David Dobrodt

Mike Billington: I watched an interview with you this morning. It was very interesting. You focused on the arrogance and hubris of the West, of being “out of date.” You referred to the UK this way: “It still thinks it is an empire which is long since gone.” I appreciated those sentiments. But you also said that there’s nothing stopping the US and Europe from changing, from joining with the BRICs and the Global South in development instead of the threats and war policies against them. I think there’s a huge irony in the fact that the Chinese are actually, in a very real sense, using the American system approach of economics, the policy of Alexander Hamilton, which focused on government directed credit for basic infrastructure and the general welfare, while the US has given up on the American System altogether in favor of adopting the British model of Hobbesian one against all and unregulated free market anarchy. The Belt and Road infrastructure you focused on — you indicated that the three aspects of the Belt and Road are: infrastructure; energy; and digital, and that China actually leads in all three of those areas. Would you agree that China is using this Hamiltonian approach to economics, perhaps coming from Sun Yat Sen, who was highly influenced by Hamilton?

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: China has what I would simply call a mixed economy, which means it’s partly state directed, partly market directed. I think all successful economies are mixed economies and the US, even when it uses free market rhetoric, has a large role of the government, not necessarily an accurate role, but a large role of government in the economy. Different countries come down differently on how they carve up the relative weights and responsibilities of public, private and civil society sectors. It’s true that the UK and  US approach is relatively more on the laissez faire side. I’d say relatively more, with lower taxes, certainly as a share of national income, and much lower social outlays. The UK more than the United States, even though it started with laissez faire in the 19th century, the UK adopted a National Health Service, of course, after World War Two. The United States never did that.

China’s a very pragmatic and economically well-governed country, very impressive during the past 40 years, because they’ve had a planning model with a major role of state finance, combined with a very dynamic and competitive market sector and very entrepreneurial lead in many sectors as well. I was just in China and noted a huge rise of electric vehicles, and there are hundreds of electric vehicle companies right now, start ups. It’s expected that the number will whittle down quickly to perhaps between 5 and 10 such companies, but right now it’s named to be in the hundreds of companies producing electric vehicles, and it’s a fiercely competitive market inside China.

Now, when it comes to the international side, China’s just doing a lot of things that the United States did for a while after World War II, which was to help finance infrastructure abroad, make the way for us multinational companies, in fact. And China right now is doing that. The United States doesn’t do much internationally at all other than war, but it doesn’t do peaceful economic development activities. You could see in the rhetoric of American leaders, politicians, their resentment that China dares to help other countries to build infrastructure. The Belt and Road Initiative, which is a very valid and quite beneficial win-win program of China, together with more than 150 other countries, by the way, is badmouthed every day by the United States, mainly out of resentment and jealousy because the US doesn’t have that kind of spirit to make connections with other countries. China is making massive investments and working with other countries to help them with developing an electric power grid, basic renewable energy sources, fast rail, 5G technologies, paved roads and highways, and many other desirable things that those counterpart countries really need. Now Biden is talking about a road project from India to the Mideast, and he’s so proud of this one road. It doesn’t exist. It’s not financed. It may may be a good idea, but it’s a little pathetic, actually, to to tell you the truth, because China has dozens of projects like this all over the world. The United States has thought about one literally. I guess they took the the “One Belt, One Road” idea, but they took One Road, one! Whereas China is doing dozens of these projects. So the US is kind of looking on.

Mike Billington: I think this IMEC program [the road from India to the Mideast and to Europe] is dead with the war now in Gaza.

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: Yes, I think that’s right. And we’re so paralyzed, so ineffective, so paralyzed with everything, so war driven that an idea of a road becomes about the best that we can do and a road that perhaps never will be built.. 

Mike Billington: I’ll come back to China. But I also knew that you were at the Valdai Discussion Club in Russia. I was told by Richard Sakwa, whom I interviewed yesterday, whom, you know and who was also speaking at Valdai, he told me that you were speaking there on the question of the discussion for a new currency and a new international trade mechanism that’s taking place within the BRICS. I think you know that Sergei Glazyev, who has been a key economist in this process of formulating these ideas, working with China and with the other BRICS countries, and now really the whole Global South, working on putting together this kind of idea. And you probably know that Glazyev has openly praised Lyndon LaRouche’s economic ideas and especially the article he wrote in the year 2000, which was called “Toward a Basket of Hard Commodities — Trade Without Currency.” So perhaps you can say a bit about where you think that whole plan stands today.. 

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: Basically, I noted that having one dominant currency in the world, which has been the US dollar after World War two, and which was the pound sterling before World War One, it has certain advantages because money is just a means of settling transactions for the real economy, for the non-monetary economy. So having a single currency can be efficient. But the US has blown it up by weaponizing the dollar. The US had an advantage because other countries and international businesses use the dollar, and that does give benefits to the US, a so-called seigniorage benefits and other benefits, essentially the ease of borrowing abroad and very high liquidity of your own national currency. But the US started to weaponize the dollar, meaning rather than letting it be used just for transactions purposes, the United States used this special situation of having transactions pass through the dollar banking system and ultimately through the central Bank of the US, the Federal Reserve, to start confiscating the dollars of other countries that the US disagreed with in foreign policy.

This is really obnoxious behavior, by the way, because the idea of money is, again, as a transactions medium, not as a hostage to foreign policy. And because the dollar was so dominant, even after the US confiscated the reserves of Iran or North Korea, then Venezuela, now Russia, now many countries use the dollar, but they don’t like to use it because they’re a little afraid of saying a word that’s crossed to the US and then seeing the US government come down on them, even freezing their money. It’s pretty bad behavior in my view, but basically very ill advised because the BRICS countries now — it started with the original five, with Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — but now it’s going to include the the new six, which is Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and Iran, is a big group of countries. And they’re saying we don’t want to use the dollar because frankly, we don’t want our money confiscated. And so they’re going to develop an alternative payments system. They will be successful at that because it’s not so hard to make payments in other ways, in renminbi or in rubles or in rupees or in an R-5 currency, so-called because the original BRICS five all have an R currency: the rial, the ruble, the rupee, the renminbi and the rand. So they call it the R-5. And they may just make a basket using those five currencies for denomination, and even for lending and borrowing in a bond denominated in a basket of currencies.

So I expect something interesting and good to come out of this. Again, it’s a little bit regrettable in a way. If having a single medium of exchange, it wouldn’t even have to be one country. Keynes had the idea that it would be the IMF’s currency — the bankcor he called it in a famous writing, would have certain convenience, but if it’s then used monopolistically for militarized or foreign policy or geopolitical purposes, it’s not going to last long, because there are always workarounds when it comes to trade and to financial settlements. And that’s what the BRICS are doing right now. They’re going to do a workaround.

Mike Billington: I sent you just before we got on this link, an article that was published by Glazyev today on this issue, in which he emphasizes that while the basket of currencies and the R5 are definitely being implemented already in various forms, but that eventually the idea of a separate currency, maybe the R5, but some separate currency, which would be also tied to a basket of commodities rather than just currencies, in order  to, in a certain sense, tie it to the actual cost of production in the real economy. He thinks this is something that it can be simple to finish completing it, that he’s hopeful that it can be done by next year when Russia is head of the of BRICS and will be holding the BRICS conference in Kazan, I believe. I’d be interested in your response to his his article.

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: I haven’t read it yet. Let me just say that there are several different issues involved in our discussion. One is the privilege of the US to host the international currency. And I’ve explained why the US has misused that privilege and why it’s now going to lose a lot of the business from the settlements in dollars. But a second is the mechanics of the payment systems, and the third is the management of monetary policy. These are all distinct issues. On the payments mechanisms, we can do something that could never have been done before, and that is digital settlements. So we don’t even need a banking system now, and we don’t need cash in circulation or gold bars or gold coins and other mechanisms that were mechanisms of settlement, because now digitally, every transaction can be tracked. We know there are different ways to do it. Blockchain is one, but there are many others, probably more efficient ways to do it with central bank clearing, for example. And that means that even the method of payments, I think will likely be digital and could well be a central bank digital currency in the future.

Then the third question is the management of monetary policy, and this is a long debate. John Maynard Keynes wrote brilliantly about it in the 1920s and the 1930s. Should a currency, whether digital or physical, be convertible into something else, for example, gold or into some commodity basket? Or should it be what economists call a fiat currency, which is that it is only backed by the policies of the central bank or banks, that currency and its value depends on expectations about those policies. We’ve had more than 100 years of debate about that. The advantage of linking a currency to a commodity basket is it can’t be issued for political purposes, especially to finance government payments not backed by a flow of tax revenues, for example. So you can’t get a hyperinflation in a backed currency. And that’s been deemed to be the advantage, that it is a kind of straitjacket and focuses on the real economy, limiting the capacity to issue credit. But on the other hand, it proved to be highly disadvantageous in other circumstances. When the world was on a gold standard or a gold exchange standard. If there were long periods in which major gold deposits were not discovered, that gave, on average, a deflationary weight to the world price trends, and that was deemed to have a distributional and real economy effects that were not highly desirable, although it also had some desirable effects as well. It also made it harder for central banks to be lenders of last resort in financial panics. The Great Depression is a very complicated, fascinating and important subject to understand about central banking, and whether the gold standard was a contributor to the persistence of the Great Depression. Well, I don’t want us to get into long excurses about monetary theory, except to say that there are several questions on the table right now. First, whose currency? Second, the technology of settlement. And third, the organization of monetary policy. They’re all very interesting. I spent many decades studying them, and I think there’s no ideal systems here, which is why we continue to have these discussions decade after decade after decade.

Mike Billington: Well, getting back to China, I did listen to your presentation in Beijing, to the UN headquarters there, to international ambassadors and Chinese officials. You really focused on the Chinese miracle, the transformation of China over a mere 40 years, from one of the poorest to one of the richest in history, and the elimination of poverty and so forth. What I really found interesting was your discussion of the idea that the Chinese model would be the proper approach for dealing with the development of Africa, which of course, is also very much part of China’s policy with the Belt and Road. In particular, you contrasted that directly to the policies of the IMF, which I thought I’d ask you to elaborate on here, because it was a very interesting way of showing the failure of the IMF to bring about real development in Africa or any other part of the developing sector.

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: To put it very straightforwardly, the rapid economic growth of China, which was, by traditional measures, around 10% per year growth of the domestic economy persistently between 1980 and nearly the year 2020. So an increase that was more than 30 fold if you accumulate in the size of the Chinese economy, came about by investment. What does investment mean? Investment means building the capital stock of a country. What is a capital stock? A capital stock means the productive assets of an economy. What are those as well? Those are three main categories. First, what we carry in our own bodies and brains, the so-called human capital. That’s the education and the skills and the health of the population. The second is the physical infrastructure, which is the roads, the power grid, the fiber optics grid, the water and sewerage systems and fast rail, highways, all of the networking that the economy depends on. And the third is the business sector, the manufacturing industries, agriculture and so forth.

Well, if you look at China’s growth during 1980 to 2020, the rates of investment were extraordinary. The rate of investment means essentially the share of the national income that is invested each year in new capital. And in the United States, the gross investment rate, which means the amount of investment that we undertake, not recognizing that some of it’s just offsetting depreciation, the gross investment is something on the order of 15 to 20% of the national income. But in China, it was typically 40 to 50% of the national income. So a super charged investment rate. Before our eyes, China built thousands of kilometers of fast rail, thousands of kilometers of a highway system, thousands of kilometers of an electricity distribution system, and on and on and on. Really impressive. And that’s what powered China. That plus the huge investments in education and skills. China started without much infrastructure at all. It started with very poor education levels. By the late 1970s, because China had had so much turmoil over the preceding 150 years. But then China finally, starting in 1978, said, okay, we’re going for it. Deng Xiaoping came to power. He was perhaps a modern history’s single most successful economic reformer. He pointed China in the right direction, said go for growth, open the economy, make a market economy, make a mixed economy, build infrastructure, invest in the people. And lo and behold, that extraordinarily high investment rate led to 40 years of rapid growth.

Now, the problem when it comes to the IMF is that the IMF does not have that vision in mind. The IMF’s vision to a finance minister of a poor country is “don’t bother us with your problems. Don’t get into excessive debt. Don’t get into a financial crisis and don’t bother us about your poverty, Thank you very much.” So nobody thinks very hard about the way for these countries to get out of poverty. But the way is just like China did, which is massive investments.

And then comes the question how to finance those investments. China partly borrowed in the early years, but also had a massively high saving rate internally. So as the income was rising, China wasn’t consuming it in a lot of household consumer spending. Chinese households were saving a lot of their rising income. Chinese businesses were reinvesting a lot of their profits. The government wasn’t running huge deficits on its current transactions and so forth. All of this meant a very high saving rate that could be turned into a high investment rate. Now, Africa right now has a very, very low saving rate. Because people are impoverished, they can’t save more. They have to survive. So they need some help with the financing right now by essentially some international financing, say from the African Development Bank or from the Belt and Road Program, in which China can provide some of the financing to build that infrastructure in Africa.

But that’s the advice that Africa should be getting. Invest, invest strongly, invest heavily, borrow where you need to borrow. Get your kids in school, electrify the economy, build the roads, build the fast rail, and so forth. And I think China can help to give some very good advice in that direction. China shows you can have 40 years of supercharged growth. And that’s what Africa needs.

Mike Billington: 40 years, I agree. You also spoke at Qufu, the birthplace of Confucius, which now is a shrine and a museum, I believe. Right, a major site.

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: That temple, the Confucian temple, has been there for more than 2000 years, and each emperor has come and added a stone, added an inscription, added calligraphy. Because Confucius has been an intellectual hero and guidepost for China basically for 2500 years. So it’s really impressive to be there at a Confucius birthday party, which I was, because this goes back essentially 2500 years. There’s a large, large complex of buildings because Emperor after Emperor added their own building to it. So you really get the feel of China’s very long, remarkable history.

Mike Billington: Right. And you focus there on, on the idea that we find our common humanity by studying the great philosophers and thinkers of of every culture in particular. You looked at Confucius and Buddha and Aristotle. I think I would differ with you on Aristotle and would would have focused on Plato rather than Aristotle. But that’s that’s a discussion for another time. In any case, this idea of looking at the great cultures and the history, the best moments of the great cultures is the exact opposite of so-called geopolitics, which is what guides the Western leaders today, deriving from ideologues like Halford Mackinder and other ideologues of the British Empire. Their view is that the only way to advance is by putting down the other guy — the opposite of the interest of the other. This, of course, leads to the sanctions policy. You didn’t mention the sanctions when you talked about the theft of reserves. But even the sanctions policy, as I understand it, is based on the fact that people have to use the dollar in trade and that therefore the US thinks they have a right to impose these sanctions on countries. China, of course, is not looking to suppress anybody else. And the massive sanctions against China and Russia and many other countries, indicates a failure of thinking in terms of the great cultures and what can be done with a culture for the future. So how do we restore that process in the West, of looking to the great minds of antiquity?

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: I think that there are two philosophical points that we really need to pay attention to that are quite fascinating, quite deep. One is the question of human nature. The philosophers that I referred to — I like Aristotle personally, but also I like the fact that Aristotle, Buddha and Confucius allow us to talk about the ABCs of philosophy. So it’s getting back to the core ABCs and what the ABCs, Aristotle Buddha and Confucius, had in mind about human nature is that it is potentially good, meaning that with proper cultivation, proper education, proper mentoring, living in a decent community, people can learn to be harmonious. People can learn to be fairer. Trustworthy people can learn reciprocity. So this is sometimes called “virtue ethics.” The idea that people can be decent, pretty good.

Now there’s another philosophical strain, which is deeply pessimistic. Augustine in Christian history is the exemplar of that. Man is fallen, and so man is a sinner and there’s no way out except perhaps by God’s grace. But the sinfulness can’t be washed away. And pessimists in history have believed that. And another pessimist like that, that had a huge influence is my second dimension, which is how people behave or how states interact. And Hobbes, in a way, is a follower of Augustine. Hobbes, of course, wrote in the 1600s, whereas Augustine was more than a millennium earlier than that. But Hobbes was a the quintessential British philosopher who said, people are rapacious. They are greedy. They are pushy. They are violent. And the best you can hope for is that someone controls them from killing each other. So he called for a very tight, centralized state for that purpose. But basically, the Hobbesian idea is that you can’t do anything in a state of nature, other than to defend yourself from being killed by someone else. And strangely enough, while British thinkers accepted that there would be a national government that would stop people from killing each other inside Britain, they took the view that internationally it is a Hobbesian war of all against all, that just countries fight with each other. And this is in the current thinking of international relations known as the the “realist school.” And our leading realist thinker in the United States is John Mearsheimer at University of Chicago. He’s a wonderful person and a tremendous gentleman and a great scholar. But he thinks that countries, and especially great powers, are inevitably at each other’s throats. And unfortunately, there’s a lot of empirical evidence that this is often the case. But John Mearsheimer says the implication of this is that the world is tragic. His most famous book is called “The Tragedy of Great Power Politics” because he says conflict is just about inevitable between major powers, because nobody trusts each other, you can’t trust each other. It’s a war of all against all. It’s eat or be eaten killer, kill or be killed. And so, yes, life’s tragic. And I debate him.  Again we’re friends and I admire him a lot. I want to be clear, but I say, “John, we can’t accept tragedy as our fate. We have to do better than that.” And so I go back to the philosophers and the philosophers taught, you know, you can have harmony. That was Confucius’s main message, which is it’s possible actually to be decent. It’s possible to observe what was famous for Confucius and in similar terms, for us in the Western culture, as the Golden Rule: “do not do to others what you would not have them do to you.” If you’re a Hobbesian, you say, “oh, there goes Sachs moralizing, but that’s not how the world is. I’m going to do what I can to the others, because otherwise they’re going to do something terrible to me, and I’m going to get there first.”

