It’s been hardly a week since the election of president-elect Donald Trump in the U.S., and it’s already clear that big changes are afoot. The freakout about some of Trump’s cabinet picks continues, in particular around the role of Tulsi Gabbard as the future Director of National Intelligence—a decision that could potentially transform the U.S. Presidency’s relationship to the Intelligence Community for the first time since the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy. There are, of course, plenty of other cabinet picks which are horrible. But the fact remains that a potential sea-change exists, and it is precisely for this reason that there is such a clamoring among the neoliberal establishment.
The recent meeting between Elon Musk and Iran’s Representative to the UN, Amir Saeid Iravani, is only the latest development in this domain. As the former Iranian Ambassador to Germany pointed out, “President Biden told President-elect Trump that Iran is the most immediate threat to America. But Donald Trump showed his first initiative in a different way… This is a sign that Donald Trump wants to save America from the mire of endless wars and hostilities… Ending several decades of hostility between America and Iran is possible. I hope Donald Trump succeeds.”
Will Trump actually maintain his promise to end wars—both in Ukraine and in Southwest Asia? That remains to be seen, but he deserves to be given the chance to do so, and to be held to account if not.
However, there is another factor currently at play on the stage of history today. As Helga Zepp-LaRouche noted during a meeting of the International Peace Coalition (IPC) on Friday, “the strategic situation has dramatically changed since Trump left the White House four years ago,” with a “new element” clearly being the existence of the BRICS nations and the overall rise of the Global South.
Indeed, on Thursday, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Peruvian President Dina Boluarte inaugurated the new Chancay Port in Peru—the $3.5 billion mega-port that will transform South America’s economy as a whole. The significance of this development was not missed by the Western Atlanticists. Biden will arrive in Peru alongside Xi for the APEC summit “with little of substance to offer,” the Atlantic Council complained, adding: “there’s no doubt about which of the two leaders’ countries is ascendant in the region.” This is part and parcel of the same dynamic seen just last month in Kazan, Russia, where an “isolated” Putin hosted the annual BRICS Summit, which now has 22 member countries representing 4.7 billion people—with another 30 countries having expressed interest in joining.
Lyndon LaRouche always insisted that sense perception is a lie, and is merely a “footprint” of the real world unfolding, unseen, before us. Therefore, it would be a mistake to simply define the present based off of trends from the past, or to assume someone will always act in the same way they had previously. Reality doesn’t work that way, and, most especially, neither do human beings.
The world into which president-elect Trump is now walking has changed fundamentally, and will never allow the U.S.-led world order to go back to the “good ol’ days.” Any effort to do so will likely only lead to a global thermonuclear war. However, if forward-looking statesmen and stateswomen work to craft a vision for a new world, then we could indeed be on the cusp of a new era which—as President Putin described—should be akin to a “polyphonic” world community.
In the IPC meeting Friday, Zepp-LaRouche laid out the LaRouche movement’s initiative to seize this moment of opportunity with the incoming administration:
“Why not take a completely different approach? If the West—that’s the United States with the Trump administration, and the European nations—would say, ‘We have to do something to alleviate this incredible issue of poverty, of war-torn regions where people cannot live. Why don’t we put our efforts together and really go for a massive economic build-up program in Africa, in Latin America, in the Middle East? And put our capacities together?’ For example, in Africa you need electrification for about 600 million people who have no electricity. Then you have certain game-changer projects like Transaqua; that takes longer, but it is an absolute game-changer for all of Africa. As well with the Inga Dam. In Latin America. Xi Jinping and the President of Peru opened the Chancay Port, which is the first deepwater port for Latin America. It could be potentially connected to the Bi-Oceanic Railway, which would connect the Atlantic and the Pacific. It would basically be the artery for a lot of infrastructure integration for all of Latin America. Likewise for the Middle East, we have proposed the Oasis Plan to create lots of new fresh water, which could become part of a general development plan of the entire Middle East….
”[These countries] no longer want to be just raw materials exporters, but to become full-set economies. They want to have the value chain in their country, they want to become middle-level income countries in the short term. They want to build the education system, the health system, the infrastructure, industry, agriculture, so that there is a reason for the people who are now fleeing as refugees to stay home, have job opportunities, and help to build up their own countries. Isn’t that what everybody wants? Who wants to be a refugee in a country where they are not received in a friendly way, if there is the opportunity to stay home and build up their own economy?
“It would be in the absolute self-interest of the United States, of the European nations, of the countries in the Global South to all join hands in doing that. The argument that it takes too long is not really valid, because it’s a question of giving a sign of hope. Once people would see that there is a serious attempt to do that, beginning with the verbal commitment of the leaders of all of these countries that they will make such a crash program, the mood would change immediately. There would be hope for a better world, and it really would end a chapter of colonialism which is really something we should draw the conclusion and make a more just approach for the whole world.”
This will be the subject of an upcoming Schiller Institute conference on Dec. 7-8, featuring high-level speakers from around the world, as well as a breakthrough pamphlet to be released in the next 10 days. So stay tuned, and organize to make it happen.
