Aug. 21 (EIRNS) – The Schiller Institute today released the names of 97 prominent signers of Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s Urgent Appeal to Presidents Xi Jinping, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin! calling on the three presidents to meet at the Sept. 3 Beijing commemorations of the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II in the Pacific (VJ Day).
Zepp-LaRouche based her urgent call on the need for dialogue to pull mankind back from the pathway toward nuclear confrontation.
Her call has taken on special significance in the wake of the successful summit in Alaska of U.S. President Trump and Russian President Putin on Aug. 15. Though Western media and political circles have attempted to reduce the summit to the issue of Ukraine, in fact it opened the door to a wide array of economic and strategic initiatives, including such large infrastructure projects as the long-discussed proposal to construct a tunnel under the Bering Strait between Alaska and Siberia. Zepp-LaRouche had called exactly for that proposal in a widely-circulated statement issued Aug. 10, Zepp-LaRouche Calls on Presidents Trump, Putin and Xi: The Bering Strait Tunnel Project Is the Perfect War-Avoidance Policy.
The August 15 Alaska meeting “was an extremely important step towards normalizing relations between the two largest nuclear powers, and it pulled the world away from a possible abyss,” Zepp-LaRouche told TASS in an interview the day after the summit. The same day, she told a gathering in New York City that, “We are lucky that Putin and Trump did what they did yesterday in Alaska. It’s just the first step. Hopefully this will lead to other agreements. Hopefully Trump will go to the commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II in Beijing on 3rd of September.” If he does, she told TASS, this will give him the opportunity “together with President Xi Jinping, President Putin and a host of other leaders from the Global South to send a powerful signal to the world that the leaders of the major powers are moving from confrontation to cooperation, and thus ushering in a new era in human history.”
The following 97 endorsers from 37 countries, are a representative selection of the more than 600 signers received as of Aug. 20, 2025. The names are listed alphabetically by country, and within each country, alphabetically by last name. Profession, title and/or affiliation, are for identification purposes only
Afghanistan/Germany
Daud Azimi, Engineer; Board Member, Peace National Front of Afghanistan
Argentina
Roberto Fritzche, Professor of Economics, University of Belgrano
Austria
Ute Kollies, former official for West Africa, U.N. Office of Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)
Bolivia
Gen. (ret.) Edwin de la Fuente Jeria, former commander-in-chief, Bolivian Armed Forces; military historian
Brazil
Luiz Erthal, editor-in-chief, Toda Palavra
Eduardo Siqueira, Brazil/U.S. analyst and researcher; Prof. (Emeritus) of Public Health, University of Massachusetts – Boston
Canada
Julian Fell, Canada, former Director, Nanaimo Regional District, British Colombia; Member, Board of Directors, Epigraphic Society
Douglas Lightfoot,Mechanical engineer (ret.); founder, Lightfoot Institute
Costa Rica
Enrique Garcia Dubon, economist
Suy Wong, Network of Solidarity with Palestine; Costa Rica chapter, Anti-Fascist International
Czech Republic
Vincenzo Romanello, Ph.D., Czech Republic/Germany/Italy, Nuclear engineer; founder, Italian chapter, “Atoms for Peace”
Dominican Republic
Marino J. Elsevyf Pineda, Attorney at Law; notary
Ramón Emilio Concepción, Attorney at Law; Presidential Pre-candidate, PRM party (2020)
Rafael Reyes Jerez, Journalist; producer of the programs “Cara a Cara” and “Economía y Política”.
Alcibiades José Abreu Marte, Professor, School of Mathematics, UNIBE (Universidad Iberoamericana) and Universidad Católica Santo Domingo
France
Jacques Cheminade, former French presidential candidate; President, Solidarité et Progrès
Col. (ret.) Alain Corvez, consultant, international strategic affairs; former Advisor to Commandant of UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL)
Rear Adm. (ret.) Hubert de Gevigney, Naval officer
Yves Pozzo di Borgo, former Senator, Union of Democrats and Independents
Germany
Dr. Jur. Wolfgang Bittner, author
Joachim Bonatz, Vice President, OKV (East German Board of Trustees of Associations)
Ulrich Leonhardt, spokesperson, peace association, North Germany
Col. (ret.) Friedemann Munkelt, Association for the Maintenance of the Traditions of the NVA of the GDR
Jacqueline Myrrhe, international space consultant; special interest, Chinese space program
Cornelia Praetorius, Mothers Against War, Berlin-Brandenburg
Rainer Rothfuss, Member, German Bundestag, AfD
Dr. Rainer Sandau, Technical Director, Satellites and Space Applications, International Academy of Aeronautics (IAA)
Jürgen Schwarzenberg, engineer; political scientist; freelance journalist
Greece
Leonidas Chrysanthopoulos, ambassador Ad Honorem; former Secretary-General, Organization of Black Sea Cooperation
Dr. Takis Ioannidis, Co-Founder, Global Gandhian Harmony Association; Dr. Litt., poet, writer
Guyana
H.E. Donald Ramotar,former President of Guyana, 2011-2015
Italy
Maurizio Abbate, Chairman, National Institute for Cultural Activities (ENAC)
Franco Battaglia, Associate Professor of Physical Chemistry, Modena University; CLINTEL
Nino Galloni, General Director, Labor Ministry, 1990-2002; economist and author
Claudio Giudici, President, URITAXI (national trade union of taxi drivers)
Liliana Gorini, Chairwoman, Movisol
India
Purnima Anand, President, BRICS International Forum
Maj. Gen. (ret.), Dr. A. K. Bardalai, Distinguished Fellow, United Services Institution of India, New Delhi; Former Deputy Head and Deputy Force Commander of U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL)
Koushik Das, journalist
Karori Singh, former Director, South Asian Studies Center, and Emeritus Fellow, University of Rajasthan, Jaipur
Iran/U.S.
Seyed Hossein Mousavian, former Iranian Ambassador to Germany, 1990-1997
Japan
Daisuke Kotegawa, former official, Japanese Ministry of Finance; former Executive Director for Japan, International Monetary Fund
Kenya
Prof. P.L.O. Lumumba, former Executive Director, Kenya School of Law; former Secretary, Constitution of Kenya Review Commission; former Director, Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission (KACC)
Pigbin Odimwengu, Founder, Youth for Youth Revolutionary Declaration movement; 2022 presidential ballot candidate, Kenya
Latvia/Belgium
Tatjana Ždanoka, former Member, European Parliament; Ph.D., Mathematics
Mexico
Dr. Rodolfo Ondarza Rovira, former member, Mexico City Legislative Assembly
Jaime Varela Salazar, Former Director, School of Chemical Sciences, University of Sonora (Unison)
Monaco
Alex Krainer, financial consultant, Krainer Analytics
Morocco
Prof. Driss Larafi, Professor of Political Science and International Relations, Ibn Tofail University
Netherlands
(Kees) le Pair, Ph.D., Physicist, University of Leiden; former assistant professor, American University of Beirut; Science Advisor, Dutch Military Research
Nicaragua
Bolívar Téllez Castellón, Ph.D., lawyer and professor, Universidad Americana (UAM)
Nigeria
David Ajetunmobi, trade union leader, Auto sector
Adeshola Kukoyi, founder, Equilibrium Perspectives – University of Lagos
Paraguay
Julia Velilla Laconich, former Paraguay Ambassador to Bolivia, Uruguay, Peru, and UNESCO
Peru
Yorel Kira Alcarraz Aguero, Member of Congress
Arq. José Antonio Benllochpiquer Castro, Vice-President, Christian Democratic Party of Peru
Luis Mora, President, Peruvian Chapter, “World Without Wars and Violence”
Lizette Vásquez, Global Coordination Team, “World Without Wars and Violence”
Roberto Vela Pinedo, former National Dean, College of Economists of Peru; Current president, Amazon Integration Network (REDIA)
Romania
Andrei Marga, philosopher; former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Romania (2012); former Minister of National Education (1997-2000); former Rector, Babes-Bolyai University
Russia
Dr. Georgy D. Toloraya, Executive Director, Russian National Committee on BRICS Research; Director, Asian Strategy Center, Institute of Economics; Chief Researcher, Institute of China and Contemporary Asia, Russian Academy of Sciences
Senegal
Alain Charlemagne Pereira – Air Brigade Général (ret.),(CR), former Chief of Staff, Senegalese Air Force; former Ambassador and Permanent Representative, International Civil Aviation Organization; former Chairman, Board of Directors, West African Network for Peace (WANEP); First General Director-General, Centre des Hautes Études de Défense et Sécurité, Senegal
Serbia
Natasa Milojevic, former Member of Parliament
Spain
Juan José Torres Núñez, Ph.D., poet, freelance journalist
South Africa
Andrew Johnson, Professor of Industrial Psychology, University of the Free State
Sweden
Ulf Sandmark, Chairman, Schiller Institute, Sweden
Switzerland
Prof. Alfred de Zayas, former UN Independent Expert on International Order
United States
Muhammad Salim Akhtar, National Director, American Muslim Alliance
Fr. Harry Bury, Twin Cities Non-Violent; Association of U.S. Catholic Priests
Maj. Gen. (ret.) Carroll Childers, U.S. Army
Marshall Carter-Tripp, Foreign Service Officer (ret.); former Division Director, State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research; member, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
Dr. James C. Cobey, MD, Founder, Health Volunteers Overseas; Steering Committee, Voices from the Holy Land; working with Physicians for Human Rights, shared 1997 Nobel Peace Prize with International Campaign to Ban Landmines Coalition
Arthur Dawes, President, Pax Christi Texas; member, Pax Christi National Board
Terry W. Donze, geophysicist (ret.); author, Climate Realism: Alarmism Exposed
Christopher and Mary Fogarty, author, The Perfect Holocaust: Ireland 1845-1850; Chicago Ireland Support
Jack Gilroy, Veterans for Peace; Pax Christi – Upstate N.Y.; Pax Christi International
Bennett Greenspan, M.D., physician; Past President, Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (SNMMI)
Ephraim Haile, Eritrean Cultural & Development Center (ECDC) USA
Joyce Hall, Head of Dallas Pax Christi; member, National Pax Christi Disarmament Task Force; member, Peace and Justice Commission
David H. Janda, M.D.; policy analyst; Founder, Operation Freedom
Frank Kartheiser, Catholic Worker Movement
Cynthia Pooler, Internet radio show host, “Issues that Matter”
Lt. Col. (ret.) Earl Rasmussen, U.S. Army
Coleen Rowley, Retired FBI Agent; Former Minneapolis Division Legal Counsel; 9/11 whistleblower; member, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS); First recipient, Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence
Diane Sare, former U.S. Senate candidate for New York; President, The LaRouche Organization
Suzanne Schwartz, Taoseños for Peaceful and Livable Futures, New Mexico; Suzuki String Teacher and Violinist
John Shanahan, civil engineer; president, Go Nuclear Inc.; editor, website allaboutenergy.net
Delbert L. Spurlock, Jr., former General Counsel, U.S. Army (1981-1983); U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Army for Manpower and Reserve Affairs, 1983-1989; U.S. Deputy Secretary of Labor (1991-1993)
Steve Starr, Professor, University of Missouri; former director, Clinical Science Laboratory; nuclear weapons expert
John Steinbach, Coordinator, Hiroshima Nagasaki Peace Committee, National Capital Area
Barbara Suhrstedt, International Concert Pianist (ret.); member, Board of Directors, Framingham Lomonosov Association for Mutual Exchange
Dr. Mohammad A. Toor, Chairman, Board of Trustees, Pakistani American Congress
Alan Waltar, Past President, American Nuclear Society (ANS); Retired professor and department head, Department of Nuclear Engineering, Texas A & M University
Benjamin Wesley, engineer; Former Independent Party candidate for U.S. Congress, 4th CD, Connecticut
Jim Wohlgemuth, United States, Veterans for Peace, Nashville (TN) chapter; radio host
Zimbabwe
Munashe Chiwanza, civil engineer
Meck Sibanda, Director, Christian Youth Volunteers Trust
Other
Tse Anye Kevin, Acting President, State 55 Afrika
Ahmed Bassalat, Ph.D., Professor of Physics, CERN associate
Mike Billington: Welcome. This is Mike Billington with the Schiller Institute and the Executive Intelligence Review. I’m very pleased to once again have the opportunity to do an interview with Professor Richard Falk. Professor Falk is a Professor Emeritus of International Law and Practice at Princeton University. He is also the former United Nations Human Rights Rapporteur in Palestine and the Occupied Territories. He also is a member of the editorial board of the magazine The Nation, in which he published a recent article on the issues that we’re going to discuss. He’s the president of the Gaza Tribunal, which we will also discuss. Welcome, Professor Falk, and thank you for joining us.
Prof. Falk: Thank you, Mike, for having me. Glad to be with you again.
Mike Billington: In your article in The Nation on July 15th, which was titled Sanctioning Francesca Albanese — Marco Rubio Tramples on the Law, Justice and Truth. In that article, you review the heroic role of Francesco Albanese as the UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories of East Jerusalem, West Bank and Gaza, which is a position you held from 2008 to 2014, in two 3 year terms. In the article you denounced the sanctions imposed by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Ms. Albanese. What is the background to this situation?
Prof. Falk: Well, the background is, as far as the US government is concerned, relates to the arrest warrants that the International Criminal Court issued some months ago, to arrest, for crimes, Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel and the former Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant. In February of this year the U.S. imposed sanctions on the four judges that participated in the endorsement of the prosecutors’ recommendation that the arrest warrants be issued. The ICC was sanctioned through the denial of entry to the U.S. to these individuals and their immediate families, and their assets that were within U.S. were frozen. The ostensible reason that the US government gave for sanctioning Francesca Albanese was that she, in her last report, which has the title “From the Economics of Occupation to the Economics of Genocide,” she singled out 48 American and international corporations that were profiting from the genocidal policies being pursued by Israel, and recommended that the ICC investigate and possibly prosecute individuals associated with these companies. The reason, I think, for the linkage to the ICC in her case was that the Trump Executive Order that originally was issued after the ICC arrest warrants and implicated the ICC in imposing these arrest warrants against Israel, in violation of America’s U.S. political interests. This was backed up by the claim that, because the US and Israel are not members of the ICC — they’re not parties to the Rome Statute setting up the ICC — they’re not subject to its authority, and therefore the ICC and the prosecutor and these judges were overreaching their staff. Francesca’s recent report really didn’t have very much to do with the ICC, except for that recommendation at the end. But it was a kind of a link to the executive order that gave at least the appearance of being a legal foundation for sanctioning her. Rubio, in his statement, made clear that that was not the only grievance that they had against her. He made a statement that she was maliciously associated with anti-Semitism and did harm to U.S. and Israeli economic and political interests, and in fact, accused her of engaging in economic warfare. It was a quite intemperate statement for a prominent US official to make. And it represented, I think, a long term campaign by Zionist NGOs and by Israel to get rid of her, or at least to discredit her in a kind of distinctive and punitive manner. That was the attempt. It had the exact reverse effect. Because now she’s, I suppose, the world’s leading candidate for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize. And she’s even being mentioned as the ideal candidate to be the first woman Secretary General of the United Nations. So it interesting polarization between this kind of satanic image of her misdeeds, and the sense of praise for what she has accomplished in the course of being a Special Rapporteur of the UN at a difficult time, when the UN itself has proved to be unable to do anything effective to stop the genocide.
