General

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

%%Putin Acts To De-Nazify Ukraine

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

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

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

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

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

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

%%A Strategy for Durable Peace and Development

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

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

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

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

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

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

%%Putin, the Man

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

%%Who, Actually, Runs Ukraine?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

%%The Lost Chance for Peace in 1991

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

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

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

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

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

%%The Belt and Road in Europe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

%%Revive the Bering Strait Tunnel?

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

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

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

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

%% ‘Global Britain’

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

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

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

Billington: Integrity Initiative.

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

%%The Russia-China Statement of February 4

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

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

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

%%A New Security Architecture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

%%Stop the War, and Operation Ibn Sina

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prof. Sakwa: Thank you.

Billington: Thank you.

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

PDF of this statement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is an edited transcript of an interview conducted January 21, 2022 by Michele Rasmussen, Vice President of the Schiller Institute in Denmark with peace and future researcher and art photographer, Jan Oberg. Prof. Oberg was born in Denmark and lives in Sweden. He has a PhD in sociology and has been a visiting professor in peace and conflict studies in Japan, Spain, Austria, Switzerland, part time over the years. Jan Oberg has written thousands of pages of published articles and several books. He is the co-founder and director of the independent TFF, the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, in Lund, Sweden since 1985, and has been nominated over several years for the Nobel Peace Prize

Michelle Rasmussen: Hello. I am Michele Rasmussen. Our interview today is with Jan Oberg, and it will have three parts:

First, the danger of war between Russia and Ukraine, which could lead to war between the United States and NATO and Russia, and how to stop it.

Second, your criticism of Denmark’s starting negotiations with the United States on a bilateral security agreement, which could mean permanent stationing of U.S. soldiers and armaments on Danish soil.

And third, your criticism of a major report which alleged that China is committing genocide in Xinjiang province.

A Russian invasion of Ukraine, which some in the West said would start last Wednesday has not occurred. But as we speak, tensions are still very high. You, Jan Oberg, wrote an Jan. 17, called “Ukraine The West has Paved the Road to War with Lies,” specifying three lies concerning the Ukraine crisis. Let’s take them one by one.

Lie Number One

You defined Lie Number One:

1. The West’s leaders never promised Mikhail Gorbachev and his Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, not to expand NATO eastward. They also did not state that they would take serious Soviet/Russian security interests around its borders. And, therefore, each of the former Warsaw Pact countries has a right to join NATO, if they decide to freely.

Can you please explain more to our viewers about this lie?

Prof. Jan Oberg: Yes. I would just say about that point that I’m amazed that it is now a kind of repeated truth in Western media, that [Soviet leader] Gorbachev was not given such promises. And it rests, with a few words taken out, on a longer article written years ago by a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, who says that Gorbachev did not say so. That article was published by Brookings Institution. 

Now the truth is—and there’s a difference between truth and non-truths, and we have to make that more and more clear when we deal with the West at the moment. If you go to the National Security Archives in the U.S., if I remember correctly, at the George Washington University, that is well documented. Their own formulation is that there are cascades of documentation. 

However, this was not written down in a treaty, or signed by the West’s leaders, who, one after the other, came to Gorbachev’s dacha outside Moscow or visited him at the Kremlin, and therefore some people would say it’s not valid. Now it is not true in politics, if we can’t rely on what was said and what was written down by people personally in their notebooks, etc.

George Bush, Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl, James Baker III—you can mention almost any important Western leader—were unanimous in saying to Gorbachev, “We understand that the Warsaw Pact has gone, the Soviet Union has gone, and therefore, we are not going to take advantage of your weakness.” James Baker’s formulation, according to all these sources, is “We’re not going to expand Eastward one inch.” And that was said in 1989, 1990. That is 30 years ago. And Gorbachev, because of those assurances—for which he’s been blamed very much ever since–accepted the reunification of Germany.

Some sources say that the deal was that if Germany should be united—which it was very quickly after—it should be a neutral country. But the interpretation in the West was it could remain a member of NATO, but would then include what was at that time the German Democratic Republic, GDR [East Germany] into one Germany.

You can go to the Gorbachev Foundation’s home page and you will find several interviews, videos, whatever, in which he says these things, and you can go to the Danish leading expert in this, Jens Jørgen Nielsen, who has also written that he personally interviewed Gorbachev, in which Gorbachev, with sadness in his eyes, said that he was cheated, or that these promises were broken, whatever the formulation is.

I fail to understand why this is one of the most important reasons behind the present crisis, namely Russia’s putting down its foot, saying, in effect,

You can’t continue this expansion with your troops and your long-range missiles up to the border of Russia. And we will not accept Ukraine [as a member of NATO]. You have gotten 10 former Warsaw Pact countries which are now members of NATO. NATO now has 30 members. We are here with a military budget, which is 8% of NATO’s, and you keep up with this expansion. We are not accepting that expansion to include Ukraine.

Now, this is so fundamental that, of course, it has to be denied by those who are hardliners or hawks, or who cannot live without enemies, or who want a new Cold War, which we already have, in my view, and have had for some years. But that’s a long story. The way the West, and the U.S. in particular—but NATO’s Secretary General [Jens Stoltenberg’s] behavior is outrageous to me, because it’s built on omission of one of the most important historical facts of modern Europe.

Rasmussen: In your article, you quote from Manfred Wörner, the Secretary General of NATO back in 1990, one year before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In these documents released by the U.S. National Security Archive, that you just referred to, you say:

Manfred Wörner had given a well-regarded speech in Brussels in May 1990, in which he argued: “The principal task of the next decade will be to build a new European security structure, to include the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact nations. The Soviet Union will have an important role to play in the construction of such a system.’

And the next year, in the middle of 1991, according to a memorandum from the Russian delegation who met with Wörner, he responded to the Russians by saying that he personally and the North Atlantic Council [the political decision-making body of NATO], were both against expansion, “13 out of 16 NATO members share this point of view,” and “Wörner said that he would speak against Poland’s and Romania’s membership in NATO to those countries leaders, as he had already done with leaders of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. And he emphasized that we should not allow the isolation of U.S.S.R. from the European community,” and this was even while the U.S.S.R. was still alive. It must have been even more the case after the U.S.S.R. collapsed, and Russia emerged.

Prof. Oberg: Well, if I may put in a little point here. Compare the quotation of a former NATO Secretary General, with that from the present Secretary General of NATO. Wörner was a man of intellect. The leaders around him at the time in Europe were too. I mean, those were the days when you had people like Chancellor Willy Brandt in Germany and Östpolitik [Eastern policy], and you had [Prime Minister] Olof Palme in Sweden with common security thinking. We cannot be sure, feel safe and secure in the West, if it’s against Russia. Which does not mean at all to give in to everything Russia does, but it just says we cannot be safe if the others don’t feel safe from us. And that was an intellectualism. That was an empathy, not a necessarily a sympathy, but it was an empathy for those over there, that we have to take into account, when we act. Today that intellectualism is gone completely.

It is very interesting, as you point out, that 13 out of 16 NATO countries, at that time, were at that level, but in came President Bill Clinton in 1990, who basically said—well, he didn’t state it, but he acted as though he had stated it: “I don’t care about those promises,” and started expanding NATO. The first office in Kiev of NATO was set up in 1994. That was the year when he did that. And that was the year I sat in Tbilisi, Georgia, and interviewed the U.S. representative there, who, through a two-hour long conversation, basically talked about Georgia as “our country.”

You know, it’s sad to say it’s human to make mistakes, but to be so anti-intellectual, so anti-empathetic, so imbued with your own thinking and worldview, that you’re not able to take the other side into account, is much more dangerous now than it was at that time, because the leaders we have in the western world today are not up to it. They were earlier, but today’s leaders are not.

