August 20, 2020

Will Young Turks Make Turkey Secular Again?

by Stanley A. Weiss

GSTAAD — One hundred years ago this month, representatives from the victorious Allied Powers in World War I gathered in a porcelain factory in the Paris suburb of Sèvres to dismantle the Ottoman Empire, one of the vanquished Central Powers.

The Treaty of Sèvres left the Ottoman Empire a rump state. It cut away the empire’s territory in Northern Africa, the Levant, and the Arabian Peninsula while carving out French, British, Italian, Greek, Kurdish, and Armenian territories and zones of influence from its Anatolian heartland. It also internationalized Constantinople, the crown jewel of the empire during the 600 years of Ottoman rule.

May 19, 2020

President Trump’s COVID-19 Catch-22

by Stanley A. Weiss

LONDON — It was in the winter of 1962, on a short weekend trip from Mexico City to San Francisco, that I first came across a novel written by a former World War II pilot.

The novel follows Captain John Yossarian, a B-25 United States Air Force bombardier stationed on the Italian island of Pianosa, as he struggles to complete the requisite number of missions required for discharge. Every time he gets close, the number gets raised.

April 18, 2020

Living a Different Irony, but the Same Agony, as the Spanish Flu

by Stanley A. Weiss

LONDON — This is the part of the story that I cannot get over, the magical part that is hard to believe, even now. In December of 1918, in the middle of the deadliest pandemic in history, which had taken more lives in their South Philadelphia neighborhood than any other American city, my parents did something profoundly hopeful in the face of tragedy.

They got married.

July 18, 2019

North Korea: What Would Harry Truman Do?

by Stanley A. Weiss

LONDON — Early in his presidency, Harry Truman received a distinguished visitor at the White House: Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist known as the “father of the atomic bomb.”

Oppenheimer, as Truman biographer David McCullough recounts, was “in a state of obvious agitation” about helping to create a weapon that had wreaked such devastation on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That didn’t sit well with Truman; the president couldn’t stand Oppenheimer’s “self-pitying, ‘cry-baby’ attitude,” according to McCullough. “The blood is on my hands,” he told Oppenheimer, “Let me worry about that.”

For Truman, the “buck stops here” wasn’t just a saying. He was a man who said what he did — and did what he said. His friends and enemies alike could trust that he would keep his promises and follow through on his threats. Above all, he made tough decisions and took full ownership of their consequences.

May 15, 2019

The End of Democracy in Thailand?

by Stanley A. Weiss

WASHINGTON — In 1851, Prince Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the nephew of Napoleon and the President of France, staged a coup against himself.

The coup was a pretext for cracking down on key institutions and consolidating his power. One year later, he became Emperor Napoleon III. In London, Karl Marx, watching these events unfold, wrote one of his most famous observations: that history repeats itself, the first time as a tragedy and the second as a farce.

April 19, 2019

It’s Time for a Grand Bargain in South Asia

by Stanley A. Weiss

WASHINGTON — The generals called it Operation Smiling Buddha.

While the name suggests a peaceful initiative, the reality was exactly the opposite: Smiling Buddha was the code name for India’s first nuclear test. Supervised by top Indian military officials at a remote desert site in May 1974, the test was a huge national leap for India. It dramatically revived Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s popularity at home and forever changed the strategic environment of South Asia.

That India and Pakistan are fierce rivals is no secret. But the nuclear weapons programs that the two countries developed since Smiling Buddha have made their tensions more likely to become devastating confrontations. It’s a situation that completely defies common sense — especially since Pakistan, with a much smaller population than India and lesser missile capabilities,would be signing its own death warrant if it launched a nuclear weapon and invited India’s massive retaliation.

March 22, 2019

The Real Threat from North Korea

by Stanley A. Weiss

LONDON — It reads like the plot of an Avengers movie in which the good guys fail to stop a cataclysmic event and America is thrown into catastrophic and irreversible ruin.

A sneak attack renders military bases across the country unable to function. Our national electric grid, including backup generators, completely fails, taking out everything — from fresh water and sewage management to cell service, emergency hospital generators, and all means of communication — along with it. Without electricity to cool them, 99 nuclear reactors across America completely melt down, sending radioactive clouds into the atmosphere while choking millions in the communities around them. Within hours, riots and civil unrest engulf every city, as anxiety and fear give way to looting and rioting.

November 16, 2017

How Trump Can Beat Putin at Geopolitical Judo

by Stanley A. Weiss

LONDON—When the ancient Chinese general and strategist Sun Tzu crafted his masterpiece, The Art of War, one principle rose above the rest. “The supreme art of war,” he wrote, “is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

It’s a point General David Petraeus emphasizes in his foreword to an upcoming edition of The Art of War. It immediately came to mind as I thought about Russia’s aggressiveness under Russian President Vladimir Putin – a man who has caused far more havoc for the United States than the wars he has started would suggest. But though Putin’s strategy has followed the principles of The Art of War to a tee, the true inspiration for his geopolitical maneuvers may come instead from something with similar principles: the Japanese martial art of judo.

August 17, 2017

What Donald Trump Should Say to Kim Jong Un

by Stanley A. Weiss

GSTAAD—We’ve now reached the point in the presidency of Donald Trump that threatening nuclear war with North Korea is just the second most controversial thing he’s done during the past week.

While America works through the fact that its commander-in-chief just gave a full-throated defense of neo-Nazis and white supremacists in a shocking-even-for-him press conference – earning praise from no less an authority on the subject than the former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke – our high-stakes standoff with the Hermit Kingdom is not going away.

August 7, 2017

How to Make Peace with North Korea

by Stanley A. Weiss

GSTAAD – Sixty-four years ago, the Korean War was suspended with a ceasefire agreement between North Korea, China and the United States.

Six and a half decades later, that “temporary” truce still governs the status quo on the Korean Peninsula. North Korea’s nuclear and missile program is advancing at a rapid clip, with Pyongyang testing two inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in just one month. But U.S. policies – from sanctions to conditional negotiations – have failed repeatedly. Why? Because North Korea’s isolated and unstable regime fears giving up its nuclear deterrent will mean the end of Kim Jong Un and his regime.