Helga Zepp-LaRouche was interviewed on Nov. 18th, for the China Radio International podcast, “The World Today.” The moderator asked about comments made by Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee at a Bloomberg event, where he said that the Biden Administration should make efforts to improve the U.S.-China relations.
Listen here (Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche starts at minute 25:08.)
Q: How do you understand Lee’s remarks here?
HZL: It’s quite understandable that Prime Minister Lee would express such a wish and recommendation, because obviously the situation in Singapore will be greatly affected by whatever the U.S.-China relationship will turn out to be.
But contrary to the impression which is created by the mainstream media, the outcome of this election is not yet decided. Yesterday, for example, Roger Stone, who is the former campaign manager of President Trump, in an interview with Newsmax TV, said that there is a widespread psychological warfare operation to make it appear as if Biden is inevitably the next President, that there are even people from the Trump Administration like National Security Adviser O’Brien, who talks about a “professional transition,” and that everything is settled. But the head of the legal team of President Trump, Sidney Powell, who is a very, very excellent lawyer, she said that the fight is by no means over, that she has evidence of vote fraud which will blow up the whole election, and that there is absolutely damning information on the Smartmatic and Dominion electronic election systems being used; and that she has affidavits of top people from the military and others that these systems were designed to change the votes, not by the thousands, but by the millions, and that this whole thing will blow up. So I would not necessarily assume that Biden will be the next President. Because if these legal cases all proceed—and also the population is rallying very much around Trump, the next President may be Trump, and not Biden.
Q: Singapore’s prime minister said, while U.S.-China tensions exist, they try their best, their very best, to do business with both sides during the past four years. Actually, we see many countries and U.S. companies express unwillingness to play the Cold War game under the Trump Administration. Do you think there will be a change in U.S.-China relations under no matter, President-elect Biden, or a next term of a Trump Administration?
HZL: Well, I’m afraid that even if I understand that the Chinese people are very bitter about how the relationship between President Xi and President Trump has evolved from a very promising beginning, that under Biden, I’m afraid it would be much worse. First of all, Biden has been painted in the media as being (quote) “soft on China.” And the aim of that was to manipulate him to prove that he’s not soft on China, like it was done in Russiagate in respect to Trump, that he was not too close to Russia.
Now I think that the trans-Atlantic establishment is so manic that with Biden everything will go back to “normal.” But we should remember that this so-called “normal” was the reason why Trump won the election in the first place. The population was completely tired of the financial policies of Wall Street, which only favored the speculators and not the common good; and the population was tired of the endless wars which Trump had promised to end and bring the troops back home, which he now reiterated that before Christmas he wants to bring back the troops from Afghanistan and more troops from Syria. So I’m afraid that Biden would not be a “third Obama Administration,” as some people say, but it would be much worse. If you look at the record of Biden who was for 50 years in Washington politics, after all, he was in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and in many points he was much more hawkish than the Obama Administration. And if you look at his team, there are people like Michèle Flournoy, who is mooted to become the next Defense Secretary if there would be a Biden Administration; she has been the architect of every war the United States was involved in in the past 20 years. And Hillary for the UN, she lied to the UN Security Council before the Libya operation which then led to the murder of Qaddafi. So I don’t think that team forebodes anything good. And I think Biden would be the worst option for U.S.-China relations.
Q: How much damage have the deteriorating relations between the U.S. and China brought to the smaller countries like Singapore? What are their expectations for the next four years from the White House?
HZL: Well, I think that was one of the compelling reasons that the Asian countries all signed the RCEP, the regional cooperation agreement, despite the recent tour of Pompeo. Pompeo went to Asia to put maximum pressure on all the Asian countries not to work with China, and only a few weeks later they signed the RCEP, which I think reflects the fact that people recognize that it is in their fundamental interest to cooperate with China.
Q: On the subject of the RCEP, what do you make of the signing of RCEP, recently? And Lee claimed that the countries in the region believe in a model of cooperation and willing trade regardless of what happens in the broader world. What do you make of his remarks here?
HZL: That’s for sure true. It is very clear that if you look at the mass media, who have in the recent period been portraying China as having all these evil intentions, the reality is that while the Western countries still are looking for the worst to come concerning the COVID-19 pandemic, because they could not do the measures which China and also other Asian countries effectively were able to implement, it is very clear that China is now the only country with a significant growth rate for this year. So China is the locomotive for the world economy, and therefore it is very clearly in the interest, especially of Chinese neighbors, to profit from that locomotive effect with respect to their own economies. And I think, if you have the choice of being an aircraft carrier for the United States in the region, or have economic benefit in cooperating with China, I think their choice was made clearly, and that is true despite the still-existing tensions with Australia.
Q: Thanks for taking your time with us, Helga. … That’s Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute, a Germany-based political and economic think tank.
