President Joe Biden’s just-concluded “mission to the Middle East” was a strategic, military and moral disaster for the world—which he then further compounded in his Thursday night speech on Oct. 19 to the American people. Biden, like the gambler who begs his wife to use the rent money “because I know I can win,” asked a crumbling America, the most indebted nation in the world, for $100 billion more, to throw down the sink-hole of a no-win-World War Three with Russia and China.
On Oct. 18, Vladimir Putin, still in Beijing, told Russian journalists, “And, finally, a larger and highly significant, if so far imperceptible mistake, is that the United States is becoming more directly involved in this conflict…. I want to say—what I am going to say and inform you about is not a threat—that I have instructed the Russian Aerospace Forces to start patrolling the neutral zone over the Black Sea on the permanent basis. Our MiG-31 aircraft carry the Kinzhal systems that, as is common knowledge, have a range of over 1,000 kilometers and can reach speeds of up to Mach 9.” Later, Putin repeated, “I emphasized that this is not a threat. But we will perform visual control, and weapons-based control over what is happening in the Mediterranean Sea.”
Veteran Kremlinologists Gilbert Doctorow and Ray McGovern drew similar conclusions, though McGovern’s came before Putin’s announcement. On Oct. 20, Doctorow said, “My unfinished sentence about the Russian aircraft now on permanent patrol of the Black Sea and carrying Russia’s hypersonic Kinzhal missiles would have ended in the following: the Russian missiles can strike the U.S. aircraft carrier task force off Israeli shores and two of them are sufficient to send the Gerald Ford to the bottom of the sea.” Days earlier, on Sunday, Oct. 15, and solely on the basis of the folly of the American carrier deployment itself—the “mistake” that Vladimir Putin described in his press conference—Ray McGovern had tweeted: “Into the valley of death sailed the 10,000, aboard aircraft carriers Ford and Eisenhower—sitting ducks for swarming drones & other weaponry not dreamed of by those who made short work of the Charge of the Light Brigade. Perhaps Blinken/Nuland/Austin want that? Or are just dumb?”
Whom the gods would destroy, they first make really, really stupid. For example, how is Biden’s Middle East diplomacy working? Financial Times quoted an unnamed G7 diplomat who said, “We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South. All the work we have done with the Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost.… Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again.”
Egypt, Palestine, and Jordan canceled a meeting with Biden, after the bombing of the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza, since it was clear that there was nothing to discuss, and no one to discuss it with. Now, the Administration has rejected a proposal for an independent investigation as to what occurred with the bombing—a move that is sure to alienate, not only the entire Islamic world, but also those of the Global South, who are already asking why cutting off food, water and electricity to 2.3 million Palestinians is not considered to be a war crime.
What about Biden’s Thursday evening $100 billion battle plan? Consider only one aspect of the context in which it is being proposed. America paid $660 billion in interest on its debt in fiscal year 2023, up from $475 billion the year before. In May 2022, the Biden Administration’s Congressional Budget Office “estimated” that the FY23 interest payments would be down, at $442 billion—$33 billion lower. Instead, they were $185 billion larger than the year before, and $218 billion larger than the CBO “estimate.” The American people don’t know, and were not allowed to know, where the first $100 billion-plus went for Ukraine, yet, Biden has just asked for another $60 billion that the United States does not have, to pay for a war that cannot be won, as part of a $100 billion fund to also be used to create a Southwest Asia-wide war, perhaps with the population of nearly the entirety of the Islamic world, which can also not be won, and which will also destroy “America’s major ally” Israel in the process—and that leaves out Biden’s and City of London’s other coming war with China.
Why is this happening?
Though one can find plausible financial and political explanations, in one sense, this were better thought of as a religious problem. “They Sense Their Own Doom,” was the theme of yesterday’s Fireside Chat with Lyndon LaRouche, given by Gerald Rose, who discussed John Keats’ (1795-1821) unfinished poem Hyperion. The Anglosphere does not fear the chaos they are plunging the world into, because they, like all the empires that have slipped into darkness before them, have a pagan religious belief in the “Triumph of the Imperial Will.” They see their system failing, and what they call “the rise of China,” “the rise of Brazil,” can only be seen as their own fall, because there is only “win-lose,” never “win-win.” Therefore, in the new emerging world of the BRICS nations process, which requires a community of principle, their experience, no matter what they do, is one of increasing isolation, as seen in the Oct. 18 United Nations Security Council vote on Brazil’s resolution to address the Gaza crisis. The United States, in its veto, was the sole objector, out of 15 nations, to Brazil’s resolution, which “would have condemned all violence and hostilities against civilians and all acts of terrorism, and would have unequivocally rejected and condemned the terrorist attacks by Hamas that took place in Israel starting on 7 October. It would have also called for the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages, and for the protection of all medical personnel and humanitarian personnel, as well as hospitals and medical facilities, consistent with international humanitarian law,” according to the United Nations’ press release. Once upon a time, that would have been a proposal that would have originated from the United States. What have we become.
Humanity, the Global Majority, has chosen a different direction. This is seen in the 140-plus nations assembled this past week for the Beijing Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation. As Michele Geraci, architect of the 2019 China-Italy Memorandum of Understanding on the Belt and Road, explains, “The BRI framework is not only about economic relations between China and a single country like Italy, but it is the relations between all the participating countries that matter more, or Italy’s relations with the other over 140 countries. If Italy withdraws, what should it do with the other countries? China is leading the initiative, but BRI belongs to the world.”
That “open humanity” outlook is now also emerging in significant opposition to the coming destruction of Gaza. It is seen in the takeover of the Cannon Building by Jewish Voice for Peace, in a demonstration of several thousands in Washington, D.C. It is seen in the refusal of a single Knesset member to endorse the pending incursion into Gaza, despite his suspension. It is seen in the intervention by José Vega upon Rachel Maddow at Temple Beth-El, New York City’s largest synagogue.
That “one humanity, new direction” approach has been continually discussed in the 20 weekly meetings held so far of the International Peace Coalition, initiated by the Schiller institute’s Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Yesterday, multiple proposals were put forward on concrete steps to be taken in the next days. A petition regarding supporting the actions of countries at the United Nations to bring that institution back to what Franklin Roosevelt originally intended it to be, through holding the UN responsible to implement its Resolution 242, as a ceasefire and a roll-back of the evacuation and destruction of Gaza, was agreed upon. Other matters will be decided upon in the next days.
The “musical pedal-point,” however, that must inform all of what needs to be done, is this, Principle Ten of Zepp-LaRouche’s “Ten Principles for a New International Security and Development Architecture": “The basic assumption for the new paradigm is, that man is fundamentally good and capable to infinitely perfect the creativity of his mind and the beauty of his soul, and being then most advanced geological force in the universe, which proves that the lawfulness of the mind and that of the physical universe are in correspondence and cohesion, and that all evil is the result of a lack of development, and therefore can be overcome.” That is the most true, and also the most controversial, statement of the method by which any successful policy to end war, must be made.
