International Peace Coalition, Week 180
Nov. 14, 2026 (EIRNS)—The 180th consecutive weekly meeting of the International Peace Coalition (IPC) began with remarks by Dennis Small, Executive Intelligence Review Ibero-American intelligence director and co-moderator of the IPC. Small noted that 10 days have passed since the decisive U.S. midterm elections on Nov. 3, and the state of the world remains one of great uncertainty, crisis, and turmoil. Because of the crisis in Southwest Asia, centering on Iran, Israel, and several other countries, as well as the Ukrainian crisis, Small said, all eyes are on the upcoming Nov. 18-19 Asia‑Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Economic Leaders’ Meeting in Shenzhen, China, where the first-ever tripartite summit with the presidents of China, Russia, and the United States—Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump—may take place.
He summarized the just concluded negotiations in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, between the U.S., Russia, and Ukraine, to end the war between Russia and Ukraine, noting that a security architecture for all of Europe was discussed, but with inconclusive results. The Russians insist that the Europeans have no place at the table to discuss Ukrainian security, unless and until they start favoring peace instead of war. Small said that “the Trump administration at the moment is on pause with respect to an accelerated attack on Iran,” and then posed the question: “Whence the indecision?” Why is the Trump team so seemingly at sea with respect to its agenda?
The answer is that the underlying cause of the wars, the insolvency of the dollar-dominated financial system, is not being addressed. But out in the world at large, “actually substantive policy issues are coming to the fore.” Unless the meltdown of the financial system is confronted, “there will be no actual solution to this crisis.” He concluded by reiterating the importance of the call by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the founder of the Schiller Institute and initiator of the IPC, to discuss her Ten Principles of a New International Security and Development Architecture.
In the Aftermath of the Israeli Election
Dr. Seyed Mohammad Marandi is an Iranian-American academic, intellectual, and political analyst, professor of English Literature and Orientalism at the University of Tehran, Iran, and a former advisor to Iranʼs nuclear negotiation team. An excerpt from a recent video interview conducted by the Schiller Institute was presented, in which he was asked to evaluate the potential for change under a new government in Israel. He replied that the new coalition around former Israel Defense Forces chief Gadi Eisenkot is just as genocidal as the Likud bloc of Israelʼs present caretaker Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, but because of the Arab participation in the election, there is a possibility that a new government might choose to accommodate the United States, should the Trump administration demand that Israel honor the terms of the June 2026 U.S.-Iran Memorandum of Understanding.
In response to a question about the Trump administration’s new “Iron Gate” attempt to stop Iran’s trade across its land-based borders and the Caspian Sea and thus strangle Iran’s economy, Marandi said that Russia and China have both been surprised by Iran’s resilience in the recent war, and noted that by antagonizing Iran, Russia, and China, U.S. policy has had the effect of bringing these nations much closer together, and has shifted the balance of power in West Asia, to the detriment of the U.S.’s influence. On the upcoming APEC summit, he said that “the United States has burnt a lot of bridges,” and that Trump “does not have a lot of cards to play with.” Any attempt to play China and Russia against each other will fail, he asserted.
Maoz Inon, an internationally recognized Israeli peace activist who is now on a U.S. speaking tour with fellow Palestinian peace activist Aziz Abu Sarah, sees a great opportunity in the wake of the recent Israeli election, where the “big winners” were the Arab parties, which have increased the number of their seats in the Knesset. He said that what has historically characterized electoral politics in Israel is that “whatever they campaign for, they can do a U-turn.” He added that opposition candidate Gen. Gadi Eisenkot promised nothing to the Israeli people other than opposition to Netanyahu, and he therefore won’t need a U-turn; the possibility of change is there if the United States makes the appropriate demands. Small asked Inon to comment on the Schiller Institute’s proposed Oasis Plan. Inon replied that his personal priority is to first resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, after which he could turn his attention to such “huge projects.”
IPC co-moderator Dennis Speed then asked Inon how he would approach solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in light of the growing grassroots activism emerging globally, in which people who were never before political find themselves “capable of wielding the power of the conscience of the world.” In response, Inon expressed his hope that growing cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians can change the political environment there. He also noted that the response has been that more doors have been opening to them in Washington, D.C., since the midterm elections in the U.S.