Mike Billington: Right. You yourself wrote an article calling on Albanese to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, rather than the sanctions that she had been given by Rubio and the US. .
Prof. Falk: I also added that a President respectful of the rule of law and international justice, would have requested Rubio’s resignation after making such an outrageous action.
Mike Billington: I was going to add to that there’s a petition now circulating which has well over 300,000 signatures calling on Francesca Albanese to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. What do you think will be if the impact of that, if she actually gets that award or if she gets appointed as the Secretary General of the UN, as you mentioned?
Prof. Falk: As far as the Nobel Peace Prize is concerned, I’ve tried to warn people not to have the appearance of a campaign on her behalf for the Peace Prize, that will hurt her prospects. I’ve been nominated a few times myself, and I know from the committee in Oslo that they are very put off by the sense that they’re giving the award in response to a campaign on behalf of a candidate. So I wish this petition wasn’t being circulated because they’re quite capable of reaching their own independent assessment, and they might well react to the feeling that they don’t want to seem to be succumbing to political pressure to give her the award.
Mike Billington: You state in the article that you had in The Nation that the sanctions being imposed are “contrary to international law and morality.” In general, what does this say about the fact that the US role in the world is now increasingly seen as a imposer of sanctions and dictates, rather than any kind of policy for supporting development and progress?
Prof. Falk: I think it’s a very concrete instance of punishing a person that should be given a honorific recognition for her bravery and trustworthy reporting under a very difficult situation. So it’s symbolic of a broader spectrum of acts destructive of justice and world order, of which the US had taken pride in establishing after World War Two. It was established with certain notable deficiencies, but it did respond to public pressure for a war prevention and global security framework that would be more in keeping with the global public interest of peoples, and less an instrument of either capitalist expansion or militarist domination. Unfortunately, after the Cold War, the US chose this path of promoting its national economic and geopolitical interests at the expense of the public good.
Mike Billington: Francesca Albanese was a featured speaker at a meeting that took place in what’s called The Hague Group in Bogota, Colombia, over this last week. This is a group of over a dozen countries that are led by South Africa and Columbia to address the question of the Palestine genocide and the question of statehood for Palestine. I’d like to read a short excerpt from her presentation there, which I’d like to hear your comment. She said that “every state should immediately review and suspend all ties with Israel. I mean, cutting ties with Israel as a whole. And to consider first and foremost what we must do to stop the genocidal onslaught.” She also said there’s a revolutionary shift going on in the mood of the world. “We are seeing a rise in a new multilateralism, a principled, courageous, increasingly led by the global majority,” often called the Global South…. I say the Hague Group has the potential to signal not just the coalition, but a new moral center in world politics. Millions are watching, hoping for leadership that can birth a new global order rooted in justice, humanity and collective liberation. This is not just about Palestine. This is about all of us. Principled states must rise to this moment, and Palestine will have written this tumultuous chapter as the newest verse in a centuries long saga of people who have risen against injustice, colonialism, and today, more than ever, neoliberal tyranny. Do you have anything you’d like to add to that?
Prof. Falk: I think it’s a very eloquent and idealistic vision of a different world order, with values that are much more in keeping with the well-being of humanity as a whole and more conducive to the promotion of peace and justice in the world. They do give a kind of a glimmer of light in a dark sky. There have been several such glimmers of light recently. And they do have the potential, far from the certainty, but the potential of a change in the political atmosphere and in the way in which global security and war prevention and development policies are pursued. It involves curtailing the impact of predatory capitalism and militarist geopolitics. That will not happen without overcoming the entrenched commitment of the established order to things as they are. And we have a very unimpressive, set of global leaders in the important countries of the world at this time of global challenge. A more skeptical response to what Francesca has said would be to criticize the short term, performance orientations of the elites of the world, both the corporate elites and the political elites. Corporate elites thinking of the profit, near-term term profits, political elites thinking of their re-election or their legacy, but in a manner that doesn’t address the fundamental issues that confront the world at this time, ranging from climate change to mass poverty, to very severe forms of continuing political violence in many places, and of course, to the centrality of this ongoing genocide that has been a challenge to even the political language that is used by the US government and other supporters of Israel, which present the most transparent genocide as if it were a routine exercise in justifiable self-defense. That involves, I think, one of the worst Orwellian reversals of reality that has occurred in my lifetime. And it is at the cost of this massive, prolonged suffering endured by all Palestinians, but most especially those living in Gaza and the West Bank.
Mike Billington: You mentioned other glimmers of hope of a major change like this. Do you want to comment on any of the other glimmers you were thinking of?
Prof. Falk: One of the other glimmers is the victory of Zoran Mamdani in the New York morality primary, which defied pollsters and political conventional wisdom that a Muslim progressive had no chance politically to prevail. He was outspent 10 to 1. And he evoked this sense, that also Francesca was projecting, that there is another possibility, another set of possibilities for how one copes with the problems of equity, fairness and the issues that are on the top of the political and economic agenda. What we see in response is the backlash from the darker forces that are bipartisan in character, both the Democratic and Republican establishments. The two party system wants no part of the political ownership of a man. Mamdani kind of revolutionary politics. But at least there is in the arena of, encounters the sense that there could be an alternative. But it’s only a glimmer of light at this point. It has to be reinforced by a popular movement of people and the engagement with the ongoing conflicts, especially Gaza and Ukraine, in ways that bring a more stable future to world politics and allow the focus to be placed more on what people need to lead a decent life, and what the world and the planet needs to be ecologically resilient under growing threats of instability.
Mike Billington: You are also the president of the Gaza Tribunal, which was founded at a conference in Sarajevo in May. The resolution which was signed there by the founders, including yourself, condemned, “the failure of the UN, the growing public protests and leading governments,” whose actions have thus far not stopped the ongoing genocide by war and starvation of the Palestinian people. What is the purpose of this tribunal, and what do you think has been the impact in its founding?
Prof. Falk: I was asked to be the president by some sponsors in Turkey of this undertaking, and they convinced me that it was a worthwhile undertaking. I’m not normally very comfortable in quasi administrative roles and also not very confident in them, but I was unsuccessful in persuading them to seek an alternative to myself. And I thought it was important. I’ve participated as a judge in past people’s tribunals and found them to be a useful way of narrating a conflict in a manner that is progressive and free from media manipulations and Government control and self-censorship and so on. And in the context of the Gaza situation, the formation of such a tribunal takes place after the formal system exhibited an inability to enforce international law. It did some positive things, such as the International Court of Justice’s response to the South African submission that Israel was, in carrying out its policies in Gaza, was violating the International Convention on Genocide. It was very professional and juridically impressive in responding to that submission by issuing some interim orders that acknowledge the plausibility of alleging genocide, and condemned Israel’s disruption of international delivery of humanitarian assistance. These interim rulings were directed to Israel, but were defied, as expected, and so an enforcement gap was made clear that the ICJ could declare authoritatively the law, but its enforcement, if a state such as Israel refused to voluntarily comply, and was subject to the veto of the only part of the UN system that had enforcement capabilities and authorities, the Security Council, that meant that the UN was paralyzed in dealing with enforcement or accountability or complicity. The objective of the. Gaza People’s Tribunal is to close these gaps, or at least to exert pressure on these gaps, by activating people in civil society to exhibit solidarity initiatives that support the Palestinian struggle, by both placing pressure on governments to stop supplying arms, to cut diplomatic relations, to do various things that would indicate more than a verbal commitment to end this genocide. It is shameful that the Arab governments that could exert decisive pressure have proved to be passive or even indirectly supportive of Israel’s tactics in Gaza. So the their the two main objectives of the Tribunal are stimulating activism by civil society individuals and other collective actors, NGOs and so on. And the second one is to document in as objective and comprehensive way the crimes that have been committed centering on the genocide, which, even if the ICJ eventually comes with a favorable decision, will not be rendered for a couple of years at best. So this is promises a quicker result and a result guided more by the pursuit of justice than a legalistic conception of wrongdoing. In other words, a formal court is bound by the technical rules of a legal process. And that means impartiality and due process for the accused side. This Tribunal starts with the premise of Israeli guilt, and it makes no attempt at appraising the arguments advanced by Israel in an objective manner. But it does try to treat the evidence available to it as objectively as possible, and to proceed a long the line, somewhat similar to what the special rapporteur Francesca Albanese, has done in her three genocide reports, to create an archive that is authoritative as to the criminality of the Israeli policies. So it’s action oriented and archival, stimulated, archivally ambitious, and has involved a good many highly qualified people.
Mike Billington: You plan a follow up meeting in October. What are your planning or your expectations for that event?
Prof. Falk: Let me preface this by saying the launch [of the Gaza Tribunal] was in London a few months before the Sarajevo meeting. The Sarajevo meeting tried to assemble a series of reports that addressed these two sets of objectives, and it will be an input into the final session in Istanbul, which will feature a jury of conscience, again trying to distinguish itself from a court of law. It is not. It is motivated by morality as much as by the attempt to identify and apply relevant law. Law is not irrelevant, but it isn’t the controlling criteria of how one assesses behavior in this sort of context, and it tries to be representative of all parts of the world and has members of its broader advisory council that come from different countries. The jury of conscience will also be try to be representative and not composed of jurists alone, but of persons who have reputations as moral authority figures.
Mike Billington: You have particularly protested the use by governments and by the press of calling anybody who protests the the horror going on in Gaza as “anti-Semitic” or “supporters of terrorism.” what do you think about those repeated accusations?
Prof. Falk: I think they are a shamefully effective means of deflecting attention in the media and in the public from the message and trying to get people to talk about the credibility of the messenger. It somewhat works, reflecting the maxim that “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
Most people and even the media are sufficiently uninformed that they’re easily susceptible to this kind of manipulation. In the case of the use of this so-called weaponization of anti-Semitism against political figures, like Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and the three special rapporteurs on Palestine prior to Frances Francesca Albanese, there’s utterly no truth to the accusation that these individuals have any record or attitudes that are hostile to Jews as people. They are hostile to Zionism as an ideology that has made the Palestinians persecuted strangers in their own homeland. And that’s something that has also been manipulated in the press to a great degree, where the reality of Israel is fused with the ideology of Zionism. I grew up in a Jewish home myself in New York City. but in an atmosphere of anti-Zionism. and I guess I’ve maintained that kind of identity throughout my life. I was a close friend of Edward Said, who was one of the principal Palestinian advocates of a just peace and an outcome that recognized the Palestinian rights, but also didn’t favor the forced displacement of Jews that were already in Israel. It did presuppose the dismantling of a Zionist set of rationales for the way in which Israel was governed, which involves, even prior to the genocide, a clear commitment to an apartheid structure, which is also a serious international crime, and was validated by such human rights NGOs as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
I also collaborated with Virginia Tilley in a study sponsored by the UN Commission for the Middle East, on how to interpret the allegations of apartheid in terms of Israel’s policies and practices. That’s all part of the pre October 7th reality that was effectively erased after the Hamas attack in such a way as to validate this reaction as if it came in a political vacuum. As the UN Secretary-General pointed out, and paid the price of being declared persona non grata in Israel even though he has refrained, as have many high officials in Europe and the UN, from using the G word.
Mike Billington: Speaking of the growing Jewish resistance to this Zionist genocidal policy, you probably saw this article by Dr. Omer Bartov, the professor at Brown University, which was published in The New York Times, which we were all quite surprised that The New York Times allowed such a thing to get through their strict restraint on any truth. But anyway, they did run this article, and he pointed out that the Israeli policy is clearly genocide. He said that not only is he Jewish, but he grew up in a Zionist family, that he lived in Israel for a long time, he served in the IDF and that he has spent his life teaching and researching war crimes and the Holocaust, so he recognizes genocide when he sees it, and this is it. You probably know also that even the former Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, has declared that the building of a so-called “humanitarian city” is nothing but an excuse for building a concentration camp, which, of course, in Israel brings up very powerful images for people who lost many of their family in Nazi concentration camps. Do you think there is a shift going on in getting the truth out, getting this narrative out?
Prof. Falk: Yes. I think there is a normalization of language, which includes even the New York Times being somewhat receptive to using illuminating terminology rather than obfuscating terminology, which they had been using, describing this as a war, or as a “justifiable defensive response” to the isolated attack on October 7th. But you should take note of the fact that today, the lead editorial in the New York Times by Brett Stevens, a militant or ultra Zionist, has the descriptive headline “No, Israel is Not Committing Genocide.” It is an intelligent but highly selective way of saying that Israel is engaged in a traditional war scenario, and that bad things happen in wars, but this has nothing to do with trying to kill Palestinians because they’re Palestinians. The casualty totals would be much higher if that was the Israeli objective, he claims. They could kill many more people with the technology that they have and the absence of any meaningful capability to resist, which very seldom is taken note of in the West. This is the most extreme of asymmetric conflicts, where one side is totally vulnerable and the other side, just decides what it wants to destroy and faces no meaningful resistance.
Mike Billington: Just the fact that such a headline would be published demonstrates that they’re increasingly frantic about the fact that the world does recognize that this is genocide. So thou dost protest too much, as they say.
You used the term “political Zionism.” What do you mean by that term?
Prof. Falk: I mean that it is an ideology that started in the 19th century and was a reaction to European anti-Semitism and a biblically rooted idea that Jews would flourish again if they could recover Palestine and make it into a Jewish promised land. They proceeded, in their early stages, under secular leadership. Very antagonistic actually, to Diaspora Jews, while quite pragmatic in their dealing with the Nazi leadership in the early years. They shared with the Nazis, before the Final Solution was adopted by the Nazis, a shared objective of removing Jews. Zionists wanted to coerce immigration to what was then Palestine, and the early Nazis wanted to exclude as many Jews as possible, a kind of ethnic cleansing, and even made favorable economic arrangements with Zionists to allow those who agreed to emigrate to take their property with them, to liquidate their real property and take the liquid assets with them. So there’s a long collaboration, a kind of ruthless pragmatism. Zionists were responsible for blowing up a synagogue in Iraq in order to again persuade Jews that they had no future if they didn’t come to Israel. And several of the European countries helped give the Zionist militias weapons and training. So there was a kind of joint project, orientalist in its character. The residents of Palestine, the Arab residents, were never consulted. This was partly a British colonial policy that wanted to divide and rule Palestine after World War One, the famous Balfour Declaration. Balfour himself, who was Foreign Secretary of the UK, was known to be an anti-Semite and welcomed the idea of Jews migrating to Israel, and supported not a state, but a homeland.
