EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR SUNDAY, APRIL 3, 2022

Global Realignment Underway, Opens Possibility To Break Forever From Geopolitical Games

April 2, 2022 (EIRNS)—The following is an edited excerpt from the weekly strategic webcast by Helga Zepp-LaRouche on April 2.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: There is one conception which Chinese President Xi Jinping has promoted, which is absolutely suitable to play a mediating role in the crisis in Europe, and that is the idea of a shared community of one future for humanity. This is a concept which has been articulated by Xi Jinping many times. It is the idea that we are one humanity, that we have one future, and either we settle our accounts in a peaceful way or we don’t exist. This is a time of acute war danger, even the danger of World War III. Either you use Ukraine as a tool, as an instrument to weaken Russia, as was promoted by Brzezinski for a long time, who said, “With Ukraine, Russia is a superpower, but without Ukraine, it’s just a mediocre regional power.” Right now it’s being used not by Russia, but by NATO, keeping up the sanctions and pushing Russia against the wall.

We must find as quickly as possible a way out of this, to have an international security architecture, which would include every single nation on the planet. That is the subject of our upcoming Schiller Institute conference on April 9, which fits exactly with the idea of the shared community of one mankind: namely, that if we say that we have an international security architecture which includes every country, including Russia and China, then you would have to have an economic policy which would be the underpinning of that, by Europe and the United States joining with the Belt and Road Initiative, which makes a lot of sense because we have a lot of very pressing issues—world famine, the pandemic is not over, new pandemics looming, poverty increasing.

So it would make absolute sense that we stop this geopolitical game, and that we integrate the Eurasian continent economically, that we develop together Latin America and Africa, and devote our efforts to the common aims of mankind. Now, in that case, Ukraine would not be an instrument of geopolitical contention, but it would be the bridge between Europe and the rest of the Eurasian continent. I think that is the conception which we must absolutely promote.

There are many people now taking note of the implications of the aggressive U.S., U.K. and EU push for sanctions, as well as the stealing of assets—first of Afghanistan, and now of Russia. Nobody mentions that anymore, that the United States and the Europeans have basically confiscated more than $300 billion worth of Russia’s foreign assets. Naturally, every country in the world now has to consider that if they have their assets in dollars and euros, they’re not safe. There is, therefore, a massive push toward building a new financial system—rupee, ruble, renminbi and other national currencies are being used for trade among countries. Clearly, this is very quickly going in the direction of setting up a new financial system. But nobody should want that either, because if you have a total decoupling of the dollar-eurozone from the other countries, that would be very much to the detriment of the West, because the value of the Western investments are unfortunately a lot in monetarist values, speculation, while Russia, China, and the countries that work with the Belt and Road Initiative are much more focussed on physical values and physical investments; so while it would be painful for everybody, I think the West would suffer by far the most.

Vladimir Putin has insisted that countries that are “unfriendly”—which have gone along with the sanctions on Russia—must pay for their gas and oil in rubles rather than other currencies. The European Union so far has refused to do it; this will have extraordinary consequences on German industry. One must ask, why is Europe being so stubborn on this? Frankly, I think it is because they have lost touch with reality. I think they’re sitting in their bubble, full of themselves. They’re arrogant, they think they are better. They think their “rules-based order” is superior to the values of other cultures, which is being perceived by many other cultures in the world as the absolute arrogance of a Euro-centric world outlook, and it’s not in touch with reality!

There is an absolute mania among some people who insist that Germany should cut its dependence on Russian gas—naturally the U.S. and the British are putting maximum pressure on Germany and Europe to this affect—but there are also people who are alarmed about what this would do.

We are already in a terrible crisis! On top of the pandemic which had a severe impact, we now have these sanctions, cutting off gas imports because of the sanctions. Gas prices, energy prices, food prices, everything is already going through the roof. The CEO of BASF, Martin Brudermüller, said that we are looking at the total collapse of the German economy, that especially the small and medium-size firms, many of them would not make it. Similar warnings are coming from Siemens Energy. We are looking at the danger of a collapse of Europe, if these policies are not reversed. Already now, since 2000, the portion of the EU in the global GDP has collapsed from 26% to only 18%, and if these policies are pursued, we could see a collapse into social chaos, into absolute poverty, social unrest. It’s just an insane policy.

