This article appears in the July 21, 2023 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Successful International Peace Meeting Centered in Malaysia
[Print version of this article]
July 5, 2023—“Save Humanity and the Planet” (SHAPE), based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, sponsored an extraordinary conference July 4 on world peace, with the focus on the rapidly escalating danger in Asia. With 500+ attending from around the world, the speakers included Prof. Jeffrey Sachs (Economics Professor at Columbia University), Chandra Muzaffar (President of the International Movement for a Just World—JUST), Victor Gao (Vice President of the Center for China and Globalization in Beijing), Dr. Alison Broinowski (President of Australians for War Powers Reform), and Prof. Chung-in Moon (former associate of President Kim Dae Jung and a Minister in South Korean governments). The meeting was chaired by SHAPE directors Joseph Carmilleri (Emeritus Professor of Politics at La Trobe University in Australia) and Richard Falk (Emeritus Professor of International Law at Princeton University) who closed the event with an impassioned synopsis of the ideas presented.
Chandra Muzaffar
Chandra Muzaffar opened the forum by dedicating it to Daniel Ellsberg’s memory, and a call for freeing Julian Assange, who is facing a life sentence for publishing classified documents about U.S. military crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. SHAPE has held four fora for peace, with the previous one dedicated to Ellsberg, while this one focused on the Asia Pacific, the AUKUS military pact between the U.S., the UK, and Australia, and the targeting of China. Muzaffar held a minute of silence in honor of the recently deceased Ellsberg.
Prof. Richard Falk
Prof. Falk posited that the greatest danger to the world was the insistence by the U.S. government and institutions on maintaining the unipolar world, enforced by U.S. military power. This insane policy, he said, is an effort to cover over the rapidly declining power of the U.S. and the G7 nations in the face of the rise of China and the BRICS cooperation with the developing sector nations, which are returning to the spirit of the Non-Aligned Movement, standing up against their former colonial masters. Since their military defeat in Vietnam and the launching of the War on Terror, he said, the U.S. population has been depoliticized, while the media have become universally the propaganda arm of the government under the direction of the military and the think tanks, centered on the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), with the intention of preventing another peace movement like that which had helped end the Vietnam disaster. The military leaders, he warned, have determined that nuclear war is preferable to allowing the end of U.S. hegemony.
Falk concluded that the alternative is now in place in the form of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) in cooperation with the Global South. The question is, he asked, how can society be mobilized rapidly enough to stop this rush to global war?
Victor Gao
Victor Gao argued that the AUKUS [the trilateral security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States] was a violation of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), as well as the intentional destruction of the Southeast Asian and South Pacific Nuclear Weapons Free Zone Treaties. Australia was, in the 1980s, very proud of being in a “nuclear free bubble” due to the treaties, but has now thrown it away. Gao said that the argument that AUKUS, which agrees to equip Australia with nuclear-powered attack submarines, is only about nuclear submarines, not nuclear weapons, is bogus, since there is no way to know what missiles can be fired from the subs.
Gao said the term “Indo-Pacific,” introduced as part of the U.S. effort to bring NATO into Asia and to isolate China, is neither “Indo” nor “Pacific,” since it leaves out most of the nations of the Indian subcontinent, South America and the Caribbean, and of course China.
He refuted the concept of the “Thucydides’ Trap” which draws on the history of such wars between declining and rising powers in the pre-nuclear age, but now that we are in the nuclear weapons era, we must adopt an “Inevitability of Peace” rather than the “inevitability of war” as the balance of power changes.
He said the fears expressed by the U.S. to justify their economic and military confrontation with China are false, namely that China intends to impose its social and political system on the U.S. when it becomes the major economic power in the world, which is not China’s aim nor its intention.
He said the U.S. effort to prevent China’s development is “the worst crime in history.” He said the U.S. is suffering from the “Tonya Harding syndrome,” wanting to break the knees of its opponent, pointing to the “chip wars” as an example—which, however, will not stop China’s development.
Dr. Alison Broinowski
Dr. Alison Broinowski said that Australia and the Western world has been “terrified by fear” since 9/11, stoked by the War on Terror, all driven by the U.S. and NATO, depriving the population of its freedoms with anti-terror laws. Now they want to bring NATO into Asia. Australia has submitted its sovereignty to the U.S., but she noted that while the U.S. can retreat from a war with China, Australia cannot leave Asia. She praised the revival of the Non-Aligned spirit among the nations of the Global South, with China’s help.
Prof. Chung-in Moon
South Korean Prof. Chung-in Moon noted that the concept of “Collective Security” in the UN Charter meant that all countries were united behind the concept that no country could breach the sovereignty of any country, but this has now been replaced by the “collective defense” posture of a few countries, now expanding into Asia through the “Global NATO.” The danger is that “geopolitics” is taking over for the collective security imbedded in the UN Charter.
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs said that “the world has gone mad, especially the Anglo-Saxon world of the Five Eyes,” (the intelligence alliance comprising the five English-speaking nations of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States). The U.S. has fully adopted British Imperial thinking, while the British cheer them on to war, in their “second Crimean War” in Ukraine. It is clear, he said, that the President does not run the U.S., but rather the military, with full support from the media and the think tanks. The public in the U.S. has “no voice, no debate, no discussion, even in the Congress.” He quoted from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and from Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1997 Grand Chessboard on U.S. insistence on global hegemony, with Brzezinski’s war policy for Russia now playing out in Ukraine and a parallel policy coming into operation in Asia against China. Even Brzezinski warned against “pushing Russia and China together,” but, said Sachs, they have done exactly that. He said Japan had to stop its move to serve the U.S. military policies, and that the Asian nations must revive dialogue, with The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) as a useful model.
Discussion Session
In the Q&A, Prof. Sachs made the point that there were two moments of a “unipolar world” after World War II—the first due to the overwhelming superiority of the U.S. after the war, economically and militarily, and the second after the collapse of the U.S.S.R., leaving the U.S. believing it was “the only superpower.” But now, there is the BRICS with a larger economy than the G7, with India rising, and Africa also rising under the African Union, overcoming the colonial division of the continent into mini-states. He concluded that the multipolar world already exists, except in the imagination of the CFR and the Western governments.