Lie Number Two

Rasmussen: Lie Number Two that you pointed out, is:

2. The Ukraine conflict started by Putin’s out-of-the-blue aggression on Ukraine and then annexation of Crimea.

What’s the rest of the story here?

Prof. Oberg: Well, it’s not the rest, it’s the beginning of the story. You see, people who write about these things—and it’s particularly those who are Western media and Western politicians and foreign ministers, etc.—say that it all started with the out-of-the-blue invasion in the Donbas, and then the taking, annexing, aggression on, or whatever the word is, Crimea. Well, they all forget, very conveniently, and very deliberately—I mean, this is not such a longer time ago than people who write about it today wouldn’t know—that there was clearly a Western assisted, if not orchestrated, coup d’état in Kiev in 2014. I won’t go into that long story. After some negotiations about an economic agreement between Ukraine and the EU, in which the president then jumped off, allegedly under pressure from Putin, or whatever, there was a series of violent events in Kiev.

It’s well known from one of those who was there, and participated, namely the Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, Mrs. Victoria Nuland. She gave a speech in the U.S. saying, if I remember correctly, that the U.S. has pumped $5 billion into Ukraine over the years, to support democracy and human rights, etc.—and training courses for young NGOs, etc. It’s obvious that that operation, that the ousting of President [Viktor Yanukovich], who had to flee to Russia, and the taking over, partly by neo-Nazis and fascists who were present and who probably did the beginning of the shooting and the killing of people, that all this had to do with the promise that was given to Ukraine years before that it would be integrated into the Euro-Atlantic framework. And then it was kind of stopping and saying, “We don’t want that anyhow. We will negotiate something else, and we will look into what Putin has to offer,” etc.

But that, in Putin’s mind, in Russia’s mind, meant that NATO would be the future of Ukraine. Russia had, still has, a huge military base in Crimea, which it had a lease on for, at the time, I think it was 30-plus years, meaning that should Ukraine, which was clearly signalled out by the western NATO member’s leadership, to enter and become a full member of NATO, Putin would look at a Russian base, either being lost or having a Russian military naval base in a NATO country.

Now I’m not saying that annexing Crimea was a smart move. I’m not saying it was a legal move, but it’s very difficult for the western world to blame Russia for doing it. Look at the opinion polls and the votes for that, if you will, voting themselves back into Russia. Crimea was part of Russia until 1954, when Khrushchev gave it to Ukraine. He was from Ukraine himself. And so, this happened three weeks before. I’m amazed that it should be intellectually possible for people who witnessed this, to somehow forget it, along with the U.S. promise about NATO. There might be some young fools who don’t read history books.

What I’m talking about now is something that happened in 2014, and there’s no excuse for not mentioning that there’s a connection between that coup d’état, and the influence of the West in Ukraine in a very substantial way, and what happened in Donbas and Crimea.

If I put it on a more general level, if we look at today’s ability to understand, describe, analyze issues as conflicts, we are heading for zero understanding. There is nobody in the press and nobody in politics who are able, intellectually, to see these things as conflicts, that is, as a problem standing between two or more parties that has to be analyzed.

Conflict resolution is about finding solutions so that the parties we have defined as parties—and there certainly are many more than two in this very complex conflict—can live with in the future. What we are down to, in banalization, is that there is no conflict. There’s only one party, Russia, that does everything bad and evil and terrible, while we, in the West, are sitting in the receiving end, being the good guys who’ve done nothing wrong in history. We, who could never rethink what we did or say, “We’re sorry,” or change our policies, because we are right.

There’s only one problem. That’s them. In the last three months, we’re down now to the level in which the accusations about Russia invading Ukraine, have nothing to do with conflict analysis. It is focusing purely on one party, and one party, by definition, is not a conflict.

We are not party to a relationship anymore, and that makes a huge difference, again, from the way of thinking and the intellectual approach of the leaders who existed 20-30 years ago. And one reason for all of this is, of course, that the West is on his way down. Second, and they feel threatened by anything that happens around the world. And third, when you have been Number One in a system for a long time, you become lazy. You don’t study. You don’t have as good an education as you should have. You bring up people to high levels who have not read books, because you can get away with everything. You are so strong militarily. And when that happens, it’s a slippery slope and you are actually on board the Titanic.

This is not a defense of everything Russia does. What I’m trying to say is that there is a partner over there. By the way, they call us in the West their partners. We call them anything else but partners. We don’t even see them. We don’t listen to their interests. We didn’t listen to Putin when he spoke at the Munich Security Conference in 2007 and said, “You have cheated us.” And of course, when Gorbachev, 90 years old, says, “You have cheated us,” he’s not even quoted in the Western world, because there’s no space anymore for views other than our own. You know, this autism that is now classical in the Western security policy elite, is damn dangerous.

Lie Number Three

Rasmussen: The third lie you, you pointed out in your cited article, was:

3. NATO always has an open door to new members. It never tries to invite or drag them in, doesn’t seek expansion. It just happens because Eastern European countries since 1989-90 have wanted to join without any pressure from NATO’s side. That also applies to Ukraine.

In this section of your article, you document that Putin actually asked for Russia to join NATO. Can you please explain your most important point about this third lie?

Prof. Oberg: Yeah, well, it’s already there since you quoted my text, but the fascinating thing is that there has not been a referendum in any of these new member states. The fascinating thing is, in 2014, when NATO membership came to its first conflictual situation, in the case of Ukraine, there was not a majority for it, according to any opinion poll in Ukraine. There was not a majority. I would say, it should not be a matter of 51%. If a country is going to join NATO, it should be at least 75 or 80% of the people saying yes to that.

Second—and it’s not something I’ve invented—[Baron George] Robertson, NATO Secretary General from 1999-2004, has told the following story. I think it was first released in The Guardian, but it’s also in a long podcast from a place I don’t remember, which The Guardian quotes. He says that he was asked by Putin whether, or at what time, or whatever the formulation was, NATO would accept Russia as a member.

This probably goes back to what you had already quoted Wörner, NATO Secretary General [from 1988-1994] for having said, namely that a new security structure in Europe would, by necessity, have some kind of involvement, in a direct sense, of Russia, because Russia is also Europe.

And that was what Gorbachev had as an idea: a new [common] European home, something like a security structure where we could deal with our conflicts or differences or misunderstandings, and could still be friends in the larger Europe.

That was why I argued at the time, 30 years ago, that with the demise of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, the only reasonable thing to do was close down NATO. Instead, as I said, with Clinton and onwards, the whole interpretation was “We have won. The Western system, the neoliberal democratic NATO system has won. We have nothing to learn from that. There’s nothing to change now. We just expand even more.”

And the first thing NATO did, as you know, was a completely illegal. Also, according to its own charter, the invasion, involvement and bombing in Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was not a member, had never been a member of NATO, and NATO’s only mission is Article 5, which states, in essence, “We are one for all, and all for one. We are going to support some member, if the member is attacked. Now, Article 5 had nothing to do with Yugoslavia. That happened in 1991 and onwards, all through the ’90s. Remember the 72 days of bombings in Kosovo and Serbia. There was no UN mandate for it. But it was a triumphalist interpretation: “We can now get away with everything, anything we want.” We could do it because there was no Russia to take into account. Russia could not do anything about it. China could not do anything about it at the time.

And so, you get into hubris and an inability to see your own limitations, and that is what we are coming up to now. We are seeing the boomerang coming back to NATO, to the Western world for these things.

Of course, some idiots will sit somewhere and say, “Jan Oberg is pro-Russia.” No, I’m trying to stick to what I happen to remember happening at the time. I’m old enough to remember what was said to Gorbachev in those days when the [Berlin] Wall came down and all these things changed fundamentally.

