March 5, 2013

The Oracle of Thailand

by Stanley A. Weiss

BANGKOK–Imagine for a minute that Hillary Clinton is elected president of the United States in 2016. Imagine that within days of being sworn into office, there are widespread rumors that her husband, former President Bill Clinton, is actually running the government. Imagine friends of the First Couple being quoted at dinner parties as saying, “Hillary cuts the ribbons, but Bill calls the shots.” Imagine that one cabinet minister is so brazen with this information that he goes on record as saying, “If we’ve got any problem, we give Bill a call.”

It sounds like a crazy way to lead a country. Well, not to most people here in Thailand, America’s oldest ally in Asia. Remote leadership is currently its preferred form of government. As journalist Thomas Fuller has written, “For the past year and a half, by the party’s own admission, the most important political decisions in this country of 65 million have been made from abroad, by a former prime minister who has been in self-imposed exile since 2008 to escape corruption charges.”

Here, it’s not a husband and wife story — but rather, brother and sister. Officially, Yingluck Shinawatra — who very publicly charmed President Barack Obama during an official visit here last fall — is the prime minister. But it is her brother, exiled former prime minister and Thai billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra, who calls the shots via Skype and cell phone from his homes in Dubai and London. Part of the reason the power-sharing works is that the same brilliant advisor is close to both.

February 25, 2013

Hacking a Path Between China’s California and Myanmar’s Dracula

by Stanley A. Weiss

MANDALAY–Reading the news that the Chinese army systematically hacked into United States computer networks brought to mind another group of soldiers who engaged in an entirely different kind of hacking here seven decades ago: Merrill’s Marauders. What makes them most memorable is that it was one of the few times that American and Chinese soldiers fought on the same side against a common enemy.

February 20, 2013

Myanmar: A Nation at War With Itself

by Stanley A. Weiss

YANGON — Towering high above the center of this ancient city, the Shwedagon Pagoda is one of the great wonders of the religious world. Said to be encased in more than sixty tons of gold, the Shwedagon is older than the city itself. Its earliest legend goes back 2,500 years, when two brothers from lower Burma are said to have met the Buddha shortly after his enlightenment. As proof of their friendship, the Buddha plucked eight strands of hair from his head, which they brought back and enshrined within the Shwedagon. There it remains, alongside the Buddha’s famous precepts, the first of which reads: “Avoid killing, or harming any living thing.”

January 14, 2013

Marshall Parks for the Middle East

by Stanley A. Weiss

WASHINGTON — On December 4, 2008, exactly 40 years after returning from a tour as an infantryman in the Vietnam War, United States Senator Chuck Hagel spoke of peace. “When I think of jobs and improving people’s conditions,” he told the nonpartisan Israel Policy Forum, “I think of what Stef Wertheimer has been doing in Turkey and Israel.” Hagel explained that Wertheimer — one of Israel’s wealthiest men — “has five very high-tech industrial base firms in Turkey and Israel. They’re planning twenty more. I’ve been there. I’ve seen them. Here he has Palestinians and Israelis and Jews working side by side in these plants, and he is helping educate their children. They have futures, they have opportunities. This is not some idealistic dream, in fact it’s happened.”

January 9, 2013

The Emerging ‘Eastphalian’ International System

by Stanley A. Weiss

LONDON — In global affairs, nothing can be so hard to see as the obvious, if it is big enough. Nowhere is this truer than in the transformation of the international diplomatic and security system now underway. Before our eyes — if not yet in strategic planning — the map of the world is rearranging itself.

December 5, 2012

Iran, the U.S. and Azerbaijan: the Land of Fire

by Stanley A. Weiss

LONDON – In December 1991, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, United States Secretary of State James Baker gave a speech at Princeton University on the relationship between the U.S. and the “Newly Independent States” of the former USSR. In his remarks, Baker took aim at a curious target: the tiny Republic of Azerbaijan — about the size of the state of Maine — which Baker described as undeserving of American recognition until it accepted a long list of conditions the U.S. had required of few other nations. Soviet watchers saw it as the work of the U.S. lobby of Azerbaijan’s neighbor and sworn enemy, Armenia, to blacklist the ancient nation in the Caucuses region on the Caspian Sea.

November 15, 2012

Myanmar: No Ethnics; No Nation

by Stanley A. Weiss & Tim Heinemann

WASHINGTON – President Obama’s upcoming Saturday trip to Myanmar, the nation previously known as Burma, is intended to encourage the continuing democratic transition of what was once pariah state. But the way it is now structured may guarantee a lost opportunity instead.

November 12, 2012

Impatient for Pashtunistan

by Stanley A. Weiss

WASHINGTON— On November 12, 1893 — 119 years ago today — Afghanistan’s Amir Rahman Khan and Britain’s Foreign Secretary for India, Sir Mortimer Durand, drew a line across the roof of the world. Running roughly 1,600 miles through the rugged peaks of Afghanistan and present-day Pakistan, the Durand Line was intended to mark “the limit of their respective spheres of influence, so that for the future there may be no difference of opinion on the subject.” (Should “any difference of detail” arise, the agreement stated, they were to be “settled in a friendly spirit.”)

November 6, 2012

It’s Time for an Independent Kurdistan

by Stanley A. Weiss

WASHINGTON — Had the course of history taken a modest swerve, the United States and Kurdistan might have celebrated their independence on the very same day. It was July 4, 1187 — 825 years ago — that Saladin, Islam’s greatest ruler, defeated 20,000 outmatched Crusaders at the bloody Battle of Hattin. The victory ultimately delivered Jerusalem into the hands of Saladin, the crown jewel of an Islamic caliphate stretching from the shores of Tunis through Cairo, Baghdad and Damascus.

October 18, 2012

Idea for the Final Debate: Talk About the Biggest Challenge of Our Time

By Stanley Weiss and Tim Heinemann

WASHINGTON — Both political parties should be ashamed.

Through the last three debates, we Americans have listened to such bumper sticker one-liners as “GM is alive and bin Ladin is dead” and “I know how to run a business.” We have heard new slants on old themes, more accusations and counter-accusations, verbal whiteouts of statistics, formulas and gotchas, and studied political-consultant rhetoric certified to make the speaker sound “presidential.” It is a no-brainer to assert: “I was the one who decided to go after bin Ladin,” as if any American would not have made the same decision. Doesn’t real presidential leadership require focusing on the toughest issues, where Americans are at the greatest risk?