Who can deny that the protection of World Peace is the most important obligation of governments? Two World Wars in the 20th century, and the dropping of two nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, brought death and suffering to those affected countries, clearly unimaginable by many leaders and politicians today.

But never has the entire existence of mankind been in greater danger than today. The strategic war between the entire West and Russia over Ukraine has come close to a military stalemate, and that leaves only two options: either an escalation which threatens the use of nuclear weapons, or the immediate end of the war through diplomatic negotiations!

If new levels of lethal weapons, such as Taurus cruise missiles and nuclear capable F-35 stealth bombers are deployed, as now planned, it threatens to lead to a Europeanization of the war, and beyond. If it comes to a global nuclear war, mankind will end in the ensuing 10-years of nuclear winter, as will virtually all life on the planet end with it.

Where other than the UN General Assembly should this be raised? The heads of state participating in this session of this unique institution represent all nations in the world, and must address this existential danger. When the present organization of the world has led to the danger of the extinction of civilization, then that organization must be changed! The world needs a new international security and development architecture, which takes into account the security and development needs of every single country on earth. Such a new architecture must create conditions that protect and nourish the lives of all people, and protect the potential of every person as a creative individual. This means not only people living today, but also the lives of future generations!

The world is presently experiencing an epochal change. The period of approximately 600 years of colonialism is coming to an end and is being replaced with a new world economic system that will allow life with dignity for all. The realization of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the largest infrastructure and development program in the history of mankind, has created the conditions in which more and more countries can overcome poverty and underdevelopment. The recent expansion of the BRICS, in Johannesburg, South Africa, to which now around 40 additional countries are in the process of applying for membership, and subsequent conferences in St. Petersburg, Jakarta, New Delhi and Vladivostok have demonstrated the breathtaking speed, with which a new system is emerging. In addition, the efforts to create new credit mechanisms for development, such as the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) now becoming the “great bank of the Global South,” are welcomed and necessary.

But as of now the danger of the world separating into two blocs has not yet been overcome, and such a separation would continue the danger of the same kind of geopolitical division that was the cause of the world wars in the 20th Century. Therefore, there is this urgent appeal to the countries of the Global North, that they must support the aspiration of the Global Majority to establish a just new world economic order for all!

This moment in history represents a greater challenge and chance than the end of the Cold War, to create a better world. Let us not miss that unique chance!

Join Helga Zepp-LaRouche in a live dialogue on September 20 to discuss how to bring the Global North into a New Paradigm.
Send in your questions early to questions@schillerinstitute.org
“LaRouche said that the society which was not capable of Classical thinking would not make it. And I think that that is the real challenge we have to solve. Because but if you think in terms of Classical composition, or it doesn’t matter whether it’s music, or drama, poetry, you organize your mind in a certain fashion, by always trying to reach the higher level above the prose, above the notes, or between the notes, above the text. It’s a mindset, and that mindset is the only one which gives you the ability to think the coincidentia oppositorum (coincidence of opposites). You cannot think it, if you are an Aristotelian who says, “No, but I insist on ‘A’” and the other one says, “No, but ‘B’ is the right answer!” and that way, you get World War III.
“Only if you can establish in your mind the higher One, which you can access when you think about the whole composition, or what is the concept above; and then you compare that to the absolute, idiotic sense-perception of deductive, or inductive thinking, or just positivist thinking in all of these things around us, so it’s really an axiomatic intervention to get people in a different mindset, which, if you don’t have a certain portion of the population, especially leading people—not establishment figures but people who are the common organic leaders in these kinds of situations, that is what makes the difference if a society can win or not.”

ADDRESS AT THE SEVENTH SPECIAL SESSION OF THE U.N. GENERAL ASSEMBLY, SEPTEMBER 8, 1975

Mr. President,

   One year ago in this very forum there were articulated the Declaration on the Establishment of the New International Economic Order and a Programme of Action to implement it. These were adopted at the Sixth Special Session and were followed by the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties promulgated at the 29th regular session of the United Nations. Thus was provided a compendious mandate for the dismantling of the old structures that have proved inadequate and the construction of an entirely new system more responsive to the needs and hopes of the poor and disadvantaged.

   The allegedly sterile debate as to whether or not a new international economic order is required has already resulted in the presentation of far-reaching proposals which it would be our clear duty to evaluate in our efforts to arrive at a global consensus.

   It is, therefore, with great pleasure, Mr. President, that my delegation views your election as President of this session. Your long standing and unswerving commitment to the solution of the problems which confront us is well-known and rightly admired.

THE IMPERATIVES FOR CHANGE

   Mr. President, in four days time we conclude our deliberations and negotiations. So far we have been encouraged by the absence of confrontation and the minimal resort to declamation and diatribe. But we must face squarely the danger of stalemate. We must not let the mantle of progress descend on extravagant ideas aimed at refurbishing tired and worn out institutions. On the other hand we must not allow the absence of novelty to be the central thrust of our objection and the focus of our criticism.

   The hour is critical. The expectations are that we will agree on concrete steps that will represent a real advance towards the new order on which the majority of mankind insists.

   The imperatives for change are clear. Thirty years ago the Bretton-Woods system, reinforced by the Marshall Plan, introduced a new era in the post-war world which promised a redress of economic disequilibrium in the developed world. Predictably, this system failed to satisfy the aspirations of the developing nations and it is this failure in especial that introduces the note

of urgency in our debate. It is imperative that we should fashion new structures and new institutions to arrest the widening gap between the developed market economies and the producers of raw materials and semi-manufactures.

     But there are other imperatives. The victory of the people in Indo-China, the relentless march of decolonization in Southern Africa both point to the erosion of the traditional structures of power. There are some who take comfort in the theory that the global order of colonial power has disappeared. But retreat from political domination is not ipso facto a retreat from colonialism. The structure of economic power built upon the foundations of the old colonial order persists with remarkable tenacity and endurance.

   In addition to these factors making for change there has been the emergence of issues which are global in their range and in their import and are only susceptible to a management which derives its authority from a global consensus. I speak here of such matters as the orderly utilisation of the resources of the sea, the preservation of our environment and the depletion of non-renewable resources.

   There can be no turning back and this is why Guyana welcomes in particular, the recognition in the statement delivered by the distinguished Ambassador of the United States of America, ‘Change is inherent in what we do and what we seek.’

   It is clear, Mr. President, that any attempt to give new vitality to obsolescent institutions is wholly unacceptable. In the face of such attempts the solidarity of the developing countries is the best guarantee that the processes of change will lead to the establishment of the new international economic order.

   Those of us who embrace Non-alignment will not lose a moment’s sleep over deliberate attempts at misrepresentation. We are not a bloc. Unbound by pacts, eschewing centralised military force, refusing the dictation of hegemonic power, we are aligned with peace, independence, equality, justice and the importance of the single human being. Our solidarity is based neither on the preservation of nor on the quest for power. It is rooted in common perception and shared ideals. The universality of the principles of Non-Alignment has long been vindicated. Those who only recently have come round to the acknowledgement of its validity must now seek to understand it properly.

GUIDELINES FOR ECONOMIC CO-OPERATION

   Mr. President, the international community must move forward and in our way forward we must be guided by three fundamental approaches to the problems of development and international economic co-operation. From these approaches my delegation feels we deviate only at our peril. 

    First, we must subject all proposals to the test of their likelihood of advancing the arrival of the New International Economic Order along the path charted by the Group of 77.

   Secondly, decision making on these vital issues must remain firmly within this Organisation.

   Thirdly, the solidarity of the developing countries must be given new depth and content, especially through programmes of collective self-reliance.

   Mr. President, I should like to dwell briefly on these three points.

    One group of proposals has come from an initiative taken by my Prime Minister, Comrade Forbes Burnham, at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Conference in Kingston, Jamaica, earlier this year. In keeping with this initiative a Group of Experts drawn from both developed and developing Commonwealth countries was established. In their Interim Report they endorsed the need for fundamental change but also identified a number of concrete steps which can assist our international dialogue. In addressing the conference of Commonwealth Finance Ministers at their meeting in Georgetown, Guyana, a few weeks ago my Prime Minister suggested that this report was an acceptable minimum approach towards the first phase of the implementation of the new economic order. Without necessarily committing their Governments to every aspect of the Interim Report, the Commonwealth Finance Ministers gave it their general endorsement. They called the attention of the Group of Experts to the need, in the Final Report, for an examination in depth of a number of issues not fully covered by their Interim Report and requested that they take into account the work carried out in other bodies.

     In this very Assembly at the beginning of our deliberations important proposals were advanced by the delegation of the United States. These are serious proposals which merit our serious consideration. In this process my delegation considers that a number of questions must be answered. Do the proposals acknowledge the need for fundamental structural change? Are the developing nations to have effective participation in all decisions affecting the global economic system? Are we of the developing countries being asked to believe that institutions which have historically served the best interests of 

the developed world can be modified to promote our development? Must the improvement in the condition of the developing world remain a mere footnote to the prosperity of the developed world? In short, in a situation that demands surgery are we being asked to be satisfied with the dispensation of mere palliatives?

   Nevertheless, Mr. President, I wish to assure you that my delegation will approach these and all other proposals, including those of the EEC, objectively and responsibly, because we are aware that what is at stake is nothing less than the future condition of all mankind.

   Mr. President, I turn now to our second guideline. Guyana has always strongly supported the strengthening of the United Nations system, Therefore, we accept no proposal calculated to diminish the role of the United Nations and to bypass it by having recourse to institutions old and new in which a privileged few control the levers of decision making. To act in such a way would be to frustrate the insistent demand by the developing countries for more effective and equitable participation in decision making on the issues which affect all mankind.