The Blowback From Neocon Wars
Coleen Rowley, former FBI special agent and 9/11 whistleblower, said that the United States had not felt the effects of the last quarter-century of neocon wars, because its governments have come to rely on aerial bombardments and proxy forces, and consequently have kept casualties among our servicemen low. But now we are seeing blowback in the form of rapid rises in the cost of living. And there is another kind of blowback, she said: “Suicidal, homicidal violence is at epidemic levels in the United States” as a result of the violence of our foreign policy. Presidents Barack Obama and Trump both promised change, away from the perpetual war policy, and people fell for it. Therefore, voting is not enough; everyone has to “watchdog the politicians who promise these things.” Her slogan is “armistice or Armageddon.” She praised the post–World War I Kellogg-Briand Pact, which attempted to outlaw war, and congratulated the IPC on a great job of “cutting through the fog of war.”
The Importance of the Pope’s Tour of Ibero-America
Sara Madueño, of EIR’s Lima bureau, spoke on Pope Leo XIV’s visit to Peru. Placing it in the context of global dynamics, she said that we see from the latest elections “a defeated Trump, a defeated Netanyahu, and a victorious Lula [Brazilian President Luiz Inácio da Silva—ed.].” The visit of the Pope to South America will have great repercussions; the three countries he visited had been carefully chosen. In Uruguay, a largely secular nation of 3 million people, where 20% of the population are self-professed Catholics, and which has legalized euthanasia and abortion, Leo stressed that humans are not objects; they have souls. In Argentina, a nation of 46 million people, about 58% of them self-professed Catholics, where the President Javier Milei is an “ultra-liberal crazy person” who had denounced the previous Argentine Pope, Francis, as “Satan on earth,” Pope Leo took the opportunity to give Milei a dressing-down and remoralized the Argentine people. Commentators had said that “he really socked it to Milei.” In Peru, which the Pope has called his homeland, he sang the national anthem. President Keiko Fujimori asked the Pope for help in achieving “national reconciliation,” and Leo made a significant contribution toward that goal. Madueño went on to describe interventions the Pope had made in Peru and the phenomenal response from the population there, noting that Leo would be there for three more days.
Discussion
Small responded to Rowley’s discussion of “blowback.” He pointed out that the Kellogg-Briand Pact did not address structural problems in the economic and financial systems, and consequently World War II followed hard on the heels of World War I. Speed also addressed Rowley, asking for her take on how to defeat the proposed “mind-meld” of the U.S. and Israeli military and intelligence apparatus under the “Jonathan Pollard Amendment” (Section 219) to the 2027 Fiscal Year National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). In response, Rowley emphasized the importance of sovereignty. She said that the mass shootings in the United States are further proof that “empires rot from the inside.” She endorsed the Track AIPAC website for its role in shedding light on the corrupting effect of American Israel Public Affairs Committee money. She said that the Golden Rule, as a part of all major religions, should also inform our foreign policy, because “you reap what you sow.”
Former congressional candidate in New York’s 15th C.D., The Bronx, Jose Vega, reported on the efforts underway to block the elections of the Democratic Partyʼs New York Senator Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, representing New Yorkʼs 8th C.D., Brooklyn, as U.S. Senate Majority Leader and Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, respectively.
Small asked Madueño to comment on the proposed Bi-Oceanic Corridor, which would cross South America, connecting Brazil’s Atlantic ports to Peru’s new Chancay Port. She replied by saying that such infrastructure projects are “the administrators and transmitters of productivity and progress.” Support for such an approach is “implicit in the message” of the Pope.
In her concluding statement, Rowley described how she had learned the rotten workings of politics when, as a congressional candidate in Minnesota during 2006, she was told by Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois’s 5th C.D. and then-chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, that “money is everything” and that she must be vetted by AIPAC. Therefore, if she were ever to get ahead in politics, she must never mention the words “peace in the Middle East.”
Small insisted that we must move from a world of “dog eat dog, law of the jungle” relations to a world governed by the principle of the Peace of Westphalia, the “interest of the other,” which is essential to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The Pope’s work is helpful toward accomplishing this, and the IPC and others need to “get a lot of people to read the darned encyclical,” Magnifica Humanitas. We can hope, he said, that the APEC meeting in Shenzhen, China, five days from now, will move the world in that direction. [eir]