The tactics of political Zionism from the beginning have been to take what they could get at any given time, but not regarded as a satisfaction of their project. In other words, it was the pursuit of so-called salami tactics where you proceed by small steps toward the ultimate objective. In my view, their response to October 7th was their attempt to pursue the end game of the Zionist political project, which the Netanyahu coalition, which came to power several months before October 7th, made rather clear that their objective was to promote the settler militancy on the West Bank with the objective of annexation, and to secure the erasure of Palestinian political identity and goals. Netanyahu came before the UN General Assembly several weeks before October 7th and waved a map at the the delegates which showed what he called the “new Middle East” with no Palestinian entity acknowledged. Therefore, I think October 7th in the broader context of what was called, even by Washington, the most extreme Israeli government ever to govern, was this kind of onslaught on Gaza as a way of terminating any Palestinian expectations of statehood or of continued resistance.
It’s well known that Netanyahu and the Israeli leadership had several very reliable warnings of the impending Gaza attack, including from Washington, months before the event, and that this was either deliberately ignored, or certainly not responded to with any kind of typical Israeli security preoccupations.
Mike Billington: This all goes back to Jabotinsky and Bibi’s father, who worked with Jabotinsky. That whole history was covered extensively in a book by one of the leading members of your Gaza tribunal, Ari Shlaim.
Prof. Falk: He’s a professor at Oxford.
Mike Billington: My associate,Harley Schlanger, has written an extensive report on the book by Iri Shlaim, which we published in the Executive Intelligence Review, which goes into that whole history, and touches on the role of Bibi Netanyahu’s father and Jabotinsky and others in doing what you described. So this is very important.
Prof. Falk: Fascism, particularly in Italy, was a powerful influence on the Jabotinsky view, which in a certain sense was realistic in viewing the fact that the Palestinians would not just abandon their own nationalism. And either Israel would have to face a continuing challenge, or it would have to erect an Iron Wall and have the Palestinians effectively behind that wall.
Mike Billington: Right. The resolution of the Gaza tribunal states that “self-determination” is “a universal rule not subject to exception and binding on all states.” But obviously this is not being followed, not being honored. How do you account for that and what has to be done?
Prof. Falk: I think that that the liberation of Palestinian people depend on the realization of their basic rights that have long been denied. The aspiration for self-determination has a certain, legal and moral foundation, in being endorsed by the UN General Assembly and the being the subject of an important General Assembly resolution which talks about cooperation and friendly relations among states, and affirms not only the right of self-determination, but also the right of a people to struggle with weapons if necessary, to achieve these rights. So there is a right of armed resistance to a situation characterized widely now as colonialism or settler colonialism. I think that’s a very important background reality. Of course there is resistance to its fulfillment in various settings, most prominently now in Gaza, but also in Kashmir, Western Sahara and other other places in the world. There’s been a lot of discussion of the rights of the people in Chechnya in Russia, and in Xinjiang province in China. Puerto Rico and Hawaii in the US context. So there are many unresolved issues of self-determination. It’s also somewhat confused by a second principle in international law, which is that the rights of self-determination cannot be achieved by the coercive fracturing of existing states. That really confuses the issue.
The last thing I would mention or call attention to is that both of the covenants of human rights, which are the basic instruments for the protection and an articulation of human rights, have as their common Article One the inalienable right of self-determination of a people. So it has a real rootedness in the evolution of international law, post 1945.
Mike Billington: On another subject, you have worked with our mutual friend Chandra Muzaffar, who is the founder of the Justice International, based in Malaysia. Recently, the former prime minister of Malaysia, Doctor Mahathir Mohamad, who just turned 100 years old by the way, a week or so ago, issued a very powerful statement which goes after the question — it’s based a lot on Palestine, but it’s basically going after the collapse of civilization that we’re living through. Let me read a short section from this and get your response. He starts by saying, “For centuries we have been ridding ourselves of barbarism in human society, of injustices, of the oppression of man by man.” He goes on about that, but then he says: “But can we say we are still civilized? Now, over the last three decades especially, we have destroyed most of the ethical values that we had built up. Now we’re seeing an orgy of killing. We’re seeing genocide being perpetrated before our own eyes, where the genocide is actually being promoted and defended, perpetuated by the so-called great leaders of our civilization, by a great nation, the United States of America…. I feel ashamed. We should feel ashamed in the eyes of the animals we consider to be wild. We are worse than them…. I hide my face, I am ashamed. Civilization is no more the norm.” Your thoughts on that?
Prof. Falk: I think it’s a very strong and powerful statement. I had the pleasure of meeting Mahathir some years ago, and he has very, strong, impressive convictions, and he’s not afraid to express them in relation to what he feels is the abusive behavior of the West. He’s controversial, of course, in Malaysia itself. He’s harsh toward his own opposition within Malaysia. The present Prime Minister of Malaysia [Anwar Ibrahim], is a former protégé, but also became an adversary of his. So he’s a very interesting figure and one of the few great leaders that is still alive at that age, and active at that age, which I can only envy.
But I think that he overstates to some extent the degree to which what was being done before this most recent period, since the end of the Cold War, the 30 years he refers to, was also characterized by barbarism of various sorts. Not least of which was the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of which this is the 80th anniversary year, and one that was exempt from legal scrutiny because it was perpetrated against an Asian country. If it had been used against, say, European cities. There’s no doubt that they would have been punished as war criminals, the surviving leaders, and the nuclear weapons might well have been prohibited as permissible weaponry, that, is now in the possession of at least nine sovereign states that are very reluctant to give them up, give up that weaponry, because it gives them a the hegemonic relationship to the non-nuclear countries. Iran has just recently paid the price of not having nuclear weapons. That Iran war, the 12 day war that supposedly was trying to destroy the enrichment facilities of Iran, was a clear case of aggression under the UN charter and under disgraceful double standards. Israel is a country that acquired nuclear weapons covertly, with the help of the liberal democracies of the West that championed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. When it comes to Iran, they ignore that much worse behavior on the part of Israel. This was an issue in the Kennedy presidency in the early 1960s. So the idea that the West was somehow not responsible for very destructive and unjust policies during the Cold War era, is, I think, somewhat misleading, in the degree to which the Vietnam War was fought in a way that has certain resemblances to what’s happening in Gaza: high technology capabilities being used against a low technology society with no adequate means of defending itself or retaliating.
The apartheid system in South Africa, the vestiges of colonialism — there were many things in the post 1945 period that ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall, that were quite reprehensible from the perspective of law, morality and justice. So I welcome Mahathir’s statement because of its general sentiments, but I think it overstates the situation that has emerged in the last period.
Mike Billington: Right. So, as I’m sure you know, on July 28th and 29th, the UN General Assembly will be holding a session, delayed from an earlier planned meeting in June which was disrupted by the Iran war. The new session will address the call for a two state solution for the Middle East. The meeting was called by France and Saudi Arabia. We issued a statement by the Schiller Institute and the Executive Intelligence Review called “A Two State Solution, Not a Final Solution.” Of course, we are not the only people to make references to the Nazi regime and their Final Solution to what’s taking place today in Gaza, but it’s worth recalling. In our proposal, we are calling for what’s called the Oasis Plan. This is a proposal first issued by Lyndon LaRouche in the 1970s. He had been looking at this throughout his life, to create a massive water and power development plan in the region, centered on Gaza, but extending throughout the broader region as the only basis for creating a situation which will actually address the needs of both the Palestinians and the Israelis, based on the concept that only by addressing the lack of water, and creating an abundance of water and energy, can we create the equality needed for a Palestinian state and the Israeli state to coexist. Your thoughts on that?
Prof. Falk: Well, I think it made more sense in the 1970s than it does today, in my judgment, because I don’t see either side agreeing. The one thing the Israelis and Palestinians seem to agree about is the non viability of a two state solution. The Israelis don’t want Palestinian statehood of any kind. And the Palestinians don’t want to have a Bantustan emerge out of a supposed solution that is drafted without their consent and participation, which has been there a lot from the beginning. Every step, including the Balfour Declaration, the UN Partition plan, and the various negotiations, have all been carried out without meaningful Palestinian participation. To expect the Palestinians to except a demilitarized state for themselves in collaboration with Israel, which remains a regional superpower, is, again, I think, quite unrealistic. Israel, unless it sheds the its Zionist mantle, is certainly unwilling to demilitarize, and it’s unwilling to have any Palestinian entity legitimately militarized. So I’m much more, sympathetic with an equally difficult resolution to put into practice with the Edward Said vision of a single secular state based on human equality and premised on a thorough commission of reconciliation, which addresses the history of grievances of the Palestinian people. I feel that has at least a glimmer of a chance of making the transition from this horrifying spectacle of one sided genocide, to a sustainable, durable peace.
Mike Billington: The idea of the Oasis Plan: it’s pretty clear that what you just said is true, that as long as you have this genocidal policy being dominant in Israel, nothing’s going to happen of use. But the idea is to put on the table, especially for this conference coming up at the UN, to put on the table the fact that there is a solution, that if both sides work together on an actual development policy, what the Pope once described as “the new name for peace is development,” that if you have a joint plan that addresses the actual needs of transforming the region. Obviously China knows they could get involved with their Belt and Road process, to do the kind of thing they’ve done to transform their deserts into blossoming agricultural regions. They could be part of this. The Belt and Road could be part. And the idea is to put on the table, especially for this conference a discussion about the only real solution that exists.
Let me add, that you brought up the question of reconciliation. I’m sure you know Dr. Naledi Pandor, the former Minister of International Relations in South Africa, who took Israel to the International Court of Justice over the genocide. She has been participating in our Schiller Institute conferences. In an interview with Helga Zepp-LaRouche in February she said the following about the Oasis plan and linked it to the question of the South Africa history. She said: “I think the Oasis plan presents a set of very useful proposals that could be looked at by groupings that are in contention as the basis for further discussion. From our own experience as South Africa, having agreed 30 years ago that we would enter into negotiations with those who had oppressed us for many, many decades. We know that once you get around the table, it is the former oppressed who must determine what future they would like to see.” So this addresses the question you brought up, but in a way which locates the need for a policy on the table as to demonstrate that there are solutions, and that, as Helga has said in her Ten Principles, the fact that the lack of development is the cause of poverty in almost every case, but it also true that this is due to man. And since it’s due to man, it’s also reversible, it can be corrected. We have to put that into people’s heads, that these are issues that can be resolved. There are solutions. It’s only the lack of a will to solve these issues. That has to be the basis for our discussion worldwide. Do you want to say anything more on that?
Prof. Falk: I think that in a situation which I would characterize as desperate, I think that’s a constructive initiative which deserves to be tested. I am a little bit skeptical of whether the elites representing those that will meet at this UN conference will be receptive. But at least, as you suggest, putting a solution on the table invites discussion.
There’s a second problem of who will decide who represents the Palestinians at that table. There’s a grave doubt as to the legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah as the appropriate representatives of the Palestinian people at this time. Remember that when the South African elite made its decision to entertain the sort of discussion that former Minister Pandor refers to, they agreed to release Nelson Mandela from prison, and he had a stature that enabled him to provide a legitimate representation. The only possible person that could do that in the Palestinian situation is Marwan Barghouti, who is in prison on multiple criminal charges, which are not thought to be a valid. If Israel had any interest in really coming to a mutually beneficial solution, it would at least consider releasing Barghouti from prison. He seems to be the only person capable of unifying Palestinian representation.
Mike Billington: Do you see any any glimmer of hope, as the term you used, that in fact, he will be released, perhaps in one of these prisoner exchanges?
Prof. Falk: I think the South African precedent was a coupled with a political affirmation, that Mandela was released in a context which looked forward to a transformation of the South African governing structure. And I think just releasing Barghouti in a prisoner exchange without endowing him with a show of Israeli confidence that they are prepared to negotiate with him and to respect him, will not be very fruitful. There’s another Barghouti — it’s a big family — Mustafa Barghouti, who’s an opposition figure living in Palestine, living in the West Bank. But I don’t think he has the same charismatic potential that Marwan Barghouti has. He’s very respected. He has a somewhat similar background, actually, to Mahathir. They were both doctors, medical doctors originally, and went into politics. He’s involved with our Gaza Tribunal. We’ve tried to involve Palestinians who seem to be more representative of their real aspirations than the Ramallah group under Muhammad Mahmoud Abbas, which was a sort of creature of the Oslo diplomacy, given legitimacy by the West, but never by the Palestinians. They’ve collaborated, the Palestinian Authority so-called, has collaborated with Israel and the US in security arrangements on the West Bank. So they’re viewed with considerable suspicion. They’re also extremely anti-Hamas. They were pushed out of Gaza by Hamas. The PLO was quite corrupt there. I don’t know the full merits of the conflict, but it’s quite complicated.
Mike Billington: Right. I appreciate this very much. We will definitely get this discussion widely circulated, especially going into this meeting at the UN on the 28th and 29th, which we’re committed to making a turning point, using the Hague Group work in Colombia and the work you’re doing with the Gaza Tribunal and other developments that are taking place. Do you have any sort of final thoughts you’d like to convey to our our audience
Prof. Falk: I think you’ve covered the ground. We didn’t say much about Ukraine, but I think I found it a fruitful exchange.
Mike Billington: Well, we can we can do another discussion if you’d like to touch on the obviously still very sensitive and very dangerous situation around Ukraine and the question of whether there will actually be a reconciliation between the US and Russia or not. It’s certainly not clear that there will be, given the, rather volatile attitude coming from the US presidency at this point, which seems to change every five minutes. But perhaps we can have another another discussion if you’d like to go into the broader issues.
Prof. Falk: Yes. let’s let’s wait a couple of weeks and see how things work out. It’s possible that the Oasis plan would have more traction at this point with Ukraine and Russia. Or trilateral, some sort of trilateral adaptation?
