The Lead

Diplomacy: Shifting the Tide in the Affairs of Men

by Dennis Speed (EIRNS) — Jul. 17, 2024

“There is a tide in the affairs of men/Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;/Omitted, all the voyage of their life/Is bound in shallows and in miseries./On such a full sea are we now afloat,/And we must take the current when it serves,/Or lose our ventures."/—Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act IV, Scene 3

We call your attention to the first two items that appear below in our “Leading Developments” section. They indicate how a New International Security and Development Architecture is both being proposed, and already taking place, involving forces for peace that are defying the warmongering “gods of Olympus” of the Anglosphere. “Promethean”-minded institutions and individuals are successfully defying the dangerous, but doomed gods of the obsolete NATO, and the bankrupt City of London/Wall Street. They can howl and scream, as the EU does at Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, but there is nothing they can offer or do to stop history, except a thermonuclear “Götterdämmerung.” How must we deploy to stop this? A “Council of Elders” within the Anglosphere—those that have not forgotten diplomacy and negotiation, or how to think—must seize this fleeting moment, when peace is yet possible, speaking loudly, and in unison: “No More War!”

Was it Global NATO’s International Assassination Bureau that took a shot at Donald Trump—and missed? Was that the same grouping that had, only two months earlier, shot and almost killed Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico? Is assassination the way that the City of London and Wall Street financial interests, for whom NATO is merely the policeman, intend to “Trump-proof” NATO? There are many questions, and much speculation. Leaving aside the distractions and dead-ends momentarily convulsing the minds of the multitude, however, let us review, from above, the results of what has happened over the first 15 days of the month of July.

Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary, held a just-published interview with the Financial Times, regarding his July 11 meeting with Donald Trump. That meeting followed Orbán’s July 2 meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, his July 5 meeting with Vladimir Putin, and his July 8 meeting with China’s Xi Jinping. The FT reported that “Donald Trump will quickly demand peace talks between Russia and Ukraine if he wins November’s U.S. presidential election and has developed ‘well-founded plans’ for doing so, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has claimed after private discussions with the Republican candidate. That prospect means the EU should reopen direct diplomatic communication with Russia and start ‘high-level’ negotiations with China to find a peaceful solution to the war in Ukraine, the Hungarian prime minister said in a private letter to EU leaders following consultations in Moscow and Beijing.”

Then, FT quotes Orbán directly. “We can expect no peace initiative coming from [Trump] until the elections. I can however surely state that shortly after his election victory, he will not wait until his inauguration, but will be ready to act as a peace broker immediately.”

Another aspect of the July 11 meeting not reported by the FT, and in light of recent events, equally important, has been recounted by Orbán’s political director, Balázs Orbán (no relation), who was also present at the Mar-a-Lago dinner held by Donald Trump with Viktor Orbán. On that occasion, the Prime Minister and the American former President discussed, among other things, the “unprecedented divisions and calls for violence (that) are taking place in America.” Orbán’s political director observed that “the West clearly thinks that it is at war with Russia, and that all means are permitted in war. In other words, anyone who speaks against the war consensus is the internal enemy against whom all means are permitted. This approach dominates in the Western press against the pro-peace politicians and this affects Hungary as well.”

Two days later, in Pennsylvania, Donald Trump turned his head, and catastrophe, directly or indirectly, authored by what Georgia’s Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze calls the “War Party,” was barely averted. America is now temporarily shocked into self-reflection, as of Saturday, July 13, by “the violence that violence produced.” 2024 must be the year that Americans decide, through mass action if necessary, as Scott Ritter and others have suggested, to compel their nation to renounce the violence of NATO’s perpetual wars. ”But how” the “realists” ask, “would that ever actually happen?”

To do that, independent candidates for federal office, such as Diane Sare and Jose Vega in New York State, who are advocating the physical economy solutions of the late economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche—such as his LaRouche Four Laws—must campaign to advance the original, anti-colonial principles of the American Revolution. This can work, because those very principles, in approximation, are now being discussed and adopted by nations of the Global South/Global Majority, even as they are abandoned by the once-progressive “West.” To do this, is to operate from the “mountaintop” of principle, as Martin Luther King did—not tactics, program, or even policy, as generally conceived.

To illustrate what we mean by the term “principle,” here is Principle Four of Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s “Ten Principles of a New International Security and Development Architecture.” “Since mankind is the only creative species known so far in the universe, and given the fact that human creativity is the only source of wealth through the potentially limitless discovery of new universal principles, one of the main aims of the new International Security and Development Architecture must be providing access to universal education for every child and adult person living. The true nature of man is to become a beautiful soul, as Friedrich Schiller discusses, and the only person that can fulfill this is the genius.”

Public discourse, involving all citizens, now, in the construction of a new international security and development architecture, is precisely the universal education that can create the conditions for the flourishing of genius, as it did at the Council of Florence in 1439, through the genius Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, one of the unrecognized Founding Fathers of the American Revolution. This, the politics of principle, politics from Martin Luther King’s and Lyndon LaRouche’s mountaintop, is the only politics of practice, only “practical politics,” that will equip us to outflank, in time, the infinite miscalculation of the “mad, old, diseased and dying” imperial/colonial era’s thermonuclear “Götterdämmerung.”