Mike Billington: Because that’s human nature. That’s what they argue.

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: Because that’s the deep human nature. That’s inevitable. But I don’t believe it. It’s certainly not the case that we’re always at war against each other. We can be better than that. But by the way, China absolutely has a different history and a different mindset. This is also a fascinating point. It’s not just Confucius versus Hobbes, it’s actually history, 2000 years of statecraft. What have we learned? Well, in China, for most of the 2000 years, there was a centralized state. This is very important. For most of the 2000 years, there was the Han dynasty, or the Tang dynasty, or the Song dynasty, or the Yuan dynasty, or the Ming dynasty, or the Qing dynasty, or today the People’s Republic of China. And for most of that 2000 years there was one country, and while there were rebellions and there were a lot of invasions from the north, mainly from the nomadic peoples in the dryland grassland steppe regions, there was one country, big, big population. 

Now in Europe after 476 AD, when the Roman Empire fell in the West, there never again was one dominant power of Western Europe. So there was war nonstop. Think of Britain and France, for example. How many years were they at war during the past 1000 years? An incredible amount across the channel. Now compare that with China and Japan. How many years were China and Japan at war between, you could take it back before 1000 AD, but say from 1000 AD to. 1890. The answer is two years. I think it’s 1274 and 1281, if I remember correctly. And there was actually one incursion a third year. Now, two of those were when the Mongols ruled China, and they tried to invade Japan and failed on two occasions. Once was when a shogun, military commander of Japan, ridiculously tried to tried to invade China and was terribly defeated in the Korean Peninsula.

But my point is not that. My point is they didn’t fight for a thousand years. Barely a skirmish. By the way, when Japan industrialized, and was the first industrializing nation of Asia. Japan followed the realist approach, sadly, Japan said, “okay, now we’re part of the Imperial Club. Now we’re going to go invade China.” And the Chinese diplomats said, “what are you doing? We’re Asians.” And Japan said, “no, no, no. Now we’re part of the Western club.” This was back in the 1890s. So Japan really behaved badly by becoming an imperialist power for some period. But China never did in that way. And if we understand the different philosophical roots, this is crucial. If we understand the different experience of Europe and China, we can come to appreciate that our mindset in the West that, well, “it’s war all the time. So China is an enemy, so we better go at it,” is nothing like the way that China thinks. And when I said to John Mearsheimer, again, I want to stress a friend and, you know, and a brilliant scholar, when I said all this war mongering against China is going to create a self-fulfilling prophecy of war. He said “yes.” I said, “John, self-fulfilling. We don’t need to have that war.” He said “yes, but that’s how it is.” And I said, “no, we don’t need to have it that way. We can do better than that.” So that’s the debate.

Mike Billington: Helga Zepp-LaRouche issued what she calls the ten principles of for an architecture of security and development for the world as a whole. And most of them are sort of self-evident, that you need education, you need cultural training, you need health, so forth. But the 10th principle is exactly what you just brought up, that the nature of man is good, and this is the one that’s most difficult for people to accept or understand. But it’s the fundamental one. It’s really the issue as as I think you correctly just located this is what distinguishes the idea of being committed to global development rather than global war. And of course, as you said, also the Confucian concept of harmony and the concentration on education is really the center of the Chinese development of their own country over the last 40 years, and what’s now being taken out to the rest of the world through the Belt and Road. As you know, we just had the Third Belt and Road Forum in Beijing with 150 countries represented, which certainly demonstrates that the West has failed miserably in the isolation of China in the world, the idea that they could get countries to “decouple” from China has just forced most countries to say, “you’re crazy. This is where development is, rather than war and sanctions.”

The headline of our EIR this week is going to be on the fact that Xi Jinping offered $100 billion in new investments through the Belt and Road. At the same time that Mr. Biden was offering a $100 billion investment in wars, naming specifically Russia, meaning Ukraine, Israel, the genocide being carried out against the Palestinians and China. They included Taiwan as one of the places where this $100 billion is going. So it’s pretty clear that they’re talking about a global war. And the only question is, how can this madness be stopped and reversed?

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: Well, it is so unacceptable, American foreign policy, and what I hope people are coming to understand is that the arrogance and the militarization of the United States that has been demonstrated time and again now over the past 30 years, is not bringing security to the US. It has busted the budget. We’ve spent trillions of dollars on these horrible wars that have accomplished nothing except violence and destruction and rising debt. And they’re not making America safer at all. They’re more and more wars that are a reflection of this arrogance, because the arrogance has meant that America, American policy makers, have thought “we can do what we want, and we don’t have to talk with anybody about it. We don’t need diplomacy. We just need our military.” And the military can’t solve political problems. We’re finding out again and again that the military approach  doesn’t work to solve the deeper problems of humanity. And can’t settle political issues. For that, you need politics. You need diplomacy, and I mean politics in the positive sense of getting together to work out arrangements for people to live peacefully together. So I think the failures of American foreign policy are on full display. Also the ignorance of it, because I would cite our National Security Advisor statement, Jake Sullivan, about a week before the violence blew up in Israel and Gaza with the Hamas attack and now the bombing of Gaza, Jake Sullivan said “the Middle East is the quietest that it’s been in two decades,” It shows they don’t know anything except what their own imagination is, and they don’t understand what’s happening around the world, and what’s happening around the world is that people want a different approach. They want development. They want social justice. They want the chance for decent lives. They don’t want the militarized approach.  

The horror unfolding in Southwest Asia today is the Bernard Lewis Plan in action: the deliberate promotion of religious strife and bloodshed throughout the region to produce the most bestial on both sides.

One is reminded of the anguished opening sentence of Nicholas of Cusa ‘s 1453 work De Pace Fidei (Peace in Faith) , an important philosophical study of the principles of the coming Golden Renaissance:

News of the atrocities, which have recently been perpetrated by the Turkish king in Constantinople and have now been divulged, has so inflamed a man who once saw that region, with zeal for God, that amongst many sighs he asked the Creator of all things if in His kindness He might moderate the persecution, which raged more than usual on account of diverse religious rites

But let’s also recall Cusa’s next sentence:

Then it occurred that after several days—indeed on account of lengthy, continuous meditation—a vision was manifested to the zealous man, from which he concluded that it would be possible, through the experience of a few wise men who are well acquainted with all the diverse practices which are observed in religions across the world, to find a unique and propitious concordance, and through this to constitute a perpetual peace in religion upon the appropriate and true course.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute and a leading Cusanus researcher, is convinced that Cusa’s method of “Coincidence of Opposites” is the only way out of the current civilizational crisis.

The choice is no longer between violence and non-violence. The choice is between non-violence and non-existence.
— Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Riverside Church, April 4, 1967

Oct. 17, 2023—United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese warned Oct. 14 that: “In the name of self-defense, Israel is seeking to justify what would amount to ethnic cleansing.… Israel has already carried out mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians under the fog of war.” Southwest Asia is now the staging ground for what is the latest phase of the World War Three now being fought against Russia and China. Sometimes that war is called “Ukraine/Russia”; once it was called “Afghanistan”; today, it is called “the Middle East.” Few dare call it by its real name. As J. Robert Oppenheimer noted in an interview: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

The lives of millions—2 million people in Gaza, and millions of others, of different faiths and nations nearby—hang in the balance. Humanity must act; it is already nearly too late. The nation of China, now hosting 140 nations at the Belt and Road Forum, expressed a view last week with which all sane people would agree: “the UN has the responsibility and obligation to play its due role on the Palestinian question,” and that China “supports the Security Council in holding an emergency meeting on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, agrees that the meeting should focus on humanitarian concerns, demand a ceasefire, an end to violence and the protection of civilians, form a binding international consensus and take concrete next steps.”

Will this thinking prevail? Or will the Anglo-American-“NATO” financial alliance and war party, through its scheming, arrogant folly, destroy itself and most life on the planet through an “unintentional” thermonuclear war, triggered by religious fanaticism and the erupting orgy of “retributive violence” in Southwest Asia, otherwise still known by its British colonial name as “the Middle East?” The credibility and even the very survival of the United Nations is now on the line.

The cycle of perpetual violence, consuming generation after generation, once more pollutes and desecrates the holy places of worship and monuments in the common meeting ground of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It is now being widely reported by publications of record that there was a compact between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and elements inside of Hamas to undermine peace. The Israeli daily {Haaretz} reported on Oct. 9 that “Between 2012 and 2018, Netanyahu gave Qatar approval to transfer a cumulative sum of about a billion dollars to Gaza, at least half of which reached Hamas, including its military wing.” {Haaretz} also quotes Netanyahu “according to the {Jerusalem Post}” as making the following statement on March 11, 2019: “‘Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas, and transferring money to Hamas,’ Netanyahu told his Likud party’s Knesset members in March 2019, ‘This is part of our strategy.’”

What really happened on Oct. 7 is still to be investigated. The timing of the attack could not have been worse—or better. Ongoing discussions among several nations of the region, including between Saudi Arabia and Israel, as well as with China and other out-of-area nations, are seeking to replace deep-seated, long-term conflict with a new era of international economic cooperation, through designs such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Whatever motivation was provided to the operatives of the Hamas-originated attack, its effect has been to interfere with the progress of that very sensitive process. Those initiatives are now threatened. Much, as with the events of Oct. 7, is now unclear.

What is clear, is the atrocities that have occurred on that day and since, and the atrocities that are to come. Will the world stand by now, as it did in the First Iraq War of 1991 and its aftermath, and watch the merciless killing of children as it did then, when 500,000 Iraqi children were murdered through sanctions and war over five years? On May 12, 1996, United States Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, responding to correspondent Lesley Stahl, after the reporter pointed out that “that’s more children than died in Hiroshima,” said, “I think this is a very hard choice. But the price, we think the price is worth it.”

Who is the “we” of which Albright spoke? Did that include the people of the United States, or Europe, then? Does it include you, now? Do you really believe, or accept, that the civilian population of Gaza, or anywhere, must be removed and sent to another country as a result of a “9/11”-style attack on Israel by forces that we are told were being financially and otherwise supported by Netanyahu, et al.?

In a macabre “simple twist of fate,” nearly 2 million people are now to be displaced by the armies of the nation whose ancestors were themselves displaced, and their whole communities eradicated, time and again, virtually everywhere in the world. The 19th- and 20th-Century British colonialists, who drew the lines of this present conflict on maps in 1916 and 1917, could not be more pleased. Colonialism, however, is over—or should be. Militarily-forced migrations of people must be vigorously opposed anywhere in the world, whatever the apparent justification. One atrocity should not answer another. The barbaric “purgative violence” that Hamas engaged in on Oct. 7, must be denounced by all—but killing thousands of the sick, elderly, and young as “collateral damage in the cause of just retribution” is an antidote worse than the disease. It will ensure that the disease will not be cured, but will instead spread.

When Yitzhak Rabin, who as Israeli Defense Minister fought Palestinians in the 1987-93 Intifada, realized, as one of his senior officers put it, that “deep in my heart I know that what we are doing will prompt others to react against us violently in revenge,” he changed his approach. Rabin, in his July 1992 speech after becoming Prime Minister a month earlier, said: “Security is not a tank, an aircraft, a missile ship. Security is also a man’s education, housing, schools, the street and neighborhood, the society in which he grew up. And security is also that man’s hope.”

Prime Minister Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres began the secret Oslo Peace Accords process with the Palestine Liberation Organization, and signed a Declaration at the White House, Sept. 13, 1993. There, Rabin said: “We who have come from a land where parents bury their children, we who have fought against you, the Palestinians, we say to you today in a loud and clear voice: Enough of blood and tears, enough!” Rabin’s most enduring words were uttered later, in his famous toast to all humanity: Let us toast “those with the courage to change their axioms.”

Rabin was assassinated by Israeli religious extremists—or was it the “International Assassination Bureau,” the people that killed Mohandas Gandhi, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and many, many others? The memory of Yitzhak Rabin should inform the investigation of the events of Oct. 7. There is something else that should be done, in the name of the martyred Rabin, and the martyred peace process for which he gave his life.

There must be a peace package, an “Oasis Plan,” that, instead of spreading weapons, gives economic stability and even prosperity to the people of Southwest Asia, including the Palestinians. Unless you put, not boots on the ground, but shovels in the ground, you will never upturn the roots of hate and division in that entire area, roots that precede and are even more deeply embedded than today’s Israel-Palestine conflict. Advanced energy, water and transportation infrastructure for Southwest Asia as a whole will be a central feature, around which hope can coalesce.

We must take a page from the new “Colonialism Is Over” movement that is the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa)-Plus nations of the world. Southwest Asian and African nations Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia and Iran are all about to join the BRICS formation. This will help to bring the voice of the Global South to bear, instead of only that of “Global NATO,” which is dominated by the old imperialisms of Europe plus the self-destructive foreign and financial policies of the United States.

Immediately, we must do what China and other nations are suggesting. We must stop the forced migration from Gaza. We must stop the daily killing through a ceasefire and even before that, by all means available. The United Nations must enforce its Resolution 242, adopted November 22, 1967 and affirmed by Israel on May 1, 1968, which consists of two propositions: “(i) Withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict; (ii) Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.”

Let it, however, be clear: There is no possibility of actually solving the British imperialism-originated “Middle East crisis” without the kind of long-term, meticulous, even tedious deliberations that took place from 1644-48 in Westphalia, Germany, to end the murderous Thirty Years War in Europe.

Speaking at Central Connecticut State University in 2009, the economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche put it this way:

“There is a solution, a solution in principle. And the solution is: End this blasted imperialist system! And understand that we, as a people, must develop our spiritual culture; that is, the creative powers of mankind, to carry further the development of mankind, from some brutish character by a campfire a million years ago, or so, into mankind as we desire that mankind should develop today. That’s the issue.”

LaRouche’s solution-concept requires a change in axioms. Principle Ten of Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s “Ten Principles of a New International Security and Development Architecture,” written in November 2022 following the outbreak of the NATO-Russia war in Ukraine, restates it. “The basic assumption for the new paradigm is, that man is fundamentally good and capable to infinitely perfect the creativity of his mind and the beauty of his soul, and being the most advanced geological force in the universe, which proves that the lawfulness of the mind and that of the physical universe are in correspondence and cohesion, and that all evil is the result of a lack of development, and therefore can be overcome.” This is the principle which must replace the suicidal axioms now held by the doomed combatants in the no-win “Israel-Palestine conflict.”

But Lyndon LaRouche also warned: “In the meantime, we will fight. We will do everything possible to try to get peace in this area, because we want to stop the killing. But we’re not going to tell somebody, we’ve got a solution that’s going to be accepted, that’s going to work. We’re going to say, we’ve got a hopeless cause, and we’re going to continue to fight for it.”

That hopeless cause is the cause of peace. Another warrior for peace, American President John F. Kennedy, said it this way, at American University, June 10, 1963: “First: Let us examine our attitude toward peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable—that mankind is doomed—that we are gripped by forces we cannot control.

“We need not accept that view. Our problems are manmade—therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable—and we believe they can do it again.”

The alternative to the “foolish” pursuit of peace undertaken by John F. Kennedy, Yitzhak Rabin, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi and others, is World War Three, a war which has now already begun. We are already “become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The question is: Do we, as did Yitzhak Rabin, have the courage to change our axioms in time to reverse what we have already begun?

Without intervention, the Palestinian-Israeli situation is a cockpit for World War III. The strategic situation of Southwest Asia is one of incredible danger, now escalating in a way that the spill-over can ignite a global conflagration.

Over the weekend, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, on a call with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, stressed that the major nations must now support an international conference on the crisis situation. The United States has been informed.

This peace conference proposal goes back to last June when Chinese President Xi Jinping presented the need for an international peace conference to be held on the Israel-Palestine conflict. That proposal is now back on the agenda, with life-and-death urgency.