Mike Billington: We certainly think that the Russia-China cooperation and how that led into the BRICS and the process which the BRICS represents as an alternative to the horror that’s being implemented by almost the entire Western leadership at this point is extremely important. We don’t want to see this break down into two “blocs.” we have to figure out a way of getting the Western leaders to recognize their own fate is dependent upon their collaboration with China, especially, and with Russia strategically as well as economically. And if they do recognize that before the whole Western financial system collapses, as it’s heading right now, then we have a chance of a new global architecture which recognizes both the security and the development of every single country, which is, obviously, what you and what Francesca Albanese and others are promoting. The point is that we have to change the direction of civilization as a whole if we’re going to get out of this unfortunate rapid descent into the threat of global war and even a nuclear war.
Prof. Falk: I completely share that view.
Mike Billington: So, yes, let’s consider it a second discussion, which could look broader. And thank you very much for this.
Prof. Falk: Good. If you have a transcript at any point, I can distribute it to my network.
June 22, 2025—Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the founder of the Schiller Institute, stated: “Since the unprovoked attack on Iran, first by Israel and then by the United States, is not only tearing down the system of international law, but has put us on a course towards World War III, I am calling on all people of good will around the world to publish and circulate this statement by The LaRouche Organization in the U.S. in whatever form possible, and help us to mobilize an international united peace movement in all countries of the planet.”
Your life, in as little as a few days or weeks, could end in an “accidental thermonuclear war,” triggered by the dropping of a tactical nuclear device on Iran, either by a renegade Israel, or by the United States, or by Israel with the agreement of the United States. What happens next, will be determined by the reports regarding the successful, or unsuccessful, destruction of the sites.
Here is a question: if the sites were not destroyed, or if Iran announces it is able to rebuild, what will happen then? Will the use of tactical nuclear weapons be the next step?
The driving force for these events is not in “the Middle East.” It is in the global shift in economic power away from the bankrupt trans-Atlantic NATO “Anglosphere” nations, inhabited by the “golden billion,” to the seven billion other people in the world, typified by the BRICS nations. Iran, a member of the BRICS, wants nuclear power, not nuclear weapons. The intent of the War Party is to use the United States, once an anti-imperial nation, as a battering ram against the BRICS, starting with Iran.
With its attack on Iran, the United States has rejected what its greatest diplomat, President John Quincy Adams, characterized as its very nature: “(America) goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy…She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own…she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue…The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.….She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.” By breaking his pledge that he would keep the United States out of war, President Donald Trump has now fallen into the policy-grip of the War Party.
If you think that means “the Israelis,” you are mistaken. They are the match, but who sets the fires? Is that the role that Tony Blair, Jonathan Powell, Sir Richard Dearlove, Sir Peter Mandelson and others from the City Of London are playing in Washington right now? Are we watching a reprise of London’s role in starting the Iraq war, in particular giving George Bush his infamous sixteen words—“The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa”—when there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Is this similar to the role that the British Ministry of Defense, through its Project Alchemy, has played in the attacks deep into Russian territory that also threaten nuclear war?
Israel has nuclear and thermonuclear weapons, and has had them for over 60 years. That ugly, open secret is why nations like Iran, whatever you may choose to think of their policies, have acted as they have. If the Iranian sites were in fact not destroyed, the danger is that some crazy from the bowels of the Pentagon will now propose, “The only ‘dead certain’ way forward is to use ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons.”
Stop and think about what the following report from Newsweek, June 20, actually means. “The Trump administration has not taken anything ‘off the table,’ including the use of tactical nuclear weapons, if it decides to take military action against the underground Iranian nuclear facility at Fordow, Fox News reported, citing a White House official.” In response to these reports, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the only responsible thing: “There have been a lot of speculations. This would be a catastrophic development, but there are so many speculations that in fact, it’s impossible to comment on them.”
No matter what you are told, by the White House, by the Pentagon, or anyone else, there is no such thing as the use of one “tactical” nuclear weapon. In the words of Annie Jacobsen, author of Nuclear War: A Scenario, “If nuclear war begins, it doesn’t end until there is a nuclear holocaust. And it happens so fast. There is no quickly going to your secret bunker.”
What does Russia do, if America, or Israel, deploys the first nuclear bomb used since Hiroshima and Nagasaki 80 years ago? Last week, America’s ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, wrote to President Trump, “No president in my lifetime has been in a position like yours. Not since Truman in 1945.”
Let this be clear: President Truman dropping the atomic bomb in 1945 was not essential to ending the war. Dropping the bomb on an already surrendering Japan was necessary to begin the next world war, planned by Britain’s Winston Churchill one month after Franklin Roosevelt died in April 1945. In May, Churchill proposed “Operation Unthinkable,” a plan to immediately nuke the Soviet Union with American-made bombs, to “impose the will of the United States and the British Empire,” in the plan’s actual words.
The use of nuclear weapons has always been wrong, has never been necessary, and is never other than a tool of imperial force. We, the people of the United States, and we, the people of the world, must stop the madness of governments and fanatics. The nations of the Global Majority, and especially the BRICS nations, of which Iran is a member, must have their voices heard. Nations should not be brought to the conclusion that the only way to retain and defend their sovereignty is to build nuclear weapons.
In Southwest Asia, we need a consortium of regional countries, working with the United States, Russia and China, to create a nuclear weapons-free zone–which has to include Israel joining the IAEA and signing the Non-Proliferation Treaty, as Iran did. A crash program for the peaceful use of nuclear power as an energy source, for water desalination and other purposes, needs to involve all nations in the region. A New Security and Development Architecture, based on diplomacy, not assassinations and war, must result from actions taken in the next hours and days.
It is up to the people to save themselves, and civilization itself, by speaking out and acting up. The world needs to hear from free citizens that say, “No to assassinations, regime changes, and thermonuclear war!” It is time, now, to change our world, before there is no world left to change.
Even as Iran was counter-attacking with massive missile strikes against Tel Aviv today, in response to the early morning June 13 Israeli attack against Iran’s nuclear program and scientific and military command structure, an urgent and extensive policy discussion was underway among leading U.S. and international strategic analysts at the 106th consecutive weekly meeting of the International Peace Coalition (IPC).
The IPC was initiated over two years ago by Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Today’s participants included M.K. Bhadrakumar, a retired ambassador and 30-year career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service, including serving in Moscow; Dr. Theodore Postol, professor emeritus of Science, Technology and International Security at MIT; Larry Johnson, former CIA officer and outspoken member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS); Ray McGovern, a former Senior Analyst for the CIA and a Founding Member of VIPS; and Helga Zepp-LaRouche.
There was broad discussion of Zepp-LaRouche’s call for the establishment of a new international security and development architecture – which ensures the security and development of {all} nations, not just some. We need a totally new approach to create a new paradigm to replace the dying system based on British geopolitics, she stated. That is the only viable war-avoidance policy.
M.K. Bhadrakumar proposed that the entire issue of uranium enrichment – the supposed basis of Israel’s illegal war of aggression against Iran – could be solved by creating a regional consortium of countries to enrich uranium and allow all countries, including Iran, to have access to the peaceful use of nuclear technology. This could be done under strict international scrutiny to ensure that no weapons-grade enrichment occurs. Russian President Vladimir Putin has offered his country’s good offices to facilitate such an arrangement. And in fact, when Putin spoke with President Donald Trump on June 4, at the height of the crisis created by Ukraine’s provocative drone attack on Russia’s strategic bomber fleet, he offered to help Trump find a negotiated solution to the Iran crisis in this and other ways.
If Trump and Putin would work on this together, Mr. Bhadrakumar emphasized, it would still be possible to avoid a “Doomsday Scenario” in the Middle East.
Zepp-LaRouche added that if China’s President Xi Jinping were also brought into such a project through his conversations with President Trump, broader cooperation could occur with the United States and regional powers such as Saudi Arabia to add transportation, water, and other energy infrastructure projects into the mix. In this way, the beginnings of the needed new security and development architecture for the region would fall in place.
Zepp-LaRouche located the broader context of the crisis and its solution in her remarks:
“We are right now on the brink of World War III. It may have started already, and that is not an exaggeration, because we are now in danger of an escalation spiral which, if not changed by some intervention, could indeed lead in the relatively short term to a global nuclear war in which all of mankind would vanish…
“This is the kind of situation where a completely different approach is required. If you look at the larger context, we have seen in the recent period massive targeting of the Global South, namely the BRICS countries, who are trying to form a new economic system which is based on economic justice and equal chances for every country to develop. We have seen targeting of South Africa, of Egypt, of Brazil, Argentina (which is probably the most far-gone case), and naturally Russia and China. The underlying issue is the fact that the Global South is trying to get a new economic system…
“I think the motive behind a lot of these crises is the fact that there is an attempt to stop the rise of a new system—the BRICS+ and so forth… I’m absolutely certain that if it’s not Ukraine, then it will be Iran or Israel or tomorrow Taiwan or China. [This will continue] as long as we are not resolving the underlying conflict and going in the direction of establishing a new security and development architecture which, in the tradition of the Peace of Westphalia, takes into account the interests of every single country.”
June 2, 2025—As you are reading this, financial forces associated with the City of London and Wall Street are careening the world to an appointment with thermonuclear Hell. It is not only sane, but essential, to ask the question: Has the world, with the June 1 attacks “by Ukraine” on four Russian airfields, including the destruction of nuclear-capable aircraft that are part of Russia’s thermonuclear triad, crossed a red line beyond which there lies the immediacy of species-annihilating thermonuclear warfare? During the entire Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, nothing so dangerous as what we are living through right now, ever occurred.
On the eve of the June 2 Istanbul talks, the June 1 Sunday’s destruction of at least 9, and possibly more (the Ukrainians have claimed 40) Russian military aircraft at bases in various parts of Russia (Olenya Airbase in Murmansk, Diaghilev Airbase in Ryazan, Belaya Airbase in Irkutsk, Ivanovo Airbase in Ivanovo) could not have been carried out, various analysts contend, without the supervision of NATO, and the involvement of either Britain, the United States, or both.
Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter puts it this way: “This would be the equivalent of a hostile actor launching drone strikes against U.S. Air Force B-52H bombers stationed at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota and at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, and B-2 bombers stationed at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri.” Consider: What would the United States do if, in a military border dispute with Mexico, that nation, using Russian and Chinese made weapons, satellite, surveillance and guidance systems, and even in-person trainers, blew up even one plane at an American Air Force base?
There is a larger, even more terrifying consideration. The Sunday attack on June 1, somewhat reminiscent of “9/11” in its surprise, coordination and complexity, also begs the question as to whether American President Donald Trump did, or did not know this attack was in the works. In the case that he did not know, we could be witnessing the beginning of a coup against Trump by those who set the attack up. Former U.S. National Security Advisor Michael Flynn said, “It appears Zelenskyy gave the go-ahead to attack parked Russian nuclear-capable bombers without informing President Trump. (If true that our President was not consulted nor informed, this isn’t simply a breach of protocol, it’s a geopolitical insult and a warning sign…)
Alternatively, if Trump did know about the attack, and authorized it, that would mean that he has given up on a diplomatic relationship with Putin and Russia, and world war would be imminent. In either case, we are heading for war, and fast. And that means, in any case, we will have to mobilize ourselves and your neighbors to “rise up on our hind legs,” declare independence from war insanity, and reverse course by acting like free citizens in the republic of world-history.
We must rise up and stop the deployment of Germany’s Taurus missiles to Ukraine. If, as some journalists believe, they have already been deployed into Ukraine, then the German government must immediately withdraw them. Russia, which lost 27 million people in the Second World War in battles against Germany, would be prepared to destroy the production facilities located in the cities of Germany which made the missiles. Only a New Security and Development Architecture—what China’s President Xi Jinping calls a “Win-Win” dedication to “the benefit of the other”—including development projects such as the LaRouche Oasis Plan for Gaza and Southwest Asia—can forge a narrow path forward and away from species-destroying warfare.
If we do nothing, then the morons of American foreign policy will take over. The psychotic bipartisan charade being carried out by Senators Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal right now in Ukraine, is undermining any prospect for peace. “At the heart of their push is a bipartisan sanctions bill, backed by nearly the entire U.S. Senate but still facing uncertain odds in Washington. It would impose 500% tariffs on countries that continue buying Russian oil, gas, uranium and other exports—targeting nations like China and India that account for roughly 70% of Russia’s energy trade and bankroll much of its war effort,” wrote Politico.
Graham called it “the most draconian bill I’ve ever seen in my life in the Senate.”
In the age of thermonuclear weapons, war as a means of conflict resolution is suicidal madness. The Global Majority, the nations of Africa, Asia and Ibero-America, want peace through economic development. Civilization will not survive, if it is fought. Yet, there are many in the City of London and Wall Street “billionaires club” that desire perpetual war. We must stop them. The first thing to do, is not to act, but to think. What can you best contribute to reverse this direction?
There are interventions, standing up in public and denouncing those that are perpetuating war in high place; there is street presence, talking to people face to face, and making sure they are not overlooked; there is the appeal to Pope Leo XIV, the first American Pope in history, whose first words upon taking his position were “Peace be with all of you” (see link below); there is circulating, studying and working our LaRouche Oasis Plan for Gaza to the United Nations prior to the special session on Palestine (see link below); there is stopping the Blumenthal-Graham sanctions bill from passing the Congress; there is building the International Peace Coalition, a worldwide organization that has met every week for two years. Finally and most importantly, read and comment upon the Ten Principles for a New International Security and Development Architecture, the document, written by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, which inspired the creation of the International Peace Coalition. It falls to this generation to be the one that abolished thermonuclear war, so that humanity might live. Otherwise, we will likely be among the last generations of a human race that looked in the mirror and did not find itself morally fit to survive.
As the U.S. tariff war intensifies, China and the European Union have recently increased high-level contacts. Some observers suggest the EU is turning to China as an alternative to Trump’s America. At a CGTN roundtable marking 50 years of China-EU relations, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, president and founder of Germany’s Schiller Institute, urged both sides to defend the global order and develop the Global South.
The Schiller Institute today released a list of 60 names of prominent individuals from 20 countries who have endorsed the March 8, 2025 call from the Institute’s founder, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, “Instead of Rearming for the Great War, We Need to Create a Global Security Architecture!” It is being issued at a time when Europe is at an historic crossroads, where a difference alternative must be urgently put on the table if a catastrophe is to be avoided.
The statement begins, “The European Union (EU) and most European governments are in the grips of a war hysteria that can only be compared to the warmongering madness that broke out before World War One.”
It concludes, “Europe has reacted to Trump’s sudden signals for an end to the Ukraine war and a resumption of diplomacy with Rusia with great panic – and cries for war. But there is still time to currect this potentially fatal course. If Europe wants to overcome its current economic misery, the way out lies in cooperation with the nations of the Global South, which has long since become the Global Majority.
