A Diplomatic Solution

A Diplomatic Solution by Howard Zinn

"A Diplomatic Solution" is a 1999 essay by Howard Zinn, published in *The Progressive* on May 2, 1999, and later collected in *Howard Zinn on War*, a volume for which historian Marilyn B. Young provided the introduction. Zinn frames the piece as a response to a friend who has asked him, point-blank, what he thinks should be done about Kosovo — a question that forces him to move past outrage and toward a concrete political position on the NATO bombing campaign against Serbia then underway. Zinn begins by refusing to dodge the moral weight of Serbian atrocities against Kosovar Albanians: he does not minimize the ethnic cleansing, the expulsions, or the killings. But he insists that acknowledging real cruelty does not automatically justify any response to it, and he turns immediately to what he sees as the central flaw in the NATO campaign — that bombing a country in the name of protecting a persecuted population predictably worsens that population's suffering. He points out that the intensification of Serbian atrocities against Kosovars followed, rather than preceded, the onset of NATO airstrikes, and argues that this sequence should have been foreseeable to policymakers: punishing a regime by making war on its whole territory gives that regime both the cover and the incentive to accelerate its violence against a vulnerable minority, while civilians on all sides absorb the cost. He extends his skepticism to the Kosovo Liberation Army itself, arguing that its turn to armed insurgency, however understandable given decades of repression, was a strategic error that invited disproportionate retaliation and helped set the terrible cycle in motion. As a contrast, he invokes the African National Congress's long, patient, largely nonviolent campaign against apartheid in South Africa, suggesting that sustained civil resistance and international pressure, though slower and less cathartic than armed struggle or aerial bombardment, achieved a more durable and less bloody transformation. This comparison is characteristic of Zinn's broader historical method: he reaches for a precedent from popular struggle rather than statecraft to test the wisdom of the policy in front of him. Much of the essay's argumentative energy goes toward exposing what Zinn takes to be the real motives behind U.S. and NATO involvement. He is unconvinced that humanitarian concern is the operative logic, noting the glaring inconsistency between Washington's outrage over Kosovo and its comparative silence about Russia's brutal war against Chechen separatists seeking the same kind of independence. For Zinn this double standard reveals that the intervention is driven less by a consistent commitment to human rights than by considerations of geopolitical positioning, alliance credibility, and the maintenance of American and NATO prestige on the world stage. He treats this as a recurring pattern in U.S. foreign policy rhetoric, in which humanitarian language is deployed selectively to justify actions whose deeper motivations lie elsewhere. Zinn also raises a legal and constitutional objection. He argues that the bombing campaign was conducted without the congressional declaration of war required by the U.S. Constitution, and that it likewise sat uneasily with the United Nations Charter's restrictions on the use of force absent Security Council authorization. For Zinn, procedural legality is not a mere technicality; it is bound up with democratic accountability, since wars launched by executive fiat and enforced through momentum and fait accompli foreclose the kind of public deliberation that might otherwise have surfaced these very objections before the bombs fell. Turning to what should be done instead, Zinn argues that no durable resolution can come from an escalating air war and that a ground invasion, which some hawks were then advocating, would only compound the catastrophe by widening the killing without addressing Kosovo's underlying political status. He proposes that the only realistic path forward is a negotiated settlement in which Kosovo receives substantial autonomy rather than immediate full independence — a compromise less satisfying than a clean victory for either side but far less costly in lives. He places particular weight on Russia's diplomatic leverage with Serbia, suggesting that Moscow, as a historic ally of Belgrade, is better positioned than NATO bombs to bring Serbian leadership to a negotiated table, and that genuine diplomacy, backed by sustained international pressure rather than explosives, offers the only route to an outcome that Kosovars, Serbs, and the wider region could live with. The essay closes on a note aimed squarely at readers rather than policymakers. Drawing an explicit analogy to Vietnam, Zinn argues that ordinary citizens in NATO countries bear responsibility for correcting the failures of their own leadership, and that public protest and organized dissent are not peripheral to foreign policy but the necessary corrective when governments substitute military force for diplomacy. The essay is thus simultaneously a specific argument about the 1999 Kosovo crisis and a restatement of Zinn's larger, career-long claim that meaningful political change is driven from below, by mobilized citizens, rather than from the deliberations of state power alone.

By Howard Zinn · First published 1999 · Genre: Political Essay, Anti-War Literature, Political Philosophy · 767 words

First lines

Many people on the American Left, who had been united in their opposition to the Vietnam War and the Gulf War, were divided on what to do when the Milosevic regime in Yugoslavia attacked people in Kosovo for wanting independence, committing atrocities, driving people from their homes. The Clinton administration responded with a bombing campaign, and I tried in this essay for The Progressive to sort out the moral issues.

A friend wrote to ask my opinion on Kosovo. He said many people were turning to him for answers, and he didn't know what to say, so he was turning to me (knowing, I guess, that I always have something to say, right or wrong).

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A Diplomatic Solution is listed on Textopian as an essay by Howard Zinn, dated 1999 CE.

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Kosovo · Diplomatic negotiation · Bombing campaign · Military intervention · Ethnic cleansing · War crimes · Military futility · Nonviolent resistance · U.S. foreign policy · NATO · Antiwar · Vietnam War

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