The following is an edited transcript of the speech by Dennis Small to Panel Two of the April 6, 2026 EIR Emergency Roundtable event, “A Dialogue of Civilizations: Is There Still Time To Prevent the War Against Iran from Escalating into a Global Nuclear Conflict?” Mr. Small is the Ibero-American editor of Executive Intelligence Review. Subheads have been added. The video is available here.

In listening to a number of the presentations over the course of this morning and this afternoon, one can’t help but muse over a certain irony. Dr. Postol [professor emeritus of Science Technology and National Security at MIT] was just explaining that if driven to the wall, Iran has a capability [to develop nuclear weapons]. But the irony of this is that, supposedly to prevent Iran from launching a nuclear war or using nuclear weapons, the United States and Israel—and with the British prominent in the background—have created the very circumstances in which that could well happen. Isn’t that interesting? Almost as if they intended it.

Or take the case of the Strait of Hormuz, where again, a tremendous dislocation has occurred—and I’ll talk a little bit more about that—with [U.S.] President Trump howling bloody murder, that this is a result of what Iran has done. But it is not Iran that has shut the Strait of Hormuz, as they themselves have said. It has been shut partially to those who are waging war against Iran. And that again, is something that has occurred and been initiated by the United States and Israel with the British prominently in the wings. So again, it’s almost as if this had been their intention.

Now, we’ve all been witness to, and most of us quite horrified to hear, the blood-curdling, savage remarks of President Donald Trump about not just bombing Iran “back to the Stone Ages”; that would be bad enough, but then adding the phrase, “where they belong.” The thing that is resulting from this, besides the war itself, is, we have an ongoing implosion of the physical economy, where the Strait of Hormuz plays an important role in this; where we see a dramatic shutdown of a large part of the world’s supply of oil, a collapse of a significant portion of natural gas and fertilizer capabilities; where food production is already beginning to be drastically affected, with the prospects for this going through a ratchet-style collapse. Do not look for a linear, gradual collapse, step by step.

I would argue that what we will be seeing if this policy is not changed is the equivalent in the domain of economics of a nuclear chain reaction. And we are on the verge of that. It’s worse than simply bad, however, because the intention behind this—and I think it is an intention—is very similar to what happened with Nord Stream. One asks, perhaps, could they be so crazy as to do something like this, to deliberately bring down the world economy? Well, just look at what happened around [the destruction of the] Nord Stream [natural gas pipelines] over the last few years, and I think you have your answer.

But what makes this worse, is the fact that this physical economic collapse underway already is intersecting a blowout of the global financial system and of a speculative [debt] bubble which now totals over $2.4 quadrillion. And it is the relationship of these two things—a physical economic collapse and an out-of-control speculative financial bubble—that has brought the world to the edge of a new dark age. And a new dark age whose effect and consequences are arguably greater in their damage than the damage done by war, other than nuclear war, of course. But other than that, that is the nature of what we’re facing.

My argument, my thesis to you today, and what I will say, is that to understand this process, if we understand exactly how this collapse-function works, why it is non-linear, why we are toying with utter destruction, actually provides us with a key, the very secret to solving the crisis. And that has to do with the fact that the nature of economic growth and of political solutions requires the deployment, the recognition, and the generalization of an absolutely unique human characteristic, a moral intention of action, which is the supreme power that shapes the physical universe around us. It is the non-use of that capability or its misuse which has brought us to the edge of this kind of non-linear collapse, and it is that capability which provides the solution.

Geopolitical Choke Points

Now, let me get into some specifics. Let me begin by showing you a map [Figure 1]. This is a map which indicates what many authorities, experts in the field, say are the 150 border conflicts in existence on the planet today. I have not counted the dots. It may be 250, or it may just be 100, I don’t know. But we’re talking about 150 border conflicts, and almost every single one of these has been created by and left behind by the British Empire intentionally for the purpose of having a world where they can control choke points, as they refer to them. This goes all the way back to the geopolitics of Alfred Mackinder, of Alfred Mahan, and so on; control choke points for the purpose of doing what the word indicates, choke the rest of the world. And use border conflicts to provoke a state of war of each against all, which would have made Thomas Hobbes proud.

Now, let me just do something very simple, which is to draw a little ellipse around the area of maximum concentration of these border conflicts. It’s true there are many also in the African region, and we don’t need to get into detailed comparisons. But this area, which is the area of our immediate concern involving Southern Asia, Southwest Asia, the crossroads of the BRICS, the Belt and Road Initiative, the expansion of that into Africa, the development of the Global South. That is exactly the area that is being targeted with the dangerous situation that we have today.