   In this connection we have before us the report of the Committee of Experts on the restructuring of the UN system. In the light of the changes in the international environment and of the imperative need to make the UN system into an effective instrument for the implementation of the new international economic order, we support the proposal to establish an Inter-governmental Committee of the Whole, which would work urgently towards this objective.

     Now, Mr. President, the third guideline – collective self-reliance among developing countries. The Programme of Action for the implementation of the New International Economic Order assigns an important role to collective self-reliance among the developing countries and calls upon the developed world to support such efforts. Forms of horizontal cooperation at the regional, sub-regional and inter-regional levels have already demonstrated their potential as instruments compelling significant change. Such    new horizontal economic structures and arrangements will assist substantially in bringing our marginal situation to an end and could provide an essential thrust for radical alteration in the international economic system. The much maligned produce associations have already proven their worth as a stimulant of International dialogue, catalyst for change and a mechanism for the mobilisation of resources in the developing world.

   At Lima just before we assembled here in New York, the Non-aligned countries took further important decisions – decisions Mr. President, on the establishment of supportive institutions for programmes of collective self-reliance, decisions for the establishment of a Solidarity Fund for Economic and Social Development of Non-aligned countries, a Special Fund for the financing of buffer stocks for raw materials and primary products exported by developing countries and a Council of Associations of developing countries which are producers as well as exporters of raw materials.

   Collective self-reliance is not co-terminous with confrontation. The processes of development which it will generate in the southern part of the world can and will provide gains for the international community as a whole.

   The new economic order must therefore be designed to foster all efforts of self-reliance on the part of the developing countries – efforts both national and collective. True development cannot be imposed ab extra, but must be part of the internal dynamics of growth. The international framework must therefore create the conditions and provide support within which self-reliance can flourish.

   We must not be mesmerised into accepting proposals for producer/consumer cooperation by sanctimonious references to the concept of interdependence. There can be no true interdependence unless it is based on relations of equality. Let us beware lest that concept of interdependence be used as a mask to disguise new forms of dependence and subjection or, indeed, to sustain the old.

   Those, therefore, Mr. President, are the guidelines which we suggest should inform our decisions as we come now to the closing stages of this Special Session. They should be integrated within the blueprint already adopted for the New International Economic Order.

   The future condition of mankind depends on the decisions we take on these issues – decisions that therefore must remain within the United Nations system appropriately restructured to deal with the gravity and range of the problems. Collective self-reliance must be our sword as well as our shield. Global consensus must remain the unalterable objective. Either we open up new possibilities of cooperation or we plunge head-long into confrontation, conflict and chaos. It is these global considerations more than the maintenance of any particular national interest which will produce the required consensus.

    Posterity will surely judge us, Mr. President, by the intensity of our efforts at accommodating the opinions of others in arriving at just and equitable solutions. At the same time compromise by itself is not an objective.

   It may be that we will come to no final agreement despite these efforts. The developing world cannot be expected to sacrifice its legitimate demands on the altar of expediency.

    More hopefully, it may be that we differ only on emphasis and priority rather than on principle and that, together here at this Session, we will take those essential steps to hasten the implementation of the New International Economic Order.

   Mr. President, I have every confidence that the hopes and aspirations of the billions on this planet will not be disappointed. I have every confidence that we, their representatives, will not be caught below the level of events.

   I thank you, Mr. President.

In South America, we see that Argentina has been destroyed, especially since 1982. We see that Bolivia is now in danger of going back under a drug dictatorship. We see related crises on the borders with Brazil and Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay. We see the loss of sovereignty of Peru, by a coup organized under the direction of President Clinton recently….

At the present time, Brazil faces an impossible burden. There’s no possible way that Brazil could carry the debt which is now being imposed upon it. This debt was not really self-incurred. The debt was imposed by international institutions under strong pressure from the United States, including the dollarization of Brazil’s debt in 1989, which was a tragedy for them. There’s no way they can pay this debt under these terms. The IMF demands that concessions be made by Brazil to all of the requirements of the markets; markets which are essentially corrupt. J.P. Morgan, Chase, and Citibank are implicitly bankrupt, and but for the power of the United States, as a physical power, they would be bankrupt. They have no hope for the future, under their present conditions. This is true of the banking system of the United States in general. The Federal Reserve System of the United States today is bankrupt in fact, and is sustained only by the political power of the United States. The banking systems of Europe are bankrupt. The central banking systems are bankrupt, and this is the condition throughout much of the world.

Now, the IMF — which has been the organizer, together with the World Bank, of this bankruptcy, which has developed over the years —now comes to Brazil and says, “Brazil, you are bad. You’re bad. You have to accept our tutelage. We, who ruined you, have come to help you by ruining you some more.” What would happen if Brazil capitulated to the IMF, and accepted anything in any way resembling the demands which have been made upon it by the IMF? Brazil would die! It would disintegrate, rapidly. Not over several years, but over months! Look at the figures. Take the ratios. Take the debt service charges. Take the effect of these conditions in the collapse of the economy of Brazil. Look at what’s happened to Argentina, and see that what happened to Argentina is now in the process of unfolding with full force in Brazil….

If Brazil resists, and does not submit, it could survive. If the average interest rate could kept below 10% in Brazil, and suitable conditions of refinancing the debt were instituted, Brazil could survive, and could be part of a recovery prospect for the hemisphere. But if Brazil were to survive under those conditions, the IMF would go bankrupt. It could not, under present circumstances, absorb that kind of financial reorganization.

Either way, the IMF is dead, in its present form. If it succeeds, it dies. If it fails, it dies. This gives you an indication of what we’ve described as a systemic crisis, as opposed to people who study the statistical phenomenon called boom-bust cycles. This is not a cyclical phenomenon….

Now obviously, there are solutions. I’ve been pushing such solutions. We had a vote most recently in the Italian Chamber of Deputies, a majority vote for a proposal which I had made; the Italian government is implicitly, by this vote, committed to working with other governments, to reorganize the world monetary system, to return to a Bretton Woods formula of the type we had in 1945-1964. To use that model: fixed exchange rates, protectionist system, to promote production, and similar kinds of programs, to ensure that we get back on a growth pattern again. This means that we have to put the world through bankruptcy reorganization, the same way you’d do any bankruptcy….

… We, as states, will create the credit; the credit needed for large-scale infrastructure programs and for promotion of private investment. This credit will be used over a long-term basis, that is, 25 years or so, in general at 1-2% simple interest rates, as state credit, to be used largely for infrastructure; to build up the level of employment; to build the railroads, the water systems, the power systems, and so forth, which are needed for society. This will stimulate private employment. We will also put credit into creditable areas of private investment, to build up agriculture, to build up manufacturing, to build up other necessary things, and we will build our way out of this mess….

What I propose is, that we look at the world in terms of certain countries which are, technologically, fountains of technology. Within other countries, including China and India—which are not prosperous countries, relatively, there are also fountains of technological progress: certain industries, certain techniques they have, but not enough to meet the total needs of their population.

Our proposal was, you take these areas of Eurasia, build up the fountains of technological progress, for long-term transmission of capital, technologically necessary capital, into areas which have low technology potential. And thus, take areas like the interior of China (as opposed to the coastal areas), and of other countries, and begin to build these up, in terms of their productivity over a generation or so. And on this basis, by long-term credit on a 25-year basis, or in that order, we can create and extend credit to fund the flow of high-technology exports from those areas which are fountains of technology, into countries which are in desperate need of these technological infusions. We could organize it in such a way that, when comes 25 years from now, they will be able to buy their way out of what we advanced as credit to them.

I proposed in 1992 and so forth, and these countries came to accept, what I call the Eurasian Land-Bridge….

But today, we have new technologies. And what I propose is the creation of development corridors, from areas such as Rotterdam in Europe, to places like Pusan in the tip of Korea, on the other side of Asia. These development corridors would run across the northern part of Russia and Kazakhstan, to the central part into China and Central Asia, and the southern part along the coast of the Indian Ocean, India and so forth, into Indochina, and so forth by those routes.

These development corridors would be 50-100 kilometers in width, that is, they would incorporate mainline transportation, water management routes, power generation and distribution centers, and thus, create industrial centers and agricultural centers along areas which today are largely underdeveloped or wasteland. And by crisscrossing an area which is largely wasteland, which contains the greatest concentration of mineral resources on this planet of any part of the world, North and Central Asia, we would transform this into an area of growth for all Asia.

This program is now being put into effect, step-wise, gradually. The efforts of China and Russia, among others, to force the building of the railroad connections between North and South Korea, which is actually a railway connection from Pusan to Rotterdam, through China and through Russia. And this is already in place.

The problem is, getting people to accept, and governments in particular, the fact that this is a bankrupt system; that it’s hopeless under this system. Don’t try to adapt to the system, replace the system. How do you do it? The authority of government, of sovereign government; a group of sovereign governments. Groups of sovereign governments must put their banking systems into a bankruptcy reorganization, create a new system of, effectively, national banking, under national government; mobilize credit; reorganize to protect the general welfare to maintain stability; to promote full employment; to find areas of growth in which credit can be concentrated, both in the public sector, in infrastructure, and in the private sector.

Only governments can do that. That is the sovereign power of government as a true sovereign….