The proposal was raised by China with Brazil last week. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said on Oct. 13, that Wang Yi is coordinating on the peace conference proposal with officials from Brazil. Note that Brazil is the rotating chair of the UN Security Council this month. Wang conferred Oct. 12 with Brazilian President Lula da Silva’s Chief Foreign Policy Advisor Celso Amorim, about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Wang told Amorim, “China calls for an international peace conference with greater authority and impact as soon as possible to galvanize a more broad-based international consensus with the two-state solution serving as its basis, and to formulate a timetable and roadmap to that end.” Wang Yi added that the UN has both the responsibility and an obligation “to pay its due role on the Palestinian question.”

The on-the-ground situation for the 2.3 million people of the Gaza Strip amounts to conditions knowably leading to mass death. An estimated 1 million people are displaced within Gaza; among those are more than 500,000 who tried to leave the north for the south. The World Health Organization has issued a statement calling Israel’s order for people to evacuate from the north to the south, a “death sentence.” This affected 22 hospitals, many of whose 2,000 patients were too ill to be moved. There is no water nor sanitation for hundreds of thousands of people. Electricity is mostly down. Food scarcity is acute.

Secretary Blinken was back in Israel today, after a swing around six Arab nations since his first emergency visit to Israel last week. But with not only no solution, but furtherance of the crisis. Likewise EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen made a visit. Pres. Biden will go to Israel Wednesday, according to a breaking report tonight. German President Olaf Scholz said today he may visit soon. Their litany: “Israel has the responsibility and obligation to do whatever it wants to protect itself.”

In contrast, the role of the International Peace Coalition (IPC), only five months in operation, is critical to galvanize decisive action internationally to intervene for security in all respects, for all nations. On Friday, Oct. 20, will be the second open (online) IPC meeting of world figures and network leaders for peace, after the first such dialogue last Friday.

There will be a world-important platform for thinking, proposals and collaboration on the emergency in Southwest Asia at the Belt and Road Initiative 10th anniversary forum in China Oct. 17-18. Already today, many heads of state arrived and important bilateral meetings took place, including that of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Foreign Minister Wang Yi. Among the thousands of people attending, delegations will represent 140 countries, and 200 of the participants will be ministerial level or higher. President Xi Jinping is expected to welcome the attendees at the beginning of the sessions, and also give a major address Wednesday at the plenary.

Schiller Institute founder, and co-initiator of the IPC, Helga Zepp-LaRouche conferred today with collaborators, on the focus of immediate demands. There must be an immediate end to the violence. There must be the process of a negotiated solution, which needs to take place in the context of a peace conference. To succeed, the Global Majority must play a leading role in this process. All of this is urgent, and can be understood as the first step towards a world-scale security and development architecture.

This is the edited transcript of an interview with U.S.-China diplomat and scholar Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, ret.) conducted Oct. 9, 2023, by Mike Billington. Freeman is a visiting scholar at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. Subheads and embedded links to sources have been added.

Mike Billington: This is Mike Billington with the Schiller Institute and Executive Intelligence Review. Joining with me today is Chas Freeman, well-known for his role as the interpreter for President Richard Nixon during his groundbreaking visit to China in 1972. He then served in several positions in both the Defense Department and the State Department and then as the U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the first war with Iraq. He was also appointed Director of the National Intelligence Council in 2009, but the appointment was undermined. 

%%The Israeli War on Hamas

Billington: I have two areas of questions that I want to bring up. One, on the war danger between Russia and the U.S. and NATO; and the other on the situation in Asia.  I’ll begin, however, with a question regarding the situation in Southwest Asia. The Schiller Institute is sponsoring a rally at the U.S. Congress Oct. 11, to demand: “No Funding for Ukraine! No War on Russia! We have learned that the neocons are sponsoring a counter rally demanding funding for two wars! So let’s begin by asking your view on the new Israeli war on Hamas, and perhaps also with Iran.

Amb. Freeman: We are seeing a disturbing tendency in our press to invent Iranian direction of this war; that somehow Iran put Hamas up to the attacks it has carried out. I think that is completely wrong and is very dangerous because it could be used to justify an Israeli or an American attack on Iran, as indeed we have threatened for years.

Palestinians have come to the point where many of them feel they have nothing to lose. This attack was an act of desperation and it came out of the blue. I analogize it to the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, which achieved objectives that no one had imagined. Namely, it convinced the public at large that the existing policies toward Vietnam were doomed to fail. And it ultimately produced a withdrawal from Vietnam by the United States. 

I think Hamas will lose decisively on the battlefield, but it may win the war, especially if Israel carries out its threat to reduce Gaza to the dimensions of the German city of Dresden in World War Two. I think that genocidal act would mobilize a lot of people against Israel who’ve been sitting on the fence.

So this is a very important moment in the history of the Middle East and in U.S. policy toward it. It’s quite clear that neither Israel nor the United States have any answer to the resistance by the Palestinians to their humiliation, eviction from their homes, and the attempted erasure of their presence from their homeland.

I might add that, unfortunately, this war in the Middle East probably greatly increases the risk of Donald Trump winning the 2024 election because it is yet another evidence of the ineptitude of the Biden administration in foreign affairs. It will also probably increase the prospects for an end to U.S. support for Ukraine. And while you may applaud the notion that that war would then end, it will end in a way that parallels the end of the war in Vietnam, where we basically encouraged a fight to the death and then walked away from it, leaving the Vietnamese to their fate. Not an act of great responsibility on our part. No accountability whatsoever for our withdrawal, as more recently, there has been none for our actions in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The difference in the third decade of the 21st Century is that during the Cold War, countries, allies, friends, faced a choice between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the Soviet system with all its brutality was so unattractive that that really was no choice at all. And now the world is not organized that way. It’s not bipolar. Countries do have the option of distancing themselves from Washington and they may well do so. In fact, they’re already doing it.

But it may be that this accelerates the process. So many political implications yet unexamined. I think it will play into the partisan divisions in the United States in such a way as to increase the prospect that aid to Ukraine will end, which of course is a very real prospect given the turmoil in the Congress and Republican opposition to that aid, which will probably strengthen now.

%%How to Assure Peace in Europe

Billington: In your presentation at Brown University last month, you noted that NATO no longer has any purpose based on its original creation as a buffer against the military threat from the Soviets. What do you think it will take for NATO to disband as the Warsaw Pact did? And for that matter, is there any reason for the European Union to continue existing?

Amb. Freeman: Your question gets to the question that we should all be discussing, but we aren’t, and that is: How to assure peace in Europe? The EU, in part, had its origins in an effort to reconcile historic enemies in Europe, that is, to reconcile the French-German divide, among other things, and produce a management system for Europe in the economic realm, ultimately in the political realm, that would ensure peace, stability, and prosperity.

NATO, after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union could have become what the Partnership for Peace promised: a management device for a cooperative security system in Europe, including a relationship with Russia, which was part of that program, that would replicate the Concert of Europe, which the Congress of Vienna created at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and manage relationships, security issues in the European area in a way that would prevent a great power war. That was an option before NATO. It did not choose it, and it chose instead to renew, in effect, a kind of Cold War with a resurgent Russia.

Russia has not sought to reassert a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, which it gave up at the end of the Cold War with the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, as you mentioned. It has instead sought to block the expansion of an American sphere of influence to its borders in the form of Ukraine’s membership in NATO, as membership in NATO is invariably followed by the forward deployment of U.S. troops and weaponry, which would simply be unacceptable to the Russians, as they have made clear.

I don’t think that NATO is going to disband. The best solution for it, frankly, would be for it to be Europeanized. Europeans should be in command of their own security. United States should backstop that but not lead it. I suspect that the unity of NATO, which the war in Ukraine has appeared to produce, is more superficial than long lasting. One can already see some NATO members, most recently Hungary and Slovakia, but others as well, who are deeply opposed to the inclusion of Ukraine in NATO and understand the Russian security perspective and are restive within the confines of NATO as it currently exists.

I suspect that when this war ends, however it ends, NATO will change, and the U.S. role in it is likely to diminish rather than increase. That is emphatically the case if Mr. Trump wins the 2024 elections, since he has no affection for NATO and no understanding of its collective security mechanisms at all.

%%The Contradictory Objectives of NATO and Russia in Ukraine

Billington: You have described NATO’s move out of area as a search for a “reason to exist,” to maintain the U.S. military superiority and sustain the military industrial complex. This included the wars in Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and more. This now includes Asia. The main issue now is the danger of a full scale war with Russia, with the failure of the counteroffensive in Ukraine. It is increasingly being recognized that the Ukraine war with Russia is lost. Even the U.S. Congress is finally recognizing that the American people will not support a continuation of the massive funding of this meat grinder war in Ukraine. Your thoughts?

Amb. Freeman: Indeed, Russia is winning this war. Russia has had two objectives: One: to ensure that NATO never incorporated Ukraine. That is now very much impossible. As the Vilnius NATO summit demonstrated and as Jake Sullivan, the National Security Adviser, said, “To incorporate Ukraine in NATO would mean to have a direct war with Russia.” That’s not on the table yet. Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO Secretary General, has said that for Ukraine to join NATO would require a peace treaty between Ukraine and Russia, and there’s no such thing in prospect. So Russia has essentially accomplished that objective, the effective sidelining of Ukraine as a future member of NATO.

Russia’s second declared objective was the protection of Russian speakers in Ukraine. They have accomplished this by annexing portions of the Donbas and the Ukrainian southeast.

The war has produced a lot of dead Ukrainians and fewer dead Russians, but a lot of dead people. It has accomplished nothing beyond that, from the Western point of view.

Billington: In your presentation, at Brown University, you quoted President Joe Biden, saying that Biden’s open admission that the purpose for the Ukraine war was to “sap Russia’s economic strength and weaken its military for years to come.” So there’s no hiding the fact that this is a surrogate war against Russia. You also quoted Boris Johnson’s intervention to prevent Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky from carrying out the agreement which had been made between Kiev and Russia back in March of 2022, which would have ended the war based on autonomy for the Donbas. You didn’t mention in that speech the threat of an escalation to a nuclear war. Why not?

Amb. Freeman: Because Russia is winning. The only circumstance in which Russia would initiate a nuclear exchange would be if it were losing decisively and this threatened the integrity of the Russian Federation. President Vladimir Putin has been very explicit on this subject. The only danger of a nuclear war, therefore, is a Russian loss, which is not what is happening. 

The pattern this war has taken is that Russia has counter escalated in response to Western escalation. We keep saying to the Ukrainians, you can’t have this weapon system or that one. And then we provide it, and the Russians announce that they will counter that with an escalation of their own. So there’s no record of Russia initiating escalations. I just don’t think this is a very realistic possibility. Of course, it’s conceivable that as we lose, we will find some way to use nuclear weapons. But I think that would be insane and would be even beyond anything I can imagine in terms of American politics or policy.

%%Most Important: How To Restore Peace

Billington: You think popular support against such a thing would prevent it from happening?

Amb. Freeman: The military, among others, would regard that as madness. Popular support would not be there either. Of course, whichever side initiates a nuclear exchange will receive nuclear attacks from the other, so nothing is gained. The notion attributed to President Ronald Reagan, that “a nuclear war can never be won and should never be fought,” is very much in evidence here.

The question for me, as I said at the outset, is not the danger of a nuclear exchange. It is how to restore peace to Europe. This is the question the Russians raised repeatedly between 1994 and 2021, 20th December, when they proposed the negotiation of a security architecture for Europe that would reassure all concerned, including themselves. We rebuffed that offer of negotiations, and the consequence was the Russian attack on Ukraine. They felt seriously enough about this issue and the threat to themselves that they were prepared to go to war. We knew that. So the basic question that they posed, how to construct a security architecture for Europe that preserves the peace, and prevents the outbreak of war, remains the operative question. And it’s not being discussed at all in the West.

Billington: Four prominent Germans, including Gen. Harold Kujat (ret.) and Prof. Dr. Horst Teltschik, have proposed a negotiated peace [[plan]] [[https://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2023/eirv50n39-20231006/eirv50n39-20231006_012-ending_the_war_by_a_negotiated_p.pdf]] for the war with Russia, arguing that it’s either that the parties involved begin negotiations now or it’s going to escalate.  Should the war escalate, the Germans point out, we are dealing with the dangerous possibility of global nuclear war. Their proposal is being broadly considered around the world. The Schiller Institute is helping to circulate it. Your thoughts on that?

Amb. Freeman: President Biden at the UN General Assembly repudiated any negotiation on the grounds that it would “reward Russia.” But wars are not decided at the negotiating table. They’re decided on the battlefield. There will be a negotiation sooner or later. And the terms that Ukraine will have to accept are not improving; they are deteriorating. Russia may well take additional territory, if only to trade it for a peace in a negotiation. Ukraine could lose its access to the Black Sea. That is not an impossibility, although it is militarily very difficult for the Russians to achieve. Ukraine’s bargaining position has been progressively weakened by this war, not strengthened.

Almost nobody in the West is talking about how to protect Ukrainians or give them peace or bring them to prosperity and clean government and democracy. All these issues are set aside in favor of punitive actions against Russia. But there will be a negotiation, and the outlines of what could be done if the Russians were wise, which they’re not incapable of being, or that the areas that Russia has illegally annexed in Ukraine might be recognized as independent of Ukraine for a period of a couple of decades, let’s say, following which there would be an OSCE [Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe] supervised referendum in each of these territories, asking them whether they wished to retain their independence, rejoin Ukraine, or rejoin Russia.

That would be a democratic process that respected the will of the people on the ground. Nobody ever asks what the people of Crimea want. Nobody ever asks what the people of the Donbas wanted. Why not ask? That would provide an interim buffer between Ukraine and Russia in the form of independent polities and set up a competition between Ukraine and Russia to attract them.

Now, this may be, in the case of Ukraine, impossible. It may be impossible to attract Russian speakers given the fact that the Ukrainian government now is committed to preventing the use of any minority language, even one as extensively spoken as Russian, for official purposes or for education. That was the first thing that the Ukrainian government we helped install in 2014 did: ban the use of minority languages. This is something that is guaranteed in the OSCE charter to people in Europe. It was guaranteed in the previous Ukrainian constitution. If it can’t be reinstated, then I don’t think Ukraine’s ever going to see peace with its Russian speakers.

%%The Relevance of Referenda in Crimea and Donbas

Billington: It sounds like you’re dismissing the status referenda in Donbas (May 11, 2014, and again Sept. 23-27, 2022] and in Crimea [March 16, 2014] as illegitimate or something. What’s your thought on that? Why don’t you recognize those as a voice of the people?

Amb. Freeman: I think they were probably an accurate reflection of popular opinion, but procedurally, they were illegal. Putting these under international auspices would give them a legitimacy they currently lack. There is an interesting contrast, of course, between the referendum that the Russians organized in Crimea—which I think accurately reflected the opinion of most people in Crimea, and accomplished a peaceful, bloodless integration of Crimea into the Russian Federation—and the NATO detachment of Kosovo from Serbia, which required a long bombing campaign and a lot of bloodshed. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say on the one hand that conducting a referendum in Crimea is improper when you’ve basically done exactly the same thing, but more violently, in Kosovo.

We need to return to some sort of sense of due process, legitimate process. The way for that to happen is for Europeans to ensure that they supervise and guarantee the fairness of whatever referendum ensues. Of course, at this point, the Russians hold those areas and they’re not going to give them up. I don’t think they’re going to go back to Ukraine. Nobody’s talking—I shouldn’t say “nobody,” of course, some people are talking—about the need for peace negotiations, but officially, both Moscow and Washington seem to be committed to the further destruction of Ukraine.

%%War Damage Assessment

Billington: You’ve also argued that Russia has been significantly damaged by the launching of the special military operation as seen in its economic and human costs. But you acknowledge that they were forced by NATO expansion to take action, or at least it’s legitimate to argue that. Looking at global results, you have noted a totally changed global geometry, with the BRICS nations now unified against the war policies and against the sanctions policies of the Anglo-Americans and NATO, while essentially the entire Global South is openly joining or at least cooperating with the BRICS and with the Belt and Road, and breaking from the U.S. dollar hegemony over world trade. In that light, aren’t Russia and the world generally heading in a potentially far better direction as a result?

Amb. Freeman: In many ways, Russia has been strengthened by this war. Its military production has increased dramatically. It has learned how to counter NATO’s weaponry and develop tactics for doing so. It has seen a reorientation of its economy toward China, India, the Middle East, and Africa that has actually enabled it to outpace Germany in terms of economic growth. Germany, of course, is being de-industrialized due to the absence of competitive pricing for energy, having lost Russian gas supplies. There’s now quite an argument between the French and Germans over energy. The French are heavily nuclear and their power generation is therefore much better, giving France a much more competitive industrial base. So the Russians have certainly gained a fair amount from this.

