A Stories Matter Pitch — The Engineering of Peace and the Silence of the Gatekeepers

Dear Editors,

I’m a Chicago-area author writing about novel solutions to some of the world’s intractable conflicts. I am sending this email to pitch a Stories Matter essay about my unfinished journey to make the world realize that peace is possible, albeit coming from an unconventional source.

My name is Doc Ngu. I grew up in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War, with a post-colonial French education of romanticism and lyricism. South Vietnam fell in 1975, and the next four years introduced me to the brutish realism of communist indoctrination and socialist ideology. Escaping as a Boat People, and after a year in a refugee camp, I resettled in the Chicago area, where I set foot into my first American college and met an education system that encouraged exploration and critical thinking. I graduated from the University of Illinois at Chicago with the Bell Award for the top undergraduate engineer and later earned a Ph.D. in computer science from the Illinois Institute of Technology. My professional career then spanned Bell Laboratories, a startup I founded, and a Chicago financial institution.

Nothing in my background suggests I would become a writer of international strategies, especially those applicable to conflicts that have endured so long they are deemed intractable. Yet, for reasons I explain next, this background enables me to develop outside-the-box solutions to boxed-in conflicts. At the same time, it hinders the distribution of those solutions when I face the quiet wall of institutional publishing and policy gatekeeping, where experts who have worked on these issues for so long through conventional frameworks may develop a blind spot toward an unconventional approach. And unconventional approaches are required for intractable conflicts. If a conflict remains, it means conventional methods, no matter how diligently applied, have failed to resolve it.

My youth exposed me to three formative currents: romanticism, which taught me to dream; socialist realism, which pushed me to dig into underlying rationales; and creative thinking, which encouraged me to imagine solutions that did not previously exist. My life journey — from an idyllic bourgeois childhood in pre-1975 South Vietnam, to a reactionary class when the country turned communist, to a stateless refugee dependent on other people’s aid, to a self-made man in the land of opportunity — gives me empathy for people on both sides of intractable conflicts and shapes my thinking about resolutions.

An additional influence is my engineering training. I examine conflicts not as an affected party, politician, soldier, pundit, or activist, but as an engineer: the world has a problem; investigate the facts; conduct a root-cause analysis; then identify an outside-the-box solution. An expert may follow the same steps, but will arrive at a conventional proposal that does not work — otherwise they will have resolved the conflict already.

My outside-the-box proposals have not fared better. I have published a 400-page book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a 600-page book on the Russo-Ukrainian war, and a deep-dive analysis of how to break the US-Israel-Iran stalemate. They have not changed the course of the conflicts, and not because they are proven to lack merit, but because they have not gained the awareness or engagement that expert publications typically receive. The difference is stark: expert analyses are circulated, debated, and absorbed into policy conversations, while my proposals remain largely unseen.

Most resources for novice writers focus on fiction or on non-fiction written by recognized experts. In the genre of current events and international affairs, writers are usually taken seriously only if they hold institutional authority or write about historical events or lived experiences. My pitched essay will be about my journey to get my ideas noticed, specifically about these encountered roadblocks: I am an uncredentialed novice outsider; the topics I am writing about are still unfolding in real time; my proposals are unprecedented and look radical by conventional wisdom; and I do not have connections to war-and-peace decision makers in governments. The essay will not have a happy ending since I am still deep into my journey.

Attached are the synopses of my peace plans.

I hope to get a positive answer from you.

Sincerely,

Doc Ngu

ATTACHMENT 1 - The PEIS Plan for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

The root cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is land. Both peoples want the same piece of land: the West Bank. For more than seven decades, every two-state proposal that attempts to partition that land has failed. The PEIS Plan introduces a new land: the PEIS Sinai. Unlike earlier Sinai-based proposals, the PEIS Sinai, combined with the Gaza Strip, would enable the creation of a contiguous New Palestine state, with two-sea access, open air space, a landmass potentially larger than the new Israel, and ample space to welcome home the diaspora. Only land would transfer; private properties atop that land would remain with their Palestinian owners, protected from deportation or confiscation through amendments to Israel’s Basic Laws. Instead of occupation, Israel would purchase the West Bank from the Palestinians, who would use the proceeds to purchase the PEIS Sinai from Egypt — giving Egypt a windfall to invest where 99% of its population lives.

PEIS Plan: https://peisplan.docngu.net/p/the-plan.html

PEIS Book: https://peisplan.docngu.net/p/the-book.html

ATTACHMENT 2 - The CURD Plan for the Russo-Ukrainian War

For the Russo-Ukrainian war, the root cause is the fascist vision of President Vladimir Putinto to assemble a “living space” for his “people”: Orthodox Slavs from Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus for a prophetical Holy Rus’. Ukraine’s motivation is conventional patriotism for territorial sovereignty. The CURD Plan presents a comprehensive eighteen-point peace framework built on the double-victory principle. Ukraine’s victory centers on “land” ? the full restoration of its pre-2014 territory. Russia’s victory focuses on “people”, enabling its ministration of the Russian-passport-holding separatists and ethnic Russians in the currently contested territories, regardless of sovereignty. When both sides can declare their own victory, war can end.

CURD Plan: https://curdplan.docngu.net/p/the-plan.html

CURD Book: https://curdplan.docngu.net/p/the-book.html