… Therefore, you must build up the base of the economy. And, 50% of any modern economy, that’s competently devised, is investment in infrastructure, not in production: Transportation, power generation and distribution, water distribution and management, sanitation, health-care systems, educational systems, these are the gut of an economy. Libraries, access to this kind of thing, are an essential part of the productive power of labor. The ability to transmit goods efficiently and quickly, on a large scale in any area, to go from one place to the other, these are the essentials. We’ve lost that sight.

My specialty in this area, of course, is what I’ve concentrated on all these years, is physical economy. Financial economy? That’s nothing. Accounting? That’s nothing. That’s connect the dots; that doesn’t require any scientific skill whatsoever. What’s required is to understand how we invest, in a combination of infrastructure, and other things, to get the effect of this multi-generational progress, increasing the productive powers of labor….

So, my concern is, that if you can get a grounding among students, where they can understand what an idea is, in Plato’s sense of idea— discovery, hypothesis, experimental proof, the method of Kepler—once you know what an idea is, stick with a physical scientific idea, because that’s an easy one to demonstrate. Then say, “How is culture developed?” It develops on the basis of transmission of ideas, which correspond to such discoveries, from one generation, to the next generation. That is history!  Archimedes and Eratosthenes and Plato and Archytas; the sources of ancient scientific method.  These live in our society today because those who are scientists have replicated those discoveries and have applied that to understanding modern science today.  And there, the transmission of culture across thousands of years to the present is the result of understanding what an idea is, and the importance through educational and related processes of transmitting that idea from one generation to the next; with the result that you have a generation which emerges which has more power per capita in respect to the universe than the previous generation. That is culture! Ideas of Classical drama, which give you insight into how human beings behave and misbehave, and how you manage that. This is what we need.

Accounting is simple. Playing with mathematics, adding and subtracting and so forth, that’s simple. That is not economics. Economics is based on human beings, which are not monkeys, which have the power to generate, assimilate, replicate ideas; whose purpose with ideas is, knowing they’re all going to die — we all die—so, what is our expenditure of our talent in life? What does our life mean after we’ve left it? What have we embedded in the coming generations, which gives us a permanent place in the space-time spectrum? That’s human. And to try to get the knowledge, in every possible area that your appetite can reach, to be able to relive and discover the wonderful discoveries of the people before you, and transmit them to others, to have a society in which this is the standard of practice —that is economics.

Economics is what one generation is capable of doing, for the benefit of two generations hence.  Thank you very much.

A Transformation Bigger than the End of the Cold War

It is most urgent that we make the ordinary citizens of European nations and the USA–who are bombarded on a daily basis with a barrage of news in the mainstream mass media, which all have generally a spin in such a way, as to create an almost entirely fictitious parallel reality–aware of the tectonic change going on in this historic moment. Because only if they recognize the choices clearly lying ahead of us, is there hope for a positive way out of the present existential crisis of humanity.

It is high time to review the success and respectively the failure of the official policies of the recent period in order to assess the validity or flaws of ones own axioms of thinking. If there is one lesson about how it came to two world wars in the 20th century, then it is the number of miscalculations on the part of the participants in those wars. Having that parallel in mind one can only sound the alarm bells in the shrillest way possible.

The geopolitical confrontation of the US-led NATO over Ukraine, which did not start „unprovoked“ on February 23, 2022, but really already with the „Orange Revolution“ financed by the NED in 2004, and escalated with Victoria Nuland’s Maidan Coup in 2014, is clearly not working the way it was intended. The unprecedented series of sanctions did not „ruin Russia“, as Annalena Baerbock had wished, but caused a far reaching reorientation of Russia to the East and the South. But also Russia’s expectation about a short term nature of the military special operation did not materialize since the Russian leadership obviously underestimated the effect of NATO-operations in Ukraine since the Maidan coup and the subsequent attitude of the population, as well as the far reaching willingness for military engagement in Ukraine by the West.

Now a military stalemate has been reached, and the continuation of the military operations can, despite all new weapon deliveries, only lead to the complete  attrition of the human resources of Ukraine, who already has suffered horrendous casualty figures, and the danger of an escalation to the nuclear level, if either Russia sees its territorial integrity threatened or somebody thinks that a limited nuclear war is feasible.

If the Europeans believed that their giving in to the demands of ever „more weapons“ to Ukraine, would lead to a victory of Ukraine on the battlefield, that also did not work out. Instead European nations find themselves completely cut off from any ties with their neighbor Russia, the „energy- dependency“ shifted from Russia to the much more expensive American energy, and in the meantime Germany has lost even the appearance of a remnant of sovereignty and with it the respect in the whole world. Germany, the erstwhile economic powerhouse of Europe is rapidly undergoing a process of deindustrialization caused by exorbitant energy prices provided by the wonderful protective power and ally US, who is not hesitating to lure the battered German industries to resettle in the US with the help  of the Inflation Reduction Act–not even to mention the North Stream Pipelines about which nobody believes the belatedly made up story about the sailing yacht Andromeda. A popular saying these days is: What do you need enemies for with friends like this?

Germany has been transformed into a doormat, trampled upon by NATO-boots, while the present political leadership with its green Atlanticist ideology, for whom it would be a euphemism to call it „German,“ is gambling away about everything all the generations have built up from the rubble fields after the Second World War. Half of the German Mittelstand, the source of the entire social system in the country, is either going bankrupt or leaving to reinvest either in the US or in China. The overwhelming mood in the country is one of desperation, restaurant owners, farmers, craftsmen, store owners, nurses, all kinds of service industries, all feel that the floor is being pulled away from under them, and those, who don’t want to move to the Alternative for Germany, a right wing party, with some good points, but also unacceptable elements in it, feel that they have no place to turn to. „Everything will crash against the wall“, is one of the most heard sentences in many private discussions. People feel completely betrayed. We should remember, it was that utter feeling of betrayal after the Versailles treaty, which was the death-nail for the Weimar Republic!

But what most citizens of the West have no inkling about, is that a much bigger, much more consequential development is taking place elsewhere, in those parts of the world, which are effected by what is going on between NATO and Russia, where the „collateral damage“, such as high energy and food prices in these countries was considered „negligible“. And now that oversight is turning out to be the biggest misjudgment of all.

The unilateral (and therefore illegal) sanctions against Russia and a whole series of other countries, the confiscation of state assets and weaponization of the dollar on top of the longstanding experience of unfair trade and credit conditions have led to a gigantic blowback in the countries of the Global South which since has emerged as the Global Majority, representing more than 85 % of the world population. The massive attempts by NATO countries to pressure countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa to take the side of the „democracies“ of the „rules based order“ against the supposed „autocracies“ and „dictatorships“ in the Ukraine conflict backfired thoroughly. The identity of these countries as being part of the Nonalignment Movement and the „Spirit of Bandung“, the major alliance between Asian and African countries of the 1955 conference, came back to life and with it the memory that it was the Soviet Union which had helped many of the developing countries in their struggles for independence against the colonial powers.

When Lyndon LaRouche, my late husband, had first proposed an alternative to the IMF and its  conditionalities in 1975 with the proposal for the IDB, which was intended to issue 400 Billion dollar credit lines per year for industrial  development projects, this proposal was fullheartedly endorsed be the NAM then, who incorporated it in their final resolution in Colombo, Sri Lanka, representing already 75 % of the world population. The reaction of the financial powers to be were brutal: Indira Gandhi and Mrs. Bandaranaike were ousted from power, President Ali Bhutto and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi several years later were assassinated. The NAM played a subdued role for many years to come as a result of these attacks.

Lyndon LaRouche, whose 101st birthday we were celebrating yesterday, and his international movement kept writing development plans relentlessly, a comprehensive infrastructure plan for the entire African continent, presented in 1976 in a conference in Paris, Operation Juarez for Latin America in cooperation with Mexican President Lopez Portillo, a 50 year plan for the Pacific Basin in light of the expected increase on population density in that part of the world, a 40 year plan for India, which Mrs. Gandhi started to implement, the Oasis plan for Southwest Asia, and in 91, when the Soviet Union disintegrated, the Eurasian Landbridge, the New Silk Road–all of these programs were presented at literally hundreds of conferences and seminars on five continents.

After President Xi Jinping presented the concept of the New Silk Road in Kazakhstan, exactly 10 years and 2 days ago, Western governments, think tanks and media amazingly ignored this program which was clearly the largest infrastructure program in history ever, easily an order of magnitude larger then the Marshal Plan for Europe after the second World War.

But for the countries of the Global South the BRI became the game changer, allowing many of them for the first time to seriously launch infrastructure programs, industrial parks, advanced science projects, etc. From the end of 2017 the attitude in the West towards the BRI suddenly shifted from indifference to hostility, in the security papers of the Pentagon first, and then synchronized in all western media and think tanks, China’s rise was characterized as „systemic rival“ and „opponent“ culminating in the recent „decoupling“ and „de-risking“ frenzy. With the recent enlargement of the BRICS into BRICS-11 and the expressed interest of around 40 more countries to join likewise, the idea of a complete decoupling from Russia and China is more than absurd: it is suicidal. The perspective of creating two more or less separate blocs in reality is not feasible and can be only seen as the futile effort to economically weaken an adversary before a planned military attack, which given the existence of several thousands of nuclear missiles would mean the annihilation of the human species and with it all life on earth.

It is time for a fundamental strategic reevaluation. Is it not now more in the interest of the US and European nations to take the initiative to cooperate with all the countries of the Global South and build a prosperous world for all nations, than taking the risk of pursuing a policy which may lead to the „end of history“, albeit in a different way than Francis Fukuyama, the father of all political misjudgments fantasized?