The people who are in danger of starvation this year was already at 200 million, but a Chinese economist from the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies noted that with these sanctions, it’s now going up to 1 billion. One billion people who are faced with starvation this year!

And then you have the Green lobby pushing for no increase in food production, saying: “No, we should not increase the food production, it creates CO2; we should stop feeding grain to animals, we should not produce meat anymore.” This is a Green Malthusian policy which must be firmly rejected. The leading economist from Russia, who is now the Minister for Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC), Sergei Glazyev, noted a few days ago, that the world could easily produce food for 20 billion people, which is more than double the number of people we have now. I think that is exactly the right way to go—we have to double food production. Why should anybody starve to death if we could easily remedy it?

I think this hypocrisy must stop, accusing Russia, China and everybody else, of human rights violations, when the very economic policies pushed by these institutes mean mass death and mass famine!

Meanwhile, there was a conference in Anhui, a beautiful province of China, with all the neighboring countries of Afghanistan. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was there, and met with Wang Yi, and others, setting up humanitarian aid and, especially, the economic buildup of Afghanistan. There was a big delegation of the Taliban who praised the Afghanistan-Chinese relations, saying that China is the only major country which is approaching the crisis with a serious economic policy. So this is very good.

Before that, you had in Islamabad, a conference of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), discussing Afghanistan. The OIC stressed that their relationship to China is improving a lot and that they want to work together to tackle all kinds of problems.

So as you can see, you have a complete realignment, and this is what neither the United States nor the Europeans realize, that their policies are pushing the rest of the world to realign, to act together for development, because they don’t want to have this war policy. A realignment of Russia, China, and India. The U.S. and U.K. wanted to pull India into the “Quad,” into an Indo-Pacific global NATO. But India wants to stay neutral, and work with Russia and China. This is a big breakthrough which has occurred. You have the development of a new system! It’s not yet done, and it will take some steps, based on the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the BRICS, there will be another summit this year of Russia, India, China. The Global South in general is orienting towards that combination which offers infrastructure investment and economic development.

I can only say, the Europeans and the United States should really rethink: Is there not somebody who understands that if you go for a confrontation to try to suppress the rise of China, it is not possible. It’s 1.4 billion people! Now, the relationship between China and India, which has another 1.4 billion people—that is the majority of mankind right now going in another direction. And the United States and Europe would do so much better if they would say, “We will just stop the geopolitical confrontation, and we will cooperate, because we have so many problems to solve.” If you consider that there are 1 billion people, out of 8 billion, who are threatened with starvation this year, this should really be a reason to say we have to change the policy!

And naturally, we need a world health system, we need to combat poverty. We have so many joint problems, I think there must be a different approach.

This coming Schiller Institute conference on April 9 is probably the most important conference the Schiller Institute has ever held, or for a very long time. People know that the world is on the verge of World War III, and many people are scared. Therefore, what the conference will concentrate on, is to call for, very soon, an international conference in the spirit of the Peace of Westphalia, to have an international security architecture which takes care of the interests of every single country on the planet. This naturally must go along with the establishment of a new world economic order. We are on the verge of a collapse of the trans-Atlantic financial system, and we must have a New Bretton Woods system, a credit policy which allows long-term investments for the development of the developing sector to overcome poverty and underdevelopment forever. Because of a combination of factors, the sanctions, in addition to the pandemic, we are now faced with the danger of 1 billion people dying of hunger this year.

So we are going to assemble an extraordinary combination of speakers, from Russia, from China, from the United States, from India, from Africa, from Latin America, from Europe. You absolutely should join this conference, and organize for it, because it’s the only place where productive and positive solutions are being offered. And if you look at the combination of people who will speak, you can see that this is not just nice words, but we are serious in trying to get a coalition together to put on the agenda, for the world, a new paradigm, one which allows the survival of all of mankind.