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The world whipsawed again on Monday March 23 as President Trump surprised the world by announcing a halt on U.S. strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure. The U.S. and Iran “have had, over the last two days, very good and productive conversations regarding a complete and total resolution of our hostilities in the Middle East,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in all caps, adding that he had postponed strikes on Iran’s infrastructure for a five day period. Oil prices fell and stocks surged at the news.
Iran, however, denied the allegations, with Iran’s Foreign Ministry stating that “no talks are taking place between Tehran and Washington.” It added that Trump’s remarks were “part of efforts to manage energy prices and buy time for the implementation of his military plans.” When asked about this, Trump simply suggested that “perhaps that hasn’t been conveyed” because of how badly their country has been destroyed.
There are claims flying in every direction, with very little confirmed as to what, if any, diplomatic process is actually underway, or whether the whole thing is simply an inelegant way for Trump to throw his hands up and walk away. While this is a welcome reprieve in a situation that was quickly headed toward disaster, including possibly nuclear war, at best it is only a pause in a far uglier policy that is still very much alive.
The real issue was laid out by American statesman Lyndon LaRouche 20 years ago, in an article titled “Strictly Speaking, There Is No Iran Crisis.” In it, he said that the push for a regime-change war against Iran was “a continuation of the evolution of what became known as Britain’s Sykes-Picot gambits.” LaRouche continued: “That is to emphasize that the targets of ‘The Crisis on the Global Chessboard’ include Russia and China, Russia more immediately. However, the more immediate phase of the British-led game in progress, is the promotion of British Arab Bureau veteran Bernard Lewis’s revival of the global anti-Islam strategy which had been the basis for the creation and perpetuation of that medieval imperialist alliance of the Venetian financier-oligarchy and Norman chivalry, known as ‘The Crusades.’ What is in progress, currently centered in [then-British Prime Minister Tony] Blair’s and Jack Straw’s Liberal Imperialist London, is the creation of that permanent state of warfare and revolution intended to be the organizing principle of a new form of global imperialism, a form currently labeled ‘globalization.’ A global, perpetual religious war against Islam, is the British imperial policy adopted currently, for this purpose, by the Blair allies associated with the U.S. Bush-Cheney regime.”
Replace George Bush and Dick Cheney with Trump’s new brand of Silicon Valley neocons and Prosperity Gospel crusaders, as well as the ongoing role of Tony Blair in the Middle East, and the situation is clear. Add in the growing role of Palantir, which epitomizes the way this “permanent state of warfare” was necessary to implement “a new form of global imperialism,” as it simultaneously establishes both global surveillance platforms and increasingly lethal (and financially profitable) military techniques—all under the rubric of defending “our way of life” from our “adversaries.”
Yet, despite this evil and almost unfathomable level of danger, the world is perched at an absolutely unique inflection point. Nothing can “go back to normal” after this conflict is over, as is also the case after the genocide in Gaza. The world has fundamentally changed, and the moral bankruptcy of the West has been irreversibly exposed for the world to see. If growing parts of the world were not already looking for the exit from this imperialistic nightmare, you can be sure they are now. The question remains: What will replace it? Can mankind actually organize itself into a new system which doesn’t ultimately lead to a war of each against all?
There is a flurry of diplomatic activity underway throughout Southwest and South Asia, with significant nations, such as Turkiye, Egypt, and Pakistan, playing new roles in reining in this crisis by the hands of the Americans and Israelis. The recent proposal by Oman’s Foreign Minister to establish a regional framework for the transparent use of nuclear energy, is also an indication of how this region could begin to break free from the British Empire’s matrix of permanent war and geopolitics.
Speaking to associates on March 23, Helga Zepp-LaRouche summed up the opportunity before us in the following way: “I think it is really up to us to say that this present course of events, even if this goes back and forth by the day, it has to be taken off the table entirely, and it has to be replaced … with the idea of a total change in the direction of the Oasis Plan, and an Oasis Plan being expanded to the entire region, from India to the Mediterranean, from the Caucasus to the Gulf. Because this region includes many countries that have been victimized by the interventionist wars in the last decades, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, Palestine, and the West Bank. The entire region is now in shambles, given the fact that the business model of the Gulf states, being on the one side extremely wealthy from their oil income, but having no in-depth state. Their populations are very small, all the work is being done by guest workers, and being protected by the U.S. military bases. This business model is now in shambles, and therefore it would be in the vested interest of these Gulf states to use the money of their sovereign wealth funds to invest in regional infrastructure programs … desalination of large amounts of ocean water, [building] canals and systems of irrigation—creating a greening of the desert like China has done in the case of Xinjiang and in the northeast, where they greened a desert the size of the territory of Germany, where now there are forests and farmland and orchards and tourism, and people have become wealthy rather than being dirt poor.
“So that approach has to be put on the table…. And if all relevant forces would work together, the Sunnis and the Shi’ites cooperating, rather than being played according to colonial scripts since Sykes-Picot and earlier, creating a clash of civilization, they should unite and go for peaceful development. That is our unified approach, and the United States should be convinced that that is in the best interest of the United States as well.”