Now, the Strait of Hormuz, as has been mentioned here before, which is in the area to Iran’s south, through this area, as is well known, 20% of world oil trade occurs, 30% of [global trade in] fertilizer. This has already, in only a little over a month of war, begun a process of a shattering of the physical economic capability worldwide that is dramatic in its implications. I’ll give you one example. We could spend all afternoon discussing the specifics, but one example. Acute hunger, according to recent statements by the World Food Program, is expected to rise from 319 million people today by 45 million people, to 364 million. Acute hunger is a condition of acute, extreme shortage of food, which, if it continues, will create the conditions for starvation and genocide as a result of that. That is already a 14% increased forecast based on merely a month of war.

Africa is one of the areas hardest hit, because, among other things, it turns out that Eastern Africa and other African countries are among the largest importers of the fertilizer coming out of the Strait of Hormuz region. Now, for example, Sudan has 26 million people living in acute hunger. Sudan also imports 54% of its fertilizer from there. They import a lot in general. You can imagine the impact of this. The lack of fertilizer simply means that the capability of producing food will be reduced.

There was a similar comment raised and posed by the chief economist for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the FAO, Mr. [Máximo] Torero, and what he said is, well, look, this is what has happened after a month, and we can manage, the world can manage, we can adjust, if it stops now. But if this continues for three months, it will have unleashed a process which is unstoppable, or unstoppable without producing tremendous, dramatic damage.

Physical Economy Is a Living Process

Now, I think that what Mr. Torero is pointing to is at the center of the issue of both the problem and the solution. Because the way a physical economy works, as Lyndon LaRouche has pointed out and proven in great detail, is that it’s a living process. And unless you are in the process of expansion and growth by increasing scientific and technological discoveries, which allows you to overcome temporary limitations of existing raw materials—because you will exhaust certain raw materials for existing technological modes. But our capability of making creative scientific and cultural discoveries allows us to invent new technologies, new ways of growing in a non-linear fashion. This creates the ability, LaRouche demonstrated, to increase what he called the potential relative population-density of mankind: that is to say, the power of a society, of an economy, to sustain and grow an ever-growing population at a higher level of living, greater longevity, in the same territorial area. In other words, the population density increases. That’s dependent on non-linear growth and technological advance. This is not something that you can simply reverse and expect things to be okay. You cannot simply kill a living process and then say, oh no, let’s reverse it and make it alive again. The example of Easter applies to other matters. It is not a justification of destroying an economy and thinking you can revive it.

And what we are playing with, therefore, is a very fundamental law of the physical universe by what we have unleashed and are allowing to be unleashed in this situation. Look at the situation of Nord Stream. It’s not just that a couple of gas pipelines were blown up. What has happened is that the cost of energy was intentionally raised dramatically, in particular in what had been the engine of industrial growth for Europe—Germany. And we now have a situation where that engine has not simply slowed down; you have an implosion. You have entropy underway in Germany, and that at the heart of the European economy. This should be a lesson as to how these processes work.

I want to again turn to Lyndon LaRouche on this to help us understand what’s really going on here. And this is a quote. I have two slides with a quote from Lyndon LaRouche from a document he wrote in May 1985, called “The Role of Economic Science in Projecting Pandemics.” And think about this as I read it to you, or you read it to yourself. LaRouche said,

Instead of simply assuming that man collapses within a constant level of the surrounding biosphere, assume that it is the biosphere which is directly affected by a collapse of the human population potential; and that it is the biosphere which must adjust to the impact of the drop in its own potential caused by the collapse of the included human potential. In that variant, human and animal pandemics and sylvatics must tend to resurge and evolve under certain kinds of shock to the biosphere caused by extreme concentration of fall of population potential.

And then LaRouche continues,

Instead of simply dying of effects of malnutrition, the population generates a pandemic which becomes the biosphere’s adaptation to its own reduced state. And this pandemic then attacks the concentration of fall of potential which has caused the lowering of the potential for the biosphere generally.

Parenthetically, this was among LaRouche’s forecasts in 1985 of what would turn out to be the later COVID pandemic. LaRouche didn’t know it was going to be COVID, but he forecast that if we did not reverse this kind of entropic collapse of the noösphere and the biosphere, we would lawfully generate pandemics. And so we did.

LaRouche’s concluding thought on this point, “Unless IMF ‘surveillance’ [to enforce its policies] is nullified in reverse, the entire world, including Western Europe and North America, is becoming increasingly ripe for effects like those which decimated the population of Europe during the middle decades of the 14th Century.” That would be the Black Death. That would be the bubonic plague pandemic. And again, that is LaRouche’s forecast of what would be the result of the extension of those policies.

Now, as I said earlier, this is not the full nature of the crisis. It’s actually much worse. Not only are we in the process of unleashing this kind of physical economic collapse, but it is also intersecting a blowout, a self-inflicted blowout of the financial system as well. We have the world’s financial aggregates—that’s all of the various financial instruments—reaching the level of $2.4 quadrillion, principally of derivatives [Figure 2]. There is no way in the world—no matter what is done, no matter how many people are killed off, no matter if these Malthusian policies reduce the world’s population to one billion, which is their [British Empire’s] intent—this bubble can be paid off, especially under conditions where you are destroying the physical economy.

