On Nov. 26, the Foreign Ministers of Russia, India and China—the RIC cooperation organization—held an online video-conference meeting which produced an agreement among these three powerhouse nations on a set of substantive strategic policy issues: the need for a coordinated global fight against COVID-19; the urgency of international aid for Afghanistan, to stop the looming starvation in that country; the need to jointly fight against the drug trade and related terrorism; and the need to organize a new system of international relations based on win-win cooperation.
Given the serious tensions between India and China over recent years, which the British have manipulated and exacerbated to keep India out of the Belt and Road Initiative, the RIC results were a significant strategic advance.
Also yesterday, the Foreign Ministry of India announced that Russian President Vladimir Putin will travel to India Dec. 6 for his first in-person summit in two years with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Their agenda will be quite broad, and will include cooperation on major infrastructure projects; partnership in nuclear, space and defense sectors; and deepening India’s ties with the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). What London and Washington most fear is that the Putin-Modi summit could play a useful role in helping India get on track for in-depth cooperation with China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Although still tentative, these Asian-centered developments point in the right direction for the planet.
In the West, however, a new Olympic record of policy failure on top of policy failure is being set almost daily. Right on the heels of the COP26 fiasco, the world is now being struck by a new COVID-19 variant—the Omicron variant—which scientists fear could be about to break through the existing vaccine protection. And if it is not Omicron, if we get lucky and dodge this bullet, it will be the next variant, or the one after that. The point is, the slow and woefully incomplete vaccination of the entire world, along with the lack of modern health systems in every nation, has left us vulnerable to such a disaster.
What is happening is exactly what Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche warned would happen, if we did not adopt the necessary policy of universal vaccination and a world network of advanced health systems in every nation. These are precisely the policies promoted by the Open Letter to virologists and other medical experts by former U.S. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, and by Zepp-LaRouche’s Operation Ibn Sina.
It may be five minutes to midnight, but it is not too late to adopt these policies, and get the United States and the nations of Europe on a sane policy path. As Lyndon LaRouche repeatedly emphasized in his call for the formation of Four Power Alliance to replace the current bankrupt international system, the United States has to join with Russia, India and China in that effort. LaRouche’s Nov. 18, 2008 international webcast was forcefully clear on that point:
“Now, you have two ways to go: Either you collapse the world, with starvation and mass death, and those effects. Or, you put the thing through bankruptcy reorganization. And how do you do that? Well, what I specified is very elementary: I have four nations in mind that can take the lead on this thing. And the four nations, which together, represent the greatest consolidation of power on this planet: These nations are the United States, Russia, China, and India, as joined by other nations, which join in the same deal. We put the world through bankruptcy reorganization. How do we do it? We use the U.S. Constitution to do that….
“Now, if the United States says, that we are going to back up our dollar, and enters into an agreement with Russia, China, and India, to join us, with other countries, in doing the same thing, to put the world through bankruptcy reorganization, in which we will cancel most of the outstanding financial obligations: It has to happen. Otherwise, no planet! If you try to collect on quadrillions of dollars of outstanding claims, from whom are you going to collect, by what means, and what’s the effect? It is against natural law, to collect on that debt! How many people are you going to kill, to collect that debt? How many countries are you going to destroy, to collect that debt?”