War Dangers Proliferate—LaRouche’s ‘Peace Through Development’ Approach Must Replace Geopolitics
By Mike BillingtonAs regional wars continue to rage, and new ones are threatened, the potential for a world nuclear war is so palpable that several world leaders are speaking out. Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, the opening speaker at this year’s Aspen Security Forum on Aug. 3, told the U.S. military-industrial community that Asian countries, and many in Europe, do not want to “choose” between China and the U.S. “No good outcome can arise from a conflict. It’s vital for the U.S. and China to strive to engage each other to head off a clash, which would be disastrous for both sides and the world…. I don’t know whether Americans realize what a formidable adversary they would be taking on if they decide that China is an enemy. China’s not going to disappear. This is not the Soviet Union. It is not the Potemkin village front. This is a country with enormous dynamism, energy, talent and determination to take its place in the world again.”
Secretary of State Tony Blinken, speaking at the ASEAN Regional Forum on Aug. 6, had the chutzpah to warn the world about “the rapid growth of the P.R.C.’s nuclear arsenal, which highlights how Beijing has sharply deviated from its decades-old nuclear strategy based on minimum deterrence.” Not only does the U.S. have about 20 times the number of nuclear weapons as does China, but China is not deploying warships and warplanes along the U.S. coast, nor carrying out military exercises within miles of the U.S. border, as the U.S. and the British are on the Chinese border.
Blinken made no effort to hide his intentions during the various ASEAN meetings this past week—namely, to recruit Asian nations to join in the anti-China crusade, to “show it is serious about engaging with Southeast Asia to push back against China,” as Reuters put it. Speaking at the East Asia Summit on Aug. 5, Blinken repeated the mantra about Chinese human rights abuses in Tibet, Hong Kong and Xinjiang. Foreign Secretary Wang Yi responded: “These clichés are not worth refuting, and none of the ASEAN countries agree with you.”
Do Americans and their NATO partners truly believe, like Ozymandias in Shelley’s poem, that with a “frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,” that the rest of the world would
“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”? What does the rest of the world think of the regime-change wars which have left millions of innocents dead or homeless? What do they think of the hoarding of vaccines for over a year, while the COVID virus mutated to new more deadly strains in the countries denied access to vaccines? What do they think of the demand from Western governments and Western banks, that their countries must forgo industrialization, constrict food supplies, and reduce their populations in order to “save the planet” from the nonexistent danger of carbon?
There are no solutions to these multiple crises if approached one at a time, or in one country at a time. Lyndon LaRouche warned 50 years ago, when Nixon shut down FDR’s Bretton Woods system on Aug. 15, 1971, unleashing unrestrained speculation and de-industrialization, that civilization itself would disintegrate, unless the dying system were replaced with one worthy of human dignity for all people. War, famine, pandemics, and economic disintegration are now upon us all, as LaRouche precisely forecast.
On Aug. 14, the LaRouche Legacy Foundation conference will provide the world with the unique solution to this crisis, reviewing LaRouche’s discoveries, and the program he developed after that fateful day in 1971. We will hear from many people, from around the world, reflecting on the “wise words of Lyndon LaRouche,” with ideas that are more urgent today than anytime in history. A new Dark Age is unfolding before our eyes, and yet, such a moment can serve to awaken the suppressed creativity of mankind, to create a more perfect world “to ourselves and our Posterity.”
Register for the Conference!