David Dobrodt

Helga Zepp-LaRouche introduces the intention of the April 9 Schiller Institute conference. View the conference in its entirety here.

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Your daily update for April 25, 2022 from Harley Schlanger.

This is an edited transcript of the interview with Joel Dejean by Mike Billington on April 20, 2022. Mr. Dejean is the LaRouche Independent candidate for U.S. Congress from Texas’s newly-created 38th C.D. Mr. Billington is an Editor for Executive Intelligence Review magazine. 

Mike Billington: Greetings! This is Mike Billington, co-editor of the Executive Intelligence Review. I’m here today with Joel Dejean for an interview for EIR, for the Schiller Institute, and for The LaRouche Organization.

Joel Dejean is a LaRouche Independent candidate for Congress in the 38th District in Texas, running against a Republican favorite, Wesley Hunt. Joel was born in Haiti. He moved with his parents at the age of six to the Bronx, a Borough of New York City, and in 1972 won admission to the prestigious Bronx High School of Science, which is part of the New York City public school system. He earned a degree in Electrical Engineering from the state university at Stony Brook, followed by 8 years working at the Texas Instruments defense electronic group, where he worked on projects, for the U.S., Australian, and South Korean air forces. 

He has been a collaborator of Lyndon LaRouche’s Fusion Energy Foundation, and the LaRouche political movement since 1985.

In 1995, while Joel was campaign for a LaRouche associate in France, he suffered a severe retinal tear in his right eye and returned to Houston. Efforts to save that eye failed as did work on the left eye, leaving him blind. But this has in no way stopped his full-time effort to fight for the future of mankind. He’s able to read anything he wishes on the internet, through various apps, and also has access to audio books and to 500 newspapers and magazines from the National Federation of the Blind. In fact, his campaign slogan is that he’s the only candidate with a positive vision for the future.

Welcome, Joel! Would you like to add anything about your career?

Joel Dejean: Well, the only thing I’ll add, is that in July of 1969 I was 10 years old, and I remember being on a family vacation to the Niagara Falls area. The evening of July 20, I remember watching Neil Armstrong come down the ladder of the Lunar Lander and take that “giant leap for mankind.” That inspired me to study real science and eventually become an engineer, and that’s how I ended up in Texas. 

Billington: You’ve run for office in Texas before. You ran for the Houston Independent School Board in the fall of 1993, and then in 1994, for U.S. Congress from the 25th C.D. in Texas, campaigning for Lyndon LaRouche’s solutions to the unfolding economic and strategic breakdown.

What made you decide to run again, at this critical moment in global history? 

Dejean: Back then, we were running as LaRouche Democrats. LaRouche himself, in January of 1994 was still in prison. He was paroled just a few weeks later. We were trying to revive the tradition of the Democratic Party—the Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy tradition of scientific optimism and a control of the banking system.

Now, in 2022, both parties have completely lost any idea of the tradition of the American System. The idea of running now as an Independent, is, [a reflection of what] LaRouche said on his 90th birthday: Party politics is out, party politics is corrupt. So, we have to provide an alternative to the American people. Because if you look at the policies coming from the Republicans and the Democrats, they are in goose-step, marching toward war, depression, and famine. We have to give the American public in Texas, in the nation, and the people of the world an alternative.

Billington: So, both you and Diane Sare—a LaRouche Independent candidate running from New York State for the U.S. Senate against Chuck Schumer—are actually running as national candidates, to build a movement of citizens to take responsibility for the current global crisis of civilization, the impending dark age of economic and strategic collapse, which at this point no one can avoid.

What inspired you to join the LaRouche movement in the first place?

Dejean: The first time I ran into the LaRouche movement was March 23, 1983. I didn’t even know about him then. I had just completed a round of flight tests with an upgraded infrared detection system at the Eglin Air Force Base in the panhandle of Florida. I had gotten wind that President Ronald Reagan was going to give a national Defense speech on TV that evening. I watched the President saying that we had to get the scientific community that gave us nuclear weapons to now give us the capability to make those same weapons “impotent and obsolete.” 

Although I wasn’t working on strategic weapons, but tactical weapons, that speech spoke to me directly. I was inspired by that speech. The next day, when I went in to work, I found almost no reaction.

I took another two years before I ran into LaRouche organizers. I was on a trip in Los Angeles. I started reading LaRouche’s material. I joined the Fusion Energy Foundation. That’s when I got a clear conception of what Reagan had been talking about. He wasn’t talking about off-the-shelf technology; he was talking about new physical principles, although he didn’t put it in those terms.

Once I met the LaRouche organization, I was inspired to learn more and more, and that’s how I came to know Lyndon LaRouche.

High-Level Texas Gerrymandering

Billington: Your District was recently created, as I understand it, through gerrymandering by a Texas state government which is Republican-led, and includes much of the world-famous Houston Energy Corridor. The gerrymandering was actually designed for your opponent, Capt. Wesley Hunt, a West Point graduate who was a helicopter pilot in the Iraq War, who is supported and funded by Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, James Baker III and others from the military-industrial complex.

What is Hunt’s program, and what is the choice you are presenting to the voting public in contrast to that of Capt. Hunt?

Dejean: Here’s the irony: Hunt claims to be against the Green New Deal, but on his website he says he is for decarbonizing the economy, he’s for a shift away from fossil fuels. His version goes that he wants to wait until Russia, India, and China get rid of fossil fuels first. So, he wants them to commit suicide, and then we can join them. Hunt’s policy is the same as that of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the same as James Baker III—it’s for the Green New Deal, if not in name, but in actuality. His other policy is to confront Russia, crush their economy. His policies are leading us directly toward World War III with Russia and China.

A Fusion Energy Science Driver

Billington: You’re well-known as an expert on the science of nuclear and fusion energy. You’ve given classes and you have written articles on the necessary transformation of the way we live, through the development of fusion power as opposed to the Green New Deal—fusion power which could provide essentially unlimited energy for all of mankind.

What is your message regarding fusion, and why has its development been sabotaged over these past 60 years since President John Kennedy called for a crash program before he was assassinated?

Dejean: I was always for nuclear power—mostly nuclear fission power. As a matter of fact, when I was in the 5th grade I made a model of a nuclear reactor. The only thing I couldn’t get was yellow cake, so it never went critical. But I was always for nuclear power. Matter of fact, my last year at Stony Brook the IEEE [Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers professional association] caucus in the university [of which I was a member] visited the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant. It was scheduled to come online within a few months, but Mario Cuomo, at that time Governor of New York State, shut down that plant and, after $5 billion being spent on building it, not one watt of power was produced.

So, as I ran into the Fusion Energy Foundation, I saw that not only was LaRouche in favor of fission nuclear power, he was in favor of a full-fledged development of fusion power, not just for energy, but for things like space propulsion, a way of getting to Mars and other destinations at a high-enough speed so that the occupants of the spacecraft will have a chance to arrive at their destination ready for exploration.

Billington: You’re already well-known in Houston. You’ve spoken several times in the recent past to the Houston City Council as a strong opponent of the Green New Deal, both because of the faulty science behind the carbon argument, but also because it’s used to justify the banking cartel’s diversion of credit from industry and agriculture and scientific research, in order to bail out the bankrupt trans-Atlantic financial system.

How are people responding to your message?

Dejean: Last year on Feb. 9, I testified to the Houston City Council and the Mayor, Sylvester Turner, one week before the deep freeze hit Texas. We both—Joe Jennings also testified with me—warned the City Council and the Mayor that their adoption of the Green New Deal and the Climate Action Plan would not only threaten Houston as an energy capital; it would lead to brownouts and blackouts. One week later, the whole State froze over, which obviously was blamed on global warming. We had a blackout for 48-96 hours, depending on your neighborhood, and close to 1,000 Texans died, freezing in the dark.

The people I mentioned that to, realized that not only was I right, but that this whole sham of global warming is a fraud. However, people like Sylvester Turner went on national television one week later to say that the freeze proved that global climate change is real. So, they are too dense to get it, but the population has reacted quite positively to what I said.

Billington: You spoke recently to the Houston City Council, right?

Dejean: There’s a little town in 38th C.D. called Bunker Hill. I went up there on the 19th and had 3 minutes to speak. I began by referencing the other Bunker Hill near Boston, and referenced that 247 years ago, on April 19, 1775 the Battle of Lexington and Concord occurred, which led in June 17 that same year to the Battle of Bunker Hill. I said that while we eventually lost that battle to the British, that battle proved that the Continental Army was a formidable force that eventually forced the British out of Boston. 

I referenced that there was a British officer who after the battle said, “Any more victories like this will lose the war,” which they eventually did lose. I referenced that today the British control Capitol Hill, from the President who’s called for regime-change in Russia, to the Senators like Sen. Chris Coons from Delaware, who has called for American boots on the ground in Ukraine, to lunatics like Sen. Roger Wicker from Mississippi, who has called for dropping nuclear bombs on Russia.

You have this whole Capitol Hill operation in the Congress. The Democrats and the Republicans are, like I said, in lockstep in goosestep, marching toward World War III, totally oblivious to the control that the British retain over Capitol Hill, in our government.

