium on another continent: an item that can be closed with a single sentence, because nobody in that hall has relatives in Kosovo, or queues at a border crossing.

Is any one of those eight conflicts genuinely closed? Not one person present asks that - and it is the only question worth asking.

Meanwhile Pristina uses the margins of the same assembly for its own appearances, Belgrade for its own, and the list stands untouched. The speech ended and nothing moved on the ground. If that is the definition of peace, then the Balkans have been at peace for a long time - they just never told anyone who lives here.