The Western Balkans today sit at the intersections of shifting global power structures and an EU whose transformative appeal is fading. Rather than treating external influence as simple ‘interference’, this analysis situates the region in a reordered international environment where Russia and China promote alternative governance models, and the US recalibrates its engagement. Strategic vulnerabilities, from weak institutions to socio-economic fragilities, shape how these offers interact with EU conditionality. The result is not a clean choice between Brussels, Moscow or Beijing, but a dense field of overlapping alignments. Tracing these dynamics clarifies why norm contestation has become a defining feature of EU-Western Balkans relations and why the Union’s leverage is increasingly conditional on its geopolitical responsiveness.