Billington: You write in a campaign statement from March 22—which I read—that we are now facing “the front end of the final hyperinflationary collapse of the Western dollar-based, liberal, free-market edifice of Western finance, forecast decades ago by economist Lyndon LaRouche.” You note that the unsustainable bubble of several quadrillion dollars in gambling debts that can never be repaid is driving a policy of fascist austerity and outright starvation globally.

What is the solution?

Dejean: The solution is really quite simple. LaRouche laid it out back in June of 2014 in his “Four Laws to Save the Economy.”

The first step is we have to reintroduce President Franklin Roosevelt’s Glass-Steagall Act, where we separate the commercial banks from the investment banks. We have to control the issuance of currency. We have to nationalize the Federal Reserve, so that we can issue long-term, low interest credit to infrastructure—things like high-speed rail, water management. The Fourth Law is that we have to have a full-scale, crash program to get controlled thermonuclear fusion, hopefully within the next decade.

Combine that with China and Russia, and India and the United States—the Four Powers—all working together, we could overwhelm this London-Wall Street dying financial system, and we can get the world on a firm security, and economic development architecture.

Rebuild and Develop Afghanistan and Haiti

Billington: You have also spoken out against the extreme evil being done to Afghanistan through the sanctions after 20 years of destruction, imposing sanctions even stealing their [financial] reserves that were on deposited in the U.S. and European banks. Afghanistan, as well as your birthplace, Haiti, represent two of the most serious threats of outright genocide now facing the conscience of mankind.

How have you acted on this, and what do you propose?

Dejean: Back in October, I held a rally outside the Houston office of the Federal Reserve, demanding that the $9 billion in Afghan funds being held by the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury be released. It was bad enough that the U.S. stole $9 billion in Afghan national money after spending $2 trillion in destroying that nation over the last 20 years.

I have endorsed the Schiller Institute’s plan for development of Afghanistan, and we released a plan in October for the development of Haiti. The plan for Haiti was originally proposed by two Chinese companies five years ago, that they would fund and develop water, sanitation, and power for the city of Port-au-Prince. Haiti, which is not a sovereign country, was told by the IMF and the U.S. State Department that they have no right to work with China. So, after the earthquake of 2010, and after the earthquake of August 2021, nothing has been rebuilt, except for a few fancy hotels for the non-governmental organizations that come in like vultures to feast off the carcasses of Haitians.

I support the Schiller Institute’s plan to develop Haiti. Today, charcoal provides 75% of the power used in Haiti. I have called for Haiti to be the first nation to go from charcoal power to fusion power in the next 10 years, with the help of the U.S. and China. That’s the way out for Haiti; that’s the way out for Afghanistan.

Now that they’ve gotten away with stealing $9 billion funds, the same Treasury Department and Federal Reserve system has stolen $300 billion from Russia. These guys are the biggest bank robbers in history.

Support China’s Belt & Road Initiative

Billington: Indeed. The world-famous MD Anderson Medical Center in Houston was one of the first targets of FBI Director Christopher Wray, both during the Trump administration and continuing in the Biden administration, carrying out an outright McCarthyite war on Chinese and Chinese-American scientists in the United States called the China Initiative, threatening them with arrest. Many have been arrested, and many have been thrown out of their jobs on the false claim that because of their collaboration with Chinese scientists, were somehow functioning as spies.

This China Initiative has recently been shut down under enormous pressure from Americans, not just Chinese-Americans, but Americans who recognize this was an abomination to be taking place in the United States. But the witch hunt against all things Chinese is continuing.

You, I know, have spoken out against this. What have you done to counter this anti-China hysteria?

Dejean: You may remember that during the last few months of the Trump administration, they actually shut down the Houston Chinese Consulate. Over the last 5 years, we’ve had a series of meetings with representatives from the Houston Chinese Consulate, talking about the Belt & Road Initiative. We had one meeting where the Chinese Consulate representative and a representative of the Pakistani Consulate here met with the Schiller Institute at a university campus to discuss the Belt & Road Initiative.

I have continued to call for the Belt & Road Initiative. I’m also calling for the U.S. to join that in what was called the North America Belt & Road Initiative. We should be part of this massive infrastructure-building. The FBI has shut down all of the Consulate activities in Houston. They have gone after Chinese scientists, and they say that the fact that Chinese scientists are working on a cure for cancer is somehow a national security threat. I continue to denounce that.

My campaign went to the Chinese New Year’s Festival this past February and got out a statement I put out on working with China. We don’t need to be enemies of China and Russia. We need to collaborate on the frontiers of science, in space, fusion, and medicine. 

Organizing in District 38

Billington: Now, of course, the focus has shifted to an all-out demonization and attack on Russia—a total degeneration of international relations with Russia from the West, and the massive and illegal economic warfare against Russia, openly aimed at destroying the Russian economy. Supposedly, this is justified by Russia’s military operations against Ukraine, but as we now all know, the U.S. killed millions of innocents and drove millions more out of their homes in totally illegal wars against Serbia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and more, and never faced justice for these crimes.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche and the Schiller Institute have called for an international conference of all nations to establish a new security and development architecture for all nations based on the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which settled 150 years of warfare in Europe, by establishing sovereign nation-states that recognized their interest to be the interest of the other, and forgave all previous alleged crimes committed on both sides, in order to establish peace through development.

I know you’re working on this. How are you organizing for this event, to have this international conference, and to prevent this extreme danger of a war with Russia, which also, of course, could be nuclear, and will almost certainly include a similar war against China? 

Dejean: There are a significant number of Muslims in the 38th C.D. I don’t know the exact percentage, but my campaign has gone to several of the mosques in the District, or right near the District. We have spoken to the people coming out of the service. We mentioned the obvious hypocrisy of the U.S. being “so concerned about the poor Ukrainians,” and not giving a damn about the millions of people killed in the illegal wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya. The reaction has been quite positive for a large number of Pakistanis. We were speaking to them about how [Pakistan Prime Minister] Imran Khan was being targetted for daring to speak his mind and saying that Pakistan is not a slave to the West. You saw what happened last week, where Khan was overthrown.

I’m continuing to organize with the Muslims in the District, and have scheduled an event for next week, where we will bring together contacts that we have met on the college campuses. There are four community college campuses in the District where we have gotten probably over 100 student contacts of all ages.

There are a lot of veterans going to these community colleges—veterans of the Iraq War, veterans of the Afghan War who are trying to make something out of their lives, who have realized that their efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan were totally wasted, not by their service, but by people like my Republican opponent, Wesley Hunt, a graduate of West Point, and is campaigning, proud of the fact that he had 55 combat missions flying Apache attack helicopters in Iraq. As a reward for his service, he became a diplomatic liaison to Saudi Arabia—the very nation that financed and supplied the hijackers who took down the World Trade Center towers in New York City and attacked the Pentagon.

I issued a call, challenging Wesley Hunt to “fess up” to what he was doing in Saudi Arabia, and whether he is still proud of his disgraceful service in Iraq. So far, I’ve gotten no response.

I continue to organize on the campuses, at the mosques, and all over the District—city councils, wherever we can find people. Like I said, I’m holding this event next week to bring these forces together.

Sanctions and The War in Ukraine

Billington: I should also mention and ask about the situation in Ukraine, where our media, our Congress, the Biden administration, both major political parties are all talking about “saving the heroic Ukrainians,” while denying the self-evident and extensively proven fact that the cutting edge of the Ukrainian battle against the people of the Donbas since the coup in 2014 in which the U.S., Victoria Nuland, and Joe Biden openly supported neo-Nazi forces—with swastikas—supporters of Stepan Bandera, Hitler’s ally in Ukraine. And that we’re now proudly supporting what can only be described as a neo-Nazi force carrying out mass murder in Ukraine, while trying to blame everything that happens on the Russians.

I’m sure you have been speaking out against this, and I wonder if you want to comment on it.

Dejean: Yes. I’ve gone to several conservative Republican meetings, and brought this up, that Wesley Hunt and his backers, like James Baker III, are pushing policies that are leading us directly toward war with Russia—not so much over Ukraine, but I’ve spoken out to say that it was the last 30 years of NATO expansion, where after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall coming down, James Baker III promised the Soviet government, Gorbachev personally, that NATO would not move “one inch” to the East, if Gorbachev allowed the reunification of East and West Germany under NATO. Baker was truthful, in the sense that NATO didn’t move one inch to the East; they moved 1,000 kilometers to the East.

Any time I mentioned that this fight around Ukraine is leading toward a U.S.-Russia war, I’ve had no one say, “Yeah, we should attack Russia; we should go in for the kill”—lunatic policies that are coming out of the U.S. Senate right now.

There is a reaction against the propaganda, but given the real history of the 2014 coup in Ukraine, and the policy of regime-change that worked so successfully in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and our attempted regime-change in Syria, people realize that we’ve been going down the wrong road. And to back either a Republican or Biden Democrat is suicide. 