News are coming in this morning, that Prime Minister Modi announced in a long overdue step at the ongoing G20 summit in New Delhi, that the African Union has been admitted to the G20, making the G21.  That is positive, but completely insufficient. In order to eliminate the danger of a third, this time thermonuclear war, we need to create a totally new international security and development architecture, which takes into account the security and economic interest of all nations on the planet. And that is only possible, if it is based on the development of all, on the interest of the other, and the creation of a common future, which is promising and uplifting for all of humanity.

The comprehensive study the Schiller Institute published in 2014 in response to President Xi’s announcement from 2013 in Kazakhstan, „The New Silk Road becomes the World Land Bridge“ can be the basis for such a peace order for the 21st Century. It gives a clear orientation for the economic buildup of all parts of the planet, concrete plans for overcoming underdevelopment in the Global South as well as concrete guidelines for the reconstruction of the decaying economies of the Global North. Together with the Ten Principles I suggested for such a new architecture, these proposals could be the basis for any serious attempt to find a solution to the present crisis. Why not conduct a special session of the UNGA to discuss such a new international architecture, when clearly so many people around the world are concerned about the threat to world peace?

The idea of a World Landbridge, connecting all infrastructurally developed continents through tunnels and bridges, so that one can travel soon with a maglev train from the southern tip of Argentina or Chile up north through the Americas via the Bering Strait all way along the transsiberean railway to Gibraltar and on through Africa to the Cape of Good Hope. This will be the realization of the vision of the German economist Friedrich List and his „space and time economy“, where he outlined, how an advanced transport and communication system with a high speed, dense regularity and cost efficiency of infrastructure would allow for new levels of the mental and material productive powers. This development would then lead to a „Republic of the planet“ based on the „economy of humanity“, which would make it possible that all talents would exchange their ideas and work together in all areas in science and art and all areas of knowledge, which in turn would increase the efficiency of all powers of humanity, the exact opposite of „decoupling“ and „derisking“, obviously.

A similar idea about the future development of humanity to become a great community of the entire world, a „datong shijie“, one can also find with Cai Yuanpei, the first education minister of  the Republic of China and President of Peking University, who introduced Schiller’s conception of aesthetic education into China. Obviously the same evolutionary innate idea governed Nikolaus of Kues idea about harmony in the macrocosm based on the best mutual development of all microcosms. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’ idea of a preestablished harmony in the universe represents the same idea, Vernadsky’s notion of the increasing dominance of the noosphere over the biosphere, as well. And I remember very well, how Lyndon LaRouche stunned his associates, when he talked about how despite the present importance of the sovereignty of the nation state, that would not be the last stage in the evolution of the the development of humanity.

Look at this latest breakthrough China made in controllable nuclear fusion technology for a new generation of an „artificial sun“, the Huanliu-3, a week ago. They realized high-confinement mode operation with a plasma current of one million ampere for the first time, according to the China National Nuclear Corporation, (CNNC). The high-confinement mode,  is also used as the standard mode for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), in Cadarache, France, which is run by seven member parties, China, the EU, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the US. This inherently safe form of nuclear energy, once it is fully realized, is one of the technologies which will remove the basis for geopolitical rivalry, because it will make energy so plentiful and cheap, that it will be cheaper than the continuation of military conflict.

The perspective for a completely new paradigm in international relations is on the horizon, and this could come much faster then most can imagine. A change in the US with the next presidential election could return the US on the path of a republic. As Sergey Glazyev indicated, a new BRICS currency will likely materialize in 2024 during Russia’s chairmanship of the BRICS, which could turn out to be the lifeboat for the global financial system.

So, there is all the reason for a culturally optimistic view for the future of mankind, provided we replace hatred, envy and resentment with love, generosity, and curiosity for the potential of the other cultures. We still have time to reset the axioms of our thinking.

“The Strategic Situation After the Historic BRICS Summit”

When I was recently at the NY State Fair in Syracuse, I learned that the building of the Erie Canal led to a 40 fold increase in the population of Syracuse. Think about that. 40 times more people moved into that city over a mere 10 year period.  And they became more and more prosperous with the diverse market that the canal opened up, allowing transport of goods back and forth between New York City and Buffalo. 

Contrast this to the statement of New York City Mayor Eric Adams who said earlier this week about the 110,000 migrants who have arrived in New York City since April of 2022, “Never in my life have I had a problem that I didn’t see an ending to, I don’t see an ending to this,” Adams said. “This issue will destroy New York City.” 

I hate to tell you, Mayor, but New York City was already destroyed.  It was destroyed in 1975 with the Municipal Assistance Corporation, just as Lyndon LaRouche warned.  That’s why a city of 8 million people can’t absorb 100,000 more.  The city couldn’t even take care of it’s own. There were 100,000 homeless children in the NYC public schools in 2018, and an NYC educator told me that even before the migrants many New York City classrooms had as many as 40 students per teacher.  Do you want to produce a nation of morons, derelicts, and drug addicts?  Destroy the schools.

Why do we need schools anyway?  Our nation isn’t doing anything!!!

Let me remind you why in 1907 we could absorb and employ TRIPLE the number of immigrants per capita as we now have entering our nation both legally and illegally combined.

What did our nation do?  How did we really liberate ourselves (mostly) from the British Empire?

Lyndon LaRouche, the greatest American of all time, pointed to the work of the young bastard from the Caribbean, Alexander Hamilton.  

Having witnessed the horrors of slavery on the sugar plantations of Nevis, where slaves only lived for months after being brought over, he was an adamant opponent of slavery.  After the Revolution against the British Empire was won, he became our first Treasury Secretary and he wrote four papers which should be a guide for any American Patriot:

On the Subject of Manufactures

On Public Credit

On the National Bank

And again, when the Bank was under attack, on the Constitutionality of the National Bank.

I suspect that there is not even ONE high school in this nation that teaches those papers which were so crucial to the founding of the United States.

What Hamilton created was the means by which human creativity could be deployed to raise the platform of human economy. Obviously transport was crucial, and so was energy.  

Imagine Hamilton, Washington, and Lafayette, in the middle of the hard fought American Revolution, standing on the cliff over the Great Falls in Paterson, NJ planning to harness those falls for the power to create a modern city – a city which became a driver of American productivity, which now lies in a shambles, and was the home of 11 of the 9-11 hijackers.  Think about that.

But what else did we do?  What about the Transcontinental Railroad, and the amazing Chinese workers who built it, despite the racism against them.  They survived many illnesses because they were smart enough to drink a lot of tea – they boiled their water. But the railroad was built in spite of the British-orchestrated mis-named “Civil War” and its completion and the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, even after the assassination of President Lincoln, by pro-British agents, inspired the world.

American Civil War veterans went to Egypt to train the Army and build the Suez Canal, celebrated by Verdi with an opera.  Was the purpose of this just so we could loot Egypt?  Was the Panama Canal built so we could loot Panama?

American patriots knew that eradicating poverty around the world would make it more difficult for the British Empire to run its destabilizing evil drug and slave running program.  People say the British eradicated slavery?  How do you explain the British East India Company?

We suffered more assassinations:  Garfield and McKinley – both staunch advocates for the development of transcontinental rail through the Americas. Their plans would never have allowed the nations south of our border to become the drug producers for the British Empire, which was still thriving in pockets of the United States – emphatically Wall Street and with the Boston Brahmins.

With FDR, we had a return to Alexander Hamilton’s principles – and no accident, as one of Franklin Roosevelts’ forebears, Isaac Roosevelt had been a collaborator of Hamilton generations earlier. Unable to tackle the unconstitutional Federal Reserve, FDR used the reconstruction finance corporation to issue billions of dollars of credit to construct thousands of new schools, roads, bridges, power plant, post offices sewage treatment plants, hospitals, and great projects.  Most notably the Tennessee Valley Authority, which transformed one of the poorest, malaria invested, backward parts of the nation, into one of the most productive parts of the country. 

Again, as after the Civil War, after World War II, delegations from all over the world came to tour the 16 new dams built by the TVA which allowed cheap abundant electricity, coupled with breakthroughs in fertilizer and flood control, increased food production in the region by orders of magnitude in a very short time. 

One delegation came from China.  The success of the TVA consolidated their plans to build the Three Gorges Dam.  Even Afghanistan built a Helmand Water Authority, which was quite productive until the various wars and occupations.

The British made sure to prolong the war, so that FDR would not be around to oversee the end of colonialism, which is what he intended.  He also wouldn’t have allowed the dropping of two nuclear bombs on Japan.

The FBI and MCCarthy-ite witch hunts took over the political scene, with Eisenhower a welcome reprieve, and then John F Kennedy, whom Eleanor Roosevelt came to like and offer advice, became president. Again, Kennedy revived the Hamiltonian principles.  We began building again. He also wanted to eradicate poverty world wide, and was a friend of Patrice Lumumba, who was assassinated in 1961, just after Kennedy was elected.

Then JFK was assassinated, Malcolm V, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were all killed within 5 years of each other.  The Vietnam war, which Kennedy intended to end was launched full force, the post-industrial flower child green anti human cultural project of the British Tavistock Institute and the CIA became our culture, and we became insane.

Just at that time, Lyndon LaRouche began recruiting a hard core of moral intellectual elites at American Universities, and later internationally. He decided in 1976 that he had to run for president of the United States, by 1983 he was Ronald Reagan’s back channel to the Soviet Union on the matter of strategic defense, The Soviets rejected LaRouche and Reagan’s proposal, and collapsed economically, just as LaRouche warned they would.