It’s clear that the United States has been weakened, as you suggest. We have set in motion antagonisms to our hegemony that are growing. So far, there’s more talk than action, but this is the writing on the wall. We haven’t gained any great credibility anywhere. And now, of course, the war in Ukraine appears to be going in favor of the Russians rather than in favor of us.

But Russia did lose a lot. It lost its connections to Europe, which are going to be very difficult to restore. It lost a good deal of its intelligentsia who fled the draft. This is something that happens periodically whenever Russia goes to war. Many, many Americans of Russian descent are here because they fled the draft in World War One. The Russians have seen their relationships with Japan and others deteriorate. And so they clearly paid a price. The regime in Moscow is more repressive than it was. It’s an elected autocracy, but more autocratic now than it was, and many Russians don’t like that. So there have been gains for Russia, there have been losses. But I think from the point of view of the United States, the losses far outweigh the gains.

%%A New Global Geometry of Nations

Billington: As to the coming together of the rest of the world, most of the rest of the world is against this. Do you think it’s too late to try to convince the Europeans and the Americans to get into the new geometry? Will the U.S. and Europe even survive if they fail to do so?

Amb. Freeman: Look at the division of the world that the United States is engineering, not just through sanctions on Russia and Iran and North Korea or China, but through active decoupling—somewhat euphemistically described as “de-risking.” Internationally, you can look at this as isolating Russia or China or whatever, or you can look at it as self isolation by the United States.

In many respects the G7 group of nations which the U.S. leads, and which is the club of former imperialist powers, does appear to be retreating into its own stockade. And as it does so, it appears to be abandoning much of the democratic system that made it admirable in previous days.

I suspect that Europe, one way or the other after the war, especially if it is able to compose some sort of peace with Russia and Ukraine, will indeed remain integrated, straddling both the American sphere and the Chinese sphere that is emerging.

I’m not so sure about the United States. We have terrible domestic problems now, which we’re not addressing. And we’re behaving internationally as though we were omnipotent, when clearly we’re not. We’re taking many risks. I note in particular that we’ve launched a technology war with China, which happens to have over a fourth of the world’s scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians, and is increasingly innovative and creative, at a time when our innovation is slowing down. Our economy is dominated by oligopolies that cooperate with the government—almost fascist, corporatist, if you will, in the way things work. Try to put in an unpopular opinion on the internet and you will be blocked by corporate media in collusion with the U.S. government. This is not what the First Amendment was intended to guarantee.

The net effect of changes in the world, our reactions to them are causing our own values to be deeply eroded in ways that I think are gravely damaging to our republic.

%%U.S.-China Relations, and Narcotics

Billington: I certainly agree with you on that. So let’s switch to Asia. You mentioned that the isolation, the decoupling, or whatever from China is continuing. The U.S. is also continuing its military buildup around China with the AUKUS agreement with the British and Australia; and then the Japan-South Korea-U.S. military deal; expanding military cooperation with the Philippines, and so forth. And yet the Biden administration has recently deployed three cabinet members to China who are talking about, “improving relations.” What’s the real story?

Amb. Freeman: We want to improve relations so we can continue to isolate China. It’s hardly a surprise that the Chinese don’t find this a very attractive proposition. We have a tendency to ask the Chinese to cooperate on things that we think are important while refusing to cooperate with them on things that they want us to cooperate on. You can’t have a relationship that works this way.

Sen. Chuck Schumer is in China at the moment. It’s a bit ironic, given China’s experience of two Opium Wars, which occurred a while back, for Schumer to be talking about American addictions and imploring the Chinese to stop the supply of fentanyl, which they don’t actually sell to the U.S. — they provide the precursors to the Mexican drug cartels. It’s not the Chinese government anyway. It’s Chinese business people. The Mexicans then make a pile of money off the world’s largest drug market, which is the United States.

There’s a lot of historical evidence that the only way to deal effectively with a narcotics problem is to address it at the demand level. We managed to get people to find smoking unacceptable, but we don’t seem to be able to apply that knowledge to marijuana, cocaine, crack cocaine, fentanyl, amphetamines, and whatnot. We’re not doing anything on the demand side. It’s all about suppressing supply.

I can tell you from my experience dealing with the narcotics issue in Southeast Asia, where I was the coordinator for our effort in the region based in Bangkok, that the markup from the farm head for a piece of opium to the streets of New York City is 300 fold. That is, you will make 30,000 times as much money selling that in New York, as you can if you’re a farmer in Burma [Myanmar].

With that kind of markup, there is no way on God’s Earth that you’re going to stop the market economy from meeting the demand. So you have to reduce the demand. There is no effort being made to do that. Now we have Republicans talking about bombing Mexico to stop fentanyl production, as if that’s going to solve the problem. It’s not. We have a tendency to blame the Chinese for all sorts of problems that are frankly caused by ourselves, for ourselves. And then we wonder why they don’t find this an attractive proposition.

Billington: Not only are there no efforts being made to stop demand, but in fact, there’s a massive move to legalize and expand the use of drugs quite openly. Sen. Schumer is in fact a leading advocate of legalizing drug use, a major target of LaRouche candidate Diane Sare in her campaign against Schumer in the 2002 election. 

Amb. Freeman: Of course. As I say, this is ironic, given the Opium Wars, where we insisted to the Chinese government at the time that we and the British and others had the absolute right to sell narcotics to the Chinese people, and that it was improper for their government to interfere. We actually went to war on that proposition, the Opium Wars in the 19^th Century.

In 1949, when the Communist Party of China took over, they addressed this problem by, among other things, detaining ten million drug addicts, and arresting and either condemning to death or imprisoning the pushers. This solved the problem.

There’s a parallel experience in American history after the Civil War. A great number of soldiers were addicted to morphine. To feed their habit they engaged in criminal activity: burglaries and the like, and robbery. The federal government rounded them all up and made them go “cold turkey,” which was pretty nasty. Many died. But it solved the problem. Maybe there are answers to this that are less draconian than those used by the Chinese in 1949 or the United States in the 1870s. But no effort is being made to find those.

%%The Transformational Effect of the Belt and Road Initiative

Billington: On the positive side, we have the 10th anniversary of the Belt and Road Initiative coming up. There’ll be a big conference Oct. 17–18 in Beijing, with people from all over the world joining in. And, of course, this goes along with the expansion of the BRICS after their Leaders’ Summit Aug. 22–24 in Johannesburg, South Africa, which, assuming this goes through in January, with six new member nations joining, will hold most or at least much of the world’s, oil reserves, helping to make BRICS the central development process worldwide. What are your expectations for this process?

Amb. Freeman: The Belt and Road Initiative has grown and changed as it went along. The Chinese began this program [in March 2013], essentially as an extension of China’s industrial policies domestically to the global level, initially directed at Central Asia, but now global. The Chinese authorized their policy banks to conduct due diligence and lend money to projects that are originated by their business people, whether they’re from state owned enterprises or the private sector, and foreign counterparts. No project is proposed except in cooperation with the foreign partner. No lending takes place without due diligence. The Chinese have learned a great deal about how to conduct due diligence, and their loan policies are now much more prudent than they were initially.

The transformational effect of this program has been immense in terms of increasing the efficiency of trade, not just physically through the construction of infrastructure, but procedurally as well, because a great part of the Belt and Road Initiative involves the conclusion of agreements for expedited customs clearance, bonded storage, transit without fees, and so forth, as well as industrial parks, and of course, fiber optic cable, airports, port improvements, all of which greatly increase the efficiency of trade and enable its expansion. I think the program has been a great success, although at the moment less money is flowing into it than before, for several reasons: global trade is down, the Chinese economy is not growing as fast as it once did, and money is a little short.

U.S. efforts to obstruct the Belt and Road Initiative have had some effect, but not a great deal, because the United States essentially offers only rhetoric and no money for competing projects. It is actually a fallacy to assume that if the United States builds a road or railroad, that somehow detracts from a Chinese road or a railroad. Anybody can drive down the road. Anybody can ship goods on the railroad, increasing connectivity that benefits everyone. It doesn’t hurt anyone. Arguably, doing that increases American or Chinese influence with the governments that benefit from the increased development. But I don’t see any governments anywhere kowtowing either to the Chinese or increasingly to the United States.

Going back to the original question you asked about Israel’s war on Gaza and Hamas’s attack on Israel, you can forget the American proposed trade route from Mumbai in India across Saudi Arabia to the port of Haifa in Israel. Not going to happen. Never was going to happen, very likely because of two factors: First, the political obstacles. Second, the absence of any American money or European money in this. But now it is certainly not going to happen, given the flaring up again, of the immiseration of the Palestinians, and the political reactions to that in the Arab Gulf.

%%Why the U.S. Won’t Join the BRI

Billington: Professor Jeffrey Sachs has been in China for the last few weeks. He gave a speech at the Temple of Confucius in Shandong. He spoke to diplomats at the UN office in Beijing. He describes the Belt and Road pretty much the way you just did, as really the greatest development program in the world, and emphasizes that this is the proper model for the development of Africa and the rest of the developing sector, but especially Africa. He encourages the U.S. and the Europeans to join it, to build the road as you just said, that the U.S. doesn’t seem to want to build. Why don’t they? Why won’t the U.S. and Europe join in this in this development process?

Amb. Freeman: Well, this is part of the basic antagonism the United States has developed with China as a result of China’s overtaking the United States in purchasing power parity terms, at least, as now the largest economy on the planet. Chinese industrial production is now twice that of the United States, and China is the world’s largest trader. What China is not is a power projector. It does not have the hundreds of military bases scattered around the world that the United States does. It doesn’t have any particular desire to pursue an American style hegemonic role of the sort we began after World War Two. And in fact, China explicitly denies any intention to do that. But, to Chinese development, the United States feels a rivalry which has become essentially enmity. We are trying to hold back Chinese development retard it, inhibit it, prevent China’s scientific and technological advance, and deny China foreign markets for its goods and services. This really began earlier in the Obama administration with the failure to join the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank [AIDB] and the effort to prevent others from doing so—an effort which I would note has entirely failed. That’s the first reason we won’t join this.

The second reason the U.S. won’t join is that we don’t have any money. We have to borrow $1.5 trillion just to keep our government going at the current level of operations. We won’t tax ourselves to pay for things we need: domestic and foreign aid, foreign assistance, which means lending for purposes of foreign development, which is a sound thing to do because it increases overseas markets, it raises prosperity and generates prosperity for Americans. We won’t do this, in part because we don’t have the money, we don’t have the revenue. We just saw a near shutdown of the U.S. government over this issue of whether we would pay as we go or not. So in a sense, we just don’t have the money. I would say, recalling Willie Sutton’s reason for robbing banks: that’s where the money is. Now, that today is in China and the Arab Gulf countries. These are the two great sources of capital today for two different reasons: In the case of the Chinese, a very high domestic savings rate; in the case of the Gulf Arabs, profits from hydrocarbon sales.

%%The Saudi-Iranian Reconciliation Agreement

Billington: President Xi Jinping co-sponsored a China-Africa Forum as part of the BRICS summit in Johannesburg, co-sponsored with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, with at least many, if not most of the African leaders attending. The BRI was a major focus of that discussion. China had already organized the historic reconciliation between the Saudi Arabia and Iran. As a former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, what is your view of that agreement and its impact on the Middle East, and on history generally?

Amb. Freeman: The agreement began with mediation by Iraq and Oman, which led to the opportunity that the Chinese seized to achieve closure in the negotiations between Riyadh and Tehran. It was a very positive development demanded by the countries of the region as the role of Iraq and Oman illustrates. And it was an alternative to the American policy of unremitting hostility to Iran and maximum pressure on Iran. It was also an alternative to the effort by the United States and Israel to organize an anti-Iranian coalition in the region.

The agreement is of enormous benefit to the parties, that is to say, normal relations with Iran reduce the threat to Saudi Arabia from Iran, normal relations with Saudi Arabia, bypass the American embargoes, and provide Iran with a significant source of trade and capital. It also represents a weakening of the American position in the Middle East and a repudiation of the U.S. policy to which the United States has not reacted in any particular way. In fact, as tensions in the Persian Gulf diminished, we increased our deployments to the region. Now, of course, we’ve increased deployments again, this time in response to the Palestinian uprising.

It is a very significant agreement. China’s diplomacy proved to be adroit, and it is an illustration of the merits of maintaining dialogue, diplomatic dialogue, with all parties, whether you agree with them or not. It is in that sense, a direct counter to our behavior at the outset of the Ukraine war when we refused to conduct a dialogue with the Russians on the issues that they said concerned them so much that they might go to war. There is a parallel, I’m sorry to say, in the case of the Taiwan issue, where we will not talk about the issues of concern to the Chinese, but merely double down on military deterrence. Military deterrence depends on increasing the threat to China. Increasing the threat to China leads to an arms race with it. Far from reducing the danger of war, it increases it because it leaves the Chinese with no path to achieving their objectives other than the use of force.

But we don’t seem to understand how to do diplomacy these days. And we don’t have a lot of situational awareness, as shown in the idiotic remark of Jake Sullivan a week ago that things had never been quite so calm in the Middle East, which was a tribute to the magnificent policies of the Biden administration. I think events have caught him out. Sadly, this isn’t the only instance. We’re totally ignoring the fact that maximum pressure on North Korea, has succeeded only in producing nuclear armed ICBMs that can hit anywhere in the United States. We have created a nuclear threat that didn’t exist. We may be doing the same with Iran.

%%Taiwan and Mainland China Relations

Billington: Presidential elections are scheduled to be held in Taiwan Jan. 13, 2004. I’m very interested in seeing what you think that might lead to. Is there any possibility, in your view, that this could lead to a change in the policy toward the mainland to bring about some sort of reconciliation, if not reunification?

Amb. Freeman: Well, the leading candidate for President is Lai Ching-te, who is the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate. He is a staunch advocate of independence.

National Day in Taiwan, which is tomorrow, October 10th, “Double Ten Day” as it’s called, has always celebrated in The Republic of China, the official name of the state in Taiwan, that is not recognized anymore internationally. That has been replaced with a celebration of Taiwan, to the extent that the Guomindang former president, Ma Ying-jeou, has declined to join the National Day festivities.

The trends are toward confrontation. No accommodation. This is extremely dangerous because China now has the capability to take Taiwan by force, even over U.S. opposition. Of course, at a huge cost. But as we’ve just seen with the Hamas attack on Israel, sometimes the fact that huge costs will be incurred is not an effective deterrent to military action. The question of how to end the civil war in a way that reaffirms some form of one-China, is a matter of passionate concern to Chinese nationalists, and China is very nationalistic at the moment. So I don’t see the prospect as promising at all. The other three candidates in the race don’t have much of an answer either, on how to restore cross-Strait dialogue and rapprochement.

Billington: Is there a chance for one of them winning?

Amb. Freeman: At the moment, the chances are poor, and there being too many candidates in the field is very much to the benefit of Mr. Lai, and the cause of the independence-minded secessionists in Taiwan.

%%Normalization of Saudi-Israel Relations

Billington: Back to the Saudi issue. There’s now a lot of discussion about the idea that Saudi Arabia either has or at least is considering canceling its very large $70 billion nuclear energy deal with the U.S. and signing a similar deal with China. I don’t know if this is accurate, but it’s at least being discussed. On the U.S. side, the U.S. has as usual conditionalities. They’re saying that we’ll help you with nuclear energy, but you have to agree not to process any enriched uranium because we don’t trust you not to build a bomb, and therefore you can’t do it at all; and they are also demanding that the Saudis must trade with China in dollars rather than the current effort to move toward trading in local currencies or in yuan. There are other conditionalities that the U.S. intends to add to this deal as well.  So it looks like that’s falling apart.

At least up until this Israel-Hamas war broke out, the U.S. was trying to arrange a deal between the Saudis and Israel, but that’s probably on hold with what’s happening now. One of the Saudi demands was that the Israelis do something significant with the Palestinians. Quite the opposite of what they’re doing now. China, of course, in their proposal, has no conditionalities. They don’t use conditionalities. So where does this nuclear discussion stand?

Amb. Freeman: There has been no deal. Talking about a $70 billion deal is interesting, but there are several factors that have to be borne in mind. The conditionality on reprocessing nuclear fuel is one of them, because it is counter to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Saudi Arabia would have the right to reprocess. Saudi Arabia said that if Iran gets a nuclear weapon, they will too. So a nuclear fuel cycle agreement that forecloses their matching Iran under circumstances where the U.S. is doing everything conceivable, as is Israel, to give Iran an excuse to develop a nuclear weapon, just isn’t very attractive.