Billington: The sanctions policies against many nations, but now emphatically against Russia and China, and their theft of foreign nations’ reserves, which you mentioned, is now driving the majority of the world’s nations to move away from dealing with the dollar at all, since that’s used as the justification for stealing their reserves and imposing sanctions. They’re now beginning to trade in local currencies, and Russia and China, and others are even setting up a totally alternative financial structure, independent of the dollar. 

If the world devolves even further into these warring blocs, a war and global chaos will certainly become unavoidable. How can we bring Americans, and Europeans, to understand that their future depends on cooperation with all nations, rather than the dying delusion of a unitary superpower controlling the world from Washington and Wall Street?

Dejean: The spearpoint of changing the United States is Diane Sare’s campaign for the Senate from New York state, where she began petitioning yesterday, and my campaign here in Texas against these Republican lunatics like Wesley Hunt. We have to mobilize people in the oil industry, scientists, people in NASA. Ordinary Americans do realize that their self-interest is in working with Russia, working with China to develop the world, or lacking that, we’re going to march right down to World War III, where no one will come out with that war.

Fusion Energy with Helium-3

Billington: Thanks. Would you like to add anything?

Dejean: Yes. Today, we are recording this interview on April 20, is the 50th anniversary of Apollo 16 landing on the Moon. We went to the Moon, not just to beat the Russians. We landed six landers on the Moon over a three-and-a-half-year period. The astronauts of Apollo 16, Charles Duke and John Young collected 200 pounds of lunar samples which they brought back to Earth. It turns out that in those lunar samples, unknown at the time they were collected, is an isotope of helium, helium-3, which is very rare on Earth, but there is an estimated one million tons of helium-3 on the lunar surface, which we could have access to.

Helium-3 happens to be the perfect fuel for second-generation fusion reactors, using deuterium from seawater and helium-3 from the Moon. Chinese scientists have estimated that if we were to develop the helium-3 on the Moon, we would have enough fusion power to take care of the needs on Earth for tens of thousands of years. And, there’s plenty of helium-3 in the large, gaseous planets like Saturn and Neptune, so we would never run out.

So, the Chinese are aware of this. That’s why they’re pushing for a lunar program. As Lyndon LaRouche said in 1987, for his 1988 campaign for President, we have to develop fusion propulsion so we can get to Mars in a matter of days, instead of months. We can’t keep using chemical rockets like we’ve been using for the last 60 years, if we hope to develop Mars.

That is the future that I’m laying out to my constituents in Texas—is that we could use the tradition of Apollo, use the tradition of American science, which developed nuclear power, not only to develop the Moon and Mars, but give the children of today something to look forward to. Right now, all they have to look forward to is starvation and war. We have to give them a future.

Billington: Thank you, Joel Dejean, candidate in Texas for U.S. Congress. I think this extremely optimistic message, so desperately needed in a nation fearful and demoralized by the degeneration of our economy and the danger of global war, should ring true and inspire both young and old in your District and around the country. We will make sure this interview gets spread far and wide.

Thank you.

Dejean: Thank you, Michael.

Statement by Helga Zepp-LaRouche recorded on February 28, 2022.

Sign our petition, “Convoke an International Conference to Establish A New Security and Development Architecture for All Nations.”

I’m speaking to you because I want to give you an extremely important message.  As you know, since a few days, Russian troops are in Ukraine, in a military operation.  As a reaction, the West has imposed very, very harsh sanctions on Russia, which are going to have incredible effects, not only on Russia, but also on the whole world.  President Putin has put the Russian nuclear weapons on alert.  Any further escalation of this situation has the danger of things going completely out of control, and in the worst case leading to a nuclear exchange, and World War III, and if that happens the chances are that nobody will survive this.  This could be the extinction of the human species.

Now, to understand how we got to this point, one has to look at the recent history of at least the last 30 years, because we have been sleepwalking from a point, which was incredibly hopeful, into a worsening of the situation—step by step, step by step—and most people were completely indifferent to what was happening.

You should remember that in 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, many of the young people were not even born then, and don’t have a very good idea of what this period was: This was a moment of incredible historical potential, because you could have built a peace order, because the enemy was gone, or about to go; the Soviet Union did not represent a threat any more because Gorbachev had agreed to the democratization of the Eastern European countries, and this was what we called the “star hour of humanity,” one of those rare moments when you can shape history for the better.  

Well, the Soviet Union did not represent a threat then, and therefore, it was quite normal that [U.S. Secretary of State] James Baker III, on Feb. 9, 1990, in a discussion with Gorbachev, promised, “NATO will not expand one inch to the East.”  Now [NATO Secretary General] Stoltenberg nowadays says never was such a promise given, but that’s not true.  Jack Matlock, who was U.S. Ambassador in Moscow at that time, has stated many, many times that, indeed, there was such a promise.  There is a video with former German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, where he confirms the same thing, and just a few days ago, the then-French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas made an interview where he absolutely confirmed this, and said, yes, we did promise this, and a new document has appeared which is in the British Archives.   

So there is overwhelming evidence that such a promise was made.  And therefore, when Putin says now, that he feels betrayed, there is actual evidence, because also Putin came to Germany in 2001, and he addressed the German Bundestag, in German, and it was full of offers, full of hopes to build a common European house, to have cooperation.  He talked about the German people, the people of culture, of Lessing, of Goethe. 

And there was the potential to really even undo in the 1990s, with Yeltsin and the shock therapy.  Because at that time, unfortunately, what had happened is that certain circles in great Britain and in the United States decided to build a unipolar world.  Rather than building a peace order, they said, OK, now is the opportunity to build an empire based on the model of the British Empire, based on the special relationship between Great Britain and the United States: It was called PNAC, the Project for a New American Century.  And slowly, step by step, they started to go for regime change of everybody who didn’t agree with that, for color revolution, for eventually humanitarian interventionist wars, which gave us Afghanistan, Iraq, which was based on lies; the incredible lying to the UN Security Council in the case of Libya; the attempt to topple Assad [in Syria]; wars which have caused {millions of people} to die, millions of people to become refugees and have a destroyed life. 

So this was one area where Ukraine, from the very beginning, was big in the calculation.  There were altogether five waves of NATO expansion, and in 2008, at the summit in Bucharest, it was promised that Ukraine and Georgia would become part of NATO, which, from the standpoint of Russia is really not acceptable.  Because if you have rather than having NATO not moving “one inch to the East,” it moved 1000 km to the East!  It’s sitting now in the Baltic countries, at the border of Russia, but Ukraine would mean that offensive weapons systems could reach Moscow in less 5 minutes, and make Russia, de facto, indefensible.  You have to understand that that is the vital security interest of Russia, which, if NATO would include Ukraine, it would violate that interest, and that is why all this discussion that the Ukrainians have the right to choose their own alliance is really not true!  Because it’s also a principle, in all the official documents, that you cannot have the security of one country at the expense of the security of another one, which would be Russia, in this case. 

So what happened was, when the EU tried to include Ukraine in the EU Association Agreement at the end of 2013, Yanukovych, the President at that time, recognized that that was unacceptable, because it would have opened up the Black Sea and NATO practically for the Ukrainian ports, so he pulled out of the agreement.  And then, immediately, you had the demonstrations on the Maidan; and it is always said these were only democratic people—sure, there were democratic people who wanted to be part of Europe and part of the West. But from the very beginning, there were elements which were kept by intelligence services since the Second World War, the networks of Stepan Bandera, that was the person who had cooperated with the Nazis in the Second World War, and Stepan Bandera became actually an agent of the MI6; his networks had offices in Munich, they were part of the anti-Bolshevist bloc of nations, they were kept by the intelligence services, the MI6, the CIA, the BND, for the case of a confrontation with the Soviet Union.  And these networks were mobilized in the Maidan as part of a regime change operation, a color revolution, and then finally the coup, for which the United States, according to Victoria Nuland, had spent $5 billion to build up NGOs and basically trying to manipulate the population to think that if they joined the EU, they would be rich like Germany overnight, which naturally was never in the cards.

So then, naturally, the coup happened, and with the coup in February 2014, networks came to power which were extremely repressive against the Russian language, the Russian population, and that was why the people of Crimea voted to be part of Russia.  It was not Putin who annexed Crimea, it was a measure of self-defense of the Russian-speaking people in Crimea to have a vote in a referendum.  And the people in East Ukraine decided to declare independent republics for the very same reason. 

Now, the Minsk agreement was supposed to find a negotiation to give these independent republics more autonomy within Ukraine, but the Ukraine government {never} pursued that, and Germany and France which were supposed to be part of the Normandy discussions, including Germany, France, Ukraine and Russia, they never put any pressure on the Ukrainian government so it did not go anywhere at all.  In the meantime, you had more and more maneuvers around Russia, and this escalated to the point where, in November, there were maneuvers even flying planes testing and rehearsing a nuclear attack on Russia up to 14 miles within the border of Russia.  

Now, it was that feeling of increasing encirclement, which is the reason why Putin declared on December 17 of last year, that he wanted to have security guarantees, for Russia, from the United States and NATO that they would guarantee legally binding the security of Russia, which would include: NATO not expanding any further to the East, Ukraine never becoming a member of NATO for the reasons I had mentioned earlier; and not to put offensive weapons on the border of Russia. 