“Humanity has reached the point where it must overcome the old patterns of thought steeped in geopolitics and the Cold War, and replace them with a new global security and development architecture that takes into account the interests of all nations on this planet. A positive example for this is provided by the Peace of Westphalia, which came about because the warring parties came to the conclusion that if the war continued, no one would be able to enjoy victory, since there would be no survivors. How much more convincing this argument is in times of thermonuclear weapons which, if used, would lead to the extinction of all mankind!”
For the full text of the statement, which has been endorsed by many others worldwide, see Instead of Rearming for the Great War, We Need to Create a Global Security Architecture! The text includes a link for new endorsements, and the Schiller Institute urges all individuals in agreement with the statement to add their names, and circulate the statement as widely as possible.
List of prominent endorsers as of April 24, organized alphabetically by country, and alphabetically by last name within country. Affiliation/background for identification purposes only.
Daud Azimi, Afghanistan/Germany, Engineer; Board Member, Peace National Front of Afghanistan
Ute Kollies, Austria, Former Deputy Regional Director for West Africa, UN Office of Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) Gen. Edwin Alfonso De La Fuente Jeria, Bolivia, Former Commander-in-Chief of the Bolivian Armed Forces
Tom Gillesberg, Denmark, President, Schiller Institute in Denmark; former independent candidate for parliament Ramón Emilio Concepción, Dominican Republic, Attorney-at-law; Presidential Pre-candidate, PRM party (2020)
Mariano Nguema Esono Medja, Equatorial Guinea, Focal Point in Equatorial Guinea, United Nations Regional Center for Peace and Disarmament in Africa
Jacques Cheminade, France, President, Solidarité et Progrès; former presidential candidate
Col. (Ret.) Alain Corvez, France, consultant on international strategic affairs
Col. (Ret.) Jacques Hogard, France, INF-LE, Land Army
Jérôme Ravenet, France, Doctor of Letters and Associate Professor of Philosophy Ali Rastbeen, France, President, Académie de Géopolitique de Paris
Dr. Jur. Wolfgang Bittner, Germany, Author
Joachim Bonatz, Germany, Vice President, East German Board of Trustees of Associations (Ostdeutsches Kuratorium von Verbänden e.V.), Berlin
Margret Bonin, Germany, Global Women for Peace United Against NATO
Frank Bornschein, Germany, City Councilor, Schwedt; Friends of Peace Schwedt e.V.
Karl Cammann, Germany, Prof. (em.) Dr.
Holger Hüttel, Germany, Chairman, local branch of Die Linke, Sangerhausen
Dr. (med.) Helmut Käss, Germany, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW)
Harald Koch, Germany, former member, Bundestag; founding member, Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW)
Wolfgang Lieberknecht, Germany, Internationale FriedensFabrik Wanfried, (IFFW)
Ulrich Leonhardt, Germany, Aufstehen Schwerin (Rise Up Schwerin)
Dr. Cornelia Nenz, Germany
Stephan Ossenkopp, Germany, Vice Chairman, BüSo; journalist, “Die Multipolare Welt”
Karin Pflug, Germany, Honorary City Councilor, Quedlinburg
Dr. Andrey Redlich, Germany, Founding member, Society for Human Rights (German section), (ISHR). Thomas Rehm, Germany, Head of workers council, Saale Energie GmbH
Dr. Rainer Sandau, Germany, Technical Director, Satellites and Space Applications, International Academy of Aeronautics (IAA)
Jan Veil, Germany, Freie Linke, South Hesse
Leonidas Chrysanthopoulos, Greece, Ambassador ad honorem; Secretary General, Black Sea Economic Cooperation Organization (BSEC), 2006-2012
Raúl Aníbal Marroquín Casasola, Guatemala, Coordinator, Citizen Observatory for Peace “La Pupila del Cielo”, San Cristóbal
Maurizio Abbate, Italy, Chairman, ENAC (Italian Institute for Cultural Activities)
Vincenzo Romanello, Ph.D., Italy/Czech Republic, Nuclear engineer; founder, Italian chapter, Atoms for Peace.
Bruno Romano, Italy, Movisol
Alessia Ruggeri, Italy, trade union leader
Marino Savina, Italy, National President, ANDICOSI (National Association of Security Employees)
Daisuke Kotegawa, Japan, Former IMF Executive Director for Japan; former Japan Ministry of Finance official Pigbin Odimwengu, Kenya, Accountability and Transparency Party, 2022 Presidential Candidate
Rafael Nava y Uribe, Mexico, President, Mexico-Colombia Chamber of Commerce
Celeste Sáenz de Miera, Mexico, Director, Journalists Club of Mexico A.C.
Alberto Vizcarra Osuna, Mexico, Member of Coordinating Committee, National Front for the Rescue of Mexican Farmland
Prof. Driss Larafi, Morocco, Professor of Political Science and International Relations, University Ibn Tofail
Kees le Pair, Ph.D., Netherlands, Physicist, Univ. of Leiden; former Ass’t Professor, American University of Beirut; Science Advisor, Dutch Military Research
Adewale Aiyedun, Ph.D., Nigeria, Forensic Investigator, Audit and Security Consultant
David Ajetunmobi, Nigeria, Trade union leader-auto sector
Adeshola Kukoyi, Nigeria, Founder, Equilibrium Perspectives, University of Lagos
Julia Vellila Laconich, Paraguay, Former ambassador from Paraguay to Bolivia, Uruguay, Peru, and UNESCO (Paris)
Kjell Lundqvist, Sweden, Chairman, European Labor Party
Ulf Sandmark, Sweden, Chairman, Schiller Institute in Sweden
Father Harry Bury, United States, Minneapolis/St. Paul Non-Violent; U.S. Priests Association
Carroll Childers, United States, Major General (ret.), U.S. Army; retired weapons developer, U.S. Dep’t. of the Navy and U.S. Marine Corps
Graham Fuller, United States/Canada, Former U.S. diplomat and CIA official; former Vice-Chair, National Intelligence Council
Jack Gilroy, United States, Veterans for Peace; Pax Christi-Upstate New York; Pax Christi International
Martin Melkonian, United States, Treasurer, Long Island (NY) Alliance for Peace and Justice
Lorin Peters, United States, Pax Christi, Northern California Chapter
Earl Rasmussen, United States, Lt. Col. (ret.), U.S. Army; international consultant
John Shanahan, United States, Civil engineer; president, Go Nuclear Inc.; editor, website: allaboutenergy.net
Steven Starr, United States, Professor, University of Missouri; nuclear warfare expert
John Steinbach, United States, Hiroshima Nagasaki Peace Committee, National Capital Area
J. Kirk Wiebe, United States, Retired analyst, National Security Agency; NSA Whistleblower
Jim Wohlgemuth, United States, Veterans for Peace, Nashville (TN) chapter; radio host
April 10 – The following emergency statement, issued by the Schiller Institute, addresses the ongoing global financial crisis and is intended for the widest possible circulation.
The Western financial system is now teetering at the edge of a general, systemic blowout which is about to usher in a new global Great Depression, far worse than that of the 1930s. The skids are being greased by the predatory trade war which the gullible United States President Donald Trump Administration has unleashed against the whole world—but especially China—on the advice of Harvard-trained quacks and hedge fund managers like Stephen Miran.
President Trump seems to intend to free the world financial system from the speculative aspects of globalization, which would be a legitimate effort. But the interpretation that the whole world looted the U.S. puts the whole story upside down. It was the neoliberal financial system of Wall Street and the City of London, which developed after President Nixon took down the Bretton Woods System and introduced floating exchange rates in 1971, that created a mechanism to loot productive capacities in all countries, including the U.S. The present efforts by the countries of the Global South to set up an economic system which would allow their own economic development is a revolt against the conditionalities policy of the IMF and the World Bank.
President Trump is right: the U.S. has been robbed, but so have the countries of the Global South—as well as other countries around the world. Therefore, we are all sitting in one boat, and the effort to correct the mistakes of the system must be a cooperative one.
Wall Street and the City of London have drooled their way to creating a $2 quadrillion speculative bubble which cannot conceivably be paid, no matter how many wars they launch and how much they slash countries’ budgets. They have destroyed the productive economies of Europe and the United States, packaged as post-industrial gobbledygook. They have looted the nations of the Global South through debt servitude and related colonial policies.
To make matters even worse, they have introduced their speculative cancer into the U.S. Treasury bond market itself, undermining the very bedrock of the post-War trans-Atlantic financial system. And they are proposing to postpone the day of reckoning of their inevitable bankruptcy by pumping the system full of worthless cryptocurrency and so-called “stablecoins,” while also demanding that the Federal Reserve go back to the policy of lending endless zero-interest money (quantitative easing)—only this time on steroids.
But you can’t simply propose to bring all of that crashing down, through a modern variant of the Trilateral Commission’s and Paul Volcker’s “controlled disintegration,” or Schumpeter’s “creative destruction,” as many of Trump’s advisers insist.
With what are you going to replace the current hopelessly bankrupt system?
Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche has answered that question directly, by insisting on the need to establish a new paradigm, a new international security and development architecture, which must take into account the interest of every nation on the planet, based on the proven principles of her late husband and renowned economist Lyndon LaRouche, starting with the central concept that man is not a beast. President Trump should follow his initial healthy instincts and consult in depth with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, and jointly convene an international conference among the nations of the world to establish a New Bretton Woods System. Such a gathering would deliberate on the underlying principles, as well as the specific policies, to be adopted for a new international security and development architecture that will address the interests of each and every nation. Where there are difficulties and disagreements, these will be worked out according to the Westphalian (Judeo-Christian) principle of the “general welfare” of all—not by aggressive pronouncements and threats against others that, in any event, don’t even address the underlying cause of the crisis.
Decades ago, Lyndon LaRouche specified the policies needed to “lick the depression in a single day,” policies restated in his 2014 “The Four New Laws to Save the U.S.A. Now!”
1. The $2 quadrillion speculative cancer has got to go—Wall Street and the City of London are going to have to take the hit. The original Glass-Steagall U.S. Banking Act of 1933 should be reenacted, splitting the banking system into two:
on the one hand, the commercial banks that engage in productive lending (and that therefore get the full backing of the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the U.S. government in general); and on the other, so-called “investment banking,” i.e. wild speculation, which will be rolled up, frozen, and given no government backing. No more bailouts of the cancer. This will also do wonders for balancing the federal budget.
2. The productive sector of the economy—which since 1971 has collapsed as fast as the speculative bubble has grown, as is indicated in LaRouche’s famous Triple Curve graphic—must be revitalized with a new source of productive credit to finance the great infrastructure projects and reindustrialization needed. This includes reconverting the military-industrial-financial complex to useful production, which today is a net drain on the productive economy.
One viable way to create such productive credit flows, the way Alexander Hamilton did with the First National Bank of the United States, would be to nationalize the Federal Reserve, rather than using it to bail out the bankrupt banks to the tune of tens of trillions of dollars. This could begin with the creation of a National Bank for Infrastructure in the New York Fed, to begin with power, water and other infrastructure projects for the United States, and international loans to development projects. The bank would be capitalized initially by trade-ins of Treasury debt for equity in the Bank.
3. Reach treaty agreements with similarly inclined nations, to reestablish a fixed-exchange rate international financial system, like we had before 1971, that will provide a favorable, predictable framework for global infrastructure and other investment projects. There is every reason for the United States to join with China’s Belt and Road Initiative and cooperate with the nations of the BRICS—which now represent well over half of humanity—in this global development endeavor.
If the United States returns to such a policy, the Global South will no longer feel the desperate need to de-dollarize and otherwise distance itself from the sinking financial Titanic that is Wall Street and the City of London. They will happily embrace American offers to cooperate on such projects.
4. The future of humanity requires an unending emphasis on science and technology, especially in the frontier areas of fusion power and space exploration. These are the perfect areas for the U.S., China, Russia, India and the BRICS nations to cooperate for the benefit of all. Such a fostering of the creative human spirit is the source of all true economic value.
On the Subject of Tariffs and Trade
Lyndon LaRouche took up this issue of principle in his book-length study, On the Subject of Tariffs and Trade, which was published by EIR magazine in its February 13, 2004 issue. LaRouche there explained:
“Now, we are in the grip of the terminal phase of a general collapse of the existing world monetary-financial system. As I warned, we are also gripped by the threat of a general fascist insurgency, as merely typified by the impact of U.S. Vice President Cheney’s revival of a strategic doctrine of ‘preventive nuclear warfare,’ and a Nazi-like replacement of the traditional military forces and doctrine of modern civilization, by a military doctrine echoing the Roman imperial legions and the Nazi intent to establish a world-reigning international Waffen-SS.”
LaRouche concluded that study with the following policy perspective:
“The national economic interest of the U.S.A. corresponds to the level of development of the productive powers of labor, which corresponds to a reasonably targeted level of improvement of the sustainable potential relative population-density of our nation considered as a whole.
“This achievement depends, essentially, upon the development of the employment of those powers, as Plato defined powers, whose typical expressions are accumulations of experimentally validated universal physical principles, or of cultural principles of a kindred import.
“The development and maintenance of those employed powers, and further improvements in that direction are, to a large degree, made possible through various forms of capital investment in the physical capital of basic economic infrastructure, in public infrastructure, in capital improvements of entrepreneurial enterprises, and in the physical and cultural standard of living of the family households of our national labor-force.
“Under the provisions of a protectionist form of policies of tariffs and trade, if operating within the framework of an international fixed-exchange-rate monetary-financial system, it is practicable to define a spectrum of ‘fair prices’ of commodities at the export-import interface of our economy with the international market. In that case, prices of our commodities may decrease as a result of technological advances which do not lower quality, except that wage-reductions may not be routinely employed as a means for price-reductions of commodities. Trade (import, export, or both) may be used as an added means for regulating forms of price-stability intended to protect the relative physical value of capital invested. In general, lowering standards of living of households as a means for making goods ‘more competitive,’ is effectively outlawed.
“Look at what I have just said against the background of that aspect of the post-1977 wrecking of the U.S. economy accomplished by deregulation of freight and passenger traffic. The result was to concentrate traffic among a limited number of ‘hubs,’ with the effect of driving communities in outlying regions into virtual collapse, and often depopulation. This meant that the productivity of the U.S.A. as a whole collapsed per square kilometer, with an accompanying net collapse of the net physical output by the population as a whole. Insanity? Yes: insanity engendered by the spread of the lunatic dogma of ‘free trade.’
“The object must be to increase the effective physical output both per capita and per square kilometer. This desired effect is fostered by standardized freight-rates, convenient mass-transit of passengers among both principal hubs and regional centers, to such effect that the optimum use is made of the potential represented by the total population and total area of the nation.