I was not optimistic then that NATO would adapt to that situation; there was hope at that time. There’s no hope today for this, because if you could change, you would have changed long ago. The prediction I make is the United States empire, NATO, will fall apart at some point. The question is how, how dangerous, and how violent that process will be, because it’s not able to conduct reforms or change itself fundamentally into something else, such as a common security organization for Europe.

Solutions

Rasmussen: I want to ask you now about the solutions. You’ve been a peace researcher for many decades. What would it take to peacefully resolve the immediate crisis? And second, how can we create the basis for peaceful world in the future?

You mentioned the idea you had 30 years ago for dismembering NATO. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the founder and President of the Schiller Institute, has now called for establishing a new security architecture, which would take the interests of all countries, including Russia, into account. So, how could we solve the immediate crisis? If there were the political will, what would have to change among the parties? And secondly, what needs to be done in terms of long-term peaceful cooperation?

Prof. Oberg: The question you are raising is a little bit like the patient who is bleeding to death, who is being operated on by the seventh doctor, and then saying, “What should we do now?” What I have suggested over 30 years is something that should have been done to avoid the situation today, and nobody listened, as is clear, because you don’t listen to researchers anymore who say something else that state-financed researchers do.

It’s not an easy question you are raising, of course. I would say, in the immediate situation, the Minsk Agreements, which have not been upheld, particularly by Ukraine, to establish some kind of autonomy for the Donbas area. That is something we could work with: autonomy solutions. We could work with confederations, we could work with cantonization, if you will. Lots of what happened, and happens, is in the eastern republics of Ukraine.

It reminds me of a country I know very well, and was partly educated in and worked in during its dissolution, namely Yugoslavia. So much so that it resembles Granica. Ukraine and Granica in Croatia, both mean border areas. Granica means border. There’s so much knowledge, wisdom, and lessons learned that could have been a transferred had we had a United Nations mission in that area: A peacekeeping mission, a monitoring mission. UN police and UN civil affairs in the Donbas region.

If I remember correctly, Putin is the only one who suggested that at some point. I don’t think he presented it as a big proposal to the world, but in an interview, he said that was something he could think of. I wrote in 2014, why on Earth has nobody even suggested that the United Nations, the world’s most competent organization in handling conflicts—and, if you will, which put a lid on the military affairs, for instance, by disarming the parties on all sides, which they did in eastern and western Slavonia, in Croatia—not been suggested? Because the western world has driven the United Nations out to the periphery of international politics.

I’ve said Minsk. I’ve said the UN. I’ve said some kind of internal reforms in Ukraine. I have said, and I would insist: NATO must stop its expansion. NATO cannot take the risk, on behalf of Europe, and the world, to say “We insist on continuing with giving weapons to, and finally making Ukraine a NATO member.” You can ask Kissinger, you can ask Brzezinski, you can take the most, if you will, right-wing hawkish politicians in the West. They’ve all said neutrality like Finland or Switzerland, or something like that, is the only viable option.

And is that to be pro-Russian? No, that is what is needed to be pro-Western. I am just looking, like so many others fortunately have done, at the Cuban Missile Crisis. How would the U.S. have reacted, if Russia had a huge military alliance and tried to get Canada or Mexico to become members with long-range weapons standing a few kilometers from the U.S. border?

Do you think the U.S. would have said, “Oh, they were all freely deciding to, so we think it’s OK”? Look at what they did during the Cuban Missile Crisis. They could not accept weapon stations in Cuba.

One of the things you have to ask yourself about, is there one rule and one set of interests for the Western world that does not apply to other actors? If you want to avoid Russia invading Ukraine, which all this nonsense is about, repeatedly now, for two or three months, look into a new status where the East and the West and Ukraine, all of it, can sit down and discuss security guarantees for Ukraine.

President Zelenskyy has said it quite nicely, I must say: “If you don’t want us to become members of NATO,” — and he says that to the West, because he feels that it has taken a long time for the West to act, and he last said that at the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 19. Interesting that a man whose country is going to be invaded any moment, leaves the country and goes to a conference to speak which he could have done on Zoom.

The whole thing doesn’t make sense, like it didn’t make sense on Feb. 16, when all the West said that Russia was going to invade Ukraine, and the Russian Defense Minister was sitting in Damascus and Putin was receiving [Brazilian President Jair] Bolsonaro. I mean, don’t they have intelligence anymore in NATO and Washington?

So, long story short: sit down and give Ukraine the guarantees and sign a non-aggression pact with both sides or all sides, clearly limiting non-nuclear defensive defense measures along the borders, or whatever, and integrate eastern and Western economic organizations.

I would be happy to see Ukraine as part of the Belt and Road Initiative with economic opportunities. There is so much Ukraine could do if it could get out of the role of being a victim, squeezed between the two sides all the time. But that can be done only if the issue is elevated to a higher level, in which Ukraine’s different peoples and different parts and parties are allowed to speak up about what future they want to have in their very specific situation. Ukraine is not just any country in in Europe. It’s a poor country. It’s a country that has a specific history. It’s a country which is very complex, ethnically, language wise, historically, etc.

And that’s why I started out saying confederation. I said something like a Switzerland model, something like Cantonization, or whatever, but for Christ’s sake, give that country and its people a security, a good feeling that nobody’s going to encroach upon them.

And that is to me, the schwerpunkt [main emphasis], the absolutely essential; that is, to give the Ukraine people a feeling of security and safety and stability and peace so that they can develop. I find it very interesting that President Zelenskyy, in this very long interview to the international press a couple of weeks ago, said, and I’m paraphrasing, “I’m tired of all these people who say that we are going to be invaded because it destroys our economy. People are leaving. No business is coming in, right?”

Who are we to do this damage to Ukraine and then want it to become a member of NATO? You know, the whole thing is recklessly irresponsible, in my view, particularly with a view of Ukraine and its peoples and their needs. I would put that in focus, and then put in a huge UN peacekeeping mission and continue and expand the excellent OSCE [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development] mission. Put the international community—good hearted, neutral people—down there and diffuse those who have only one eyesight, only one view of all this. They are the dangerous people.

A New Security Architecture

Rasmussen: And what about the more long-term idea of a new security architecture in general?

Prof. Oberg: Oh, I would build a kind of, I wouldn’t say copy of, but I would build something inspired by the United Nations Security Council: All Europe, representatives from all countries, including NGOs, and not just government representatives. I would have an early warning mechanism where the moment there is something like a conflict coming up, we would have reporters and we would have investigations we would look into it, not conflict prevention.

My goodness, people don’t read books. There’s nothing about conflict prevention. We should prevent violence. We should prevent violent conflict, but preventing conflicts is nonsense, life is getting richer. There’s not a family, there’s not a school, there’s not a workplace, there’s not a political party, there’s not a parliament in which there are no conflicts. Conflict is what life is made of. Conflict is terribly important because it makes us change and reflect. I’m all for conflicts, but I’m 110% against violence. People will say, “Conflict prevention is something we should work, on and educate people in.” Nonsense, from people who never read books, as I said.

I would look for something like common security. The good old Palme Commission from the ’80s, which built on defensive defense. The idea that according to Article 51, in the UN Charter, every nation has a right to self-defense.

But nations do not have a right to missiles that can go 4,000 km or 8,000 km and kill millions of people far away. Get rid of nuclear weapons and all these things. They have nothing to do with defensiveness and common security. Wherever I go and whoever I speak to, I say, “Get rid of nuclear weapons and offensive long-range weapons.”

The only legitimate weapons there are in this world are defensive ones, and they are defined by two things. Short distance, that is, the ability to go only over a short distance, such as helicopters instead of fighter airplanes or missiles.