Now, he did not get an answer.  He got an answer from the United States and NATO, basically responding to secondary issues, like a certain agreement to go back into arms negotiations, but he did not get an answer to the core demands.  And that is why, for example, I think Russia and China have now moved into a very close strategic alliance, which happened on February 4, and Putin was trying to test out if there would be a willingness of European nations like Germany—whose Chancellor Scholz went to Moscow, French President Macron went to Moscow—but he came to the conclusion that there was no willingness to stand up against the continuous push by NATO and by the United States, to keep with the encirclement of Russia. 

Now, you can say war is very bad, and naturally, it is the most horrible thing which can happen.  But you have to understand that if you put the core security interests of Russia into jeopardy, well, that’s what you get!  You have to understand the history of Russia: Because two times there was an invasion of Russia already.  One was with Napoleon, who if you remember or if you know history, had an enormously big army and was going into the very wide region of Russia. And there was a plan to defeat Napoleon by luring him into the far regions, by having him draw a long operational line, by using the fact that Napoleon was destroying everything on the way in, to basically make it impossible for him to have any more requisition of food and other materials; they even allowed the burning down of Moscow, to make sure there was nothing with which Napoleon could survive the winter, so he had to make the decision to return, in the winter, with the snow.  And when Napoleon’s troops finally came back at the end of the borders of Russia, there were only a few people from a previously gigantic army.  This was a traumatic experience, already, there.

Then, naturally, you had Hitler, who also invaded Russia, and for the Russians this is an experience, which is deeply ingrained in their DNA, one can say, because they lost 27 million people!  And for them, to defend Russia, it’s the most important—it’s a life-and-death question. 

So, what happened now, is when all of this escalated, Russia said, we absolutely put a red line, when these red lines were not respected, then this was an action which was supposed to make very clear, and Putin said he will take a “military-technical reaction,” and I don’t think Russia has the intention to occupy Ukraine; I think they want to have some neutralization, they want to have a de-Nazification, and frankly, with the present combination—sure, Zelenskyy was democratically elected, but the Azov Brigade is still there as part of the defense forces, you have still in the parliament, a lot of right-wing elements, and Zelenskyy has changed from a peace-loving, or promising peace President, into somebody who is completely a tool, not even daring to bring up Minsk 2, because he feels under threat that if he goes for Minsk 2, he will be toppled or worse. 

So, it is a situation where we have to accept the fact that a de-Nazification is not Russian propaganda, but it has a real element to it.  And it’s a complete scandal that the West, with their so-called freedom-loving, Western values, “rules-based order,” democracy, human rights—which has become a little bit shale, after all these interventionist wars, and especially what was done, and is being done in Afghanistan, where people are left to die and it’s all a conscious policy, because people knew what would happen if there would be such a hasty withdrawal, leaving the Afghanistan people with absolutely nothing.  

So we are in a very, very dangerous situation.  On Sunday, an epochal shift has happened:  Germany, which has good reasons to say “Never Again” do we want war, because we had two world wars on our soil, and in the memory of everybody, especially the older people, we have the stories of our parents and grandparents in our ears of what war does when it is on your soil!  So on Sunday, there was an earthquake, which is I think an absolute catastrophe, because Chancellor Scholz made a government declaration in the parliament, which was turning the German government de facto into a war cabinet.  They now want to have a beefing up of the Bundeswehr; they created a special fund of €100 billion for this year alone; they want to increase the military spending; they already are sending weapons to Ukraine, which was really against any principle Germany had, because it had the idea to never send weapons into crisis areas.  

So all of this is happening.  The German population is in a complete state of brainwashing.  In France, it’s not very different, but in Germany it’s much worse.  And people on the scene, who know both situations, were reporting that it can only be compared to the shock the American people had after 9/11.  I was in the United States at that point, and I remember, you couldn’t talk to anybody, because people were completely crazy, hyped up, whipped up, and this is now the situation in Germany.  

When I heard the speech of Chancellor Scholz yesterday, it reminded me of this horrible speech of Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm, Emperor Wilhelm II, on Aug. 6, 1914, when he announced Germany basically preparing for World War I.  And we all know that at the beginning of World War I, nobody expected that it would be four years in the trenches, back and forth, back and forth, meaningless killing, and at the end, a whole generation was destroyed, and the Versailles Treaty was an unjust treaty, which was just creating the precondition for World War II.

So, what do we do now? I think the only chance is that we get an immediate international mobilization for an international security architecture which must take into account the security interest of every single nation on the planet, including Russia, including China, and the United States, Europe nations, and all other nations on the planet.  The model for this is the Peace of Westphalia Treaty.  That treaty came about because you had 150 years of religious war in Europe, the culmination of which was the Thirty Years’ War, and it led to the destruction of everything: One-third of assets, of people, of villages, of animals—so that eventually, people came to the conclusion that if they continue this war, there will be absolutely nobody left to enjoy the victory.  And from four years, from 1644-1648, people were sitting together, working out a treaty which established very important principles.  The most important principle was that peace can only be won if a new arrangement takes into account the interest of the other.  And then it had other principles, such as, for the sake of peace, you have to make foreign policy on the basis of love; you have to forget the crimes on either side, because otherwise you would never get to an agreement; and it established the principle that in the reconstruction of the economy after the war, the state must have an important role, and that led to cameralism in economics. 

This Treaty of Westphalia was the beginning of international law, and it is reflected today in the Charter of the United Nations, and it is that model which must be taken for nations to sit together, to say, what are the principles how we can give ourselves an order which allows the peaceful coexistence of all nations?  And the equivalent of the cameralistic principles of the Peace of Westphalia must be that this new security architecture combination, must address that which is the real cause of war, which is the pending collapse of the Western financial system, which is about to blow long before this situation with Ukraine developed, but it will be aggravated now by the sanctions and all the consequences; and it must apply those measures which Lyndon LaRouche has defined already many years ago, namely, there must be an end to the casino economy, because that is what is driving this confrontation; there must be a global Glass-Steagall banking separation agreement; you must have a national bank in every single country in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton; and there must be a New Bretton Woods system to give a credit system for long-term development to uplift the developing countries through industrial development.  And all of that must focus on the pressing issue of the pandemic: We need a world health system, because without that this pandemic and future pandemics will not go away; we need an increase in world food production, because we have a famine of “biblical dimensions” as David Beasley from the World Food Program is continuously saying; and we need to have an effort to overcome poverty in all countries where it is a threatening fact, such as those in Africa, many Latin American and Asia countries, even pockets in the United States and in Europe.  And the framework is obviously the offer by China for the United States and Europe to cooperate with the Belt and Road Initiative, to maybe join the Build Back Better program of the United States and Global Gateway of the European Union, to not look at it as competition but as the chance for cooperation.  Because only if the nations of this world work together economically, to the benefit of all, do you have the basis of trust to establish a security architecture, which can function.

So I think we have issued a call for such a conference, and such a new international security architecture, and I’m calling on your to promote that idea, to get many people to sign this petition, to get people to write articles, comment about it, create an international debate, that {we do need a new paradigm}:  Because any continuation of geopolitics of the so-called “enemy image” of one or the other can only lead to a catastrophe, and if it comes to that, there will be nobody left to even comment about it, because it will be the end of humanity. 

So I’m calling on you: Join our mobilization, because it is your life and all our own future. 

This is an edited transcription of an interview conducted February 25, 2022 by Mike Billington of the Schiller Institute, the LaRouche Organization, and the Executive Intelligence Review, with Dr. Richard Sakwa, a professor of Russian and European studies at the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent in the UK.

Dr. Sakwa has served as head of that school twice in the past. He is also a senior research fellow at the National Research Institute, the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, and an honorary professor in the Faculty of Political Science at Moscow State University. He’s an author of dozens of books and many articles, a very active participant in both political and academic fora, and is a highly respected spokesman for global cooperation as the only means to prevent war.

Mike Billington: Greetings, Professor Sakwa. I’m delighted that you agreed to do this interview. On the day we scheduled this interview earlier this week, Vladimir Putin announced that Russia would recognize the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk republics. Russia’s Armed Forces have subsequently attacked military sites across Ukraine and moved some ground forces into the country. President Putin said the objective is to demilitarize and de-Nazify Ukraine. You’ve studied and written about Russia for decades. How do you see Putin’s move and how do you expect things will develop, going forward?

%%Putin Acts To De-Nazify Ukraine

Prof. Richard Sakwa: Well, it’s a pleasure to be with you today. Obviously, we’re meeting at a time of, how can I put it, a global turning point in all sorts of ways, even though it’s a culmination of processes which have been going on for a long time. The Ukrainian crisis at this moment, this war, is the intersection of all sorts of trends. The big one, obviously, is the failure to achieve a unified, indivisible post-Cold War order, focusing obviously instead on NATO enlargement. But much more than that, the failure to establish some sort of overarching framework for security. And the sharp point of all of this, of course, is Ukraine.