“Similar advantages from regulation of trade and tariffs are to be sought among nations, more or less on a global scale. Thus, we must encourage the relevant physical capital formation throughout the planet, to optimize the rate of increase of per-capita and per-square-kilometer gross and net outputs.
“The general principle, bearing on tariffs and trade, illustrated by those cases, is the urgency of shifting the notions of cost and profitability away from cheapness of the physical-capital costs of production and distribution, to gains in the margin of growth per capita which are obtained through raising the objective standard of living and quality and relative intensity of capital formation.
“The initial emphasis must be upon large-scale and massive investment in basic economic infrastructure, to effect an urgently needed, qualitative change in the environment of production and family life. That emphasis on basic economic infrastructure, is the only durable means for promoting a general regrowth of a viable private sector.
“However, none of this could be accomplished, without reference to the successes of President Franklin Roosevelt in saving the U.S.A. from both a depression at home, and the threat of a Nazi-led world-empire. This requires junking Adam Smith and everything that smells of him, and returning to the constitutional principles of the American System of political-economy as described by Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton and others. This means the restoration of those practices of regulation, including protectionism, associated with the Franklin Roosevelt revolution of the 1930s.”
Lyndon LaRouche Explains the Cause of the Collapse
What is collapsing today, is not an economy, but a vast financial bubble, a bubble whose chief economic expression is the U.S. financial system’s role as ‘The Importer of Last Resort’ for the world at large.… In effect, the world has been supporting, until about now, a vast U.S. dollar-denominated financial bubble, all largely for the purpose of propping up an inflated, intrinsically bankrupt U.S. economy’s role as ‘importer of last resort’ for much of the world. What happens, when that financial bubble moves into its inevitable chain-reaction-collapse phase? That is what is happening now.”
Mike Billington: Greetings. This is Mike Billington with the Executive Intelligence Review and the Schiller Institute. I’m very pleased to be today with Mr. M.K. Bhadrakumar, who had a 30 year diplomatic career for India. He was the ambassador to the USSR and also held leading positions within the Foreign Ministry. He had positions in Pakistan, in Iran, in Afghanistan. He is a prolific writer on world affairs. His blog is called India Punchline, which I encourage people to go to. Doctor Bhadrakumar, welcome, and thank you very much for agreeing to this discussion.
Dr. MK Bhadrakumar: Mike, good evening. It is my privilege, entirely my privilege. I have known and I have read a lot about you in your distinguished career as an activist and a promoter of world peace. But I never had an opportunity to sit face to face with you, so it’s a privilege. I have a small correction. I was not ambassador to the Soviet Union. At that time in the diplomatic service, I served twice in Moscow, at the time of Brezhnev and at the time of Gorbachev. When I finished my second term, I was just becoming a minister counselor. I retired from Turkey as Ambassador.
Mike Billington: Let me begin by noting that your most recent essay on the India Punchline website was on the extraordinary re-establishment of diplomatic relations between the US and Russia, with the phone call between Putin and Trump and then diplomatic meetings between several of their associates. What are your thoughts on how that’s going so far?
Dr. MK Bhadrakumar: I suppose I can see, in the limited time that President Trump has been in the Oval Office –he’s in the second month into his presidency. My feeling is that much ground has been covered, though it’s too early to say what the future trajectory is going to be, because there are very many variables in the situation. The Russian-American relations have a long history. If you go back to the time of President Eisenhower, there were very high hopes at that time that he and Nikita Khrushchev might work out an understanding for peaceful coexistence. But you know how abruptly it ended. On both sides, there are forces, as far as I can see, who may not be happy with what is happening today. But I trust President Trump to be assertive in his second term. He has a wealth of experience from his first term and would have held a perspective on why he couldn’t achieve what he had wanted, in foreign policy, how he got constrained. How he couldn’t proceed with that. I see traces of that already, the way he’s going about his second presidency. So I expect him to be assertive.
But a new factor has come in, which is this, that unlike in the Soviet times, the Soviet period, where the variables actually were with regard to the United States primarily, but here it is also with regard to the United States and transatlantic allies. It’s a new factor. Britain apart, I think the other European powers were quite inclined to get on with the USSR, especially Germany, The gas pipelines were set up in the 60s, early 70s, despite reservations from the United States.
So there is now a kind of role reversal here. The United States is pushing for this cooperation with Russia, and from the statements in Moscow, I have come to a feeling that there is a level of transparency already existing in the dialogue, backchannel dialogue communications that are going on between the two sides. President Putin’s remarks last Thursday while addressing the Collegium of the FSB, which is the collegium of the top officials in foreign intelligence. He was optimistic, actually. I have never seen in the recent years such a ray of hope that he was holding out. Of course, he cautioned at the end, and he did so rightly, that there are forces who may be working to undermine this process, and therefore utmost vigilance is required. He was telling the Russian intelligence apparatus — we saw evidence of it already in the subsequent couple of days, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, the dramatic events in the Oval Office when Zelensky came to Washington. then the meeting of 18 countries hosted by the UK, including Zelensky and their determination to pursue their own pathway in Ukraine, no matter the dialogue between Russia and the United States. I find also that the American media is playing a very negative role.
The mainstream media — there are other voices, voices of reason. But I cannot understand, I cannot comprehend why there should be such a fear about dialogue. I saw an interview given by the Secretary of State [Mark Rubio] where he asked this, very directly, forthright, “what is wrong with dialogue? You engage even your adversaries in dialogue. Why should you be terrified about it?” But that is the way it is. The discourses in the US are going on.
We don’t know much about the discourses in Russia. I don’t think it will be coming out into the open, as assertive in the way that it is being asserting in the European capitals and in the United States. There are hard liners there also. But I think the Russians are more in control of the situation. And if Trump persists with this trajectory, I think there is a strong likelihood that it can gather momentum. Let us see how far the normalization of diplomatic relations go. The resumption of activities of the embassies, which is very important, because a sustained conversation, dialogue, is only possible if the embassies are functioning full throttle. It’s not simply a matter of consular services and so on. It’s a matter of vital importance at this time that both countries are able to optimally perform on the diplomatic track.
Mike Billington: Do you have an opinion on the Russian Ambassador who has been appointed?
Dr. MK Bhadrakumar:The Russians, I think, have chosen a thoroughbred professional, with very deep experience in handling North America, North American matters [Ambassador Alexander Darchiev]. They proposed the name quite a bit earlier, about a couple of months back, and they were waiting for the agreement from the American side. And when the representatives met in Istanbul, the officials of the two sides last week, the agreement was formally conveyed to the Russian side. He’s a very solid professional diplomat, and is in a position to roll up his sleeves and work from day one once he arrives there. And I can understand that they have a lot of work to do, because they were denied any opportunity to communicate with the American public, at the people to people level. And that is very important, because a nonsensical narrative is there in America. All kinds of things. It’s almost like when George Orwell wrote about matters that he could have been referring to a situation like in the Western world today. A kind of contrarian view is blocked — it’s absolutely censorship — even American writers and thinkers, their point of view is not coming through. And a lot of people were actually writing to me and asking me whether I could communicate to them some Russian commentaries. Even the Russian point of view was not available to the American public. So reaching out to the American public will be a top priority for the new Ambassador. I’m sure about that.
Mike Billington: Let me ask you about the opposition to this process. I was quite impressed by the fact that you referred to both Obama and Joe Biden, you used the phrase that they were guilty of “wanton acts of motiveless, malignity and hubris.” Now, that’s quite a phrase. But what I’m interested in is to what extent you think there is a British hand behind those policies, and in general, those of the so-called “deep state.”
Dr. MK Bhadrakumar: Oh, there’s no doubt about it. It’s not to what extent– It’s an all pervasive influence. The British influence on the American policy — and often I think from the American side, they were led to believe — and Britain has the skill to get the Americans to believe — that it is their own policy! But it is scripted and it is thought through first in London and handed over. It’s almost like leading from the rear. This has been a consistent characteristic of British diplomacy. For Britain, the entire stature that it has in the world depends on its indispensability for the American policies and American foreign policy strategy. And therefore, you can see the centrality of it in the British side of things. America is a global power. There are many countries which are willing to work with it. But in the case of Britain, it’s not like that. It’s an obsessive thought. And this was very evident in the last week — the panic that is there. It’s going to be a very major negative factor in the coming weeks and months because the British intelligence has a stranglehold on the regime in Kiev. And now France also joined there. I saw a commentary by CNN earlier today discussing the possibility of, the ouster of Zelensky. We are getting into very sensitive issues now, and British intelligence is doing a lot of havoc. Most of these acts of terrorism on Russian soil were actually planned by British intelligence. And the Russians knew that also — the missile attacks, targets inside Russia, assassination plots, such other things. Since yesterday, there has been talk that that Ukrainian intelligence might have been involved in the second failed assassination attempt on President Trump, candidate Trump, during the campaign. This is something which was articulated by top senior Ukrainian politicians even at that time, that this is all a doing of these people. But who trained the Ukrainian intelligence? The Ukrainian intelligence is completely in the hands of MI6, and therefore, Britain’s influence is not at all a positive factor in the situation today. It’s one of the single biggest negative factors, Britain’s, capacity to be a spoiler.
Mike Billington: We met Mr. Starmer’s visit to Washington this past week with a major flier, a four-page piece which basically called for an end to the “Special Relationship” between the U.S. and the UK. It reviewed the several hundred years-long role of the British in undermining the efforts of the American Founding Fathers, and then the intervention in the war in 1812, as well as in the Civil War, trying to disrupt and destroy the United States as a sovereign nation, and then trying to subvert it when they failed to do it militarily. And the subversion is what you’ve just described. It’s basically their ability to — I like the way you put it, to convince Americans that these policies are their own when they actually come directly from British Intelligence. So, of course, Mr. Starmer went back, acting as if it was a successful trip. But I think it was a failed trip. And then he embraced Zelensky and sponsored this meeting at 10 Downing Street, which also failed to achieve anything significant, especially since Europe itself is now crumbling economically and falling apart in terms of any kind of unity within the EU or within NATO even for that matter. So where do you see Europe going at this point?
Dr. MK Bhadrakumar: Even Britain’s capacity to fill in if the United States drifts away, doesn’t have a role any longer in the Ukraine war, as it has had during the Biden presidency. Britain has no capacity to fill in. It has a standing army of around 60,000 soldiers. I read somewhere recently that its entire inventory of battle tanks works out to a mighty total of 25 tanks. So what kind of peacekeeping role can it perform in Ukraine? Within a week they will become victims of the meatgrinder. It has been a war of attrition. I don’t think that Europe can play a significant role, except if it realizes the wrong trajectory that it took in 2022, and played a happily subaltern role. Whatever Biden wanted, they did, and they have paid a very heavy price as a result of it. Germany is the biggest example. As I told you, I have lived in Russia, and have seen the kind of relationship that Germany had with Russia. Very frankly, Putin was discussing Germany as the next superpower. And where is it today? Putin has stated publicly. There were some thousands of German companies who were operating there, and Germany’s export industry was very heavily dependent on the energy supplies from Russia. Putin once disclosed that the energy, the gas supplies, were given at subsidised prices to Germany.
The Russians knew that it was a subsidised price, and the Germans bought a lot of it and sold it in the European market at marked up prices. And the Russians knew that also! So you see such a close relationship was there.
Now, the entire production relations in the German economy is totally derelict. The export industry is not going to be competitive with the kind of prices they have to pay for importing gas and oil from outside. So I do not think that the new government that is coming into power in Germany after the recent elections to the Bundestag — I have lived in Germany. I know the potency of the constituency which rooted for the transatlantic relationship. But, today, the new chancellor designate, if he makes it as a CDU leader, he has spoken against the United States and he has spoken about a future for Europe that does not count on solidarity with the US, that does not count on support from the US and so on.
But I don’t think this is the final word, because Germany is in very serious trouble. From that high pedestal where it was four years, five years back, as more than half a superpower already. The economy is in recession, very deep recession.
I saw the FT, the Financial Times, had a report three days, four days back that already there is a talk about an American role in repairing the Nord Stream pipeline. I don’t know if you have heard about it or not — the pipeline which Biden had destroyed. If that comes, then it’s a very interesting proposition. Russia has abundant supplies and massive quantities of gas and oil can flow from there again. An American company managing that transaction on the ground, and the German economy again reviving, with plentiful gas supplies from Russia. So I don’t think Germany is going to be comfortable with the kind of trajectory that Britain and France are promoting. Italy is also, from what I see from odd statements here and there, one can always discern there that Italy is also very uncomfortable with this. What are the other countries which can play a role in replacing the United States, to mentor Zelenskyy and his people there? So I don’t think the Europeans are on the right track, I think they are on a very wrong track. And if you see the known unknown, there is also a factor there — that is, that a lot of it is a power struggle. There has been a power struggle in Kyiv. And if and when this comes out — people were holding back Zelensky’s rival camp, you know, holding back because they were nervous that any kind of effort to replace him would not have support from the United States.
But now, if the United States just cuts him loose and goes its own way, and says, “you manage,” then those forces will come up. And I don’t think the British intelligence can control that kind of a situation, because Russia has — I’ve lived in that country, I’ve traveled in Ukraine, and Russia knows that country like the back of its hand. Russia has its eyes and ears open there, even while the war is going on. If changes of that kind do take place, and I can only hope — I have written that also — that it doesn’t take a violent turn. But if that kind of a change takes place, then how does Europe address the situation, an emergency situation like that?
Whereas I think that both Putin and Trump are comfortably placed. They can build up the bilateral relationship between Russia and the United States. And I think Trump’s line, his political line is a very smart one. It’s based on smart thinking, that there is nothing to lose and everything to gain. So it’s a matter of sitting out, and that at some point some other side will give way. This is the way I see it.
Mike Billington: Let me go back to the US. You said in another one of your reports that I read that it was, in your words, that “it’s immaterial that the Trump administration is packed with pro-Israel figures and hard liners on China, for it is Trump that will be calling the shots.” What is your basis for that judgment?
Dr. MK Bhadrakumar:I’ll tell you. I never believed in this “Russia collusion” thesis, hypothesis, during Trump’s first term. I don’t know, Mike, whether you have seen a paper which I have in my collection, a one page advertisement, a full page advertisement in The New York Times, a paid advertisement by a young man in his 30s by the name of Donald Trump. I don’t know if you’ve seen it. Dated 1980 or 81. When President Reagan was elected. You know what he had written there? We both have passed through that stage in life. And I’m sure you’ll agree with me that at that time when you were in your mid-30s, you know what you’re talking about, in your adulthood. Now, he has written there, strongly arguing, that this kind of a collision course with the Soviet Union is unwarranted, that Russia is not an enemy country, and peaceful coexistence is possible, and arms control is a necessity. It’s an imperative need, arms control. And he offered his own services. This young, obscure businessman from New York offered his own services to be an envoy, a presidential envoy, to work on this. I think you know, the Democrats have done a great injustice by caricaturing this man. He’s a man of convictions. I was stunned when I read it that he could have written this when he was in his 30s, you know, mid 30s.