And second, limited destructive capacity because they’re going to be used on one’s own territory in case somebody encroaches or invades you. Nobody wants to have nuclear weapons or totally super destructive weapons on their own territory because they don’t want them to be used to there. So just ask yourself, what would you like in Country X, Y and Z to be defended with? And that’s a definition of a defensive weapons. If we all had only defensive military structures, there would be very few wars, but they would also not be a military-industrial-media-academic complex that earns its money on this.

The big elephant in the room we are talking about is, well, there are two of them: one is NATO expansion, which we should never have done this way. And second, the interest of the military-industrial-media-academic complex, as I call it, that earns a hell of a lot of money on people’s suffering. Millions of people at this moment while we speak, are living in fear and despair because of what they see in the media is going to happen. None of what we see at this moment was necessary. It’s all made up by elites who have an interest in these kinds of things happening or the threat of the Cold War. And even if we avoid a big war now, and I hope, I don’t pray to anything, but I hope very much that we do, thanks to some people’s wisdom, and it’s going to be very cold in Europe in the future after this.

Look at the demonization that the West has done again against Russia, and to a certain extent, of Ukraine. This is not psychologically something that will be repaired in two weeks.

Rasmussen: And also, as you mentioned at the beginning, it has also something to do with the unwillingness in part of certain of the Western elites to accept that we do not have an Anglo-American unipolar world, but that there are other countries that need to be listened to and respected.

Prof. Oberg:  You might add, what the West gets out of this is that Russia and China will get closer and closer. You are already seeing that in the Joint Statement of Feb. 4: “We will have friendship eternally.” And that’s between two countries who up to the ’60s at some point were very strong enemies. And the same will go with Iran, and there will be other countries like Serbia which are turning away from the West. We’re going to sit and be isolating ourselves because, one, we in the West cannot bully the world anymore, as we could before. And second, nobody wants to be bullied anymore. We have to live in a world in which there are different systems. The Christian missionary idea that everybody must become like us, where we opened up to China because we hoped they would become liberal democracies with many parties, and a parliament, is awfully naïve. Time is over for that kind of thinking.

The U.S.-Denmark Defense Cooperation Agreement

Rasmussen: I want to go into the other two subjects. First, the negotiations between Denmark and the United States in the context of the political, military and media statements of recent years, alleging that Russia has aggressive intentions against Europe and the U.S. The Danish Social Democratic government announced Feb. 10 that a year ago the U.S. requested negotiations on a Defense Cooperation Agreement, and that Denmark was now ready to start these negotiations. The government announced that it could mean permanent stationing of U.S. troops and armaments on Danish soil. This would be against the decades-long policy of the Danish government not to allow foreign troops or armaments to be permanently stationed in Denmark. You wrote an article two days later criticizing these negotiations. Why are you against this?

Prof. Oberg: I’m against it because it’s a break of 70 years of sensible policies. We do not accept foreign weapons and we do not accept foreign troops, and we do not accept nuclear weapons stationed on Danish soil. I sat, for ten years, all throughout the 1980s, in the Danish Governments Commission for Security and Disarmament as an expert. Nobody in the ’80s would have mentioned anything like this.

I guess the whole thing is something that had begun to go mad around 20 years ago, when Denmark engaged and became a bomber nation for the first time, in Yugoslavia. And then Afghanistan and Iraq. It means that you cannot say “No.” This is an offer you can’t refuse. You can’t refuse it, among other things—it’s my interpretation—because—you remember the story where President Trump suggested that he or the U.S. could buy Greenland, and the Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said, “Well, that is not something to be discussed. The question is absurd,” after which he got very angry. He got personally very angry, and he said, ‘It’s not a matter of speaking to me. You’re speaking to the United States of America.”

I think this offer to begin negotiations must have come relatively shortly after that, as “This offer is not something you should call absurd once again.” I’ve no evidence for that. But if these negotiations started more than a year ago, we are back in the Trump administration.

Second, what kind of democracy is that? We do not know when that letter was written, or its contents, in which the Americans asked to have negotiations about this. But what we do hear, is that a little more than a year ago, we began some negotiations about this whole thing behind the back of Parliament, and behind the back of the people, and then it is presented more or less as a fait accompli. There will be an agreement. The question is only nitty-gritty as to what will be in it.

In terms of substance, there is no doubt that any place where there would be an American facilities, or whenever you’d call them, weapons stored, which will be the first targets in a war, seen as such in a war, under the best circumstances, seen by Russia. Russia’s first targets will be to eliminate the Americans everywhere they can in Europe, because those are the strongest and most dangerous forces.

Second, it is not true that there is a “no to nuclear weapons” in other senses than Denmark will keep up the principle that we will not have them stationed, permanently. But with such an agreement, where the Air Force, Navy and soldiers, military, shall more frequently work with, come in to visit, etc., there’s no doubt that there will be more nuclear weapons coming in, for instance, on American vessels than before, because the cooperation would get closer and closer.

The only thing the Danish government will be able to do is, since they know that under the “neither confirm nor deny policy” of the U.S., they would not even ask the question, if they asked by journalists, they would say, “Well, we take for granted that the Americans honor or understand and respect that we do not have nuclear weapons on Danish territory, sea territory,” or whatever. Now the Americans are violating that in Japan even. So, this is nonsense. There would be more nuclear weapons. I’m not saying they would go off or anything like that. I’m just saying there would be more undermining of Danish principles.

The whole thing, of course, has to do with the fact that Denmark is placing—and that was something the present government under Mette Frederiksen’s leadership did before this was made public—110% of its eggs in the U.S. basket. This is the most foolish thing you can do, given how the world is changing. The best thing a small country can do is to uphold international law and the UN. Denmark doesn’t. It speaks like the U.S. for an international rules-based order, which is the opposite of, or very far away from the international law.

Third, in a world where you are going to want multipolarity, a stronger Asia, a stronger Africa, another Russia from the one we have known the last 30 years, etc., and a United States that is, on all indicators except the military, declining and will fall as the world leader. This is, in my view — be careful with my words — the most foolish thing you can do at the moment, if you are a leader of Denmark, or if you are leading the Danish security policies.

You should be open—I wrote an article about that in a small Danish book some six or seven years ago, and said “Walk on two legs.” Remain friendly with the United States and NATO, and all that, but develop your other leg, so you can walk on two legs in the next 20, 30, 40 years. But there’s nobody that thinks so long-term in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and there’s nobody who thinks independently anymore in research institutes or ministries. It’s basically adapting to everything we think, or are told by Washington we should do. That’s not foreign policy to me. There’s nothing to do with it.

A good foreign policy is one where you have a good capacity to analyze the world, do scenarios, discuss which way to go, pros and contras, and different types of futures, and then make a decision in your parliament based on a public discussion. That was what we did early, ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. When you become a bomber nation, when you become a militaristic nation, when active foreign policy means nothing but militarily active, then, of course, you are getting closer and closer and closer down into the into the darkness of the hole, where suddenly you fall so deeply you cannot see the daylight.

I think it’s very sad. I find it tragic. I find it very dangerous. I find that Denmark will be a much less free country in the future by doing these kinds of things. I don’t look at this agreement as an isolated thing. It comes with all the things we’ve done, all the wars Denmark has participated in. Sorry, I said we, I don’t feel Danish anymore, so I should say Denmark or the Danes. And finally, I have a problem with democratically elected leaders who seem to be more loyal to a foreign government, than with their own people’s needs.

China and Xinjiang

Rasmussen: You just mentioned the lack of independence of analysis. There’s not only an enemy image being painted against Russia, but also against China, with allegations of central government genocide against the Muslim Uyghur minority in Xinjiang Province as a major point of contention.