It came to a head in 2014, as we all know. And then, with the Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics, where nearly four million people have been living essentially under siege since 2014. You ask “Why has Putin acted at this time?” We had a Normandy format which has been going on, and an attempt to implement the Minsk Accords, which was a way of restoring Donetsk and Luhansk to Ukrainian sovereignty. Both failed. Both failed under President Petro Poroshenko from 2014 to 2019, and under President Volodymyr Zelenskyy since then.

Also, that’s nested within the larger question of getting an overarching European security order. There are at least three levels of conflict: the one in the Donbas; one over Ukraine more broadly—its neutrality or future place in its security order; and then the larger failure of European security. We could even add a fourth, the global tension pressure between the United States’ vision as a global hegemon and the resistance of powers like Russia and China to those hegemonic ambitions. We’re living at the intersection of multiple crises, and it’s not quite clear whether these crises will escalate to the top level: We’re really talking about a global war.

Billington: How do you see the Russian people responding to this situation?

Prof. Sakwa: It’s extremely mixed. I think everybody is shocked. No one really expected this. Just like with the Ukrainian people, it’s a strange sort of conflict, one which was endlessly anticipated. Yet when it happened, was extremely unexpected. We’ve seen some protests across Russia. Leading political figures are condemning it. 

At the same time, the elite seems to be relatively united on the view that the Ukrainian developments—moving into NATO, and possibly even what was most shocking, was President Zelenskyy’s comment at the Munich Security Conference that Ukraine may become a nuclear weapons power. That was shocking enough. But perhaps even more disturbing was the lack of response of the Western powers, the Atlantic powers, which of course, are blocking North Korea and Iran from becoming nuclear weapon powers. And yet it seemed as if Ukraine was going to be given a free pass. As Putin pointed out, and not just him, it wouldn’t be so hard technically to go that way with experts in Ukraine. This is not to justify anything which has happened, but certainly it’s the perception amongst a section of the elite, that Russia faced an existential challenge.

%%A Strategy for Durable Peace and Development

Billington: Elizabeth Wilmshurst, Distinguished Fellow of the International Law Program at Chatham House, the British empire’s preeminent think tank, accused Russia of “violating the prohibition in the UN Charter on the use of force, violating the obligation to respect sovereignty and territorial integrity of other states, and violating the prohibition on intervention,” and then went on to lecture Russia on the meaning of international law.

I find this rather rich, coming from a country that invaded and destroyed several Mideast nations, which were no threat to anyone, killing and wounding millions and driving millions more from their homes. Perhaps you could comment on this hypocrisy.

Prof. Sakwa: It’s yet again another indication of the crisis of the post-Cold War order. We never really had a stable unified peace order—that fourth level I mentioned, at the global level. Double standards are the name of the game, and have been for a long time. When NATO’s being talked about as a “peace body,” a “collective defense body” only—we’ve seen the bombing of Serbia in 1999; not so much a NATO plan of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and above all, the destruction of the Libyan state in 2011, which was all very disturbing. But Libya was particularly interesting, or affecting for me. That was because in 2008, Libya and Italy signed a development agreement, a long-term cooperation agreement. Italy, being the former colonial power.

This really did seem to be the way forward. Gaddafi, of course, had given up ambitions for Libya to become a nuclear power in the early 2000s. As part of this shift away from the old Gaddafi system of rule, his son, Saif al-Islam [Gaddafi] was leading a reform effort and was funding PhD students across the world. One of them came to Kent and I was working with him. It was fascinating. Every few weeks he would go back to Libya. His family was there, and he would meet up with Saif al-Islam. It was a genuine feeling between 2008 and 2011, just before the war, that Libya was going to change; it was going to be gradual and moving in a way we would all want, toward a greater freedom, respect, in different ways, but for dignity of the citizens and so on, while maintaining and keeping the developments which had happened in the Gaddafi years. All of that was destroyed in 2011.

So it really is a shocking evidence, a moment. All of the falsehoods which attended the attack. The UN Security Council Resolution 1973 was limited to a limited no fly zone and so on, but was used as a pretext to go far beyond it.

Of course, one wrong element doesn’t justify another. That’s why we all argue—certainly I do—against militarism on all sides; that we need to have a genuine strategy for peace and development.

%%Putin, the Man

Billington: You have written four books on Vladimir Putin. I’m certain you watched his extraordinary speech Monday night, Feb. 21 and subsequent speeches on the history of the Ukraine, recognizing the two republics; and then explaining why he was carrying out military action. Could you give us your sense of the man and your expectation of his role in the future?

Prof. Sakwa: In the light of these events, of the invasion of Ukraine, there’s been much speculation in the British media that he’s somehow, in some way, mentally unhinged or unstable or suffering from “late-stage despot syndrome.” I don’t see that. This is not to justify what’s going on, but I certainly don’t see that.

Putin speech on the 21st of February about Ukrainian history was meandering, but underlying it was a controlled passion—not desperation even, but anger—about the fact that Ukraine has become—may become, indeed, we don’t know how this is going to end—his nemesis. But the arguments he made were rational. Whether they were right or not we can all debate, but they were certainly rational. Despite what people have said, this speech did not say that Ukraine has no right to sovereign statehood. In fact, he simply said, you have a responsibility as a sovereign state to look after all of your people within that sovereign state, and at the same time, to ensure peace and development by working with your neighbors.

The desperation in his tone was because Ukraine had failed to do that, the elite had failed to do it in one form or another. That’s one reason why, in the very last moment, he refused even to talk to Zelenskyy and others, because there was just absolutely a movement not to accept the legitimacy of Russia’s security concerns, let alone their substance.

Billington: Natalia Vitrenko, a long-time friend of the Schiller Institute and the LaRouches, is the chairwoman of the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine. Speaking to a Schiller Institute conference February 19, she [[presented]] [[https://larouchepub.com/other/2022/4908-ukraine_s_role_in_present_worl.html]] a devastating picture of the collapse of the Ukrainian economy and the influence of the neo-Nazis within the government and the institutions of Ukraine since the 2014 coup. Putin also addressed the internal breakdown of key industries of the economy and the social structure in his Monday speech.

This picture contrasts greatly with the Western media argument that the U.S. and NATO are defending “freedom and democracy” in Ukraine against Russian autocracy. You’ve written about Ukraine for many years. You have a quite famous book on Ukraine [[[Frontline Ukraine]]: Crisis in the Borderlands]. [[https://www.amazon.com/Frontline-Ukraine-Borderlands-Richard-Sakwa-ebook/dp/B07PBLPJGH/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1645925121&sr=8-2]] What was the internal situation there as this Russian action began?

Prof. Sakwa: I think Natalia Vitrenko’s analysis is one of the best, and others, perhaps in the left tradition, such as Volodymyr K. Yushchenko, because they’ve understood the way that the model of post-communist capitalism and the way it has developed since 2014, which has unleashed a neoliberal “shock therapy” on a society which has already been devastated and pillaged by inequality and by political intolerance.

We know that the Communist Party of Ukraine was banned in 2014, a rather shocking development, and the Socialist Party, the group Natalia leads, has been under permanent pressure. Ukraine is one of the few states whose GDP, both in nominal terms and per capita terms today, is lower than it was in 1991—a shocking development. Indeed, whole swathes of industry have died. Reflecting these dire economic circumstances, with very, very expensive services, energy and so on, all pushed by the IMF, is the mass emigration. At least six million have left Ukraine as labor emigrants.

It’s interesting that as the events were developing this week, there’s been endless talk of “44 million Ukrainians,” which perhaps is indeed the case, but not within Ukraine. The population has fallen from 48 million at independence to an estimate now lower than 40 million living—before the recent events—living in Ukraine itself. It’s a catastrophic position. And worst of all is that political atmosphere of these mobilized civil society militant groupings, which have effectively kept the society and politics hostage for many years, certainly since 2014.

%%What Happened to Zelenskyy, the ‘Peace Candidate’ in 2014?

Billington: In the 2019 presidential election in Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy was portrayed by many as a “peace candidate,” who wanted to make peace with Donbas and with Russia. He won in a landslide. Was that characterization accurate? And if so, what happened to that impulse, because it’s certainly not there, doesn’t appear to be there today.

Prof. Sakwa: He certainly did present himself as the peace candidate, just like, by the way, Poroshenko did in the election of May 2014. He was putting himself forward, and the people believed him, as an oligarch and somebody with economic interests in Russia. My profound belief until recently was that both the Russian people and the Ukrainian people wanted peace genuinely, profoundly, because they are in effect one people—not one state—but having very many links.

Poroshenko immediately betrayed that peace mandate, but Zelenskyy actually did try. He was elected in April 2019 with over 70% of the vote, an overwhelming landslide, because he did say, and promised, peace, which was very good. In the early years [of his Presidency] he tried to implement it, in particular, at the meeting of the Normandy format in December 2019, when he met with Macron, Merkel, and Putin in Paris. This was a very important meeting, and it really did seem as if the Donbas question could be resolved. So he did make an effort.