Saudi Arabia has been trying to get whatever it can from Mr. Biden’s passion for normalization with Israel, which of course is not a foreign policy objective; it’s a domestic political objective, aimed at generating campaign donations. 50% of the donations the Democratic Party receives are from Jewish Americans. Although Jews in the United States are only 2.4% of the population, and many of that 2.4% don’t give a fig about Israel, you do have donors for whom Israel and support for Zionism are transcendent issues. Mr. Biden is appealing to them. I never thought this nuclear deal was likely to go anywhere.

It’s not just China that is prepared to provide nuclear reactors to the Saudis. So are the French. So are the South Koreans. So are the Russians. So, the U.S., if it wants to be the nuclear provider to Saudi Arabia it has very limited bargaining leverage. More broadly, I would say that the way the Saudis have treated this issue of normalization with Israel has been to play it for all they could get, just to see what they could get out of it.

In recent years, Saudi Arabia has been quite prepared to engage in transactions with Israel. For example, the Saudis would like to have Israeli tourists bring their money to Saudi Arabia, to the new resorts being built on the Red Sea. That makes a lot of sense. Hence, the Israeli Ministry of Tourism was permitted to travel to Riyadh recently. So the Saudis will do what they see is in their interest, and they won’t do anything they don’t see as in their interest, and provoking internal dissent and uprising, possibly over the Palestinian issue in the kingdom is not in the interest of Mohammed bin Salman’s father, the King.

I never thought that normalization across the board was feasible. As you said, given the Israeli savagery against Gaza in retaliation for the Hamas attack, normalization is even less feasible now than it was.

%%‘Trade Without Currency’ Deals

Mike Billington: There’s another Middle East deal that’s in the works that has been signed: that between China and Iran, in which the Chinese are going to be adding a second terminal to Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport, in exchange for $2.7 billion (equivalent) in oil imports. This is not actually a barter deal, but it’s something like what Lyndon LaRouche promoted in his 2000 [[article]] [[https://larouchepub.com/lar/2000/lar_commodities_2730.html]] called “Trade Without Currency,” where trade is based on some sort of a basket of commodities, which would include gold and oil and things of that sort. This is something that Russian economist Sergey Glazyev and other Russians, and now all the BRICS, are very seriously working on. This China-Iran deal tends is in that direction. What are your thoughts on that?

Amb. Freeman: There are many precedents for this kind of thing in the region. The one that comes to mind immediately is the so-called Al-Yamamah deal between Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom, which, of course, led to a great deal of corruption and embarrassment eventually. 

Billington: And wars! 

Amb. Freeman: That deal was, however, the commitment of a supply of oil [by Saudi Arabia] to Royal Dutch Shell and British Petroleum. The proceeds from the sale of that oil were then banked at the Bank of England to fund in an account managed by British Aerospace. This is an arrangement very similar to what seems to have been done between China and Iran. That is, the participating Chinese construction company would get paid from the proceeds of sales of Iranian oil, which presumably will then be banked in a Chinese bank. Which one? I don’t know. Maybe just the People’s Bank of China, which is the central bank. So this is an interesting development, but it is hardly unprecedented. It is perhaps a model for other transactions involving commodities.

%%De-Dollarization: Liberating From U.S. Policy Hegemony.

Billington: Do you have thoughts on this financial deal that I just referenced, the fact that the Russians and the Chinese and now really the whole BRICS and much of the Global South are actively negotiating ways of setting up alternative systems that are independent of the dollar, and that partially include local currencies. But it also is a discussion of a new system altogether. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Amb. Freeman: About 20 years ago, I remember having a conversation with a noted American pundit who writes for The Washington Post in which I said that the abuse of the dollar as American currency, but also the universal medium of trade settlement, would lead eventually to a search for ways to dethrone the dollar from that trade settlement role. And that is exactly what is happening because of the widespread use of American financial sanctions, the denial of access to the SWIFT clearing house in Brussels for dollar-based and euro-based transactions, the use of the dollar to interfere with trade between third parties, which has no connection to the United States, except that the trade settlement goes through the Federal Reserve in New York. 

Such practices are widely seen internationally as abuses of American hegemonic power, and they’re unacceptable. It’s hardly surprising that there’s quite an effort being made to find ways around U.S. use of the dollar to control other countries’ foreign policies and economic interactions.

At the moment, with a few exceptions, one of which is Sino-Russian trade, this hasn’t gone very far, but it is increasing. Oddly enough, the euro has been diminishing as an instrument of trade settlement as the yuan and other currencies increase. I don’t understand why that is the case, except perhaps that the European economies have been gravely damaged by the war in Ukraine, or more accurately, by the sanctions imposed on Russian energy exports as a result of the war in Ukraine. We keep saying, well, the war in Ukraine caused this. Well, we had choices about how we responded and we chose to respond in several ways, including probably blowing up the Nord Stream Two pipeline, which is an act of war against an ally, Germany. I think the European economies are paying the price for this in terms of future expectations of their viability. Maybe that explains why the euro is going down rather than up in terms of usage for trade settlement.

Billington: Is there anything you’d like to say as concluding remarks?

Amb. Freeman: No, I’ve incriminated myself enough, I think.

%%The End of Centuries of Colonialism

Billington: Thanks, then. I appreciate your taking the time for this interview. It’s a busy time in the world; that’s for sure. This is an incredible moment of crisis in civilization. Helga Zepp-LaRouche characterizes this as the end of the era of colonialism—the 600 years of colonialism as the structure of the organization of the world, which is coming to an end. What direction it’s going to go, it could go either well or ill, but it’s going to change. There’s no keeping this system any longer.

Amb. Freeman: I agree with her about that. Five centuries of EuroAtlantic hegemony have come to an end. The United States is the heir of European colonialism, and Japanese colonialism is also seeing its empire fray at the edges. And the events in the Holy Land are one indication of that—a violent indication. The war in Ukraine is another.

You have discussed the emergence of alternative institutions like the BRICS. One could also mention the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the New Development Bank under the BRICS, and the wide expansion of freedom of maneuver for middle power, middle ranked powers like the Saudis, who now have choices before them that are no longer constrained by fealty to the United States. We see this with Turkey as well. So I think she’s correct. This is a Zeitenwende as somebody said—a turning point in history, a pivotal moment.

Billington: Okay. Well, thank you very much. I hope we can repeat this. It would be very useful if we could have regular discussions of this sort. They’re very much appreciated by our audience around the world.

Amb. Freeman: Give my regards to Helga!

Join us LIVE on Wednesday, October 11 at 11am EDT for a discussion with Helga Zepp-LaRouche.

We encourage viewers to submit questions ahead of time at questions@schillerinstitute.org

Please read and distribute the Schiller Institute Statement for International Distribution: No More Money for Arms in Ukraine! No World War with Russia or China!!

Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche said in dialogue with associates on Monday, Oct. 9, “You cannot look at any one of these situations individually. You have to look at Ukraine in respect to NATO expansion and the danger of that leading to World War III in the short term. Now, we have the situation in Southwest Asia. Other conflicts are looming, like the Taiwan issue with China and Global NATO. And then you have a lot of smaller conflicts, which nevertheless are very severe for the people it attacks, like Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh. And not even to start to talk about Haiti and Afghanistan, and all of these other terrible situations.

“So our approach must be, we absolutely have to catalyze this whole thing into a new paradigm, because only if you establish a new security and development architecture which takes into account the security interests and development interests of every country, can there be a peaceful resolution. And that has been our policy since the beginning of the Ukraine war, and I think that that just goes for the Southwest Asia situation as well.”

The Schiller Institute has posted an international statement as a call to action. In Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, October 11, midday outside Congress, the LaRouche Organization will hold a rally, on the theme of, “No Money to Ukraine, No World War III with Russia, China.”

A Schiller Institute spokesman reported tonight, “In the next hours and days, the Congress of the United States, the parliaments of Canada and Europe, the presidencies of Central and South America, and the governments of Asia and Africa must hear and see the people of the world stand up for humanity against world war with Russia/China, and the ‘theater population wars’ that are part of that world war. We need to get on the phones and into the offices of public officials, we need to go into the streets and in front of governmental institutions, to say that war is not the answer; that imposing war upon the dispossessed and poor is a crime against humanity; that not one more dollar should be spent on weapons for Ukraine.

Legitimate self-defense and the quest for a just and lasting peace are not contradictory

Negotiation proposal by Professor Dr. Peter Brandt, Professor Dr. Hajo Funke, General (ret.) Harald Kujat and Professor Dr. h. c. Horst Teltschik

Since the beginning of the Russian war of aggression on 24 February 2022, Ukraine has been waging a legitimate war of defense in which its survival as a state, its national independence and security are at stake. This statement is true regardless of the democratic and rule of law situation and constitutional reality and also regardless of the war’s much more complicated antecedents and its equally complicated global political backdrop.

However, the legitimacy of armed self-defense on the basis of Article 51 of the UN Charter does not release the government in Kyiv, and the states supporting it, from the obligation – not least vis-à-vis its own people – to exercise restraint, not to overreact by increasing violence and destruction and to promote a political settlement on the basis of a just and lasting peace. Even during the war – and especially during it – constant efforts to achieve a diplomatic solution must not let up.

This applies just as much to those states indirectly involved, including the Federal Republic of Germany, which is particularly obliged by the peace imperative of its Constitution. Moreover, on 2 March 2022, a few days after the start of the Russian attack, the Federal Government agreed to a resolution¹ tabled by Ukraine and adopted by the United Nations General Assembly, calling for a “peaceful settlement of the conflict between the Russian Federation and Ukraine through political dialogue, negotiations, mediation and other peaceful means”. On 23 February 2023, another UN resolution² called on member states and international organisations to “redouble their support for diplomatic efforts to achieve a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine”. This commitment also applies to the Ukrainian government, which continues to reject negotiations with Russia.³

Ukraine has so far resisted the Russian war of aggression thanks to comprehensive Western support. However, far-reaching decisions on the expenditures necessary to continue the war, contrary to all reason and despite the unachievable nature of the political goals, must not be left to the Ukrainian government alone. The constant ramping up of the war has already led to large numbers of Ukrainian casualties, both military and civilian, as well as to substantial destruction of infrastructure. The longer the war goes on, the more Ukraine’s casualties and destruction will increase and the more difficult it will be to achieve a just and lasting negotiated peace that also provides security for the states supporting Ukraine. There is already the potential for further escalation through foreseeable offensives by Russian forces, in the battle for Odesa and through the conflict that has broken out again over Ukrainian grain exports.

Since 4 June 2023, Ukrainian forces have been trying to break through the deeply layered Russian defensive positions and sever the land bridge between Russia and Crimea in order to cut off Russian forces from the logistics hub of Crimea. Ukrainian forces are losing large numbers of soldiers and (Western) armor in the fighting, without having achieved any sweeping success so far.

If the counteroffensive fails, it is to be expected that Ukraine will demand that Western soldiers follow Western weapons, as even the planned Western arms deliveries cannot compensate for the enormous losses of Ukrainian military personnel. Russia, on the other hand, has not yet deployed the mass of its active combat troops. It can therefore be assumed that after further Ukrainian losses in the counteroffensive, Russia will move to secure the annexed territories and thus achieve the goal of the “special military operation”.

Neither side can win the war

It has been clear for some time that neither Russia nor Ukraine can win this war, as neither will achieve the political goals for which they are fighting. Ukraine cannot defeat Russia militarily, even with Western support in the form of arms and ammunition and the training of Ukrainian soldiers. Even the delivery of “miracle weapons”⁴, which has been demanded by laymen time and again, will not be the hoped for “game changer” that could shift the strategic situation in Ukraine’s favour. At the same time, however, there is an increasing risk of even greater escalation, leading to a military conflict between NATO and Russia and the real danger of a nuclear war limited to the European continent, although the USA and Russia want to avoid it.⁵

This eventuality should be averted, as it would be most of all in Ukraine’s interest to seek a ceasefire as soon as possible, opening the door to peace negotiations. It is equally in the interest of the European states which unconditionally support Ukraine but lack a discernible strategy. And due to the increasing attrition of the Ukrainian armed forces, the risk is growing that the war in Ukraine will escalate into a European war over Ukraine.

Ukraine is increasing this risk by launching an increasing number of attacks against Russia’s strategic infrastructure with Western support, like the one against the Engels nuclear strategic base near Saratov on 26 December 2022 or the Kerch Bridge.⁶ Moreover, the West might feel compelled to intervene actively to prevent a crushing Ukrainian defeat. There is a growing realisation that this is a real danger. (Daily Telegraph: “Ukraine and the West are facing a devastating defeat.”)⁷

Is it possible to negotiate with Putin?

So far there is no evidence that the political goal of the “special military operation” is to conquer and occupy the whole of Ukraine and that subsequently Russia is planning to attack NATO states. Nor is there any evidence that Russia and the USA are making preparations for this eventuality. From a military point of view, however, one cannot completely rule out the possibility that Russian forces intend to conquer areas west of the Dnieper, as they have not yet destroyed the bridges over the river, although this would be to their advantage in the current configuration. Putin vigorously refutes that he is pursuing – as is often claimed – the imperialist goal of restoring the Soviet Union: “Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart, whoever wants it back has no brain.”⁸

Putin was willing to negotiate with Ukraine and certainly still is – but always on the condition that the other side – the American, Ukrainian and Western sides – also want to negotiate. Putin has made several positive statements in this respect. For example, on the occasion of the declaration of partial mobilization on 21 September 2022: “This is what I would like to declare publicly for the first time. After the start of the special military operation, in particular after the Istanbul talks, Kyiv representatives voiced quite a positive response to our proposals. […] But a peaceful settlement obviously did not suit the West, which is why, after certain compromises were coordinated, Kyiv was in effect ordered to wreck all these agreements.”⁹

Also on 30 September 2022, in the declaration on the annexation of the four regions: “We call on the Kyiv regime to immediately cease fire and all hostilities; to end the war it unleashed back in 2014 and return to the negotiating table. We are ready for this, as we have said more than once.”¹⁰

On 17 June 2023, Putin told the African peace delegation: “We are open to a constructive dialogue with all those who want peace, based on the principles of justice and taking into account the legitimate interests of the different sides. “^11/12 On this occasion, Putin demonstratively showed an initialled copy of the draft treaty from the Istanbul negotiations.

The “Welt” wrote in a detailed editorial on 23 June 2023 that the Russian media also spoke of negotiations; one can assume that this was done with the approval of the Kremlin. The African initiative had been widely picked up and favorably commented on in Russian news coverage on the occasion of the Russia-Africa summit. The state news agency, RIA, published a commentary deploring the failure of the previous peace initiatives. Editor-in-chief Margarita Simonjan, who had previously called for tougher action by the Russian army, advocated a ceasefire and a demilitarised zone secured by UN peacekeepers. It was right to stop the bloodshed now, she said. Ukrainians should then vote in referendums to which country they want to belong. “Do we need territories that do not want to live with us? I am not sure about that. For some reason it seems to me that the president doesn’t need them either,” Simonjan said.¹³

The war could have been prevented,¹⁴ had the West accepted a neutral status for Ukraine – which Zelensky was initially quite willing to do – renounced NATO membership and enforced the Minsk II agreement on minority rights for the Russian-speaking population. The war could have ended in early April 2022 if the West had allowed the Istanbul negotiations to be concluded. It is now once again, and possibly for the last time, the responsibility of the “collective West” and especially the USA to set a course towards a ceasefire and peace negotiations.

It is imperative to ward off danger

Imperial rivalries, national arrogance and ignorance triggered the First World War, which has been called the seminal catastrophe of the 20th century. The Ukraine war must not become the seminal catastrophe of the 21st century! The increasing Europeanisation of the conflict threatens to slide into a major war between Russia and NATO, which neither side wants and, in view of the acute threat of nuclear catastrophe in such a case, cannot possibly want. Therefore, it is urgent to stop the escalation before it develops a momentum of its own that escapes political control.

Now it is up to the European states and the European Union, whose global political weight is constantly being reduced in the war and by the war, to direct all their efforts towards the restoration of a stable peace on the continent and thus prevent a major European war. Averting this requires the commitment of leading European politicians, namely the French President and the German Chancellor¹⁵ in a joint effort and in coordination with the US and Turkish Presidents, while there is still time and the “point of no return”, to which Jürgen Habermas has specifically referred, has not yet been passed.

Peace is possible – a way out of danger

Positions of the warring parties:

Ukraine:

– Negotiations only after the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukrainian territory or after the liberation of all Russian occupied territories.

– Obligation on Russia to bear the costs of reconstruction.

– Condemnation of the Russian leadership responsible for the attack.

– NATO membership after the end of the war.

– Security guarantees by states designated by Ukraine.

Russia:

– Consolidated neutrality of Ukraine – no NATO membership.

– No stationing of American and other NATO troops on Ukrainian territory.

– Recognition of the Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson regions as Russian territory.

– Ceilings on Ukrainian armed forces in general and for each armed force in particular.