By the late 1980’s the treasonous intelligence agencies and their main stream propaganda outlets in the New York Times and elsewhere, all funded by Wall Street crooks had geared up a get LaRouche task force, not only shutting down LaRouche’s Fusion Energy Foundation, his anti-Drug magazine, and his newspaper, but ultimately jailing him and over a dozen of his associates in what former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark called the longest running and broadest ranged operation to “lay low” a political leader in his time or to his knowledge.

Perhaps this is why, as the leaders of Russia, China, Brazil, South Africa, India, and so many other nations finally throw off the yoke of British Colonial divide and conquer games, Americans are not rejoicing.

If we were sane, we would recognize this as the long-overdue fulfillment of the principles of the American Revolution. Instead, we are so bowed down by the rage and frustration of our self-inflicted oppression that we are missing it.

But, happily, we are a nation of immigrants, and the liars and traitors in the mainstream media, and who infest our government agencies will not be able to suppress the news forever.  The truth of the rejection of colonialism is seeping in, and I am optimistic that the enemy won’t be able to contain it.

My biggest fear is that as this old stinky monolith collapses, Americans will be looking at their dirty socks and not at the stars, which is where we have to go, along with our brothers and sisters of the entire human race worldwide.

“Prospects and Challenges post BRICS Summit”

The just concluded BRICS Conference in South Africa will certainly go down as an historic event. This is so because it could very well be the beginning of the end of Neo-colonialism and the advent of a new era of economic liberation. This is something that Patriotic and Nationalist leaders of the Global South had longed for. 

This was something that many countries and progressive leaders had been pondering for a long time. We have suffered for so long by the massive manipulation of International institutions, such as the World Bank and the IMF which became instruments of oppression used by the US. Even the United Nations was known to be mis-used on several occasions e.g. in the murder of Patrice Lumumba and more recently the invasion of Iraq and Libya. 

However the issue that made them necessary was the use of the US dollar as the pre-eminent currency to carry out international trade. This gave the US authorities enormous power and influence in the global economy. 

This United States used its position in the international economy to impose its positions on other countries. 

If it did not like the policy of any state it was quick to impose sanctions on those states. 

The longest sanctions have been imposed on Cuba. This has created great hardships on the people of that island. The main objective of the sanctions is to ensure that Cuba’s socialist system does not succeed. 

Over the years this became a powerful weapon in the hands of the U.S. Today the people of Venezuela and Nicaragua are laboring under heavy sanctions. Iraq were heavily sanctioned during the time of Saddam Hussein and its cost them dearly. More than ½ million children did became of those sanctions. US secretary of State Madeleine Albright said then that it was worth killing all those children among others. 

They have seized billions of dollars from Iran, Afghanistan and many other states.

Indeed, they weaponized the dollar using it to raid and rob other states and even individuals. 

They felt so sure about their ability to destroy and/or inflict heavy damage on countries that they placed that in their planning to destroy Russia. 

So, when they pushed Ukraine to provoke Russia into a conflict they were not only depending on their military might but also on their sanctions. 

Recall President Biden’s boast about imposing that mother of all sanctions on Russia. They felt that Russia could not withstand such comprehensive sanctions which included the stealing of Russia money that were held in U.S Banks. 

Russia’s response showed that the sanctions could be defeated. In my view the demand by Russia to be paid in Rubles for its oil and other commodities was most responsible for exposing the sanctions and making it ineffective. 

Russia began trading with other countries using their respective currencies. The system is working. Moreover, it offers all nations a greater degree of economic freedom. 

Other countries, including allies of the U.S have recognized this and have appreciated the wisdom of this. Added to the greater independence is the recognition that the U.S can seize any countries savings that are held in U.S banks. 

Trading in their own currencies and eventually creating a new currency for foreign trade among BRICS and states is demonstrating a strong viability. 

This movement has great possibilities and is likely to spread even wider. 

Other systems are coming into existence that will facilitate this for want of a better word, independence movement. This includes finding alternatives to the SWIFT system and other in Banking arrangements. The BRICS Bank has the possibility of offering a new kind of relations among all nations. This is particularly attractive to the Global South. 

While recognizing the potential that the BRICS arrangements offer, we must not allow ourselves to fall into false sense of security. we must see this as a struggle and the possibilities are so great that they are worth fighting for. 

Let us not believe that it would be smooth sailing. If we agree that this would be a struggle then we must examine the vulnerabilities of the BRICS and anticipate that the US and its NATO allies would strive to take advantage of anything to frustrate and defeat this movement. 

We must be aware that unity with in the group even on limited objective is most important. Without doubt the NATO group would use any vulnerability it could find.  

Some Vulnerabilities 

In the first place I see that India would be a target to work on. This is so because of the border issue which exist between China and India. It was rather disappointing that at the same time when announcements were being made of the glorious possibilities of BRICS we saw that tensions have grown between those these two countries. 

Mother major issue is the situation in the South China Sea. The U.S is ensuring that the countries are getting together to discuss the matter. Even a country like Vietnam is straddling its positions between China and the U.S. 

The U.S is seeking out of any country with any issue with China and Russia and offering its supports to them. We see them at this moment working with Armenia one of Russia’s allies, because of the tensions with Turkmenia.

In Latin America we can expect massive overt and covert actions by the U.S to bring about regime change in many countries. 

Recall that Mexico expressed strong support for BRICS initiative at an earlier period. It should be noted that did not materialized.

Argentina has great internal problems. The US has strong influence in the military of most countries of the region. They have strong links within the countries including the political parties.  The government of Argentina is in a very weak position. You can bet your bottom dollar that the US is going to activate its contacts to bring about regime change. 

The situation is a bit better in Brazil; however, we must not forget that Lula’s victory was very slim. Here too we have to expect US involvement to remove Lula. 

These are some of the areas that could be exploited to stem the tide that the BRICS summit in South Africa has created. 

Our first task is to minimize the issues in and among BRICS nations. 

Whatever influence we have we should first direct it towards removing things that could be used to stymie BRICS advancement. 

In my opinion the border issues are the most dangerous of all. We should encourage discussions among the BRICS states to assist in settling the contentions issues among the group members.

If we can succeed in removing those impediments then we will be contributing to the unity of the movement which is so essential for success. 

Thank you for your attention! 

Sept. 5, 2023 (EIRNS)–This is Mike Billington with the Executive Intelligence Review and the Schiller Institute. I’m pleased to be here today with Professor Richard Falk, who has agreed to an interview about current affairs and world developments in this crucial moment in history. Professor Falk, would you like to say a few words about your own history and your role in history?

Prof. Richard Falk: I’m not sure I have a role in history. I’ve taught at universities all of my adult life, starting with Ohio State in Columbus, Ohio, in 1955, moving to Princeton University, where I stayed for 40 years, retiring in 2001, and since then I have been connected both with the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Queen Mary University in London. I’ve done a fair amount of writing over the decades, including a memoir called Public Intellectual—The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim—along with a stream of commentary on global issues. I have led at times a confusing life, which accounts for the bewildering title, I suppose. I have been active through the UN in supporting the Palestinian struggle for human rights and self-determination, and served as UN Special Rapporteur for the Human Rights Council on Occupied Palestine between 2008 and 2014. During this period I was frequently defamed as an anti-Semite and self-hating Jew and otherwise targeted and discredited. Recently, I’ve continued more quietly to write for publication, including a book of poems, Waiting for Rainbows, splitting my time between Turkey and the US. 

I suppose this is enough by way of introduction, maybe more than enough. I would just add that I’m glad to do this interview with Mike Billington, although I’ve had severe differences with the Lyndon LaRouche movement in the past. I’ve also been a target of what I consider their defamatory attacks connected with my support for the pro-democracy, anti-Marcos movement in the Philippines and the insurgent campaign for the protection of human rights in Iran. Such disagreements persist. Despite this I feel that those who seek a safer, more secure, more peaceful and just world have to let these bygones-be-bygones and collaborate in the present for the good of humanity and future generations.

Mike Billington: Well, that’s quite interesting. You and I have discussed privately those differences, which we maintain as differences, both in regard to the history and other aspects of things. But they don’t necessarily have to come up today unless you wish to bring them up further.

Let me start by referencing the fact that you were a speaker at an event sponsored by my friend Chandra Muzaffar in Malaysia, the head of Just International, organized by an organization called SHAPE, Save Humanity And Planet Earth—along with other speakers from the US, from China, from Korea, and from Australia. You referred to what you called the “unstable tension between geopolitics and self-determination,” which I found to be the most profound point of that conference. Could you comment on that and explain what you mean by that?

Prof. Falk: I will try. I’ve been preoccupied with geopolitics in the context of the Ukraine War, which started as a Russian attack on Ukraine, transformed itself, due to the intrusive role that US NATO forces played, into what I call a “geopolitical war” between Russia and the United States, in which the outcome in Ukraine was subordinated by stages to the strategic goal of inflicting a geopolitically significant defeat on Russia, and at the same time to send a warning signal to China not to attempt, with respect to Taiwan, to do the same thing that Russia has tried to do, at least that it was alleged to be trying to do.

My specific connection of self-determination with these issues arose from my sense of the Vietnam War and its outcome, how the US, so predominant militarily, managed, despite a huge investment over a long period of time, to lose the war. That, I think, has been responsible in part for the decline of the US, in part the result of many years of overinvestment and overreliance on military solutions and military approaches to international problems, coupled with an underestimation of the forces of national self-determination, which in Vietnam showed they prepared more patiently to pay the costs and devise effective tactics of resisting efforts of an imperial intervenor to suppress the basic rights of a people in a historical period of decolonization. What I fear in the present context is a similar exaggerated reliance on militarism as a solvent for international problems and an activation of a variety of nationalist responses dangerously intensifying geopolitical warfare, and posing unacceptable risks of a nuclear confrontation..