However, even as these four were meeting, the militants were gathering on the Maidan and threatening Zelenskyy, even with a coup. Zelenskyy did follow up. His Chief of Staff did have some meetings, but all of that very quickly ran into the sand, because, effectively, the elected leader of Ukraine did not dare to stand up to the militants. This was in part one of the reasons for the frustration of the Kremlin leadership since 2020 and 2021. With the arming of this force, it became even worse: the failure of the peace movement, the failure to implement the Minsk Agreements, and then the increasing arming of Ukraine, and training. The British, of course, were in the forefront of this, with a major naval modernization contract, including modernization of the port not far from Odessa. It seemed as if time was running out, that peace was no longer on the agenda. And worse, that a more militant and more aggressive Ukraine was beginning to emerge.

%%Who, Actually, Runs Ukraine?

Billington: It sounds like it would be fair to say that the government in Ukraine is not run by Zelenskyy as much as by the neo-Nazi gangs.

Prof. Sakwa: Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that because they are still the government. The economic bloc continues, the financial bloc—of course, much of it very much inter-penetrated by officials from the U.S. Embassy and other external organizations. It’s a balance. Ukraine has always been a very diverse and plural and genuinely democratic society in certain respects with certain limits. There’s a fundamental sense of dynamic pluralism in that society. Unfortunately, it’s too often the case—as you’re suggesting, and I agree with you—that the actual formal mechanisms are overloaded not only by corruption, but by these informal pressure lobbies, which have had an extraordinarily deleterious influence on the political development. Unfortunately, Zelenskyy has not been able to stand up to them, and has thus become hostage to them.

Billington: Zelenskyy today said he was not afraid to meet with Russia, with Putin, to discuss security guarantees, to discuss neutrality for Ukraine. These are the very things that they refused to do earlier. Do you see any chance that in fact, Russia will negotiate and not demand regime-change through this process?

Prof. Sakwa: If only he’d said that a week ago, and if only when there was endless diplomacy, when we had Macron going to Moscow, we had Scholz going to Moscow—for which I laud them, I support them. Any attempt to try to maintain a peaceful development is to be applauded. But we seem to be in a total impasse with the endless talks; they were sterile. There was no substance to it. What Zelenskyy is now saying—guarantees of neutrality and mutual security—this has been exactly what Russia has been arguing for, for months, if not years.

Is it now a credible offer? I personally am always in favor of negotiation. Talk—talk as much as you can. I would say, OK, take him up at his word and let him send an emissary to Moscow with substantive brief, and also to ensure that the Atlantic powers back it up. Because clearly, what we’ve had so far is that Macron, who has been saying for a long time that we cannot build a European security order against Russia; it only can be with Russia. Yet he is not able to deliver either, because of the framework and bloc discipline within the Atlantic power system.

So Zelenskyy simply needed to have said this a week ago; this is what is so astonishing. Instead, he went to the Munich Security Conference and threatened to make Ukraine a nuclear power. It could not be more absurd: You had the Western powers saying that Ukraine had the freedom of choice, of any sovereign power, to join any alliance that they want, which is of course, a fundamental absurdity. Imagine Cuba saying that it’s going to become a nuclear power, or the Republic of Ireland next to Britain. If Ireland declared that they wish to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and that the Chinese are welcome to pop some missiles into Ireland, that wouldn’t last five minutes; it was just fundamentally absurd.

And yet he’s now saying, with his back to the wall—again, one doesn’t necessarily approve of it, but this sort of coercive diplomacy of the mobilization of Russia’s army around Ukraine for the last few months was all an attempt to open up negotiation. It was an attempt to achieve precisely what Zelenskyy is now offering. So I wonder how credible it is. Certainly, it should be explored. Send an envoy, send a concrete proposal, obviously, to avoid bloodshed and to avoid conflict. It is always important.

%%The Lost Chance for Peace in 1991

Billington: Stepping back, you have written often about the lost chance for peace at the end of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union collapsed. If a new security architecture uniting all of Europe, including Russia, had been established at that time, the world would obviously be a very, very different place today. What happened?

Prof. Sakwa: Two parts to my answer: At the end of the Cold War, there were two peace orders on offer, both reasonably good in some ways. The first one was Mikhail Gorbachev’s version, based on “charter internationalism,” the Charter of the United Nations and the subsequent international body of law built on that, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The model there is “sovereign internationalism,” which is good, and this is the one that Russia and China pursue.

The second model is one of hegemonic peace with the expansive so-called liberal international order, with two legs, the economic one and the peculiar model of the economy, and of course, with NATO. You may say that this model delivers certain public goods, but it meant that the rest of the world had to be a subaltern, a subordinate, accepting the dominance of the Atlantic power system.

So these two models developed. They’ve been in conflict; ultimately, this underlies the conflict to this day. Then more specifically, we had this NATO enlargement—all the promises in 1990 that it wouldn’t enlarge. But even Zbigniew Brzezinski, in his famous book, The Grand Chessboard—a very intelligent book in a strange sort of way, but really profoundly disturbing, because it sees not nations and peoples as living subjects, but only as pieces on a chessboard, which is a really frightening image—Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser in the late 1970s, even Brzezinski, who was ferociously in favor of NATO enlargement, said it should only be done within the framework of an overarching architecture of some sort of agreement with Russia. Even he understood that unmediated NATO enlargement would lead to a catastrophe of the sort that we now see.

That’s why we lost the peace. There are lots of other factors, but the two models of world peace: one, sovereign internationalism, sovereign development, of countries coming together, building and using the huge opportunities of technology and of science and human talent; and the other, a much more dependent sort of capitalism, more exploitative. Of course, the end of the Cold War took place just in a rising wave of neoliberalism, outsourcing, and all the other pathologies of our time.

%%The Belt and Road in Europe

Billington: At that time, Lyndon LaRouche called for more than a new security architecture for Europe, but rather called for bringing all of the Eurasian continent together through a series of development corridors connecting the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans by rail—a new Silk Road. Russia at the time was being looted by Western carpetbaggers and could not accept LaRouche’s proposal. But the Chinese welcomed the idea and co-sponsored with the Schiller Institute, a conference in 1996 in Beijing on the New Silk Road, which Helga Zepp-LaRouche addressed in a keynote. What is your reading on the impact of this New Silk Road, what’s now called the Belt and Road Initiative since Xi Jinping officially adopted the Belt and Road in 2013? What do you see as the impact of that development on the continent as a whole?

Prof. Sakwa: The Belt and Road Initiative and its maritime equivalent are extraordinarily important because they provide an alternative source of development financing for all those countries who sign up to it. It’s criticized much in the West as becoming exploitative, as becoming a sort of debt trap to get their countries subordinate to China. Many good studies have demonstrated that this isn’t quite the case. Clearly, there have been some issues. But what China has offered is a genuine effort.

I’ll give you the example of Kenya, which signed up to it. I have studied and looked at Kenya since I was a boy. For many, many years there were plans to build a new railway line from the capital of Nairobi to Mombasa on the coast. Endless plans, endless funds, and it all disappeared, it never happened. The Chinese came in as part of the Belt and Road Initiative and pretty quickly built it.

There are issues—I think they should use more local sourcing of infrastructure, of steel and of talent and so on. They come in as sort of a closed bubble, turnkey, with their own cooks, their own security guards and everything. Nevertheless, the railway, a splendid railway, has been built. The Kenyans occasionally complain that China stocked it with old second hand rolling stock from one of their cities, but still, it is far better than anything they’ve had before.

All development is always complex and it always has to be balanced with local concerns and so on. Yet, the Belt and Road Initiative is a project for the 21st Century. I’m someone who believes that infrastructure is important, that it isn’t just consumption, but in the building, using the technology to open up human skills.

It isn’t just the infrastructure. Mombasa, for example, opens up markets and opens up facilities, and can be transformative if the infrastructure is balanced together with the social capital, with cooperative forms of social organization. You could call it socialism, you could call it other things, but development which is not exploitative, but genuine, where profit and the dignity of labor, as we used to call it, is manifest, in combination with the infrastructure.

We’ve seen a huge backlash against the Belt and Road Initiative from the Atlantic powers. Lithuania, for example, has now left, and there’s a whole stack of attacks on it because it is a model, an alternative model, not just of world power, but an alternative model of world development.

%%Revive the Bering Strait Tunnel?

Billington: Which has certainly been lacking in the colonial world and the post-colonial world for many, many decades. Extending that idea even further, on April 24, 2007, there was a conference in Moscow, organized by the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Council for the Study of Productive Forces, titled 

“Mega-Projects of Russia’s East: A Transcontinental Eurasia-America Transport Link via the Bering Strait.” A [[paper]] [[https://archive.schillerinstitute.com/economy/phys_econ/2014/larouche_40_year_record-4.html#c4anchor]] by Lyndon LaRouche was presented there called, “The World’s Political Map Changes: Mendeleev Would Have Agreed.” This conference promoted the idea of a tunnel under the Bering Strait. At the time, there was significant optimism that this was going to take place, that it would be constructed and would thereby physically connect the U.S. and Russia by rail. What do you think such a great project would have meant for the world and for U.S.-Russia relations then? And what would it mean to try to revive that today?