And what he is saying today, it occurs to me, are almost exactly the same thing. No change in that. I can only conclude as an outsider who doesn’t have an emotional reaction towards him, that he is a rational thinker, and also that what he is saying is based on convictions. Putin said the other day that Trump is a “very transparent person.” Putin said it, and Putin said that it’s very difficult to be like that. Putin said it, but that’s what it is. So this camp of liberals, globalists, the neo cons in the American setup, who provided the political cover for the deep state, they have done a great injustice to the political discourses in the US. And they were singularly responsible for creating all these kinds of things — Ukraine, the expansion of NATO, starting from that time, from Bill Clinton’s time. All these are legacies of those people, that camp, and now they are hell bent, despite the mandate — a powerful mandate that a person has got — and he didn’t rig the election. He has a genuine mandate and a very strong mandate. And nonetheless, they are not giving up. They are trying to undermine it. What is it?
Mike Billington: What’s your view of Putin in light of what you’ve said about Trump and Putin?
Dr. MK Bhadrakumar: What I tell you may surprise you, Mike. Putin in my assessment was a “Westernist” in the sense that, someone who believed that Russia’s interests are best served by having a very strong relationship with the Western world and a mutually beneficial relationship with the Western world, but with certain guardrails. Putin’s problem is also this, that Putin is a trained professional intelligence officer. He has said openly that he saw the evidence that the United States helped the insurgents in Chechnya. He leveled this allegation publicly, and the Americans failed to respond. He volunteered even that he could produce good evidence to show that there was direct involvement by American intelligence in the war in Chechnya. Despite that, he was willing to work for a stable, predictable, mutually beneficial relationship, because he was convinced that it is important for Russia’s own development, in terms of technology, in terms of trade, in terms of the standard of living of the Russian people, all that taken into account. So if he is replaced, it is going to be a tremendous loss of opportunity, actually, for the United States. While he is there, therefore, what I am recommending is that the Trump administration should make the fullest use of it, this period, and to go ahead, because you have an interlocutor in Moscow, a very powerful interlocutor in Moscow who can get almost any kind of decision taken there. He is not a dictatorial man. There is a collegial spirit in the Kremlin, and they are all people who are known to him, who formed the National Security Council — the present day Politburo. He can carry them along. Therefore, this period should not be wasted, because, you may not have a person of this kind of stature, experience, who has handled so many presidents across the Atlantic, and, who is innately, intrinsically open to having a relationship with the West. I think that his assignment in Germany was a very formative experience for him. He is a fluent German speaker, so all this could be working to the advantage of Trump.
It will be somewhat audacious on my part to say this, but I have a feeling that Trump means what he says, that Putin can be an interlocutor for him. He believes in it, that there can be a partnership possible.
Mike Billington: Russia and India have had a long, very close relationship, maybe with some troubles here and there. But in both cases, relations between India and China and between Russia and China are extremely important in the current volatile situation that the world is in. What is your view about this three-way relationship between Russia, China and India, the three key countries in this new BRICS alliance and the leadership of the global South.
Dr. MK Bhadrakumar: The troubled relationship with China is working to the disadvantage of India, especially in the present day times, because China is a huge reality, geopolitical reality, and it’s an immediate neighbor. Not having a conversation with China –the kind of line that India adopted in the most recent years, I think, was a very flawed policy. My personal opinion about it is that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, India could have taken a route like what Yeltsin took vis-a-vis China: China–Russia reconciliation. Russian Federation reconciliation came after China began to know that Russia has a strategic autonomy. If India also had behaved that way– the US–India relationship has been a very big handicap for India. There’s a contradiction there. The relationship with the United States is extremely consequential for India. And as far as the Indian elite is concerned, this is an indispensable relationship for India, and therefore in the post-Cold War era, right from the 1990s, India pursued a policy which was almost, one can say, US centric. But one template of it was that the United States gave an impression to India, and sections of Indian opinion also came to believe, that the United States is looking at India as a counterweight to China.
I don’t think the United States had any illusions about India’s weaknesses, and that India could never be a counterweight to China, because there’s such a disparity in the comprehensive national power of the two countries. But a section of Indian elite believed that. Then, of course, the United States was an interested party, to kind of invidiously fuel the China-India tensions, mutual suspicions and so on. This became a very negative factor in China-India relations, because for China, any kind of tendency on the part of the Indians to align with the United States — though, of course, China has a very good, awareness that in the final analysis, India will follow an independent foreign policy. And India cannot in any way be regarded as an ally of the United States working against China. Chinese commentators openly write about it, but they had their own anxieties and concerns as the US-Indian relationship began to gather momentum. It’s a very strong relationship. There is a bipartisan consensus in the United States.
India is one of the few countries, perhaps, which can make a very smooth transition from the Biden presidency to the Trump presidency, and without any kind of hiccups. Even close allies of the United States, as we have seen in Europe or Japan or Australia, have problems in coming to terms with the Trump presidency, but we don’t have anything of that kind in India.
So you see, India is very well placed that way. But this has been a negative factor. But now, having said that, let me also add a caveat here, that I think that the Trump presidency will be good for India, because Trump has no reason, in fact, to act as a spoiler in the India-Russia relationship, which is very vital for India. Biden tried it, but that is not a worry that India has anymore. And similarly, Trump also, I don’t think he will work to fuel the tensions between India and China. Not openly, but even in a quiet way. I don’t think he will do that. So India, speaking that way for the first time, is in a position to pursue its relationship with Russia. And if the Russian-American relations improve, and there is going to be content in the relationship, especially on the economic side and so on, India may even try to get a share of it, may like to join that, because here the Indian’s focus is ultimately in terms of access to technology, trade, and the issues of development. There you see the predicament, which is this, that India doesn’t have a strong manufacturing industry. India’s growth is primarily in terms of the services sector. Infrastructure is developing. Infrastructure development is picking up momentum, but it’s a long way to go. So in these areas, United States cannot help India. It is the Chinese experience which will be relevant for India. I’ve been strongly advocating that no matter the differences with China, India must tap into China’s rise and create synergy for India’s development.
The border problem has to be set aside, Mike, what is often not understood is that this is not a territorial dispute between India and China. Why is it intractable? It is intractable because this is about the creation of a border where no border existed, either on paper or in political reality! So there are vast vacant spaces in the Himalayas, where, no one is in a position to claim that this has been part of India. So both sides are having their own claims, and it’s a question of agreeing to create a border.
You can imagine how difficult it is. And as now the countries have picked up momentum as regional powers, national prestige always comes into play, public opinion comes into play. So it’s going to be very difficult. India has to have a leadership which understands this, that the border dispute is not going to be settled easily, and it may take a long time. But meanwhile, mutual confidence and, in terms of India’s self-interest, it is useful to have a strong relationship with China.
One more point I need to mention is this, that in the final analysis, the fact remains that there are common interests for India and China as rising powers in today’s international order. They both are staking claim to have a voice at the decision making level in the international financial institutions, for example. They have a common interest in that. So they are both ambitious about their role in the coming decades, well into the 21st century. The Chinese commentary is often right about this, that if we work together, it has a multiplier effect, and that can be a game changer for both. But if you do not work together, then both are losing.
Mike Billington: I’d like to ask you to address the situation in the Middle East, but I’d like to approach it through Iran. I think you were Ambassador in Iran, or you worked in Iran.
Dr. MK Bhadrakumar: Well, Yes, I have. I have a long experience on Iran, right from the time of the Islamic revolution. Yes, I mentioned to you my postings at headquarters, I handled only Iran-Pakistan-Afghanistan. I had no other charge. It’s a very important division in the Indian Foreign Ministry. All very key relationships.
Mike Billington: But I think you’ve mentioned in other writings that you’re confident that Trump will not be drawn into Netanyahu’s effort to have a US-Israeli war on Iran. What do you think about Iran’s role today, not just in the Middle East, but their role internationally?
Dr. MK Bhadrakumar: Iran is on the cusp of change. Although there are, I know, people in the US who understand this, but the old stereotyped notions are still dominating in the US. I went to Iran as an observer during the 2024 presidential election. I met people whom I have known from earlier times –for a long time, I interacted with them and talked with them, and I came away distinctly with an impression that Iran is going to change, and since then there is much evidence pointing in that direction. The problem here is that, just as we spoke about Britain, a similar kind of a pernicious influence is there from Israel. Israel will not allow a kind of normalization, which would have been useful for both the United States and Iran. But in my opinion, there again, we could see some interesting changes. The bottom line there is, I think, Trump is genuinely averse to wars, especially getting involved in wars, deploying the United States forces in a war in an outside country to defend another country’s interests. So if that holds good through this next four year period, what is the way that it can develop if there is no war? Naturally, the United States will not decouple from Israel. Israel is hugely influential in the United States in terms of media, Congress, the political elite, think tanks and so on. So that will not change, the so-called Israel lobby — that relationship will continue. But, I have a feeling that at some point, if it has not already taken place during Netanyahu’s visit to the US, I think Trump will convey to him, someone will get them to understand that if they embark on something of an adventurous policy towards Iran, in terms of a conflict, then don’t count on him to step in and fight for Israel, fight Iran, for its interests. You see, a thing which is difficult for the Americans to understand is also this, that I have no doubt in my mind that Iranians are not interested in a nuclear weapon. And however much they try to say this, what option has been left to them in terms of when it comes to their enrichment? The United States pulled out of the JCPOA. Iran had fulfilled its obligations fully. Nonetheless, the United States did not deliver. Then it tore up the agreement and said that it will go for a “maximum pressure” policy. Sanctions remained. None of the sanctions were lifted.
So what is it that one could expect the Iranians to do? They went back to the drawing board and their enrichment continued. And they have now come up to a point that they are a threshold state. Now, still, I don’t think that they will go for — and it’s not a question of thinking. I know the Iranian mind on this. They do not think that nuclear weapons gives them any additional deterrent capability. So they have developed their deterrent capability in other directions. We both can agree that that capability is very credible today, in terms of their missile capabilities and so on. A war means it will be to the detriment of Israel, which is a much smaller country ultimately. And unless the United States came into it, it’s a much smaller country. And I think Israel will be completely destroyed if there is a confrontation, military confrontation. And I feel that, Netanyahu is also ultimately a realist, and he should be knowing this. But the rest is a matter of rhetoric and grandstanding that is straining at the leash to go for a war and so on. But I don’t think it will happen because he knows it. He knows that Iran’s capabilities are today at such a level that there will be no winners in such a war, and Israel will be destroyed in the process.
Besides, I think that Trump definitely would have conveyed this to Netanyahu, if not directly then through others. Witkoff was there 2 or 3 times, he would have conveyed that: “Look, do not do anything.” And much of Trump’s own grandstanding with regard to the “Riviera of the Middle East” and so on in Gaza, I think it’s a matter of publicly posturing that the American backing for Israel is very solid. But that has its limitations. That cannot be logically taken to mean that the United States will align with Israel to fight a war against Iran. My understanding, after conversing with very influential people in Tehran during my last visit in June, is this: that they also do not think that there is going to be a war between the United States and Iran. Of course, the Iranians were all along contemptuous about the Israeli threats to attack because they know that Israel doesn’t have that capability without the United States. When you add up these tendencies, which are there for us to see, if you rationally look at the situation without Pride and Prejudice, then what is the result that you get out of it? That Iran can make an interlocutor for the United States.
And in the present situation, a new factor has also come in there, that the old American strategy of creating an anti-Iran front in that region, with Israeli participation in it, to isolate Iran, that is not going to work. You know, the Iran-Saudi rapprochement brokered by China has brought about a sea change in the regional climate, so much so that, it is doubtful if any of these countries would want to be seen as siding with Israel or the United States in the event of a war with Iran.
The third thing is this, that there is a Saudi factor. Saudi Arabia is also undergoing profound changes. And we must see that. It continues to be an important ally of the United States. That is because it is playing its diplomatic cards very carefully. But it has diversified its relationships, and it has a very strong relationship today with Russia. It began with the creation of this brilliant idea of OPEC-plus, where they have aligned to influence the world market conditions, oil market conditions. And with China, they have a strong relationship again.
So you see Saudi Arabia today is a very different Saudi Arabia. The most important thing about the Saudi approach to life now in regional politics is this: that the traditional attitude of using the militant Islamist jihadi forces as geopolitical tool, they have ended that, they are not in that business anymore. Now, this is a sea change. This has brought about a sea change in the situation in the Middle East. And this young man, the crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, is genuinely a moderniser. I know there’s a lot of demonizing going on about him in the US, in the Biden period. But I think that he is a moderniser. And he is, like the Iranians actually, what is happening, that they are now moving in the same direction, giving primacy to economic growth and development. Iran also has a serious problem, an economic crisis. So they want to move also in the direction of greater trade, greater regional cooperation and so on. So what does it mean? This means that there are no takers in that region, if you want to pursue an inimical strategy towards Iran, be it the United States or Israel. If they want to do that, they are on their own.
This was not at all the case in all these decades that we have passed through. So all this creates a very favorable setting. But let’s see, I have a feeling that there will be an engagement between Trump with Iran at some point, sooner rather than later. He’s only been there for a little more than a month. But this can happen. Maybe this can happen. That will be a very historic development in the Middle East situation.
You see, ultimately, your people do not understand that this is a self-made man, Trump. I am looking at it as an outsider. I’ve never met him nor have I ever talked to him or anything like that. But he is a self-made man, and such people, self-made men, are hugely ambitious. When they have made it big, they become hugely ambitious about their own legacy. This is particularly an American strain. He will be looking at these issues as legacy issues. Russia, Iran and so on. Now you may laugh at it. I can already see a smile on your face. But you know, the fact of the matter is that what he is doing is nothing really short of a revolution. Like Vladimir Lenin said, you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.
Mike Billington: We’ve reached our one hour. But if you don’t mind I’d like to ask you one further issue.
Dr. MK Bhadrakumar: Sure, Sure.