– Arms control negotiations with the USA/NATO, in particular on verification mechanisms for NATO’s Ballistic Missile Defence System/BMDS in Poland and Romania.

Both warring parties have set preconditions for the start of negotiations after Ukraine’s withdrawal from the Istanbul agreements, and the Ukrainian president has even issued a decree forbidding negotiations. Both sides have also made demands for the outcome of negotiations that are impossible to fulfill in this way. Therefore, it is essential that all preconditions for the start of negotiations are dropped. The Chinese position paper offers a reasonable approach. It calls on the parties to “resume peace talks […] resumption of negotiations”.

The USA has an important role to play in bringing about negotiations and would have to pressure the Ukrainian president to negotiate. In addition, the USA (and NATO) must be prepared to engage in arms control negotiations, including confidence-building military measures.

Phase I – Ceasefire

To start the peace process, the UN Security Council should consider a draft resolution along the following lines and mandate further measure as outlined below:

1. The UN Security Council:

• shall adopt, in accordance with Article 24(1) of the UN Charter, a timetable and schedule for a ceasefire and for negotiations to end the Ukrainian war and restore peace, consistent with the primary responsibility assigned to it by its members for the maintenance of international peace and security,
• shall decide on a general and comprehensive ceasefire between the warring parties, Russia and Ukraine, with effect from “Day X”. The ceasefire shall be without exception and without limitation or special arrangements, irrespective of the deployment of the opposing armed forces and weapons systems. It shall be binding and implemented in a general and comprehensive manner,
• shall entrust a High Commissioner for Peace and Security in Ukraine with the political responsibility for the implementation of the timetable and schedule as well as all measures decided by the UN Security Council in this context,
• shall decide on the deployment of a UN peacekeeping force¹⁶ in accordance with Chapter VII of the UN Charter, tasked with observing and enforcing the ceasefire and the security and military measures agreed between the parties to the conflict.

2. The parties to the conflict shall cease all hostilities on the date determined by the UN Security Council (“Day X”).
3. No more weapons and ammunition shall be supplied to Ukraine from that date. Russia shall also cease supplying arms and ammunition to its forces in the territories occupied since 24 February 2022 and Crimea.
4. All irregular foreign forces, military advisors and intelligence personnel of both warring parties shall be withdrawn from Ukrainian territory by Day X +10.

Phase II – Peace Negotiations

1. Peace negotiations shall begin on Day X +15 under the chairmanship of the UN Secretary-General and/or the UN High Commissioner for Peace and Security in Ukraine at UN Headquarters in Geneva.
2. Both parties to the conflict shall reaffirm their determination to conduct the negotiations with the firm intention of ending the war and seeking a peaceful and lasting settlement of all issues in dispute. They shall take account of Russia’s letters to the United States and NATO of 17 December 2021, insofar as they are relevant to the bilateral negotiations, and Ukraine’s position paper for the negotiations of 29 March 2022, and build on the results of the Istanbul negotiations.
3. Elements of a negotiated settlement:
4. a) The parties to the conflict

– would not consider each other as adversaries in the future and would undertake to return to the principles of equal and indivisible security,

– would undertake to renounce the threat and use of force,

– would undertake not to take any preparatory measures to wage war against the other party,

– would undertake to show transparency in their military planning and exercises and greater predictability in their military and political actions,

– would accept the deployment of a UN peacekeeping force on Ukrainian territory in a 50 km wide zone from the Russian border, including the regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson within their administrative boundaries,

– would undertake to resolve all disputes without the use of force through the mediation of the United Nations High Comissioner or if necessary, by the guarantor states. The right of Ukraine to individual and collective self-defense under article 51 of the UN Charter would not be affected.

1. b) Russia

– would withdraw its armed forces from the territory of Ukraine to the borders of 23 February 2022,

– would withdraw its armed forces on its own territory to no less than 50 km from the Ukrainian border, if they have been deployed to this zone since 24 February 2022.

1. c) Ukraine

– would withdraw its armed forces from a zone no less than 50 km from the Russian border, including the regions of Luhansk Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson,

– would declare as permanent its status as a neutral state and would not join any military alliance, including the North Atlantic Alliance. Ukraine’s sovereignty, territorial integrity and state independence would be guaranteed by corresponding pledges of guarantor powers.¹⁷ The guarantees would not apply to Crimea, and the regions of Luhansk Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson within their former administrative borders,

– would renounce the development, possession, and deployment of nuclear weapons on its territory,

– would not allow the permanent or temporary deployment of the armed forces of a foreign power or its military infrastructure on its territory,

– would not permit exercises and manoeuvres by foreign armed forces on its territory,

– would implement the agreed ceilings¹⁸ on Ukrainian armed forces within two years.

1. d) The problems related to Crimea and Sevastopol would be negotiated bilaterally through diplomatic channels within 15 years and resolved by renouncing military force.
2. e) The future status of the Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson regions would be mutually agreed in the negotiations. Russia would allow refugees to return. If the negotiating partners failed to reach an agreement on this issue, the United Nations High Commissioner for Peace and Security in Ukraine would hold a referendum within two years of the peace treaty coming into force, in which the population would decide on the future status. Ukrainian citizens who were permanent residents of these regions on 31.12.2021 would be eligible to participate. Russia and Ukraine would undertake to recognize the results of the referendum and implement them in their respective national legislations by the end of the year in which the referendum took place. For the population of regions that decided to remain within Ukraine, the Ukrainian government would incorporate into its constitution minority rights according to European standards and implement them by the end of the year in which the referendum took place (in accordance with the Minsk II Agreement).
3. f) Guarantor states, which are members of the European Union, would promote Ukraine’s membership by supporting rule of law and democratic reforms.
4. g) The reconstruction of the Ukrainian economy and infrastructure would be promoted through an international donor conference.
5. h) Both Parties would participate in and constructively support a Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in the CSCE format with the aim of establishing a European security and peace order. The conference would take place within one year of the entry into force of the Peace Treaty.
6. i) The Treaty would enter into force as soon as both Parties and five guarantor states had signed the Treaty and, to the extent necessary, the parliaments of these states had approved it, and Ukraine had enshrined its status as a neutral, independent and non-aligned state (without the goal of NATO membership) by amending its constitution.¹⁹
7. k) Any delays would not justify either breaking the ceasefire or withdrawing from the agreements reached so far.

Phase III – A European Security and Peace Order

In the long term, only a European security and peace order can guarantee Ukraine’s security and freedom, in which Ukraine and Russia have their place. This European security architecture would ensure that Ukraine’s geostrategic position would no longer play a key role in the geopolitical rivalry between the United States and Russia. The way to achieve this is through a conference in the CSCE format that builds on the great progress made in the “Charter of Paris” and develops it further, taking into account the current security and strategic framework.

Published: 28/8/2023

¹ www.un.org/depts/german/gv-notsondert/a-es11-1.pdf
² www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/a_res_es_11_6.pdf
³ According to FAZ, Ukraine still sees no chance for a negotiated peace with Russia. “This peace must be fought for. And Russia must be defeated. Otherwise, there will be no peace,” the Ukrainian ambassador in Berlin, Oleksii Makeiev, told the newspapers “Rheinische Post” and “General-Anzeiger”.
⁴ German politicians, who do not understand the strategic principle of end-means relationships, are again demanding the delivery of Taurus cruise missiles. https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/ukraine-liveticker-deutsche-politiker-fordern-lieferung-von-marschflugkoerpern-faz-19030454.html
⁵ And then there’s the whole question of, if Ukraine is really losing, let’s assume that the Ukrainian military cracks […] and the Ukrainians are on the run. Again, I’m not saying that’s going to happen, but it is a possibility. What is NATO going to do? Are we going to accept the situation where Ukraine is being defeated on the battlefield in a serious way by the Russians? I’m not so sure. And it may be possible in those circumstances that NATO will come into the fight. It may be possible that the Poles decide that they alone have to come into the fight, and once the Poles come into the fight in a very important way, that may bring us into the fight, and then you have a great power war involving the United States on one side and the Russians on the other. https://mate.substack.com/p/john-mearsheimer-ukraine-war-is-a?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
⁶ seymourhersh.substack.com/p/opera-buffa-in-ukraine
⁷ www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/18/ukraine-and-the-west-are-facing-a-devastating-defeat/
⁸ https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-john-mearsheimer-blames-the-us-for-the-crisis-in-ukraine
⁹ http://www.en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/69390
¹⁰ http://www.en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/69465
¹¹ www.mdr.de/nachrichten/welt/osteuropa/politik/ukraine-krieg-russland-putin-afrika-friedensmission-100.html
¹² Azali Assoumani, President of Comoros and Chair of the African Union, after meeting President Putin: “President Putin has shown that he is ready for dialogue and to find a solution, and now we have to convince the other side. I hope we will succeed.” https://augenauf.blog/2023/07/28/afrikanische-union-waffenstillstand-in-ukraine-ruckt-naher-wenn-selenski-will/
¹³ The editorialist of the “Welt” writes: “Putin currently considers negotiations and a ceasefire to be the most advantageous option. At any rate, a better one than having to decide for himself how many of the conquered territories he can hold. For Ukraine’s counteroffensive is advancing. The costs of the war are also growing with each passing day and are detrimental to developments in the country. The population feels this, and Putin, who does not want any social tensions around next year’s presidential election, knows it.” The author concludes: “Should the negotiations between Ukraine and Russia be taken up seriously at some point – for example, because Ukraine’s counteroffensive has not produced the desired results – nothing will have changed in the conflict: Ukraine will need credible security guarantees from the West so that Russia does not invade Ukraine again after the ceasefire.

At the very least, it is a sign that the Kremlin is testing the waters, but it should be heeded because it takes up what the Chinese initiative has always emphasized, namely that the Istanbul negotiations, that were not finalized, should be “resumed”. (Compare Harald Kujat’s ceasefire and peace plan, printed in Funke: “Ukraine. Negotiation is the only way to peace”. Berlin 2023: S. 100-104).
¹⁴ Jeffrey D. Sachs: “In fact, the war was provoked by the U.S. in ways that leading U.S. diplomats anticipated for decades in the lead-up to the war, meaning that the war could have been avoided and should now be stopped through negotiations.” consortiumnews.com/2023/05/24/the-war-in-ukraine-was-provoked/
¹⁵ President Biden on 31.05 2022 in NYT: “As President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has said, ultimately this war will only definitively end through diplomacy.” www.nytimes.com/2022/05/31/opinion/biden-ukraine-strategy.html
¹⁶ The selection and composition should not follow the usual force generation procedure of the UN, but the troop contributors should be coordinated by the negotiating partners. Military contingents of the following states could be acceptable to both sides: Austria, Brazil, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Pakistan, Switzerland, Turkey.
¹⁷ In its position paper on the negotiations in Istanbul on 29 March 2022, Ukraine named the following states as its favored guarantors: Russia, Great Britain, China, USA, France, Turkey, Germany, Canada, Italy, Poland, Israel.
¹⁸ On the basis of the text of the treaty as annexed to the initialed Istanbul text and its listed ceilings.
¹⁹ Ukraine could make the entry into force of the treaty dependent on a nationwide referendum.

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute

Who can deny that the protection of World Peace is the most important obligation of governments? Two World Wars in the 20th century, and the dropping of two nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, brought death and suffering to those affected countries, clearly unimaginable by many leaders and politicians today.

But never has the entire existence of mankind been in greater danger than today. The strategic war between the entire West and Russia over Ukraine has come close to a military stalemate, and that leaves only two options: either an escalation which threatens the use of nuclear weapons, or the immediate end of the war through diplomatic negotiations!

If new levels of lethal weapons, such as Taurus cruise missiles and nuclear capable F-35 stealth bombers are deployed, as now planned, it threatens to lead to a Europeanization of the war, and beyond. If it comes to a global nuclear war, mankind will end in the ensuing 10-years of nuclear winter, as will virtually all life on the planet end with it.

Where other than the UN General Assembly should this be raised? The heads of state participating in this session of this unique institution represent all nations in the world, and must address this existential danger. When the present organization of the world has led to the danger of the extinction of civilization, then that organization must be changed! The world needs a new international security and development architecture, which takes into account the security and development needs of every single country on earth. Such a new architecture must create conditions that protect and nourish the lives of all people, and protect the potential of every person as a creative individual. This means not only people living today, but also the lives of future generations!

The world is presently experiencing an epochal change. The period of approximately 600 years of colonialism is coming to an end and is being replaced with a new world economic system that will allow life with dignity for all. The realization of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the largest infrastructure and development program in the history of mankind, has created the conditions in which more and more countries can overcome poverty and underdevelopment. The recent expansion of the BRICS, in Johannesburg, South Africa, to which now around 40 additional countries are in the process of applying for membership, and subsequent conferences in St. Petersburg, Jakarta, New Delhi and Vladivostok have demonstrated the breathtaking speed, with which a new system is emerging. In addition, the efforts to create new credit mechanisms for development, such as the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) now becoming the “great bank of the Global South,” are welcomed and necessary.

But as of now the danger of the world separating into two blocs has not yet been overcome, and such a separation would continue the danger of the same kind of geopolitical division that was the cause of the world wars in the 20th Century. Therefore, there is this urgent appeal to the countries of the Global North, that they must support the aspiration of the Global Majority to establish a just new world economic order for all!

This moment in history represents a greater challenge and chance than the end of the Cold War, to create a better world. Let us not miss that unique chance!

In South America, we see that Argentina has been destroyed, especially since 1982. We see that Bolivia is now in danger of going back under a drug dictatorship. We see related crises on the borders with Brazil and Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay. We see the loss of sovereignty of Peru, by a coup organized under the direction of President Clinton recently….

At the present time, Brazil faces an impossible burden. There’s no possible way that Brazil could carry the debt which is now being imposed upon it. This debt was not really self-incurred. The debt was imposed by international institutions under strong pressure from the United States, including the dollarization of Brazil’s debt in 1989, which was a tragedy for them. There’s no way they can pay this debt under these terms. The IMF demands that concessions be made by Brazil to all of the requirements of the markets; markets which are essentially corrupt. J.P. Morgan, Chase, and Citibank are implicitly bankrupt, and but for the power of the United States, as a physical power, they would be bankrupt. They have no hope for the future, under their present conditions. This is true of the banking system of the United States in general. The Federal Reserve System of the United States today is bankrupt in fact, and is sustained only by the political power of the United States. The banking systems of Europe are bankrupt. The central banking systems are bankrupt, and this is the condition throughout much of the world.

Now, the IMF — which has been the organizer, together with the World Bank, of this bankruptcy, which has developed over the years —now comes to Brazil and says, “Brazil, you are bad. You’re bad. You have to accept our tutelage. We, who ruined you, have come to help you by ruining you some more.” What would happen if Brazil capitulated to the IMF, and accepted anything in any way resembling the demands which have been made upon it by the IMF? Brazil would die! It would disintegrate, rapidly. Not over several years, but over months! Look at the figures. Take the ratios. Take the debt service charges. Take the effect of these conditions in the collapse of the economy of Brazil. Look at what’s happened to Argentina, and see that what happened to Argentina is now in the process of unfolding with full force in Brazil….

If Brazil resists, and does not submit, it could survive. If the average interest rate could kept below 10% in Brazil, and suitable conditions of refinancing the debt were instituted, Brazil could survive, and could be part of a recovery prospect for the hemisphere. But if Brazil were to survive under those conditions, the IMF would go bankrupt. It could not, under present circumstances, absorb that kind of financial reorganization.

Either way, the IMF is dead, in its present form. If it succeeds, it dies. If it fails, it dies. This gives you an indication of what we’ve described as a systemic crisis, as opposed to people who study the statistical phenomenon called boom-bust cycles. This is not a cyclical phenomenon….

Now obviously, there are solutions. I’ve been pushing such solutions. We had a vote most recently in the Italian Chamber of Deputies, a majority vote for a proposal which I had made; the Italian government is implicitly, by this vote, committed to working with other governments, to reorganize the world monetary system, to return to a Bretton Woods formula of the type we had in 1945-1964. To use that model: fixed exchange rates, protectionist system, to promote production, and similar kinds of programs, to ensure that we get back on a growth pattern again. This means that we have to put the world through bankruptcy reorganization, the same way you’d do any bankruptcy….

… We, as states, will create the credit; the credit needed for large-scale infrastructure programs and for promotion of private investment. This credit will be used over a long-term basis, that is, 25 years or so, in general at 1-2% simple interest rates, as state credit, to be used largely for infrastructure; to build up the level of employment; to build the railroads, the water systems, the power systems, and so forth, which are needed for society. This will stimulate private employment. We will also put credit into creditable areas of private investment, to build up agriculture, to build up manufacturing, to build up other necessary things, and we will build our way out of this mess….