Prof. Sakwa: As I say, I’m actually very keen on infrastructure development: railways, less on highways, but that’s also important as part of it. As for this one across the Bering Strait, I’m not sure that it would become—it’s a fascinating idea. What I do think—and this is what Russia is certainly now talking about, and Volodymyr Ishchenko [Deputy Director of the Center for Social and Labor Research (Kiev)], and many more—is that given the fact that Russia is going to be hit with such sanctions, that it will have to focus on the development of Siberia and the Russian Far East.

I don’t think the Russia and U.S.—you’re right, in some ways, this physical link would then have been a symbolic development. But it would have cost billions I think would have been better spent. Russia, of course, as the Soviet Union, spent billions on developing Ukraine. And what did that help? It should have been spending it on developing the Urals, Siberia and the Russian Far East. We now know the equivalent of this is that there are regular trains from China going all the way to Hamburg, Germany. What we failed to achieve in that visionary idea of Lyndon LaRouche, of going from the U.S. to Russia, has now been built between China and Russia, that physical link. And of course, the other one of these links is the northern sea route. As the warmer seasons become longer and with their nuclear-powered icebreakers, the maritime link will perhaps serve as a functional substitute.

%% ‘Global Britain’

Billington: LaRouche always identified the British Empire as basically a tool of the City of London, the banking center, and that in that sense, the Empire still very much exists and together with Wall Street, is dragging the entire Western world into a monetary and financial crisis, a hyperinflation which could well mean the end of the Empire and even the House of Windsor. As a British subject, how do you see the role of the British in the world today?

Prof. Sakwa: Well, I’m deeply critical of this Global Britain agenda in the way that it has developed, which reflects the worst aspects you’ve just referred to. Global Britain is an archaic project to try to re-establish influence, not in the framework of what we talked about just now, of peace and development. It’s an old-fashioned “gunboat diplomacy”-type attitude, which has had enormous deleterious consequences over the years.

When Britain left the European Union, I wanted—and I would love to see—a global Britain that builds on the sort of idea we’ve been talking about—the idea of development, of moving beyond militarism, moving beyond the endless attempt of gunboat diplomacy, of the sort we saw in the Black Sea when that British ship went within the territorial waters of Crimea, and the aircraft carrier that has been sent off to the Far East, to the South China Sea, to wave the flag. This is a sort of 19th Century behavior. This is a worst sort of old fashioned 19th Century imperialism, combined now with 21st Century liberal empire of capital, which is exceptionally frightening in all sorts of ways. It’s also, one has to say, the media in all of this, the way that media autonomy has become undermined by not only financial interests, but by the erosion of public debate.

Billington: Integrity Initiative.

Prof. Sakwa: Yes. Which is an excellent example of that, which is basically an instrument to intimidate and to destroy, to undermine alternative perspectives.

%%The Russia-China Statement of February 4

Billington: You have long called on Russia and China to put forward a positive perspective regarding the purpose and the importance of their cooperation for the rest of the world. And they have now done so in their February 4th “[[Joint Statement]] [[https://www-lawinfochina-com.translate.goog/display.aspx?id=8215&lib=tax&SearchKeyword&SearchCKeyword&_x_tr_sch=http&_x_tr_sl=zh-CN&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=sc]] of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on the International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development.” This was issued on the opening day ceremony of the Winter Olympics. Did this statement meet your expectations?

Prof. Sakwa: It did. I thought it was a splendid statement, because it put to rest the argument that Russia and China are revisionist powers. This is a usual term of abuse. What it has done, in fact, it has confirmed many of my arguments about these two models of world order at the end of the Cold War. It absolutely unequivocally committed the two countries to that body of international law, including human rights, as outlined in the United Nations Charter of 1945 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, and all the rest.

They went on and on about this in the Joint Statement, including more positive perspectives about democracy; that each society has to shape its own destiny, and there can be no single model imposed from outside, which is, of course, [a reference to] the view of liberal hegemony after the end of the Cold War. So yes, it did meet my expectations. And more than that, it wasn’t just the individual statements, but the fact that the two did it together was quite astonishing. Of course, it’s now been followed up, with various comments by the Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and others, reinforcing the principles enunciated in the 4th of February Joint Statement.

%%A New Security Architecture

Billington: We’ve discussed the failure of the Western powers—NATO and the U.S.—to respond to Russia’s demand for a new security architecture for Europe. It’s clear that this has brought us to the brink of not just the war in Ukraine, but a war between the superpowers—a war that could very well be nuclear. You have called for a Helsinki 2, to use the model of the OSCE—the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which includes Russia, to bring all the parties together for a mutually advantageous resolution to this very severe crisis. What is your expectation about the potential for such a conference?

Prof. Sakwa: There is undoubtedly a need for this. It’s absolutely clear, but it has to be well prepared, and therefore the foundations and the postulates have to be worked out. What would be on the agenda? You’d have a whole stack of things—first of all, Ukraine and its status, and also those frozen conflicts—Abkhazia, South Ossetia, even possibly even the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, but certainly the Donbas, and Transnistria. 

But more broadly, such a conference could take many forms. Yes, I think Helsinki would be an ideal way, because it would then avoid the taint of Yalta. Even though Yalta—the substance of the Yalta agreements in 1945—was actually useful and good. Not that some of those agreements were not fulfilled; the general principle agreement on establishing the United Nations was important. Yalta established a Security Council in the nascent United Nations. This Security Council, the five permanent members, is a type of concert of powers. So if we are going to talk about a type of confidence, it’s useful to think back of other ones—a Congress of Vienna, possibly, which was the victorious powers at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. But one way or another, the issue is to establish a framework in which all of the great powers, certainly, other powers as well, buy into it, to establish the rules of the game.

I’m deeply pessimistic. I don’t think this is going to happen, and therefore I have a feeling that the conflict will only intensify. I know that you’ve spoken about a new Treaty of Westphalia. In some ways I would endorse Westphalia, because it enunciated, for the first time, the principle of sovereign internationalism, of sovereignty, which is fundamental, so states then can devise models for their own development, and so on. But I’d be slightly hesitant about Westphalia, because the other side of sovereignty, in my view, is to find ways of working together, sovereign internationalism, which goes beyond. And that’s why I really do like the charter international system, because 1945 emphasizes the UN Charter sovereignty, absolutely, but it also provides a framework for internationalism, for genuine internationalism of the sort that Russia and China are beginning to devise today.

One final point on all of this is that Putin, for the last 18 months, perhaps for two years now, has been calling for a summit of the P5, the permanent five members of the UN Security Council. That may have been an important first step, as you would expect. Of course, there was the pandemic, but it could have taken place virtually. Of course, as always, it was rejected, as all of Russia’s proposals over the last two, if not more decades have been rejected.

Billington: One of the reasons that Helga Zepp-LaRouche has emphasized the Treaty of Westphalia approach is that it’s global rather than merely Europe, or even Eurasia. If you consider the fact that it is really the entire world that is now faced with the general breakdown of the dollar-based international financial system, a hyperinflation that now everybody is aware of, and most of the financial institutions admit they have no idea how to stop it; it could get much worse.

And also, of course, the pandemic, which is not under control by any means. The Director General of the UN’s World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros, said the other day that 83% of Africa’s population has not even had their first dose of COVID-19 vaccine. And now the danger of a nuclear war, which of course, would affect the entire world.

In order to truly resolve all of these things, you simply have to have all the major powers, but really, the whole world, represented in a single body. The issue of this extreme crisis is obviously frightening, but at the same time, it forces people to reflect on the fact that they’ve had false assumptions about the future of mankind and the future of peace, and therefore, while dangerous, the situation has become also a moment of opportunity to bring about that kind of event that most people, if you’re following the course of history in a linear way, you might think is impossible. What do you think about that?

Prof. Sakwa: Yes, I think that a transformative agenda which could be implemented through such a gathering is fundamental. The shocking thing is that at the beginning of the pandemic, the feeling was, that all of humanity faces this enormous challenge, and the resolution can only be on a universal basis—that is, no one is safe until everyone is safe, when all of Africa and Asia is vaccinated. And more broadly, that health care, and developmental needs are addressed. All of that is absolutely right.

The problem now is, where is the societal push for this? It’s not going to be granted from above and especially with the sort of leadership in evidence in most Western powers. Some people who’ve been working very closely, for example, for the peace movement, for so many years trying to say, “Look, we’ve got to halt the militarism of NATO,” etc. have not got very far. And so I’m deeply pessimistic, though that does not take away the need. Our task, therefore, it seems to me always, is to formulate the agenda and that’s the best we can do, and provide adequate analysis. And that’s certainly what I’m going to do, and I know that you are as well.