Of course, the situation is superficially different in Ukraine because, purportedly, the nationalist forces are supported by the US and NATO. But I think the broader reality is that the Ukrainian people are being sacrificed on the altar of this post-Cold War recalibration of the geopolitical status quo.

Mike Billington: Let me mention that geopolitics, of course, originated with people like Mackinder and Haushofer and other theoreticians for the British Empire. It’s always been the political view of the Empire that the world is a zero sum game—that to benefit ourselves we have to defeat the others. And that certainly is what you just described in terms of the current proxy war with Russia and the threat to China, and really to the whole developing sector.

Prof. Falk: I distinguish between a proxy war of the sort that has continued in Syria for more than a decade, in which the objective of outside political actors is to exert control over the internal politics of the country that is the scene of violent combat. This is not my view of what the Ukraine War is really about. In other words, it’s not primarily about the internal effects of the conflict, which I believe all three geopolitical actors have come to view as secondary to the impact the Ukrainian political outcome will have on the geopolitical alignments governing relations among the US, Russia and China. I see this realignment agenda as providing my justification for treating this as a geopolitical war rather than a proxy war.

Mike Billington: Well, generally, the term proxy war is meant to be a way of saying that this is really a war against Russia. It’s being fought with Ukrainian bodies. But the aim, as you are pointing out, is to weaken and undermine, or even destroy Russia and potentially China in the same manner.

Prof. Falk: And to reinforce the unipolar prerogatives that the US has claimed and exercised since  the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Mike Billington: Yes, exactly. You said, in the SHAPE event that I mentioned just now, that the greatest danger facing the world is the West’s “insistence on keeping the unipolar world in place using military methods,” which is what you’ve just reiterated, and that this was aimed at obscuring the decline in power of the US and of the G7 generally. China and the BRICS nations, as we saw last week (at the BRICS Summit) and the Global South, are generally no longer submitting to the colonial division of the world, and they are renewing the Spirit of Bandung. What is your view of the BRICS and the August 22-24 BRICS summit in South Africa?

Prof. Falk: Basically, I have a very positive view of the BRICS role. I think it goes beyond the Bandung Spirit because it’s more about global engagement by the non-West than seeking diplomatic distance from and “non-involvement in the struggles of the North” I think a posture of geopolitical neutralism was the main motivation of Bandung, to avoid getting caught up in the competing ideologically antagonistic alliances between the global powers—a framework that the US and Soviet Union were developing, which posed threats of a Third World War. The Bandung countries wanted to focus on their own development and to stay uninvolved in this post-colonial struggle for global ascendancy.

I regard the BRICS as responding to a different configuration of concerns. As such it is a more creative form of involvement that has its own defensive and offensive geopolitical ambitions. A primary example of this engagement sensibility of the BRICS is their campaign aimed at the de-dollarization of international trade, which if even partially successful, will have a huge impact on the global north, and also by giving shape and direction to a new type of multipolarity that is very different than what the North and the G-7 want. It’s very instructive to compare the documents emanating from the main meeting of the G-7 at Hiroshima, both in their tone and rhetoric and substance, from those emanating from the BRICS Summit, most notably the Johannesburg Declaration that was issued just last week. On almost all counts I would rather live in the world envisioned by the Johannesburg Declaration than the one depicted at Hiroshima.

Mike Billington: As you mentioned just a minute ago, the decline of the US began with the Vietnam War. And you said during your presentation earlier that the US became depoliticized by the impact of the war and then further depoliticized by the events of 9/11. Do you want to explain that?

Prof. Falk: Your question raises a big set of issues. I think what the so-called “deep state” in the US, and the sort of thing Washington think tanks and foreign policy advisers learned from Vietnam, were several lessons. One of them was to make a major effort to co-opt the mainstream media, including independent journalists, making the media more akin to an instrument of state propaganda when it came to public discourse on foreign policy, especially in controlling the range of policy debate. This was one lesson.

Another lesson was to rely on a volunteer armed force, rather than to conscript individuals on the basis of age via the draft, whose conscripts and families became the core of the antiwar movement in the Vietnam War. The middle class, parents of children that were either conscripted or suffered casualties and disabilities in the course of their exposure to war in Vietnam raised influential voices of dissent in a war that made little sense from the perspectives of national security and national interests. An expression widely used by pro-war people was that “the Vietnam War was lost in American living rooms,” which was a part of this attempt to make sure that the media didn’t in the future show body bags and coffins coming back from foreign war zones.

Perhaps the most important of all lessons learned pertained to tactics and weapons. Future war tactics relied on ‘shock and awe’ air attacks, coercive sanctions and an array of weapons that shifted casualties to those entrapped in the war zones, most spectacularly, the use of drones of an ever more advanced character. With media control, professionalized armed forces, and minimized American casualties, the result was a depoliticized citizenry, but actually was a failure in practice if measured by political outcomes, with the Afghan and Iraqi state-building efforts resulting in great economic cost, while damaging to the U.S. claims of diplomatic leadership, with benefits going to the arms merchants and militarists.    

These kinds of lessons were accentuated by 9/11, which included the whole apparatus of Homeland Security, which was a way of insulating the society from radical protest. Another aspect of these various developments was the degree to which the militarized sectors of government and private society joined forces to depoliticize the citizenry to the extent possible, to, in fact, mobilize the citizenry for a much more active role that involved exaggerating security threats from abroad, even inventing them, as in Iraq 20 years ago. So it was a combination of these various lessons learned, which unfortunately, corresponding lessons were not learned by the peace movement.

So you had a rebalancing of society after the Vietnam War, in which the peace minded and justice inclined parts of society were less affected, less active, less effective, distracted in various ways. Even by the kind of populist movements that emerged in America, the kind of Woodstock generation. All of that, I think, was part of the pacification of American protest activity, the modern equivalent of Roman bread and circuses, although somewhat short on the bread dimension.

Mike Billington: The fact that the vast majority, or a good portion—a much too large portion—of the population today seems to concur, both here and in Europe, to go along with this war, together with the demonization of Russia and China, would indicate that they’ve been quite successful in that effort.

Prof. Falk: Yes, I think they have been. And oddly enough, it’s the extreme right that has begun to mount the most coherent opposition to the Ukraine involvement, mainly on economistic terms, and accompanied by. the regressive suggestion that the U.S. international focus should be on the rivalry with China, not bothering with Ukraine, because the Chinese are out-competing the U.S.in a number of key strategic sectors, endangering its primacy. From this perspective, the Ukraine engagement by the West is geopolitically wasteful, and risks driving Russia into China’s waiting arms.

Mike Billington: The Schiller Institute has initiated and led an effort to create an International Peace Coalition, which now has more than 30 sponsoring international organizations that are committed to peace, often coming from very different and opposing political outlooks. But they have joined forces in order to stop what is increasingly apparent as the danger of a possible full scale NATO war on Russia, very likely a nuclear war, coming out of the apparently failed NATO efforts in Ukraine. Do you agree with this sentiment?

Prof. Falk: Well, I agree with the collaboration, because I think there is what one might call a planetary emergency that is being largely ignored by civil society. We are living with the danger of an intensified second Cold War without the kind of constraints that prevented World War III from occurring during the first Cold War. And secondly, in this earlier period, the severity of global challenges such as global warming did not complicate the nature of the conflict. The failure to give the attention that global warming should be receiving is a threat to all of humanity and especially the security of future generations. This attention along with adequate resources are needed, as is equity is the distribution of bearing the. adaptive burdens that must be borne if the human interest is to be served. There are also present the war dangers as dramatized by the nuclear danger, that you pointed out, very real aspects of the current global setting. There is also the failure to address other serious global challenges of an ecological character. All this attention and investment in a new arms race which is taking place throughout much of the world. It is emblematic of this alarming developments that Japan recently announced the highest increase in its military budget since World War II. A general heightening of the worst features of the state-centric world order, at a time when global cooperation for pragmatic reasons would seem to be the rational priority of political leaders summarizes the overall picture.

There is also a leadership gap, which seems unable to comprehend the national interests being globalized in these menacing ways. The persistence of overinvestment in the military, underinvestment in coping with climate change, migration and biodiversity, a series of social protection challenges.

Mike Billington: Regarding the war in Ukraine. You said—again, this was in the SHAPE event where you spoke, which I monitored—you said that both the US and NATO, on the one hand, and Russia on the other, that both miscalculated in starting this war. I would ask, this appears to leave out the fact that the Russians had agreed to the Minsk agreements, which would have prevented the war, but which were intentionally ignored and sabotaged by the NATO nations. And also that they had negotiated directly between Russia and Ukraine through Turkey in the first months of the military operation, which resulted in a signed agreement to stop the war in May of 2022, even before the referendums which were held in the Donbass regions to become part of Russia. But again, this agreement was just completely ignored and sabotaged by NATO. So that makes me question whether you can really say that Russia miscalculated, or were they left with no option. So what’s your view on that?