On March 8, 2021, the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy in Washington published a The Uyghur Genocide: An Examination of China’s Breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention, in cooperation with the Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights in Montreal. The following month, on April 27, you and two others issued a report criticizing the Newlines Institute report. What is the basis of your criticism, and what do you think should be done to lessen tension with China?

And also, as a wrap-up question, if you wanted to say anything else about what has to be done to make a change from looking at Russia and China as the autocratic enemies of the West, and instead shift to a world in which there is cooperation between the major powers, which would give us the possibility of concentrating on such great task as economic development of the poorer parts of the world?

Prof. Oberg: Well, of course, that’s something we could speak another hour about. Our tiny think tank, the Transnational Foundation for Peace & Future Research (TFF), by the way, is totally independent and people-financed and all volunteer. That’s why we can say and do what we think should be said and done. Not politically in anybody’s hands or pockets, we can say that the Newlines Institute’s report and other similar reports do not hold water, would not pass as a paper for a master’s degree in social science or political science.

We say that if you look into not only that report, but several other reports and researchers who contribute to this genocide discussion, if you look into their work, they are very often related to the military-industrial-media-academic complex. And they are paid for, have formerly had positions somewhere else in that system, or are known for having hawkish views on China, Russia and everybody else outside the western sphere.

When we began to look into this, we also began to see a trend. And that’s why we published shortly after a 150-page Behind the Smokescreen: An Analysis of the West’s Destructive China Cold War Agenda and Why it Must Stop, about the new Cold War on China, and Xinjiang is part of a much larger orchestrated—and I’m not a conspiracy theorist, it’s all documented, in contrast to media and other research reports. It’s documented. You can see where we get our knowledge from, and on which basis we draw conclusions.

Disappearance of Scholarship

Whereas now, significantly, for Western scholarship and media, they don’t deal with, are not interested in sources. I’ll come back to that. It’s part of a much larger, only-tell-negative-stories about China; don’t be interested in China’s new social model. Don’t be interested in how in 30-40 years they did what nobody else in humankind has ever done: Uplifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and created a society that I can see the difference from when I visited China in 1983. I know what it looked like back then when they had just opened up, so to speak.

What we are saying is not that we know what happened and happens in Xinjiang, because we’ve not been there and we are not a human rights organization. We are a conflict resolution and peace proposal making policy think tank. But what we do say is, if you cannot come up with better arguments and more decent documentation, then probably you are not honest. If there’s nothing more you can show us to prove that there’s a genocide going on at Xinjiang, you should perhaps do your homework before you make these assertions and accusations.

That’s what we are saying, and we are also saying that it is peculiar that the last thing Mike Pompeo, Trump’s Secretary of State, did in his office, on Jan. 19, 2021 was to say “I hereby declare that Xinjiang is a genocide.” The State Department has still not published as much as one A4 [world standard for letter paper, slightly longer than the U.S. 8-1/2 x 11] page with the documentation.

I feel sad on a completely different level, and that is, Western scholarship is disappearing in this field. And those who may really have different views and analyses, and question what we hear or uphold—a plurality of viewpoints and interpretations of the world—we’re not listened to. I mean, I’m listened to elsewhere, but I’m not listened to in Western media, although I have 45 years of experience in these things and I’ve traveled quite a lot and worked in quite a lot of conflict and war zones. I can live with that, but I think it’s a pity for the Western world that we are now so far down the drain, that good scholarship is not what politics is built on anymore. If it ever was, I think it was at a distant point in time.

Also striking to me is the uniformity of the press. The day that the Newlines report that you referred to, was published, it was all over the place, including front pages of the leading Western newspapers, including the Danish Broadcasting’s website, etc.—all saying the same thing, quoting the same bits of parts.

The uniformity of this is just mind boggling. How come nobody said, “Hey, what is this Newlines Institute, by the way, that nobody had heard about before? Who are these people behind it? Who are the authors?” Anybody can sit in their chair and do quite a lot of research, which was impossible to do 20 years ago. If you are curious, if you are asked to be curious, if you are permitted to be curious, and do research in the media, in the editorial office where you are sitting, then you would find out lots of this here is B.S. Sorry to say so, intellectually, it’s B.S.

And so, I made a little pastime. I wrote a very diplomatic letter to people at CNN, BBC, Reuters, etc. Danish and Norwegian, and Swedish media, those who write this opinion journalism about Xinjiang, and a couple of other things, and I sent them all our report, which is online, so it’s just a click away, and I said “Kindly read this one, and I look forward to hearing from you.” I’ve done this in about 50 or 60 cases, individually dug up their email addresses, etc. Not one has responded. The strategy when you lie, or when you deceive, or when you have a political man, is don’t go into any dialogue with somebody who knows more or it’s critical of what you do.

That’s very sad. Our TFF Pressinfo goes to 20 people at the BBC. They know everything we write about Ukraine, about China, about Xinjiang, etc. Not one has ever called.

These are the kinds of things that make me scared as an intellectual. One thing is what happens out in the world. That’s bad enough. But when I begin to find out how this is going on, how it is manipulated internally in editorial offices, close to foreign ministries, etc. or defense ministries, then I say, we are approaching the Pravda moment. The Pravda moment is not the present Pravda [newspaper], but the Pravda that went down with the Soviet Union. When I visited Russia (the Soviet Union at the time) for conferences, etc., I found out that very few people believed anything they saw in the media. Now, to me, it’s a question of whether the Western media, so-called free media, want to save themselves, or do they want to become totally irrelevant, because at some point, as someone once said, “You cannot lie all the time to all of the people, you may get away with lying to some, to some people, for some of the time.”

Rasmussen: President Lincoln.

Prof. Oberg: Yeah. The long story short, is that this is not good. This deceives people. And of course, some people, at some point, will be very upset about that. They have been lied to. And also, don’t make reference anymore to the so-called difference between free and state media.

Viewers may like to hear it, may not like it, but should know this: the U.S. has just passed a law—they have three laws against China—intervening in all kinds of Chinese things, such as, for instance, trying to influence who will become the successor to Dalai Lama, and things like that. They are not finished at all about how to influence Taiwan, and all that—things they have nothing to do with, and which were decided between President Richard Nixon and Premier Zhou Enlai, that America accepted the One-China policy and would not mix themselves into Taiwanese issues. But that is another broken promise. These so-called free media are actually state media in the U.S.

Take Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia. they both, particularly the latter, have disseminated most of these Xinjiang genocide stories, which then bounce back to BBC, etc. These are state media. As an agency for that in in Washington, it’s financed by millions of dollars, of course, and it has the mandate to make American foreign policy more understood, and promote U.S. foreign policy goals and views. Anybody can go to a website and see this. Again, I’m back to this, everybody can do what I’ve done. 

That law that has just been passed says the U.S. sets aside $1.5 billion in the next 5 years, to support education, training courses, whatever, for media people to write negative stories about China, particularly the Belt and Road Initiative. I look forward to Politiken [Danish newspaper] or Dagens Nyheter [Swedish newspaper] or whatever newspapers in the allied countries who would say, “This comes from a U.S. state media,” when it actually does.

And so, my view is that there is a reason for calling it the military-industrial-media-academic complex, because it’s one cluster of elites who are now running the deception, but also the wars that are built on deception. And that is very sad where, instead, we should cooperate. I would not even say we should morally cooperate. I would say we have no choice on this Earth but to cooperate, because if we have a new Cold War between China and the West, we cannot solve humanity’s problems, whether it’s the climate issue, environmental issues, poverty, justice, income differences or cleavages, or modern technological problems, whatever. All these things are, by definition, global. We have one former empire, a soon to be former empire, that does nothing but disseminate negative energy, criticize, demonize, running cold wars, basically isolating itself and going down.

