REVEALED: CIA Knew Yugoslav Wars Would End in Disaster | Dr. Harry Blain

Originally published on 9 Oct 2025.
What if the official story of the Bosnian War is a carefully constructed myth? We'll explore declassified documents that ask: Did US intelligence warn against the very policies that led to disaster? And was the climactic bombing campaign not a necessity for peace, but a way to rebrand a failed policy?

Today I’m talking to Dr. Harry Blain, an Assistant Professor for Political Science at Sacramento State University. On this channel, we’ve been running several programs on the Wars in the former Yugoslavia and Harry wrote a paper on the subject called “The myth of coercive diplomacy: the US intelligence community and the war in Bosnia” (linked below), in which he explores declassified US intelligence documents on Yugoslavia.

Dr. Blain's research uncovers a startling story. We'll journey through assessments from the CIA's Balkan Task Force, revealing how experts consistently warned against the interventions the Clinton administration pursued. We discuss how early peace proposals, remarkably similar to the final Dayton Agreement, were scuttled. You'll hear the cynical backstory to the fall of Srebrenica—how it was viewed not just as a tragedy, but as a "diplomatic opportunity." We examine how the final NATO bombing campaign was less about forcing an unwilling enemy to the table and more about rebranding a policy failure and coercing Washington's own allies.

Links:
Harry's X (Twitter): ⁠https://x.com/hblain⁠
Harry's paper: ⁠https://doi.org/10.1080/02684527.2025...⁠

Neutrality Studies substack: ⁠https://pascallottaz.substack.com⁠
Neutrality Studies Youtube Channel: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@neutralitystudies⁠
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