Prof. Falk: Well, I plead guilty somewhat for misleadingly using the word miscalculation. What I had in mind was that I think the Russians underestimated the NATO response, and therefore didn’t calculate in a persuasive way how their military operation would succeed at an acceptable cost to themselves, as assessed by the level of casualties and economic costs. When it comes to context, the provocations as you enumerated them were very great. And whether there was any alternative for Russia other than this recourse to a military solution, is a difficult question, because I think it was a part of Putin’s mindset to reestablish, as he had in Crimea, the Russians’ traditional sphere of influence in their so-called near abroad or borderland territories. And in the course of doing this, to challenge U.S. “Unipolarity,” which is best comprehended as, in effect, an un-proclaimed “Monroe doctrine for the world.” Its geopolitical claim amounted to an enforced declaration that only the US could use military force outside its own territory for security or other purposes, and if any country dared challenge this purported red line it would be met with retaliatory force. It was a unilateral denial of  geopolitical status to Russia and China, the signature global policy agenda of US foreign policy after the Cold War, reinforced by a new set of alliances. Overall, the U.S. response to the Russian attack was an illuminating disclosure of what was meant by Washington’s insistence of ‘a rules-governed world.’

From the outlook of Moscow and Beijing this must have seemed a new double standard inserted at the base of this post-Cold War geopolitics. Putin, I think, wanted to act in defiance of this challenge. But he didn’t estimate the depth of the commitment by the Biden presidency, and its capacity to mobilize NATO countries and their publics around a defense of Ukraine.

There is also the racial factor, being that Ukraine is a white Christian country, at least Western Ukraine, which is what is being defended. The U.S. shared an affinity with popular sentiments—a large number of European countries, including Poland, that were particularly militant in their spontaneous opposition to the Russian attack. In such an atmosphere further inflamed by the complete erasure of the background provocations by a geopolitically compliant Western media, reporting only the way that Biden and Blinken presented the case for a military response to a supposedly pure instance of international crime of ‘aggression.’ Such absolutism was further manifested by the absence of any indication of a readiness to allow a political compromise to go forward, especially after they came to the belief that Ukraine had the capabilities, including the political will, to mount an effective resistance. The miscalculation on Washington’s side, which became more evident in the second year of escalating combat, is that the NATO West was failing despite massive investments in assistance to produce a Soviet defeat. It also became clear that pressing that course of action raised to intolerable levels the risk of nuclear war. These developments amounted to a serious miscalculation, actually a repetition of past misjudgments going back to Vietnam.

I think another explanation of the Russian miscalculation resulted from their experience in Crimea, which succeeded without generating much pushback. Putin likely interpreted Ukraine through the lens of the Crimea experience and probably believed that the comparable justification in Donbass would be accepted. And as you suggested, given the violation and repudiation of the Minsk Agreements Puttin felt he had a strong justification for acting as did, and could accomplish Russia’s goals in Ukraine in an acceptable time period and acceptable cost.

Mike Billington: Do you see that as still a possibility, that they will succeed in essentially consolidating the results of the votes of the several oblasts to join Russia?

Prof. Falk: Yes, I think to some extent that it is likely that will be elements of an eventual political compromise in the course of a much overdue peace diplomacy. And I think that political compromise, as you previously suggested—even Zelensky seemed to endorse such an approach early on—I probably would have included, at least in part, such an element.

Mike Billington: Some sort of sovereignty or autonomy, at least.

Prof. Falk: Autonomy at least. And maybe given some added assurance of stability by deploying peacekeeping forces in Ukraine and near to the Russian border.

Mike Billington: You’ve already answered this, but I wanted to bring up the fact that in your earlier presentation you ridiculed Tony Blinken, who had claimed that “the concept of spheres of influence has been delegated to the dustbin of history.” I found that to be quite interesting. It’s clearly not true for the US position and its treatment of other nations. And this is certainly one of the reasons that the Global South is now looking to the BRICS and not to London and Washington for their choice of friends and collaborators. Helga Zepp-LaRouche has described this as a “once in a thousand years” shift. One of the top BRICS people called this a “tectonic shift,” basically the end of the 600 years of colonialism and neo colonialism dominating mankind. What do you think of that?

Prof. Falk: Well, I still think that projecting a geopolitical alignment in such dramatic language remains at this time aspirational rather than descriptive. I have the sense that the US-led NATO countries will react in coercive ways to the BRICS challenge, which is undoubtedly being perceived as a bigger challenge to unipolarity than is being acknowledged. What this interaction will eventually lead to is difficult to anticipate. In other words, I don’t think the BRICS can mount a really formidable challenge of the sort implied by that language without encountering significant Western resistance of a major character. For these reasons, the future management of the world economy and global security will exist under storm clouds of uncertainty for some time to come.

The BRICS, despite what I feel is an overall positive development, have incorporated some new members. And even the original five are not fully on board with a scenario of challenging the West, that is, of creating a new world order in effect. India, for instance, is very aligned in several contexts with the West and plays a regressive role in Israel with respect to the Israel-Palestine conflict. What one can say about Saudi Arabia being part of BRICS—it’s important, of course, for the energy dimension of soft power, but it’s a horrible example of repressive theocratic governance. And what’s going on in the West African countries, the former French colonies, Niger, being the most recent military coups with an anti-foreign agenda, suggests that there is still a lot of potency to what I call “colonialism after colonialism”—in other words, post-independence colonialism, which I find a more graphic term than neo-colonialism.

Mike Billington: Yes, this is a description of the unipolar world, basically—under IMF, World Bank domination of the economy.

Prof. Falk: And the former colonial power—I’ve studied a bit the situation in Niger. The French colonialists made it impossible for the Nigerien elites to govern their country in a competent way, because they forbade education above a high school level, and made sure that an independent West Africa would be completely dependent on French assistance in order to survive as a viable independent political entity. The resource agreements pertaining to uranium and gold together with the French management of the financial system in Niger are extreme examples of colonialism in operation, even after political independence and national sovereignty have been achieved. 

Mike Billington: But it would appear also that this series of revolts by the francophone countries is an expression of the general sentiment throughout the entire Global South, that this is it — we’re not going to tolerate colonial policies any longer. It’s liable to lead to war, and that’s the problem — as you’re saying, the colonial powers are not going to stand back and give up easily. And they could very well start another war in Africa of the sort that we’ve seen already in Europe, the Mideast, and are threatening to do in Asia.

Prof. Falk: Yes, And of course, in Africa, as you know, there’s also the so-called Wagner Group and a growing Russian factor. Russia has increased its influence. Its earlier influence was somewhat anti-colonial, but mainly competitive with the West, and its interactions with China in Africa are ambiguous. It may be seen as another form in the geopolitical war, whose main arena is Ukraine.

What Russia seeks to do other than to counter the West, the French, European,  and American influence and presence remains uncertain, and yet to be determined. Since these coups, Russia has still maintained a kind of political distance from the new leaderships in West Africa. The African Union and ECOWAS [Economic Community of West African States], both supported, initially, a military intervention in Niger, as did Nigeria, to restore what was called civilian rule, which is more realistically viewed as a puppet government serving French interests in Niger. There is obviously a good deal of complexity underneath the superficial reporting of these events. And that’s partly why I feel that we should view this larger vision of the global future as still at an aspirational stage, not yet a determined outcome, much less a consummated reality.

Mike Billington: It’s not over. But the impulse is unmistakable. Let me approach the Asia issue on that. The conference that I monitored, where you spoke with Chandra Muzaffar and Jeffrey Sachs and others, was actually called to discuss the issue of NATO moving into Asia, the AUKUS agreement [Australia, UK and US] and the Global NATO, Global Britain spreading the anti-Russia military operations into an anti-China operation in Asia. What is your view of why the leaders in the West are so hysterically trying to demonize and perhaps go to war with China? What is China’s actual role in the world today, in your view?

Prof. Falk: First, let me clarify my presence on that webinar. I’m one of the three co-conveners of SHAPE, and SHAPE, as its Call makes clear, has largely similar goals to the Schiller Institute initiative, as I understand them. I’ve worked with Chandra Muzaffar and Joe Camilleri for maybe the past 8 or 9 months to put  SHAPE together as an organization. In this spirit, we’ve had this series of webinars of which the last one was devoted to Asia, and was, I think, one of our most important. I think that what is at stake really is the control of a post-colonial era of world history, which is entailing regressive moves by military means, and a sense of inability to really compete with China except through military means. Wars in the past have often occurred when a rising power has much greater potential than the dominant power. And I think China is seen as a rising power. overtaking the U.S. at least in the important domains of trade and technological innovation, and maybe even global influence…

Mike Billington: The Thucydides Trap, it was called.

Prof. Falk: Yes. The so-called Thucydides Trap, which Graham Allison wrote an important book about. There is a good deal of evidence that having nurtured this image of being number one in the world, and having that image threatened, is a source of provocation for the militarists in the West. And, through NATO, in trying to turn back the clock of history, so to speak, they seem prepared to pay this heavy price.

It is worth taking account of the underreported diplomatic success of Russia, at its July Saint Petersburg Russia-African Conference. Russia seems to have been learning from China about how to force win/win relationships with countries of the Global South, which seems more sensible than trying, as the West is doing in devising ways to fight China. I think if left on their own, Putin’s Russia would not orient its foreign policy around the military sources of power, as much as creatively develop diplomatic and economic sources of power. The West is in systemic decline. It has no alternative to its military dominance if intent on sustaining the post-Cold War status quo. This is a costly, risky path as shown by the Ukraine Crisis. The West hopes may fail for intimidating China by confining its boundaries as well as continuing to accept the kind of economic warfare that has been waged against it, without retaliation. Chinese retaliation would be treated as aggression, triggering a Western response. It would be treated as a casus belli, or a justifiable cause of war. So that it’s. It’s a very dangerous situation, more so than the international situation after World War II.