The U.S. Is Needed to Contribute to a Better World

We lack America doing good things. I’ve never been anti-American. I want to say that very clearly. I’ve never, ever been anti-American. I’m anti-empire and anti-militarism. We need the United States, with its creativity, with its possibilities, with what it already has given the world, to contribute constructively to a better world, together with the Russians, together with Europe, together with Africa, together with everybody else, and China, and stop this idea that we can only work with those who are like us, because if that’s what you want to do, you will have fewer and fewer to work with.

The world is going toward diversity. Other cultures are coming up who have other ways of doing things. We may like it or not. The beauty of conflict resolution and peace is to do it with those who are different from you. It is not to make peace with those who already love you, or are already completely identical with you. Conflict and peace illiteracy, unfortunately, has now completely overtaken the western world. Whereas, I see people thinking about peace, and I hear people mentioning the word peace, I do not hear Western politicians or media anymore mention the word peace. And when that word is not there, and the discussion and the discourse has disappeared about peace, we are very far out.

Combine that with lack of intellectualism and an analytical capacity, and you will end up in militarism and war. You cannot forget these things and avoid a war. In my view, there are reasons other than Russia, if you will, why we’re in a dangerous situation, and that danger has to do with the way the West itself is operating at the moment. Nobody in the world is threatening the United States or the West. If it goes down, it’s all of its own making. I think that’s an important thing to say in these days when we always blame somebody else for our problems. That is not the truth.

Rasmussen: Thank you so much, Jan Oberg.

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

Michelle Rasmussen: Presidents Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin held a summit meeting on the sidelines of the Beijing Olympics and issued a statement on Feb. 4 called Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on the International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development. Schiller Institute founder and international President Helga Zepp-LaRouche said that this signals a new era in international relations. To discuss the content and implications of the development, I am pleased to interview Dr. Li Xing, Professor of Development and International Relations in the Department of Politics and Society, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences from Aalborg University in Denmark. Dr. Li also gave the Schiller Institute an interview on Jan. 26 of this year, entitled “Cooperate with China. It Is not the Enemy.” [add EIR link]

Before we go into details, can you please give us your assessment of the overall importance of the summit and statement, including what it means for relations between China and Russia, and China-Russian relations with the rest of the world. And at the end of the interview, we will also discuss what it means in the current, very tense situation between Russia and NATO.

Li Xing: Thank you Michelle for your invitation. It’s my pleasure to be invited again by the Schiller Institute.

First of all let me emphasize that it is a landmark document. Why? Because the document emphasizes what I call a “new era,” declaring a shift in the world order, a multipolar world order, in which the U.S. and the West are not the only rule-makers, and Russia and China take the lead, and lay out a set of principles and a shared worldview. This is my first general summary.

Second, unlike the U.S./NATO alliance, the China-Russia relationship is described by the joint document as a “close comprehensive strategic partnership.” In Putin’s early words, he said, “The China-Russia relationship is a relationship that probably cannot be compared with anything in the world. The relationship is not aimed against any other countries. It is superior to the political and military alliances of the Cold War era,” referring to the U.S.-NATO alliance. It also echoes Xi Jinping’s recent statement, that “the relationship even exceeds an alliance in its closeness and effectiveness.” So the document tries to demonstrate that the China-Russia relationship is a good example of interstate relationships.

Rasmussen: You have characterized the introduction as “a conceptual understanding and analysis of global changes and transformations taking place in the current era.” It especially refers to the transformation from a unipolar to a multipolar world. Can you please explain how the statement addresses this, and what it means?

Li: In the beginning of this statement, it puts forward both countries’ conception of the understanding of the world order, which is characterized as “multipolarity, economic globalization, the advent of information society, cultural diversity, transformation of the global governance architecture and world order; there is increasing interrelation and interdependence between the States; a trend has emerged towards redistribution of power in the world.” [emphasis added by Li] “Redistribution of power in the world.” This is what the part emphasizes.

Second, this part also clearly sets up a series of analyses, arguments and discourses to demonstrate both countries’ understanding, and to emphasize the fact that the world order has entered a new era. Again, “new era” are the key words for this document.

Lastly, in this beginning part of the joint statement, it shows both Russia and China’s grand worldview that pave the foundation for the two countries’ broad consensus on almost all issues of the world, which we will deal with one by one later on.

Rasmussen: Part 1 is about the question of democracy, and it starts by saying: “The sides” —that is, China and Russia—”share the understanding that democracy is a universal human value, rather than a privilege of a limited number of States, and that its promotion and protection is a common responsibility of the entire world community.”

But the charge is that China and Russia are not democratic, but rather autocratic. This is one of the leading accusations by those in the West who are trying to maintain a unipolar world, and they portray the world as a battle between the democrats and the autocrats. How does the document respond to this, and treat the idea of democracy?

Li: Actually, this document utilizes a large amount of space to discuss this point. First, the joint statement points out that “democracy”—including human rights—”is a universal human value, rather than a privilege of a limited number of States.” So here it implies that the concept of democracy must not be defined by the West alone. The West cannot single-handedly define which country is autocratic and which country is democratic.

Second, the joint document emphasizes that the essential? point is that there is no universal one-form document, or human rights standard. Different countries have different cultures, histories, different social-political systems in a multipolar world. We have to respect the way each country chooses their own social-political system, and also the tradition of other states.

Third, it signals a strong critique of the West, and in this part, there are a lot of criticisms toward the West. That is, that the West has a tendency to weaponize the issue of democracy and human rights, and very often uses it as a tool to interfere in other countries’ internal affairs. It is completely wrong for the U.S. and the West to impose their own “democratic standards” on other countries, and to monopolize the right to assess the level of compliance with democratic criteria, and to draw a dividing line on the basis of ideology, including by establishing inclusive blocs and lines of convenience, and this is very bad, according to these two countries, that the West tends to use democracy and human rights to interfere into other countries’ internal affairs, and China really suffers a lot from this point.

Rasmussen: How would you say democracy works in China?

Li: I would argue that if we use Western standards to define democracy, then definitely, China is not a democracy, in a Western version of democracy. China does not have a multi-party system, China does not have elections. But the point is, how the West will respond to the fact that according to major Western sources, survey data sources, throughout many years, that the Chinese people’s confidence in their government is the highest in the whole world. And the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese state receive the highest approval from the Chinese population according to those data. And also China has reached very high, rapid economic development, under the so-called “non-democratic government.” Now, how can the West explain these issues? Many democratic countries suffer from economic backwardness and underdevelopment.

So, as to the form of governance in China, I think it is the Chinese people, themselves, who should make the judgment.

Rasmussen: Let’s move on to part 2, which is about coordinating economic development initiatives, including harmonizing the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, and also the Russian Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), even more, and taking initiatives to create economic development, where they emphasize the role of scientific research in generating economic growth, something that Lyndon LaRouche and our movement have had as a priority concept. And also increasing healthcare and pandemic response in poor countries. What do you see as the significance of this call for increasing economic development cooperation?

Li: Yes. I also read this part of the document very carefully. This part shows a clear difference in approach between the West and the U.S. on the one side, and China-Russia on the other side. While the West is emphasizing, or holding the flag of democracy and human rights, China-Russia actually emphasize that peace, development and cooperation lies at the core of the modern international system. So, according to the understanding of Russia and China, development is the key driver in ensuring the prosperity of other nations, even though democracy and human rights are important, but development must be the core. So it implies that good development will lead the country in the direction of democracy, but not defined solely by the West, the counter-democracy.