A Typical Collapse Function

Now, to explain the intersection of these two functions—not two separate functions, but one interrelated function—I’m going to draw your attention to LaRouche’s most famous pedagogical explanation of how the world economy works, which is his typical collapse function [Figure 3]. On the one hand you have, as indicated in the bottom curve, a collapse of the physical economy, such as is now underway. You have a growth of financial aggregates of the sort we were just looking at, growing exponentially; and then you have the green curve, the monetary aggregates, which is the issuance of more and more and more funny money, cryptocurrency, stable coins, all sorts of nonsense that has no backing, which has to grow at a higher rate than the financial aggregates themselves. And this of course, in the final analysis, will not work. It will blow out, and that is exactly what happened in 2008; but it’s nothing compared to what we’re about to see. Because what we’re going through right now is something even worse, which is the rapid transformation of the economies of the trans-Atlantic sector into what can be referred to as Schachtian economics. That’s named after Hjalmar Schacht, who was the economic czar for [Nazi Germanyʼs dictator Adolf] Hitler, on orders of the British head of the central bank [Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England, 1920-1944], and so on. And what he did, is, he issued funny money in order to encourage a massive increase in military production, a defense of the speculative bubble by gearing up military production, which turned eastward, as is well known, and it also turned westward.

Now, this is what is going on with the United States military budget. You just heard President Trump, with his usual delicacy of expression, state that the military budget for next year, 2027, will increase to $1.5 trillion. Now, if you look at what it was in 2021, 2025, and 2027, and we take the dark red part [Figure 4], which is the military proportion of the budget, I have added to that, on top of it, this pink area of interest payments. That’s because the military budget, in effect, goes to bolster Wall Street and the City of London; because the controllers of the Lockheed Martins and the major military companies, as we have proven, are the large financial institutions such as BlackRock, State Street, and so on. So, this portion of the budget, which was only 18% in 2021, and 27% now, in 2027, with interest rising and the military budget soaring by 40% to 50%, will gobble up 36% of the United States budget. So this is incredible, because it can only go in one direction—a further gobbling up of the budget, a growth of the cancer, a collapse of the physical economy, and more wars.

And take a look at Europe [Figure 5]. This is what’s happened in Europe. This is the proposal of what will happen with the military budget, first with the United States on the bottom, going up to $1.5 trillion. But the EU budget is also proposed to rise to about $700 billion. I converted the euro equivalent to dollars. So this is not just the United States. This is the entire bankrupt trans-Atlantic sector. And in fact, I might be tempted to argue that it is actually not the wars which are creating the military budgets, but it is the financial and physical economic collapse process, the budgets, which are creating the wars.

Corridors of Development

That tells us something about what the solution concept required for this situation is. And I will conclude by raising the topic and focusing on what the first panel began with, with Helga’s detailed discussion of the Extended Oasis Plan [Figure 6]. This is a form of a map that we’ve shown on many occasions, of the World Land-Bridge. I’ve marked off in red a route from India to Europe and to Russia, which is largely interrupted because of the destruction of Nord Stream, and also the fact that the Red Sea is not exactly very navigable these days. And left in green, what is the future, the direction for which countries like Iran, the BRICS countries, Russia, China, and so on have no choice but to do, which is to look south and look east.

I have emphasized here two things. One is the International North-South Transportation Corridor. This extends from Mumbai on India’s west coast, by sea to the port of Chabahar in Iran; through Iran by rail—the proposal is to continue by rail. There’s a 15-kilometer stretch—which has not yet been completed—but then up through into Russia, up to Moscow, up to St. Petersburg. This is extremely important for India, for Iran, for Russia. It’s a corridor of development. Now, the other one that I’ve drawn here is principally the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which is a major part of the Belt and Road Initiative. It goes from China down, really right next door to the port of Chabahar, but to the Pakistani port of Gwadar, and then from there connecting over to Shanghai, and from Shanghai, through the maritime corridors, to the South American coast, and so on.

Now, I do these two together, because this is an area of conflict, not just the war against Iran. This is an area of plenty of conflict around Afghanistan, India, China, Pakistan, the disputed areas, and so on. The only way any of this is going to work is if each and all of the nations take a look at the prospects of the world and choose the kind of cooperation that’s implied by working jointly in this direction [of corridors of development] instead of what is otherwise the direction of the planet, which is towards nuclear war and towards an entropic collapse of the biosphere and the noösphere.

We must enable, activate, and generalize that unique capability that produces anti-entropic physical economic growth, which is the actual true nature of the dignity of man. Thank you.