What I propose is, that we look at the world in terms of certain countries which are, technologically, fountains of technology. Within other countries, including China and India—which are not prosperous countries, relatively, there are also fountains of technological progress: certain industries, certain techniques they have, but not enough to meet the total needs of their population.

Our proposal was, you take these areas of Eurasia, build up the fountains of technological progress, for long-term transmission of capital, technologically necessary capital, into areas which have low technology potential. And thus, take areas like the interior of China (as opposed to the coastal areas), and of other countries, and begin to build these up, in terms of their productivity over a generation or so. And on this basis, by long-term credit on a 25-year basis, or in that order, we can create and extend credit to fund the flow of high-technology exports from those areas which are fountains of technology, into countries which are in desperate need of these technological infusions. We could organize it in such a way that, when comes 25 years from now, they will be able to buy their way out of what we advanced as credit to them.

I proposed in 1992 and so forth, and these countries came to accept, what I call the Eurasian Land-Bridge….

But today, we have new technologies. And what I propose is the creation of development corridors, from areas such as Rotterdam in Europe, to places like Pusan in the tip of Korea, on the other side of Asia. These development corridors would run across the northern part of Russia and Kazakhstan, to the central part into China and Central Asia, and the southern part along the coast of the Indian Ocean, India and so forth, into Indochina, and so forth by those routes.

These development corridors would be 50-100 kilometers in width, that is, they would incorporate mainline transportation, water management routes, power generation and distribution centers, and thus, create industrial centers and agricultural centers along areas which today are largely underdeveloped or wasteland. And by crisscrossing an area which is largely wasteland, which contains the greatest concentration of mineral resources on this planet of any part of the world, North and Central Asia, we would transform this into an area of growth for all Asia.

This program is now being put into effect, step-wise, gradually. The efforts of China and Russia, among others, to force the building of the railroad connections between North and South Korea, which is actually a railway connection from Pusan to Rotterdam, through China and through Russia. And this is already in place.

The problem is, getting people to accept, and governments in particular, the fact that this is a bankrupt system; that it’s hopeless under this system. Don’t try to adapt to the system, replace the system. How do you do it? The authority of government, of sovereign government; a group of sovereign governments. Groups of sovereign governments must put their banking systems into a bankruptcy reorganization, create a new system of, effectively, national banking, under national government; mobilize credit; reorganize to protect the general welfare to maintain stability; to promote full employment; to find areas of growth in which credit can be concentrated, both in the public sector, in infrastructure, and in the private sector.

Only governments can do that. That is the sovereign power of government as a true sovereign….

… Therefore, you must build up the base of the economy. And, 50% of any modern economy, that’s competently devised, is investment in infrastructure, not in production: Transportation, power generation and distribution, water distribution and management, sanitation, health-care systems, educational systems, these are the gut of an economy. Libraries, access to this kind of thing, are an essential part of the productive power of labor. The ability to transmit goods efficiently and quickly, on a large scale in any area, to go from one place to the other, these are the essentials. We’ve lost that sight.

My specialty in this area, of course, is what I’ve concentrated on all these years, is physical economy. Financial economy? That’s nothing. Accounting? That’s nothing. That’s connect the dots; that doesn’t require any scientific skill whatsoever. What’s required is to understand how we invest, in a combination of infrastructure, and other things, to get the effect of this multi-generational progress, increasing the productive powers of labor….

So, my concern is, that if you can get a grounding among students, where they can understand what an idea is, in Plato’s sense of idea— discovery, hypothesis, experimental proof, the method of Kepler—once you know what an idea is, stick with a physical scientific idea, because that’s an easy one to demonstrate. Then say, “How is culture developed?” It develops on the basis of transmission of ideas, which correspond to such discoveries, from one generation, to the next generation. That is history!  Archimedes and Eratosthenes and Plato and Archytas; the sources of ancient scientific method.  These live in our society today because those who are scientists have replicated those discoveries and have applied that to understanding modern science today.  And there, the transmission of culture across thousands of years to the present is the result of understanding what an idea is, and the importance through educational and related processes of transmitting that idea from one generation to the next; with the result that you have a generation which emerges which has more power per capita in respect to the universe than the previous generation. That is culture! Ideas of Classical drama, which give you insight into how human beings behave and misbehave, and how you manage that. This is what we need.

Accounting is simple. Playing with mathematics, adding and subtracting and so forth, that’s simple. That is not economics. Economics is based on human beings, which are not monkeys, which have the power to generate, assimilate, replicate ideas; whose purpose with ideas is, knowing they’re all going to die — we all die—so, what is our expenditure of our talent in life? What does our life mean after we’ve left it? What have we embedded in the coming generations, which gives us a permanent place in the space-time spectrum? That’s human. And to try to get the knowledge, in every possible area that your appetite can reach, to be able to relive and discover the wonderful discoveries of the people before you, and transmit them to others, to have a society in which this is the standard of practice —that is economics.

Economics is what one generation is capable of doing, for the benefit of two generations hence.  Thank you very much.

Sept. 5, 2023 (EIRNS)–This is Mike Billington with the Executive Intelligence Review and the Schiller Institute. I’m pleased to be here today with Professor Richard Falk, who has agreed to an interview about current affairs and world developments in this crucial moment in history. Professor Falk, would you like to say a few words about your own history and your role in history?

Prof. Richard Falk: I’m not sure I have a role in history. I’ve taught at universities all of my adult life, starting with Ohio State in Columbus, Ohio, in 1955, moving to Princeton University, where I stayed for 40 years, retiring in 2001, and since then I have been connected both with the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Queen Mary University in London. I’ve done a fair amount of writing over the decades, including a memoir called Public Intellectual—The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim—along with a stream of commentary on global issues. I have led at times a confusing life, which accounts for the bewildering title, I suppose. I have been active through the UN in supporting the Palestinian struggle for human rights and self-determination, and served as UN Special Rapporteur for the Human Rights Council on Occupied Palestine between 2008 and 2014. During this period I was frequently defamed as an anti-Semite and self-hating Jew and otherwise targeted and discredited. Recently, I’ve continued more quietly to write for publication, including a book of poems, Waiting for Rainbows, splitting my time between Turkey and the US. 

I suppose this is enough by way of introduction, maybe more than enough. I would just add that I’m glad to do this interview with Mike Billington, although I’ve had severe differences with the Lyndon LaRouche movement in the past. I’ve also been a target of what I consider their defamatory attacks connected with my support for the pro-democracy, anti-Marcos movement in the Philippines and the insurgent campaign for the protection of human rights in Iran. Such disagreements persist. Despite this I feel that those who seek a safer, more secure, more peaceful and just world have to let these bygones-be-bygones and collaborate in the present for the good of humanity and future generations.

Mike Billington: Well, that’s quite interesting. You and I have discussed privately those differences, which we maintain as differences, both in regard to the history and other aspects of things. But they don’t necessarily have to come up today unless you wish to bring them up further.

Let me start by referencing the fact that you were a speaker at an event sponsored by my friend Chandra Muzaffar in Malaysia, the head of Just International, organized by an organization called SHAPE, Save Humanity And Planet Earth—along with other speakers from the US, from China, from Korea, and from Australia. You referred to what you called the “unstable tension between geopolitics and self-determination,” which I found to be the most profound point of that conference. Could you comment on that and explain what you mean by that?

Prof. Falk: I will try. I’ve been preoccupied with geopolitics in the context of the Ukraine War, which started as a Russian attack on Ukraine, transformed itself, due to the intrusive role that US NATO forces played, into what I call a “geopolitical war” between Russia and the United States, in which the outcome in Ukraine was subordinated by stages to the strategic goal of inflicting a geopolitically significant defeat on Russia, and at the same time to send a warning signal to China not to attempt, with respect to Taiwan, to do the same thing that Russia has tried to do, at least that it was alleged to be trying to do.

My specific connection of self-determination with these issues arose from my sense of the Vietnam War and its outcome, how the US, so predominant militarily, managed, despite a huge investment over a long period of time, to lose the war. That, I think, has been responsible in part for the decline of the US, in part the result of many years of overinvestment and overreliance on military solutions and military approaches to international problems, coupled with an underestimation of the forces of national self-determination, which in Vietnam showed they prepared more patiently to pay the costs and devise effective tactics of resisting efforts of an imperial intervenor to suppress the basic rights of a people in a historical period of decolonization. What I fear in the present context is a similar exaggerated reliance on militarism as a solvent for international problems and an activation of a variety of nationalist responses dangerously intensifying geopolitical warfare, and posing unacceptable risks of a nuclear confrontation..

Of course, the situation is superficially different in Ukraine because, purportedly, the nationalist forces are supported by the US and NATO. But I think the broader reality is that the Ukrainian people are being sacrificed on the altar of this post-Cold War recalibration of the geopolitical status quo.

Mike Billington: Let me mention that geopolitics, of course, originated with people like Mackinder and Haushofer and other theoreticians for the British Empire. It’s always been the political view of the Empire that the world is a zero sum game—that to benefit ourselves we have to defeat the others. And that certainly is what you just described in terms of the current proxy war with Russia and the threat to China, and really to the whole developing sector.

Prof. Falk: I distinguish between a proxy war of the sort that has continued in Syria for more than a decade, in which the objective of outside political actors is to exert control over the internal politics of the country that is the scene of violent combat. This is not my view of what the Ukraine War is really about. In other words, it’s not primarily about the internal effects of the conflict, which I believe all three geopolitical actors have come to view as secondary to the impact the Ukrainian political outcome will have on the geopolitical alignments governing relations among the US, Russia and China. I see this realignment agenda as providing my justification for treating this as a geopolitical war rather than a proxy war.

Mike Billington: Well, generally, the term proxy war is meant to be a way of saying that this is really a war against Russia. It’s being fought with Ukrainian bodies. But the aim, as you are pointing out, is to weaken and undermine, or even destroy Russia and potentially China in the same manner.

Prof. Falk: And to reinforce the unipolar prerogatives that the US has claimed and exercised since  the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Mike Billington: Yes, exactly. You said, in the SHAPE event that I mentioned just now, that the greatest danger facing the world is the West’s “insistence on keeping the unipolar world in place using military methods,” which is what you’ve just reiterated, and that this was aimed at obscuring the decline in power of the US and of the G7 generally. China and the BRICS nations, as we saw last week (at the BRICS Summit) and the Global South, are generally no longer submitting to the colonial division of the world, and they are renewing the Spirit of Bandung. What is your view of the BRICS and the August 22-24 BRICS summit in South Africa?

Prof. Falk: Basically, I have a very positive view of the BRICS role. I think it goes beyond the Bandung Spirit because it’s more about global engagement by the non-West than seeking diplomatic distance from and “non-involvement in the struggles of the North” I think a posture of geopolitical neutralism was the main motivation of Bandung, to avoid getting caught up in the competing ideologically antagonistic alliances between the global powers—a framework that the US and Soviet Union were developing, which posed threats of a Third World War. The Bandung countries wanted to focus on their own development and to stay uninvolved in this post-colonial struggle for global ascendancy.

I regard the BRICS as responding to a different configuration of concerns. As such it is a more creative form of involvement that has its own defensive and offensive geopolitical ambitions. A primary example of this engagement sensibility of the BRICS is their campaign aimed at the de-dollarization of international trade, which if even partially successful, will have a huge impact on the global north, and also by giving shape and direction to a new type of multipolarity that is very different than what the North and the G-7 want. It’s very instructive to compare the documents emanating from the main meeting of the G-7 at Hiroshima, both in their tone and rhetoric and substance, from those emanating from the BRICS Summit, most notably the Johannesburg Declaration that was issued just last week. On almost all counts I would rather live in the world envisioned by the Johannesburg Declaration than the one depicted at Hiroshima.

Mike Billington: As you mentioned just a minute ago, the decline of the US began with the Vietnam War. And you said during your presentation earlier that the US became depoliticized by the impact of the war and then further depoliticized by the events of 9/11. Do you want to explain that?

Prof. Falk: Your question raises a big set of issues. I think what the so-called “deep state” in the US, and the sort of thing Washington think tanks and foreign policy advisers learned from Vietnam, were several lessons. One of them was to make a major effort to co-opt the mainstream media, including independent journalists, making the media more akin to an instrument of state propaganda when it came to public discourse on foreign policy, especially in controlling the range of policy debate. This was one lesson.

Another lesson was to rely on a volunteer armed force, rather than to conscript individuals on the basis of age via the draft, whose conscripts and families became the core of the antiwar movement in the Vietnam War. The middle class, parents of children that were either conscripted or suffered casualties and disabilities in the course of their exposure to war in Vietnam raised influential voices of dissent in a war that made little sense from the perspectives of national security and national interests. An expression widely used by pro-war people was that “the Vietnam War was lost in American living rooms,” which was a part of this attempt to make sure that the media didn’t in the future show body bags and coffins coming back from foreign war zones.

Perhaps the most important of all lessons learned pertained to tactics and weapons. Future war tactics relied on ‘shock and awe’ air attacks, coercive sanctions and an array of weapons that shifted casualties to those entrapped in the war zones, most spectacularly, the use of drones of an ever more advanced character. With media control, professionalized armed forces, and minimized American casualties, the result was a depoliticized citizenry, but actually was a failure in practice if measured by political outcomes, with the Afghan and Iraqi state-building efforts resulting in great economic cost, while damaging to the U.S. claims of diplomatic leadership, with benefits going to the arms merchants and militarists.    

These kinds of lessons were accentuated by 9/11, which included the whole apparatus of Homeland Security, which was a way of insulating the society from radical protest. Another aspect of these various developments was the degree to which the militarized sectors of government and private society joined forces to depoliticize the citizenry to the extent possible, to, in fact, mobilize the citizenry for a much more active role that involved exaggerating security threats from abroad, even inventing them, as in Iraq 20 years ago. So it was a combination of these various lessons learned, which unfortunately, corresponding lessons were not learned by the peace movement.

So you had a rebalancing of society after the Vietnam War, in which the peace minded and justice inclined parts of society were less affected, less active, less effective, distracted in various ways. Even by the kind of populist movements that emerged in America, the kind of Woodstock generation. All of that, I think, was part of the pacification of American protest activity, the modern equivalent of Roman bread and circuses, although somewhat short on the bread dimension.

Mike Billington: The fact that the vast majority, or a good portion—a much too large portion—of the population today seems to concur, both here and in Europe, to go along with this war, together with the demonization of Russia and China, would indicate that they’ve been quite successful in that effort.

Prof. Falk: Yes, I think they have been. And oddly enough, it’s the extreme right that has begun to mount the most coherent opposition to the Ukraine involvement, mainly on economistic terms, and accompanied by. the regressive suggestion that the U.S. international focus should be on the rivalry with China, not bothering with Ukraine, because the Chinese are out-competing the U.S.in a number of key strategic sectors, endangering its primacy. From this perspective, the Ukraine engagement by the West is geopolitically wasteful, and risks driving Russia into China’s waiting arms.

Mike Billington: The Schiller Institute has initiated and led an effort to create an International Peace Coalition, which now has more than 30 sponsoring international organizations that are committed to peace, often coming from very different and opposing political outlooks. But they have joined forces in order to stop what is increasingly apparent as the danger of a possible full scale NATO war on Russia, very likely a nuclear war, coming out of the apparently failed NATO efforts in Ukraine. Do you agree with this sentiment?

Prof. Falk: Well, I agree with the collaboration, because I think there is what one might call a planetary emergency that is being largely ignored by civil society. We are living with the danger of an intensified second Cold War without the kind of constraints that prevented World War III from occurring during the first Cold War. And secondly, in this earlier period, the severity of global challenges such as global warming did not complicate the nature of the conflict. The failure to give the attention that global warming should be receiving is a threat to all of humanity and especially the security of future generations. This attention along with adequate resources are needed, as is equity is the distribution of bearing the. adaptive burdens that must be borne if the human interest is to be served. There are also present the war dangers as dramatized by the nuclear danger, that you pointed out, very real aspects of the current global setting. There is also the failure to address other serious global challenges of an ecological character. All this attention and investment in a new arms race which is taking place throughout much of the world. It is emblematic of this alarming developments that Japan recently announced the highest increase in its military budget since World War II. A general heightening of the worst features of the state-centric world order, at a time when global cooperation for pragmatic reasons would seem to be the rational priority of political leaders summarizes the overall picture.

There is also a leadership gap, which seems unable to comprehend the national interests being globalized in these menacing ways. The persistence of overinvestment in the military, underinvestment in coping with climate change, migration and biodiversity, a series of social protection challenges.