Second, that following this line of understanding, then China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union are good examples of interregional cooperation. So they actually use the Belt and Road, and also Russia’s Eurasia Economic Union, as good examples. One interesting point I want to emphasize is that both countries emphasize scientific and technological development, and “open, equal, and fair conditions.” I think here, there is a kind of implicit criticism toward the United States, which has been conducting sanctions against Chinese tech companies, for example, Huawei, or other high-tech companies.

Finally, I’ll remark here that both countries show their commitment to the Paris Agreement and to combat COVID-19, and these two issues are the most vital issues for the international community today. So it is a core for every country to emphasize these two vital issues: climate change, Paris Agreement, on the one side, and COVID-19 on the other side.

Rasmussen: Yes, I can add that Helga Zepp-LaRouche has initiated a proposal which she calls Operation Ibn Sina, which deals with the terrible humanitarian catastrophe in Afghanistan, leading off with creating a modern health system in every country. And if we could get much more international cooperation for building a modern health system, having the economic development which gives the basis for the population to have the immunology to resist disease, this would be a very important field for economic development, which means life and death at this moment.

Li: I fully agree with Helga’s understanding and call.

Rasmussen: As to part 3, this is about the increasing, dangerous international security situation, with a sharp critique of Western attitudes and actions. And the statement reads: “No State can or should ensure its own security separately from the security of the rest of the world and at the expense of the security of other States.” And here, China addresses Russia’s concerns and criticizes NATO’s expansion eastward after the Fall of the Berlin Wall. And Russia addresses China’s concerns by reaffirming the One-China principle and concerns about building different regional alliances against China —the Quad and AUKUS. It also praises the recent P5 statement against nuclear war.

Can you say more about China’s and Russia’s concerns? And do you think this is a call for a new international security architecture?

Li: Yes. If you read the document carefully, and this part on international security architecture, or their understanding of international security, occupied quite a large space. So it is a very important part for China and Russia.

In this part, the statement is actually bluntly clear about their mutual support for each other’s national security concerns. For Russia, it is connected with the Ukraine crisis, but the document does not mention Ukraine specifically, but it is connected. For China, it is the Taiwan issue, definitely. So they show their mutual support for each other.

On Russia’s concern for its national security, both countries oppose “further enlargement of NATO,” and “respect the sovereignty, security and interests of other countries.” And it clearly pronounced, there will be no peace if states “seek to obtain, directly or indirectly, unilateral military advantages to the detriment of the security of others.” The document claims that the NATO plan to enlarge its membership to encircle Russia will mean security for the Western side, but it is a danger for Russia. It is a national security concern.

On the Taiwan issue, Russia reconfirms that Taiwan is part of China—the One-China policy—and it is against any form of Taiwan independence.

Third, the joint statement also openly criticized the formation of closed blocs, as what you mentioned about the Quad. The document does not mention the Quad, but it does mention AUKUS. The document shows that both countries oppose U.S.-led military camps, or security camps in the Asia-Pacific region, definitely implying the Quad and AUKUS, and it points out the negative impact of the United States Indo-Pacific strategy.

Finally, the two countries call for a new international security architecture, with “equitable, open and inclusive security system … that is not directed against third countries and that promotes peace, stability and prosperity.” So this part is very important for China and Russia to challenge the traditional international security architecture, and call for a new international security architecture, which I will touch on a bit later.

Rasmussen: Many political spokesmen in the West have criticized Russia and China for not adhering to the “rules-based order” and here, in part 4, China and Russia write that they “strongly advocate the international system with the central coordinating role of the United Nations in international affairs, defend the world order based on international law, including the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations, advance multipolarity and promote the democratization of international relations, together create an even more prospering, stable, and just world, jointly build international relations of a new type.”

And it continues: “The Russian side notes the significance of [Xi Jinping’s] concept of constructing a ‘community of common destiny for mankind…’”

Can you say more about the significance of this section, about global governance and the difference between the question of the “rules-based order” and an order based on international law, as laid out by the United Nations Charter?

Li: Yes. This part is extremely interesting, because it touches upon the mental clashes between China-Russia on the one side, and the U.S. and West on the other side, about the “rules-based order.” China, in particular, has been criticized a lot, as you also mentioned, that China has been accused by the U.S. of not following the “rules-based order.” If you remember the dialogue between a Chinese delegation and a U.S. delegation in Alaska in December two years ago, then we still remember the clash, that the Chinese claim that the U.S. rules-based order does not represent the global rules-based order, rather the United Nations—China emphasizes that the United Nations should play the central coordination role in international affairs. But the United States does not really like the UN-based structure, which is based on one-country/one-vote. So if we trace UN voting, we could easily find that the United States very often suffers from many setbacks when it comes to UN voting on many issues. So that’s why China emphasizes the United Nations rules-based order, whereas United States prefers a U.S. rules-based order.

And this joint statement also calls for advancing multipolarity and promoting democratization of international relations. In my interpretation, democratization of international relations implies that the power structure embedded in the Bretton Woods system, which was created by the United States after the Second World War, does not really reflect the new era, as I pointed out earlier. China and Russia think reforms are needed to reflect the new era. This definitely, again, from my interpretation, refers to international financial institutions like the World Bank, and the IMF, where Chinese voting power is proportionally weaker than it should have been, according to its economic size.

And also the joint statement mentions the China foreign policy, as you mentioned in your question, “community of common destiny for mankind,” which was raised by President Xi Jinping. And in this nexus China’s Belt and Road Initiative is a good example, seen from China’s point of view, a good example of community of common destiny for mankind, in which the Belt and Road intends to promote, through worldwide infrastructure investment, the formation of a new global economic order, through creating a community of shared interest, and the community of shared responsibilities.

Unfortunately, the West does not really like both a “community of common destiny for mankind,” and the Belt and Road Initiative, because, as I interpret it, the Chinese agenda is to transform global governance and the rules-based order.

However, I really think that the West should rethink their opposition, and they must face the fact that the Belt and Road memorandum has been signed by 148 countries and by 32 international organizations. So, according to my judgment, the Belt and Road, and also a community for common destiny for mankind, have already become an indispensable part of global governance and global order.

Rasmussen: Yes, this is also to underscore what you said before, about how important economic development is for the wellbeing of the countries. And here you have China, which was the first country to eliminate poverty in their country, over the last 40 years, and is offering this as a model for other countries to get economic development. The slogan of the Schiller Institute is “Peace through Economic Development,”—

Li: Exactly.

Rasmussen: The way that you can get countries that have perceived each other as enemies to rise to a new level, to seek common interest, is through arranging economic development programs, not only for a single country, but for a whole region, which encourages them to work together. You spoke before about the Chinese criticism of the Bretton Woods institutions. What the Schiller Institute and Lyndon LaRouche have been saying, is that the initial idea of the Bretton Woods institutions as proposed by Franklin Roosevelt was to try to get the economic development of the poorer countries. But it degenerated into, for example, where you had the World Bank and International Monetary Fund imposing austerity conditions on countries as a precondition for loans, where nothing was done to actually increase the productivity of the countries, in the way that the Belt and Road is actually —with the infrastructure development, creating the basis for the countries to becoming prosperous. And what we’re saying is that the total change in the international financial institutions is absolutely necessary now, at a point where financial speculation is blowing out, hyperinflation, and we need to have a new economic architecture, you could say, based on the physical development of the countries.

Li: I fully agree with your remarks and comments.

Rasmussen: Then another important statement in part 4, is that Chinese-Russian relations have reached a new level, as you said at the beginning, “a new era.”