Mike Billington: And that is our Oasis Plan. I don’t know if you’ve looked at this, but this is a plan that Lyndon LaRouche authored way back in the 1970s, which was based on the idea that the real problem in the Middle East, if there was going to be peace, there had to be a concrete development policy which would address the water crisis as well as the energy and transportation and basic infrastructure. The Oasis Plan is a very ambitious idea of building canals, of building nuclear desalinization in order to create huge quantities of fresh water from seawater, and other kinds of infrastructure development, not just for Gaza, but for the whole region, extending out into Iraq and Iran and so forth. I’m wondering what your view of that is. We’re trying to intersect this policy debate now as powerfully as we can, into the discussions that are taking place because of the Gaza crisis.
Dr. MK Bhadrakumar: I think Trump would be interested in this. Logically, Trump would be interested in this. The United States has a handicap. Why is it said that its influence is steadily draining, is losing its capacity in the region. It’s a paradox, but Iran is actually American’s natural ally in that region. The Iranian elite is, again, distinctly pro-Western, and that country is performing today much below its optimal level. It has a huge population, massive land mass and powerful agriculture, a well-developed agriculture base. If only it is allowed to bring out its LNG and gas to the world market, it has a huge reserve. So you see it can be of use and all these things become possible. But so long as that doesn’t happen — how do you realize these dreams? — they will remain on paper. Because I don’t think any country there has got the kind of intellectual resources, absorption capacity for technology, and the national will and purpose in this way that Iran has. Trump will certainly be attracted towards this if an engagement takes place. I strongly suggest that you should promote an engagement, a constructive engagement between the United States and Iran. And this would be in some ways, I tell you, this would be even, I would say, as significant as the normalization of the Russian-American relationship. It will be in America’s interests.
Mike Billington: Very interesting. And thank you very much. I appreciate your taking the time. Your views on these things are very stimulating and insightful, and I think it will lead to further discussion, within our organization and with our associates around the world. I thank you. Do you have any final words you’d like to say?
Dr. MK Bhadrakumar: Mike, I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. I have a sneaking suspicion that we are probably on the same page in the sense that you know you are. I didn’t expect that you would be so receptive to these thoughts, which I projected. So what does it mean? It means that there are thoughtful people in the US, who understand these things. And I think, therefore, you should use your influence, to work on some of these areas. And the Trump presidency, take it as a golden opportunity. And do not be misled by your own people there, your own think tanks and media, mainstream media and so on. He’s opened a gateway, a pathway, through which, if the country can travel, it will be transformed phenomenally. I had never thought that this slogan of MAGA, you know, Make America Great Again, that it is anything but a pipe dream. But now I am beginning to feel that if he proceeds — i saw this morning, for example, the press conference by Trump announcing the $100 billion investment to make chips in Arizona from Taiwan. How often did you see these kind of things during the Biden presidency? So he is working overtime and he has a hugely ambitious agenda. Please do not handicap him by creating the kind of digressions and distractions and so on, as it happened during his First Presidency. This is the essence of democracy, that when someone has earned a legitimate mandate from the people — and what a mandate it is, such a strong mandate from the people, the American people — he got. Then he should be allowed to govern because the people are going to get an opportunity after four years to go on the same path, or take some other path, which is what democracy is about. A peaceful transfer of power is no longer possible in your country. I find it is extremely frustrating.
Mike Billington: It’s like what many people are now saying about Europe, I think it was Vance who said the problem in Europe is not Russia or China — it’s that they no longer believe in the voice of their own people, that there’s no democracy anymore. And he pointed to Romania and the AfD.
Dr. MK Bhadrakumar: And I’m telling you, this is the problem in Europe — you hit the nail on the head. And this is also the problem in the United States. You see, this has to be like these people who are systematically undermining, decrying Trump. They should understand that to behave like adults and let the process of governance continue, discuss a policy but in objective terms, but leave it at that. Everything is not about winning elections. So now you see the plate is like this, that unless he is humbled and he is destroyed, the other side cannot hope to have a revival. It’s a zero sum mentality.
Mike Billington: Yes, exactly. The win-win idea, the idea of mutual collaboration and the respect of the other, from the Peace of Westphalia, is totally missing in this “unipolar” world mentality.
Dr. MK Bhadrakumar: Let me thank you. And I wish you all success in your endeavors. You know, you have had a very eventful life and you aspired for things which were not even humanly possible. So you had such dreams in your life. I admire you, and therefore I feel greatly privileged, that you spent this one hour with me alone in a conversation.
10:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m. Panel One: Strategic Challenges and the Emerging New Order
Music: Johann Sebastian Bach: Prelude and Fugue 3 C sharp major, BWV 872, Dura Jun, piano
Video: Lyndon LaRouche
Moderator: Dennis Speed (U.S.), The Schiller Institute
Helga Zepp-LaRouche (Germany), Founder, The Schiller Institute
H.E. Naledi Pandor (South Africa), former Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, South Africa
Prof. Zhang Weiwei, Professor of International Relations at Fudan University, China,
Prof. Dmitri Trenin (Russia), Director of the Institute of World Military Economy and Strategy at the Higher School of Economics University (HSE) (Moscow)
H.E. Donald Ramotar (Guyana), Former President of Guyana
Ambassador Jack Matlock (U.S.) former United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union, 1987-1991
Ambassador Chas Freeman (U.S.), former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, 1993-1994
Ray McGovern (U.S.), former Senior Analyst, U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); Founding Member, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
Scott Ritter (U.S.), former USMC Intel. and former UN Weapons Inspector)
2:00-5:00 p.m. Panel Two: The Beauty of the Diversity of Cultures
Moderator: Jen Pearl (U.S.), The Schiller Institute
Video: Lyndon LaRouche on Jesu, Meine Freude
Jesu, Meine Freude BWV 227 by J.S. Bach. Schiller Institute Festival Chorus, conducted by John Sigerson.
Megan Dobrodt (U.S.) President, Schiller Institute U.S.A.
Elvira Green (U.S.) Mezzosoprano, formerly with the New York Metropolitan Opera
Helga Zepp-LaRouche (Germany), Founder, The Schiller Institute
Feride Istogu Soprano, Schiller Institute and Founder of Lola Gjoka Project, “Little Halit” and “Sara” (Albanian folk songs arranged by Lola Aleksi Gjoka), Martin Kaptein, piano
Nader Majd Director, Center for Persian Classical Music and Alireza Analouei Founder of the SAMA music ensemble (Iran)
Ruijia Dong (China) mezzo-soprano; Louis Arques, clarinet; Dura Jun, piano. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, “Parto, ma tu ben mio,” (I go, but you, my treasure” aria from {La Clemenza di Tito} ({Titus’s Clemency}).
Yulin Wang (China) tenor, Dura Jun, piano. Confucius: “在水一方” (“By the Waterside”) On the Other Side of the River”– “O wie ängstlich, o wie feurig,” (Oh how fearfully oh with what fire”) Belmonte’s aria from Mozart’s {Die Entführung aus dem Serail} ({Abduction from the Seraglio})
Everett Suttle (U.S.), Internationally known Opera and Concert Tenor, Dura Jun, piano: Jayme Rujas de Aragón y Ovalle: “Vai, azulão” (“Fly Away, Bluebird”), Op. 21.; Everett Suttle, tenor; Dura Jun, piano: Sergei Rachmaninoff (Aleksander Pushkin): “Не пой, красавица” (“Don’t Sing, My Pretty One”), Op. 4, No. 4. Michelle Erin, soprano; Everett Suttle, tenor; Dura Jun, piano: Johannes Brahms: “Schwesterlein” (“Sister”), WoO 33, Vol. 3, No. 15.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, motet Ave Verum corpus (Hail, true body) presentation by John Sigerson (Music Director, Schiller Institute) Ave Verum Corpus by Mozart
7:00-10:00 p.m. Panel Three: The LaRouche Oasis Plan — Driver for the LaRouche Program for 3 Billion New Productive Jobs
Moderator Anastasia Battle
Music: John Sigerson, tenor, and Dura Jun (piano): Three settings of Ludwig Uhland’s poem “Frühlingsglaube” (“Faith in Spring”) by (a) Conradin Kreutzer (1780–1849), (b) Franz Schubert (1797–1828), and (c) Josephine Lang (1815–1880)
Harley Schlanger(U.S.), Vice-Chairman of the Board of The Schiller Institute
Jason Ross (US) Science Advisor to the Schiller Institute
Sergei Glazyev, 2001 video address to Schiller Institute conference (Russia), State Secretary of the Russia-Belarus Union State; Academician, Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS): “Reconstruction After the Financial Crash”
Paul Gallagher (U.S.), Economics Co-Editor, Executive Intelligence Review
William DeOreo (US), civil engineer
Robert Baker (U.S.), Schiller Institute Agriculture Commission; Joe Maxwell (U.S.) Missouri farmer and former Lt. Governor, and state legislator, co-founder of Farm Action Mike Callicrate (U.S.) Kansas cattleman, and founder Ranch Foods Direct, Colorado; Alberto Vizcarra (Mexico), spokesman for the National Front for the Rescue of the Mexican Countryside. Joint Topic: Principles for Food & Agriculture Security
SUNDAY, May 25, 9 a.m. EDT
9:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m. Panel Four: The LaRouche Legacy Foundation on the Actuality of LaRouche’s Ideas
Music: Schubert B flat Piano Sonata 1st movement, Martin Kaptein, piano
Moderator: Dennis Small (U.S.), LaRouche Legacy Foundation
Diane Sare (U.S.), President, The LaRouche Organization, former Independent Candidate for the U.S. Senate in New York: Lyndon LaRouche: The Power of the Individual in a Republic
Lyndon LaRouche, video excerpts
Helga Zepp-LaRouche (Germany), Founder, The Schiller Institute
1:00-4:00 p.m. Panel Five: Shaping the Earth’s Next 50 Years
Music:Franz Schubert Impromptu in G flat, Martin Kaptein, piano
Video: Lyndon LaRouche
Moderator: Daniel Burke (U.S.), The Schiller Institute
Jason Ross (U.S.), Science Advisor to the Schiller Institute
Mike Campbell (U.S.)
Adrian Pearl (U.S.)
Robert Castle (U.S.)
Carolina Domínguez (Mexico), Schiller Institute
Kynan Thistlethwaite (U.S.)
Anastasia Battle (U.S.)
Ashley Tran* (US)
Jose Vega (U.S.), LaRouche Youth Movement Leader, Independent Congressional Candidate, Bronx, New York
Megan Dobrodt (U.S.), President, Schiller Institute
6:15-9:30 p.m. Panel Six: The Power of Reason to Change the Universe
Music:Beethoven Trio #4, Op. 11: Dura Jun, piano; Jungwon Yoon, violin and Sam Chung, cello
Video: Lyndon LaRouche
Moderator: Dennis Speed (U.S.),The Schiller Institute
Jacques Cheminade (France), Former Presidential Candidate, President of Solidarité et Progrès
William Happer (U.S.), Professor Emeritus of Physics, Princeton University; former member, U.S. National Security Council and the U.S. Department of Energy
Kelvin Kemm (South Africa), Nuclear Physicist, Past Chairman, South African Nuclear Energy Corporation
Steve Durst (U.S.), International Lunar Observatory Association
Cody Jones (U.S.), High School Teacher
Jason Ross (U.S.), Schiller Institute Science Advisor
Invitation
Following President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, the trans-Atlantic relationship very quickly shattered, with a deafening burst of noise. “The U.S. is now the enemy of the West,” screamed London’s Financial Times, in a front-page article which concluded: “The West is dead.” The special relationship between the U.S. and the U.K., which was the pillar of the unipolar order, has been broken, never to be restored.
It is now coming to light that the pro-EU forces in Europe were allied with the very same “deep state,” sometimes called the “permanent bureaucracy,” under attack by the Trump administration. Vice President J.D. Vance’s remarks at the Munich Security Conference about the lack of democratic practices in Europe struck a raw nerve in the European “permanent bureaucracy.”
If President Trump succeeds in not only ending the Ukraine war, but also permanently banning the species-threatening use of nuclear weapons, through a process of cooperation and dialogue with Russia and China, he will deserve a place on Mount Rushmore. This would mean nothing less than replacing the practice of geopolitical confrontation against the BRICS states and the Global South with cooperation for the mutual benefit of all.
The second tectonic change is marked by the process in which the nations of the Global South are presently overcoming 500 years of colonialism with the help of China and moving to become middle-level income countries in the near term. Instead of regarding this development as a threat, European nations and the United States should happily welcome the elimination of grinding poverty for billions of people now being liberated to achieve their full potential. The only way the danger of global nuclear war and the subsequent annihilation of the human species can be overcome, is by cooperation with the Global Majority.
The conference will also reflect on the life work of Lyndon LaRouche. The LaRouche Legacy Foundation (LLF) will present ample evidence that Lyndon LaRouche, as early as the 1960s, had forecast the present crisis of the liberal system with astounding accuracy. If the world had listened to LaRouche’s analysis, and his warning of Nixon’s destruction of the old Bretton Woods system, by the introduction of floating exchange rates, the world would never have entered the present existential crisis—a crisis characterized by a zooming speculative financial bubble, collapsing physical economy, and an unquenchable drive for war and the Schachtian militarization of the economy associated with it.
The scientific method of LaRouche’s physical economy is most closely approximated today by China, which is why that country is so enormously successful, a success which can be replicated by any nation that chooses to do so.
The major challenge facing the world as a whole, is to finally create a just, new world economic order, and to apply the concept of peace through development. At the conference, there will be an important discussion of the campaign by the Schiller Institute to put the Oasis plan, first proposed by LaRouche in 1975, on the agenda for all of Southwest Asia. There will be a special focus on a development plan for the African continent in line with the African Union’s Agenda 2063, which shares the spirit of the Oasis Plan.
We need to catapult the entire world out of the present misery of geopolitical confrontation, out of the barbaric conception that everything is a zero-sum game, and that one always needs an enemy. We have reached a moment in history in which we absolutely need to reach a new paradigm that proceeds from the idea of the one humanity first, and then brings into cohesion the interests of all nations with that of the one humanity. We must create a new era in human history, based on completely new axioms, not those of the old order which has just imploded. For that, we need a new global security and development architecture that takes into account the existential interest of every single nation on the planet. It is the quality of a degraded, or a sublime character of culture, which determines how we think. The needed new paradigm requires that we replace the present ignorance, indifference and outright chauvinism with respect to other cultures, with curiosity, interest, knowledge and even love for the different cultures of the planet. The Schiller Institute conference will feature a dialogue of cultures and civilizations, whereby the uniqueness, as well as the universal principles uniting art, will be brought forth.
Mankind is at its most important branching point ever. If we continue as barbarians, we will suffer the fate of the dinosaurs and troglodytes. But we also have hope because man is capable of the limitless perfection of his reason and beauty of character. This must inform our vision of the future.