%%Stop the War, and Operation Ibn Sina

Billington: On that question of how to bring that about, one of the things Helga LaRouche has emphasized is that the situation in Afghanistan, which is an abomination, after 20 years, 40 years really, of warfare and destruction by outside powers who then pulled out leaving the place to starvation: no food and no money. The U.S. has even gone so far as to steal $7 billion of the Afghan central bank’s money that they were having held at the Federal Reserve, which the U.S. is now openly declaring they’re taking away from the Afghan central bank.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche insists that this is a situation which could and should bring the world together, because everybody will agree that we don’t want Afghanistan to be a center for terrorism, the center for drug production, and so forth; that it would behoove the entire world to address this humanitarian nightmare, beginning with modern health care and immediately providing the basis for the development of Afghanistan to be what it once was, a prosperous hub for east-west and north-south trade. She’s called this Operation Ibn Sina, named after the brilliant physician and philosopher from the 11th Century from that region.

I know you’ve been involved with the Stop the War movement in the UK. You appeared at a recent Stop the War event with Member of Parliament Jeremy Corbyn, who, as I understand it, formed Stop the War after the 9/11 terrorist attack, with the purpose of preventing a war on Afghanistan and subsequent wars after that. I believe you or one of your associates said that every one of these efforts to stop these wars was ridiculed, but it’s now been fully shown that we were right and the warmongers wrong with the disasters that unfolded. What do we have to do to awaken the world’s consciousness on this?

Prof. Sakwa: You’re absolutely right. The Stop the War Coalition and other peace movements have been absolutely right, and their critique of the hawks whose only solution to most questions is to bomb it and to zap it and to invade it and to occupy it. It’s catastrophic that this sort of tendency has been unleashed in the 21st Century.

But then you ask, “How can we work to stop it?” Optimism of the will and pessimism of the spirit, I suppose, is the only way forward, because I think the world is regressing. It’s going backwards, massively. We’re seeing public services eroded, the quality of governance is going down. It’s going down in Australia, it’s going down in Britain, massively. I’ve got a folder called Governance, and it’s just shocking to see the undermining of local government, the quality of municipal government, the quality of democracy. The outsourcing of services has meant poor, poor services, with the profits linked off to multinationals, often even abroad, in the UK’s context, to nationalized industries, Deutsche Bank, German railways, and so on.

How do we move on in all of this? I don’t know, except that each person must maintain their integrity and to warn of all of this. Even in this Ukrainian war, people are now condemning me, but I’ve absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. We, you—we have been working, and I’ve been working for years, if not decades, to avoid precisely this conflict which has now engulfed us. That is what has been driving me for a long time, and it’s failing. We have failed. I failed in stopping this. We’re talking at a time when the world is looking as dark as it has ever been.

%%The Treaty of Versailles and the ‘Rules-Based Order’

Billington: You once compared the Versailles Treaty after World War I to the current argument by the Anglo-American NATO crowd of what they like to call the “rules-based order,” which, as we now know, is quite distinct from actual international law, from the UN Charter. Can you explain what you meant about the Treaty of Versailles and the rules-based order?

Prof. Sakwa: There are two things. The Versailles peace, of course, was a victors’ peace against Germany. In the Congress of Vienna, 1814-1815, one of its great acts of statesmanship was to ensure that France became, even though a defeated power, part of that winning coalition, and thus France was very quickly rehabilitated. It worked, basically, and the Vienna peace lasted nearly a century until the First World War. Obviously, there was the Crimean War and other things in between.

But the Versailles peace lasted barely 20 years, because Germany was humiliated and was excluded from that peace. And why this Versailles analogy works for post-communist times, is because Russia was also excluded, and this is where this war is going on now. It took 20 years for Germany—and I’m not making the analogy that it’s similar or the same—but I’m just saying in systemic terms, we’re talking about a power which was dissatisfied for a long time. And Russia is quite clearly dissatisfied, though—and this is where we have to get the judgment right—it’s not out to grab land or anything like that. It’s out for security.

The Versailles peace was a disaster, as E.H. Carr describes in his marvelous book, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919-1939. It was accompanied by massive idealism. And this takes us to this so-called liberal international order, the “rules-based order.” That idealism, in the interwar years, masked, of course, far more naked imperial and other Great Power achievements. Today, this so-called “rules-based order,” after 1989, after the end of the Cold War, and indeed after the Soviet collapse and Russian weakness, effectively substitutes for that Charter International System. It claims to be, in fact, the basic system of international order, the U.S.-led international order.

This is a massive act of usurpation, which both Russia and China—and indeed India and some other countries—are refusing to accept. That is, if you like, the deep, underlying fourth level, that deep, underlying conflict between normative visions of world order—one based on the Charter International System and the second one, the sort of usurpers, the usurped peace, which has ended up as no peace at all, which was effectively the Versailles peace as far as Russia is concerned.

Today, the challenge is to ensure that the United States and its allies go back to the United Nations. That’s why Putin, when he called for a summit of the UN permanent five, it was actually quite a smart move. The Joint Declaration of Russia and China also stressed this point, to stop the usurpation, by the group of Western powers who claim to be synonymous with world order, rather than just being part of, and subordinate, to the rules of the United Nations and sovereign internationalism.

%% ‘End of History’ vs. the Dignity of Man

Billington: Francis Fukuyama’s so-called “end of history.”

Prof. Sakwa: Well, indeed, one of the most hubristic concepts ever, and the worst thing about it was that it was based on Hegelian dialectics, and at one moment they abandoned Marxist dialectics and replaced it with this new form of Hegelian dialectics, the liberal one, that this is the end of history and it’s the solution to all of humanity’s needs.

Billington: Thank you very much. Do you have any other thoughts you’d like to bring up for the audience that we have at the Schiller Institute and EIR?

Prof. Sakwa: It’s been a pleasure talking with you. I do read your material. I’ve been particularly close to your Australian colleagues, but also your Executive Intelligence Review, and so on. All I can say is that I think that the vision which the Schiller Institute and you have, of combining technology, technocracy, to human needs, and to harness human ingenuity through major projects—we’re talking about ways in which to make life better for all—I think is a visionary agenda and indeed based on peace and cooperation. I wish you success, and I wish that more people would join us and work for that.

Billington: I certainly join you absolutely in that call and certainly invite you to participate with us and our subsequent conferences as we try to pull the world together around a sane approach to the dignity of man.

Prof. Sakwa: Thank you.

Billington: Thank you.

Your daily update for April 21, 2022 from Harley Schlanger.

PDF of this statement

Carnegie Hall, the Rotterdam Philharmonic, Italy’s Teatro alla Scala, the Munich Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic, and probably others have joined in a McCarthyite witch-hunt against prominent Russian artists, including renowned conductor Valery Gergiev.

Carnegie Hall has cancelled the appearance at a three-concert series of both Gergiev and Pianist Denis Matsuev, while in actions straight out of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, other musical institutions are demanding that Gergiev state his answer to the question: “Are you, or have you ever been a friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin?”

In doing so, it would certainly seem that these western musical institutions have taken a political stand in defense of war-mongering circles centered in London and Washington, circles bent on nothing less than the economic and political destruction of the nation of Russia. These circles have been training and supporting Nazis in Ukraine, overt admirers of Adolf Hitler and Stepan Bandera. It has even been mooted that nuclear weapons will be put into the hands of the Nazi-dominated Kiev government, which owes its existence to a NATO-backed coup in 2014. These circles have also continued to adamantly refuse to acknowledge Russia’s concerns over the vital threat to Russia’s national security.

The Schiller Institute therefore demands that Carnegie Hall issue its own letter clearly renouncing its support of NATO’s illegal expansion up to Russia’s borders, and also renouncing NATO’s use of Nazi hooligans and other terrorists as part of their openly stated intention to crush the Russian nation.

If, on the other hand, Carnegie Hall remains silent, is it not confirming the remark made in 2014 by Willy Wimmer, Vice President of the Organization for Security and Cooperationin Europe (OSCE), that the West refuses to denounce Ukrainian Nazis because “these are good Nazis, because they’re our Nazis”?

The Schiller Institute is urging everyone that, rather than engaging in infantile witch-hunts and economic sanctions that are damaging to us all, an international conference must be convened to establish a new world security architecture based on mutual respect and peace through economic development. 

In her webcast/dialogue on April 20, Helga Zepp-LaRouche pointed to the intensifying confrontation between the demands of the oligarchy, and those pursuing the Common Good of mankind, as the nature of the battle ahead, following the highly successful April 9 Schiller Institute conference.

“The conflict is not between the ‘democracies’ and the ‘autocracies’, but between the colonial system and those who oppose it.” There is a realignment underway, which is emerging around Russia, China and India. This is taking shape as her late husband, Lyndon LaRouche, had advocated. To create the necessary change away from the collapsing Trans-Atlantic system, you need a coalition of nations powerful enough to stand up to London, Wall Street and Silicon Valley. This is occurring — the main question is whether we can mobilize enough forces in the U.S. and Europe to support this new strategic and financial architecture before those defending the present bankrupt system provoke World War III.

The immediate future, she said, will be increasingly tumultuous, adding that she is convinced that “we won’t get through this year without major developments.” She advised those wishing to direct the developments toward peace and development should avoid being influenced by the narratives coming from the war faction and instead to think, study and be inner directed.

Summary of presentations delivered to the Schiller Institute conference “To Establish a New Security and Development Architecture for All Nations” of April 9, 2022.