“The sides [China and Russia] call for the establishment of a new kind of relationship between world powers on the basis of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and mutually beneficial cooperation. They reaffirm that the new inter-State relations between Russia and China are superior to political and military alliances of the Cold War era. Friendship between the two States has no limits, there are no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation, strengthening of bilateral strategic cooperation is neither aimed against third countries nor affected by the changing international environment and circumstantial changes in third countries.”

And yet, this is a plea to end the geopolitical blocs, where the two countries also call for strengthening multilateral fora, like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the BRICS.

Li Xing, what will this much strengthened alliance mean for China and Russia, and also for the rest of the world? Should the West be worried, or is this a plea for a new type of international relations? What are the implications for shaping the new world order? What is your conclusion from the joint statement?

Li: I think one of the purposes of the joint statement is to demonstrate the good example of the China-Russia relationship, characterized as mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and mutually beneficial cooperation. It is not targetted at any other country. It is not like the U.S.-led coalitions which are Cold War minded, according to Russia and China’s understanding.

And if we look at the BRICS, and if you look at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, they are not purely juridical and geopolitical organizations or alliances. They are non-binding, open and non-binding.

After I read the document several times, I reached the conclusion that the unipolar world order is over. The West and the United States might have a hard time to accept it.

So the joint statement shows a strong unity between Russia and China. So my question is where is the West’s unity after the Cold War, and when the unipolar world order is over? How strong is the trans-Atlantic relationship today? I don’t know: I’m asking the questions to the West, the U.S. The West must rethink its Cold War strategy of reviving unity through creating enemies, and I think this is a completely wrong strategy, in a multipolar world order, where countries are much more interdependent. So it is necessary for the U.S. to rethink its own version of the rules-based order, in which the U.S. is the rule-maker and others are rule-followers. And this does not work in a new era any more. That is my conclusion after reading the joint statement.

Rasmussen: Now, as to the current situation, today is Feb. 22, and yesterday, Russia recognized the two breakaway republics in Ukraine as independent republics, which is now going to lead to very heavy sanctions by the West. Putin’s point was that these sanctions would have come anyway, but in any case, without going into the details of the Ukraine-Russia-U.S./NATO crisis, the fact is that Russia will be most probably faced with enormously hard sanctions.

In our last interview, you were asked, for example, if Russia were thrown out of the SWIFT system, how would China react? Now it’s a question of the not only of the SWIFT system, but also of other major financial penalties. How do you see China reacting, in light of the joint statement, to the new sanctions against Russia, that will most probably come?

Li: Let me first of all put it in this way: That sanctions are never one-sided punishments. That both sides will suffer. It’s like President Trump’s trade war, that President Trump thought the trade war would hurt China. Yes, it hurt China, but it had a backlash, a backfire to the U.S. economy. And today, if you look at the U.S. economy, the inflation actually is, one way or another, connected with the trade war, as well. It was one of the outcomes.

Now, sanctions against Russia will also cause mutually suffering by both sides. Because if you look at the European dependence on Russia’s oil and gas, it’s about 30-35%; some countries more, some less. If Russia is thrown out of the SWIFT system, which means that Russia cannot have international trade, then Europe cannot pay Russia as well, then the oil or gas pipelines will be blocked, which is in the interest of the United States, but not in the interest of Europe. This is the first point.

Second, that China and Russia have already agreed that they are not going to use dollars for their bilateral trade. So that doesn’t really matter seen from the Russian and Chinese perspective, and in light of the spirit of this joint statement. So definitely China will continue to do business with Russia, and if the U.S. is saying that any country that is doing business Russia will be sanctioned as well, then the U.S. is creating even a larger, a bigger enemy. And China is a different story. And Russia, because Russia’s economy, Russia’s economic-financial status is relatively limited, compared with China. China is the second largest economy in the world.

By the way, China is the largest trading nation in the world. And you can see that last year, the China and EU trade reached more than 850 billion! That’s a lot! And look at the China-U.S. trade as well. If you punish China, in what way? I cannot imagine it. Take China out of the SWIFT system as well? No, you can’t do that! Then the whole world is blocked! Then no trade, no economic development at all.

So these are grave consequences of sanctions. I cannot predict the future situations. Until now I haven’t read any concrete reaction from the Chinese government, but I guess, following the spirit of this document, which was signed three weeks ago, definitely, China is going to act. China will also act in accordance with the spirit of solidarity between both countries.

Rasmussen: Our analysts were saying that it may be the case that China would buy more oil and gas and other products from Russia. Actually, one thing is that today, February 21 , is the 50th anniversary of Nixon’s trip to China, [February 21 to 28, 1972] and the opening up of relations, and the United States commitment to the One-China policy. And at that time, many people were saying that Kissinger’s strategy was to open up the relations to China, as a way of isolating Russia, of putting Russia aside. But the fact is that these sanctions and this type of policy over the recent period, has done more to bring Russia and China together, as signified by this document. What is your reaction to that? But also the prospects of how we get out of this?

Lyndon LaRouche, for many years, called for a “Four Power” agreement between the United States, Russia, China, and India. How can we break through, looking at the world as Russia and China on one side, andthe U.S. and Europe on the other side, how can we get a cooperation among the great powers for the necessity of dealing with these other very serious crises the world is facing?

Li: Extremely interesting that you mentioned Nixon’s trip, of playing the “China card,” during the Cold War, in the beginning of the 1970s. You are completely right that the U.S. has historically enjoyed a very favorable position, in which the U.S. has been able to keep relatively stable relations with China, relatively stable relations with Soviet Union, at that time—but making the Soviet Union and China fight each other all the time. And especially after the Cold War, the U.S. still had this favorable position—relatively stable relations with both countries, but China and Russia still had difficult relations with each other.

But today, the situation is reversed. It’s totally shocking that the U.S. is fighting both world powers simultaneously. If you remember that the former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, he wrote, before he died, he wrote clearly, that the worst situation for the United States, for the West is when Iran, Russia, and China become a bloc, become an alliance, with China as the economic driver, with the economic power. I was very surprised that his words are becoming true today!

So, the only way we can come to the second part of your question, about how we can manage major power relations, is in line with the spirit of the Schiller Institute conference that took place last week and its call for establishing a new international security architecture. There is no other way. The Western dominance, the U.S. singlehanded dominance, the unipolar world is over. We need what Helga proposed, to establish a new international security architecture. We don’t know exactly what the form of this architecture, but that needs discussion from both sides! Unless the international community forms a kind of great, new international security architecture, conflict will continue.

Rasmussen: And then, as we spoke, it goes hand in hand with the increasing economic cooperation and the determination of the great powers to really do something for the economic development of the poor parts of the world.

Li: Yes, definitely. I agree with you. Thank you.

Rasmussen: Is there anything else you would like to add?

Li: No, I just want to add the last point, that I am very amazed by this joint statement, because I have come across many joint statements by two countries, or by multiple countries. But this one is the most comprehensive political document I have ever come across, because it covers every aspect of the world order, international relations, governance, security, values, norms, technology, climate change, health—you name it. So it is an extremely comprehensive document, which shows what Russia and China envision as a just world order.

So I would argue that this document implies a kind of new world order which Russia and China are going to, not only propose, but also push forward.

Unfortunately, this document has been demonized by many Western media—I have read many media talking about — to me it’s a kind of Cold War syndrome, because those media describe the document as creating a “bipolar world,” they say bipolar world, with the Russia and China autocracies on the one side, and the U.S. and the West democracies on the other side. So to me again, it’s a dividing line, when they allege that this document divides the world into two camps again. So to me, this is a typical Cold War syndrome.

Again, I come back to my last point: That we need a new international security architecture, as the Schiller Institute also proposed during the conference last week. Otherwise, there will be no peace and development. Thank you.

Rasmussen: Thank you so much, Li Xing. This has been a very important discussion.

Li: Thank you very much.