Mike Billington: Regarding the war in Ukraine. You said—again, this was in the SHAPE event where you spoke, which I monitored—you said that both the US and NATO, on the one hand, and Russia on the other, that both miscalculated in starting this war. I would ask, this appears to leave out the fact that the Russians had agreed to the Minsk agreements, which would have prevented the war, but which were intentionally ignored and sabotaged by the NATO nations. And also that they had negotiated directly between Russia and Ukraine through Turkey in the first months of the military operation, which resulted in a signed agreement to stop the war in May of 2022, even before the referendums which were held in the Donbass regions to become part of Russia. But again, this agreement was just completely ignored and sabotaged by NATO. So that makes me question whether you can really say that Russia miscalculated, or were they left with no option. So what’s your view on that?

Prof. Falk: Well, I plead guilty somewhat for misleadingly using the word miscalculation. What I had in mind was that I think the Russians underestimated the NATO response, and therefore didn’t calculate in a persuasive way how their military operation would succeed at an acceptable cost to themselves, as assessed by the level of casualties and economic costs. When it comes to context, the provocations as you enumerated them were very great. And whether there was any alternative for Russia other than this recourse to a military solution, is a difficult question, because I think it was a part of Putin’s mindset to reestablish, as he had in Crimea, the Russians’ traditional sphere of influence in their so-called near abroad or borderland territories. And in the course of doing this, to challenge U.S. “Unipolarity,” which is best comprehended as, in effect, an un-proclaimed “Monroe doctrine for the world.” Its geopolitical claim amounted to an enforced declaration that only the US could use military force outside its own territory for security or other purposes, and if any country dared challenge this purported red line it would be met with retaliatory force. It was a unilateral denial of  geopolitical status to Russia and China, the signature global policy agenda of US foreign policy after the Cold War, reinforced by a new set of alliances. Overall, the U.S. response to the Russian attack was an illuminating disclosure of what was meant by Washington’s insistence of ‘a rules-governed world.’

From the outlook of Moscow and Beijing this must have seemed a new double standard inserted at the base of this post-Cold War geopolitics. Putin, I think, wanted to act in defiance of this challenge. But he didn’t estimate the depth of the commitment by the Biden presidency, and its capacity to mobilize NATO countries and their publics around a defense of Ukraine.

There is also the racial factor, being that Ukraine is a white Christian country, at least Western Ukraine, which is what is being defended. The U.S. shared an affinity with popular sentiments—a large number of European countries, including Poland, that were particularly militant in their spontaneous opposition to the Russian attack. In such an atmosphere further inflamed by the complete erasure of the background provocations by a geopolitically compliant Western media, reporting only the way that Biden and Blinken presented the case for a military response to a supposedly pure instance of international crime of ‘aggression.’ Such absolutism was further manifested by the absence of any indication of a readiness to allow a political compromise to go forward, especially after they came to the belief that Ukraine had the capabilities, including the political will, to mount an effective resistance. The miscalculation on Washington’s side, which became more evident in the second year of escalating combat, is that the NATO West was failing despite massive investments in assistance to produce a Soviet defeat. It also became clear that pressing that course of action raised to intolerable levels the risk of nuclear war. These developments amounted to a serious miscalculation, actually a repetition of past misjudgments going back to Vietnam.

I think another explanation of the Russian miscalculation resulted from their experience in Crimea, which succeeded without generating much pushback. Putin likely interpreted Ukraine through the lens of the Crimea experience and probably believed that the comparable justification in Donbass would be accepted. And as you suggested, given the violation and repudiation of the Minsk Agreements Puttin felt he had a strong justification for acting as did, and could accomplish Russia’s goals in Ukraine in an acceptable time period and acceptable cost.

Mike Billington: Do you see that as still a possibility, that they will succeed in essentially consolidating the results of the votes of the several oblasts to join Russia?

Prof. Falk: Yes, I think to some extent that it is likely that will be elements of an eventual political compromise in the course of a much overdue peace diplomacy. And I think that political compromise, as you previously suggested—even Zelensky seemed to endorse such an approach early on—I probably would have included, at least in part, such an element.

Mike Billington: Some sort of sovereignty or autonomy, at least.

Prof. Falk: Autonomy at least. And maybe given some added assurance of stability by deploying peacekeeping forces in Ukraine and near to the Russian border.

Mike Billington: You’ve already answered this, but I wanted to bring up the fact that in your earlier presentation you ridiculed Tony Blinken, who had claimed that “the concept of spheres of influence has been delegated to the dustbin of history.” I found that to be quite interesting. It’s clearly not true for the US position and its treatment of other nations. And this is certainly one of the reasons that the Global South is now looking to the BRICS and not to London and Washington for their choice of friends and collaborators. Helga Zepp-LaRouche has described this as a “once in a thousand years” shift. One of the top BRICS people called this a “tectonic shift,” basically the end of the 600 years of colonialism and neo colonialism dominating mankind. What do you think of that?

Prof. Falk: Well, I still think that projecting a geopolitical alignment in such dramatic language remains at this time aspirational rather than descriptive. I have the sense that the US-led NATO countries will react in coercive ways to the BRICS challenge, which is undoubtedly being perceived as a bigger challenge to unipolarity than is being acknowledged. What this interaction will eventually lead to is difficult to anticipate. In other words, I don’t think the BRICS can mount a really formidable challenge of the sort implied by that language without encountering significant Western resistance of a major character. For these reasons, the future management of the world economy and global security will exist under storm clouds of uncertainty for some time to come.

The BRICS, despite what I feel is an overall positive development, have incorporated some new members. And even the original five are not fully on board with a scenario of challenging the West, that is, of creating a new world order in effect. India, for instance, is very aligned in several contexts with the West and plays a regressive role in Israel with respect to the Israel-Palestine conflict. What one can say about Saudi Arabia being part of BRICS—it’s important, of course, for the energy dimension of soft power, but it’s a horrible example of repressive theocratic governance. And what’s going on in the West African countries, the former French colonies, Niger, being the most recent military coups with an anti-foreign agenda, suggests that there is still a lot of potency to what I call “colonialism after colonialism”—in other words, post-independence colonialism, which I find a more graphic term than neo-colonialism.

Mike Billington: Yes, this is a description of the unipolar world, basically—under IMF, World Bank domination of the economy.

Prof. Falk: And the former colonial power—I’ve studied a bit the situation in Niger. The French colonialists made it impossible for the Nigerien elites to govern their country in a competent way, because they forbade education above a high school level, and made sure that an independent West Africa would be completely dependent on French assistance in order to survive as a viable independent political entity. The resource agreements pertaining to uranium and gold together with the French management of the financial system in Niger are extreme examples of colonialism in operation, even after political independence and national sovereignty have been achieved. 

Mike Billington: But it would appear also that this series of revolts by the francophone countries is an expression of the general sentiment throughout the entire Global South, that this is it — we’re not going to tolerate colonial policies any longer. It’s liable to lead to war, and that’s the problem — as you’re saying, the colonial powers are not going to stand back and give up easily. And they could very well start another war in Africa of the sort that we’ve seen already in Europe, the Mideast, and are threatening to do in Asia.

Prof. Falk: Yes, And of course, in Africa, as you know, there’s also the so-called Wagner Group and a growing Russian factor. Russia has increased its influence. Its earlier influence was somewhat anti-colonial, but mainly competitive with the West, and its interactions with China in Africa are ambiguous. It may be seen as another form in the geopolitical war, whose main arena is Ukraine.

What Russia seeks to do other than to counter the West, the French, European,  and American influence and presence remains uncertain, and yet to be determined. Since these coups, Russia has still maintained a kind of political distance from the new leaderships in West Africa. The African Union and ECOWAS [Economic Community of West African States], both supported, initially, a military intervention in Niger, as did Nigeria, to restore what was called civilian rule, which is more realistically viewed as a puppet government serving French interests in Niger. There is obviously a good deal of complexity underneath the superficial reporting of these events. And that’s partly why I feel that we should view this larger vision of the global future as still at an aspirational stage, not yet a determined outcome, much less a consummated reality.

Mike Billington: It’s not over. But the impulse is unmistakable. Let me approach the Asia issue on that. The conference that I monitored, where you spoke with Chandra Muzaffar and Jeffrey Sachs and others, was actually called to discuss the issue of NATO moving into Asia, the AUKUS agreement [Australia, UK and US] and the Global NATO, Global Britain spreading the anti-Russia military operations into an anti-China operation in Asia. What is your view of why the leaders in the West are so hysterically trying to demonize and perhaps go to war with China? What is China’s actual role in the world today, in your view?

Prof. Falk: First, let me clarify my presence on that webinar. I’m one of the three co-conveners of SHAPE, and SHAPE, as its Call makes clear, has largely similar goals to the Schiller Institute initiative, as I understand them. I’ve worked with Chandra Muzaffar and Joe Camilleri for maybe the past 8 or 9 months to put  SHAPE together as an organization. In this spirit, we’ve had this series of webinars of which the last one was devoted to Asia, and was, I think, one of our most important. I think that what is at stake really is the control of a post-colonial era of world history, which is entailing regressive moves by military means, and a sense of inability to really compete with China except through military means. Wars in the past have often occurred when a rising power has much greater potential than the dominant power. And I think China is seen as a rising power. overtaking the U.S. at least in the important domains of trade and technological innovation, and maybe even global influence…

Mike Billington: The Thucydides Trap, it was called.

Prof. Falk: Yes. The so-called Thucydides Trap, which Graham Allison wrote an important book about. There is a good deal of evidence that having nurtured this image of being number one in the world, and having that image threatened, is a source of provocation for the militarists in the West. And, through NATO, in trying to turn back the clock of history, so to speak, they seem prepared to pay this heavy price.

It is worth taking account of the underreported diplomatic success of Russia, at its July Saint Petersburg Russia-African Conference. Russia seems to have been learning from China about how to force win/win relationships with countries of the Global South, which seems more sensible than trying, as the West is doing in devising ways to fight China. I think if left on their own, Putin’s Russia would not orient its foreign policy around the military sources of power, as much as creatively develop diplomatic and economic sources of power. The West is in systemic decline. It has no alternative to its military dominance if intent on sustaining the post-Cold War status quo. This is a costly, risky path as shown by the Ukraine Crisis. The West hopes may fail for intimidating China by confining its boundaries as well as continuing to accept the kind of economic warfare that has been waged against it, without retaliation. Chinese retaliation would be treated as aggression, triggering a Western response. It would be treated as a casus belli, or a justifiable cause of war. So that it’s. It’s a very dangerous situation, more so than the international situation after World War II.

No precautions have been taken, no geopolitical fault lines have been agreed upon. Compare this with the Yalta and Potsdam conferences at which the divisions of Europe and even Berlin were agreed upon in the course of creating geopolitical fault lines. It is instructive that these arrangements were respected by both sides throughout the Cold War. If they had not existed, for instance, the 1956 intervention in Hungary by the Soviet Union might have served as a pretext for World War III, regardless of the foreseeable catastrophic results for both sides. Or at the very least an intensified confrontation with the Soviet Union. Since 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell, we have been living in a world without those geopolitical fault lines, and risk stumbling into a mutually destructive war as happened in World War I. And that’s one of the reasons I think the aggressive posturing of the NATO West is so extremely dangerous. One line of interpretation is to consider that these geopolitical challengers are trying to establish new fault lines fit for an emergent multipolar cooperative world order. One way of looking at the Ukraine war and at the BRICS’ muted reaction to that war is to put limits on what the NATO powers can hope to get away with in the future. Just as NATO seeks to deliver a geopolitical message to China and Russia, the BRICSS have decided to send their own cautionary message to the West.

NATO, of course, is an anachronism. It was supposedly established in 1949 as a defensive alliance against Soviet expansion. But it’s been converted into a political instrument of global scope far beyond the language of the treaty and the motivations behind it. When the Soviets dissolved the Warsaw Pact, it should have been the occasion for dissolving NATO instead of trying to revive and expand its role, first in Kosovo and then in Afghanistan, now even in the Asia-Pacific region. And of course, Ukraine. The identity of the alliance has morphed from its origins as a defensive shield for Europe into an offensive sword for the world.

Mike Billington: You mentioned the Russia Africa Summit in St. Petersburg, a phenomenal event in which literally hundreds of agreements were signed between Russia and the African countries, including the building of a nuclear power industry and several other industries. And of course, China’s Belt and Road Initiative has been doing exactly the same thing for many years across Africa, to bring the Chinese miracle, which lifted 800 million Chinese people out of poverty, to the developing sector, to the former colonized nations of the Global South, through a focus on infrastructure development to create modern industrial nations where once there was only vast poverty. It’s clear from the BRICS meeting that the Global South has made the determination that it’s not going to accept the western denunciation of China, or that they must “decouple” from China, that they must join in sanctions against Russia—they’re simply rejecting that. I’m wondering if you have other comments on that, and how do you interpret the demonization of Russia and China across the West?

Prof. Falk: Well, I interpret this dynamic of demonization as a reaction against the perceived threat they pose to this geopolitical primacy that the US has exercised since the collapse of the Soviet Union and as a way to build domestic support for a renewal of geopolitical rivalry on a. global scale. I think we’re in a transitional moment in international affairs which will be characterized either by the end of the post-Cold War era and the beginning of something new—I suppose that’s part of your comment on the magnitude of the change we can anticipate—or we’re experiencing the moment where unfortunately unipolarity is being reinforced, at least temporarily. In this kind of transition—accepting the Gramsci idea that in moments of societal transition, morbid things happen. We’re living through this sort of interval. It’s our historic moment. We have very poor leadership with which to navigate these turbulent waters even from a self-interested point of view. And one suspects that the belligerent stance being supported in Washington is as motivated by Biden’s calculations about the 2024 presidential election as by the dynamics of what’s going on in Ukraine and elsewhere in the world.

Mike Billington: The irony of this election situation is that the leading candidates in both parties, if you consider Trump and if you think of Robert Kennedy Jr as the leading candidate (even though they’re trying to ignore that he’s even a candidate, and refusing to even have any debates, treating him as a kook rather than as a serious person) but both of those candidates, Trump and Robert Kennedy Jr., are openly and quite strongly opposed to the Ukraine war, to any further war in Ukraine, which certainly is a measure of the general mood of the population, despite the fact that the media and the parties are completely ignoring any kind of opposition to this war, as if it’s unanimously supported, which it’s not.

Let me make one point and see what your response is. Helga Zepp-LaRouche has made the point that the move from a unipolar world to a multipolar world, which is on everybody’s lips who are involved in this process, but if there’s a multi-polar world which does not end the division into two separate blocs, then you’re still going to have a war. In other words, if you don’t break down the division where the U.S. and the Europeans see themselves as part of a bloc that has to unilaterally oppose the rise of the Global South, then it’s going to lead to war. And therefore, you have to have a way of getting people in the West to stand up against this division, against the threat of war, which was the idea behind forming this International Peace Coalition, which was to get people to come together from different political views, but to recognize that you have to sit down and talk with Russia and China and the Global South rather than going to war with them, or it will lead to nuclear war. Your thoughts.

Prof. Falk: Essentially, I find the language of Helga LaRouche too causally determined. I think there are constraints on going to war at least on the scale of  World War III, nuclear war. These constraints are too weak to feel reassured, but at the same time the view that unless drastic change occurs soon war is inevitable is in my view an overstated interpretation. I think that major war avoidance remains something that even these inferior or limited leaders seek to ensure. I think what a failure of geopolitical clarification will do, though, is to produce a dangerous, militarized competition that the world can’t afford, and such a course would aggravate these other global problems, and not just the problems associated with the environment and with other forms of public dissatisfaction. I see this challenge of. unipolarity as basically a positive move to encourage a reorientation of the outlook of the West in the direction of the Schiller initiative proposals, as well as the SHAPE proposals. But I think it will require a very deeply motivated and mobilized effort, because the entrenched, private sector forces and governmentally embedded forces have lots at stake, including the career and monetary benefits of militarization, media inflated threats, exaggeration of security requirements, confrontation, even limited wars. All these things help arms sales, promote the military and governmental sides of the elite structures in the West.

So. I’m not hopeful. I do think there’s one factor that you haven’t mentioned, and I keep trying to bring up in various ways. That is, the pressure from these new kinds of challenges: global warming, causing severe heat, extreme weather, deterioration of ocean quality, all phenomena that adversely affect human wellbeing, thereby creating a pragmatic basis for a cooperative multipolarity. What would benefit the people of the world is a non-adversarial form of multipolarity. Or at least a subdued, competitive multipolarity that makes political space for cooperative solutions to common problems in the global interest. These problems seem bound to grow more severe in the near future. And failure to practice a solutions-oriented geopolitics affects society in ever more detrimental ways. Even Canada burning for the whole summer of 2023 in unprecedented fires produced pollution and a very health-destroying character for much of the population. I think that such occurrences are of planetary relevance and should be woven into any kind of constructive vision of the future.

Mike Billington: Okay. Do you have any last thoughts?

Prof. Falk: Not now. We have had a rather comprehensive conversation because you have posed truly important questions. Thank you. Thank you very much. I appreciate this opportunity to express my views on this range of topics.