No precautions have been taken, no geopolitical fault lines have been agreed upon. Compare this with the Yalta and Potsdam conferences at which the divisions of Europe and even Berlin were agreed upon in the course of creating geopolitical fault lines. It is instructive that these arrangements were respected by both sides throughout the Cold War. If they had not existed, for instance, the 1956 intervention in Hungary by the Soviet Union might have served as a pretext for World War III, regardless of the foreseeable catastrophic results for both sides. Or at the very least an intensified confrontation with the Soviet Union. Since 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell, we have been living in a world without those geopolitical fault lines, and risk stumbling into a mutually destructive war as happened in World War I. And that’s one of the reasons I think the aggressive posturing of the NATO West is so extremely dangerous. One line of interpretation is to consider that these geopolitical challengers are trying to establish new fault lines fit for an emergent multipolar cooperative world order. One way of looking at the Ukraine war and at the BRICS’ muted reaction to that war is to put limits on what the NATO powers can hope to get away with in the future. Just as NATO seeks to deliver a geopolitical message to China and Russia, the BRICSS have decided to send their own cautionary message to the West.

NATO, of course, is an anachronism. It was supposedly established in 1949 as a defensive alliance against Soviet expansion. But it’s been converted into a political instrument of global scope far beyond the language of the treaty and the motivations behind it. When the Soviets dissolved the Warsaw Pact, it should have been the occasion for dissolving NATO instead of trying to revive and expand its role, first in Kosovo and then in Afghanistan, now even in the Asia-Pacific region. And of course, Ukraine. The identity of the alliance has morphed from its origins as a defensive shield for Europe into an offensive sword for the world.

Mike Billington: You mentioned the Russia Africa Summit in St. Petersburg, a phenomenal event in which literally hundreds of agreements were signed between Russia and the African countries, including the building of a nuclear power industry and several other industries. And of course, China’s Belt and Road Initiative has been doing exactly the same thing for many years across Africa, to bring the Chinese miracle, which lifted 800 million Chinese people out of poverty, to the developing sector, to the former colonized nations of the Global South, through a focus on infrastructure development to create modern industrial nations where once there was only vast poverty. It’s clear from the BRICS meeting that the Global South has made the determination that it’s not going to accept the western denunciation of China, or that they must “decouple” from China, that they must join in sanctions against Russia—they’re simply rejecting that. I’m wondering if you have other comments on that, and how do you interpret the demonization of Russia and China across the West?

Prof. Falk: Well, I interpret this dynamic of demonization as a reaction against the perceived threat they pose to this geopolitical primacy that the US has exercised since the collapse of the Soviet Union and as a way to build domestic support for a renewal of geopolitical rivalry on a. global scale. I think we’re in a transitional moment in international affairs which will be characterized either by the end of the post-Cold War era and the beginning of something new—I suppose that’s part of your comment on the magnitude of the change we can anticipate—or we’re experiencing the moment where unfortunately unipolarity is being reinforced, at least temporarily. In this kind of transition—accepting the Gramsci idea that in moments of societal transition, morbid things happen. We’re living through this sort of interval. It’s our historic moment. We have very poor leadership with which to navigate these turbulent waters even from a self-interested point of view. And one suspects that the belligerent stance being supported in Washington is as motivated by Biden’s calculations about the 2024 presidential election as by the dynamics of what’s going on in Ukraine and elsewhere in the world.

Mike Billington: The irony of this election situation is that the leading candidates in both parties, if you consider Trump and if you think of Robert Kennedy Jr as the leading candidate (even though they’re trying to ignore that he’s even a candidate, and refusing to even have any debates, treating him as a kook rather than as a serious person) but both of those candidates, Trump and Robert Kennedy Jr., are openly and quite strongly opposed to the Ukraine war, to any further war in Ukraine, which certainly is a measure of the general mood of the population, despite the fact that the media and the parties are completely ignoring any kind of opposition to this war, as if it’s unanimously supported, which it’s not.

Let me make one point and see what your response is. Helga Zepp-LaRouche has made the point that the move from a unipolar world to a multipolar world, which is on everybody’s lips who are involved in this process, but if there’s a multi-polar world which does not end the division into two separate blocs, then you’re still going to have a war. In other words, if you don’t break down the division where the U.S. and the Europeans see themselves as part of a bloc that has to unilaterally oppose the rise of the Global South, then it’s going to lead to war. And therefore, you have to have a way of getting people in the West to stand up against this division, against the threat of war, which was the idea behind forming this International Peace Coalition, which was to get people to come together from different political views, but to recognize that you have to sit down and talk with Russia and China and the Global South rather than going to war with them, or it will lead to nuclear war. Your thoughts.

Prof. Falk: Essentially, I find the language of Helga LaRouche too causally determined. I think there are constraints on going to war at least on the scale of  World War III, nuclear war. These constraints are too weak to feel reassured, but at the same time the view that unless drastic change occurs soon war is inevitable is in my view an overstated interpretation. I think that major war avoidance remains something that even these inferior or limited leaders seek to ensure. I think what a failure of geopolitical clarification will do, though, is to produce a dangerous, militarized competition that the world can’t afford, and such a course would aggravate these other global problems, and not just the problems associated with the environment and with other forms of public dissatisfaction. I see this challenge of. unipolarity as basically a positive move to encourage a reorientation of the outlook of the West in the direction of the Schiller initiative proposals, as well as the SHAPE proposals. But I think it will require a very deeply motivated and mobilized effort, because the entrenched, private sector forces and governmentally embedded forces have lots at stake, including the career and monetary benefits of militarization, media inflated threats, exaggeration of security requirements, confrontation, even limited wars. All these things help arms sales, promote the military and governmental sides of the elite structures in the West.

So. I’m not hopeful. I do think there’s one factor that you haven’t mentioned, and I keep trying to bring up in various ways. That is, the pressure from these new kinds of challenges: global warming, causing severe heat, extreme weather, deterioration of ocean quality, all phenomena that adversely affect human wellbeing, thereby creating a pragmatic basis for a cooperative multipolarity. What would benefit the people of the world is a non-adversarial form of multipolarity. Or at least a subdued, competitive multipolarity that makes political space for cooperative solutions to common problems in the global interest. These problems seem bound to grow more severe in the near future. And failure to practice a solutions-oriented geopolitics affects society in ever more detrimental ways. Even Canada burning for the whole summer of 2023 in unprecedented fires produced pollution and a very health-destroying character for much of the population. I think that such occurrences are of planetary relevance and should be woven into any kind of constructive vision of the future.

Mike Billington: Okay. Do you have any last thoughts?

Prof. Falk: Not now. We have had a rather comprehensive conversation because you have posed truly important questions. Thank you. Thank you very much. I appreciate this opportunity to express my views on this range of topics.

Panel 1: The Strategic Situation After the Historic BRICS Summit
Saturday, September 9, 9:00 am EDT; 15:00 hrs. CET

Please send questions to questions@schillerinstitute.org

Moderator: Dennis Speed, The Schiller Institute (U.S.)

1. Helga Zepp-LaRouche (Germany), Founder, The Schiller Institute: “BRICS: A Transformation Greater than that of the End of the Cold War”
2. H.E. Donald Ramotar (Guyana), Former President of Guyana: “Prospects and Challenges post BRICS Summit”
3. Prof. Georgy Toloraya (Russia), Retired Senior Diplomat; Deputy Chairman, Russian National Committee on BRICS Research: “BRICS: A War Prevention Medicine”
4. Robert Cushing (U.S.), Association of U.S. Catholic Priests, and others: “A Policy for Peace”
5. Raymond McGovern (U.S.), former Senior Analyst, U.S. Central intelligence Agency (CIA); Founding Member, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS): “JFK and Russia, Making a Shift Towards Sanity on the Brink of Annihilation”
6. Diane Sare (U.S.), LaRouche independent candidate for U.S. Senate from New York
7. Scott Ritter (U.S.), former UN Weapons Inspector in Iraq: “The NATO Worldview Is Colliding with Reality”

Discussion Period

Panel 2: A New Paradigm in the History of Mankind Is Taking Shape
Saturday, September 9, 1:00 pm EDT; 19:00 hrs. CET

Please send questions to questions@schillerinstitute.org

Moderator: Stephan Ossenkopp, The Schiller Institute (Germany)

1. Lyndon LaRouche (U.S), Scientist and Economist (1922-2019), Video presentation: TBA
2. Dennis Small (U.S.), Schiller Institute, U.S.: “An Emergency Program to Save Argentina, the Newest Member of the BRICS”
3. Kiran Karnik (India), former President of the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM); 20 years at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO): “India and Chandrayaan-3: The Global South as Protagonist”
4. Jacques Cheminade (France), Chairman of the Solidarity and Progress party; former French Presidential Candidate: “The Win-Win Policy of the BRICS and the Role Of Argentina”
5. Prof. David Monyae (South Africa), Director of the Center of Africa-China Studies (CACS),  University of Johannesburg, South Africa: “The Future of Africa, China and the BRICS”
6. Rubén Guzzetti (Argentina), Foreign policy analyst, Argentine Institute of Geopolitical Studies (IADEG): “Argentina in the BRICS, a Historic Opportunity”
7. Prof. Franco Battaglia (Italy), Professor of Chemical Physics, University of Modena, Italy: “A Solution (the Energy Transition) in Search of a Problem (Climate Emergency)”

Discussion Period

Discussion Participants:

Dr. Akiko Mikamo (Japan), Author, “8:15 – A Story of Survival and Forgiveness from Hiroshima”
Alejandro Yaya (Argentina), Vice-President, Civil Institute of Space Technology; leader of the Technology and Innovation Relations Unit, National Defense University