It is clear to all the world, and to all thinking Americans, that in this new year, we need something fundamentally new from the American Presidency. President-elect Donald Trump has made it clear that he intends to meet with President Vladimir Putin at the earliest possible date—but what will, or can, be discussed? “There is no substantive preparation yet, there is a declared understanding and political will, because such contacts would be very, very necessary and advisable. We will look further after the administration in Washington has changed,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
It also appears that a deal to release the hostages held in Gaza (and, hopefully, some of the hostages held in Israel) will be concluded in the next days—but then what? A documentary, “Gaza, in the Extermination Strip,” that premiered yesterday in Mexico, and the Jan. 12 CBS News “60 Minutes” spot both make it clear that most of the people who have been killed in the war in Gaza have been children. Israeli soldiers are refusing to continue fighting, and one of the hostages’ parents has declared his agreement with the characterization by the International Criminal Court that Netanyahu is a war criminal. What will, what can be proposed for the West Bank and Gaza? How can, how should an American President address this?
The American Presidency must choose to “kick against the pricks” and conspire with world leaders of stature to address the question of war, including thermonuclear war “from the mountain-top.” To do that, it may be necessary, to dare to seek advice precisely where no one expects you to look. For example, what lessons can a Trump Presidency learn from the life and outlook of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King? He is the only non-President on the National Mall; maybe that’s the person whose life should be consulted, especially by a nearly-assassinated incoming President.
On January 15, had he lived, Martin Luther King would have celebrated his 96th birthday. King famously said, the day before he was killed, “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land.”
The “Promised Land,” contrary to the profane beliefs of certain deluded factions in Southwest Asia, and their counterparts in the United States, is not a dream of empire. It is a future. The United States, which, as of this moment, no longer lives in the future, is no longer the Promised Land, either for Americans or anyone else. How can that be reversed?
President Abraham Lincoln’s vigorous defense and advancement of the United States and its Constitution, was not merely through war. It was his idea of the future, seen in his initiation, advocacy and support of the Trans-Continental Railroad, that would catapult the United States, even in the mid-19th century, to become the greatest industrial power in human history. It was his “greenbacks” financial policy, by means of which he circumvented going into debt to Wall Street, that allowed the U.S. economy to come out of the 1861-65 war stronger than it went into it, despite the horrific destruction of human life and resources.
President Lincoln understood what Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury had understood, and written about, in 1789, in his four Reports—on Manufactures, on the National Bank, on Public Credit, and on the Constitutionality of the National Bank. Hamilton saw the public credit as a tool to shape the future. Hamilton’s purpose was to make the United States truly and permanently independent from the British Empire, by providing a way for the fledgling republic to assume, and not repudiate, the thirteen colonies’ debt. He knew that in a United States that increased the productive powers of labor through manufacturing, if that debt were deployed as credit, could eventually break from the plantation slavery system which he and many American founders detested. Hamilton and the Americans, just as the BRICS nations of today, wanted to be free of perfidious Albion, the British Empire. What would Hamilton think of the United States’ “special relationship” with the British? Have they changed from 250 years ago?
The January 9 speech by British Foreign Secretary David Lammy, retailed “the same worn-out and easily recognizable neo-colonial principles of British foreign policy, which had on many occasions contributed to ratcheting up global tensions in the past,” in the evaluation of the Russian Embassy in London. But why take their word? Lammy in 2018 had called Trump “a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath, “ but two days after Trump won the 2024 election he said that Trump was “someone that we can build a relationship with in our national interest.” That is the way of the British Empire—"I’ll always be your friend, Othello,” said Iago.
A clean break with the past must be made by a United States that has not only de-industrialized itself, and de-populated itself, but is now burning itself down. Technological progress has to be returned to the United States. The promise of a future must be given to its youth. And a new security and development architecture must be composed by Russia, the United States, China and other nations, which the Presidency must engage.
When the United States turned its back on FDR’s mission to abolish British, French, Belgian, Dutch and Portuguese colonialism, and instead, dropped the atomic bomb as a first step in Winston Churchill’s “Operation Unthinkable” drive to destroy the Soviet Union with thermonuclear weapons, the seeds of the problems we see all over the world now, were sown. Martin Luther King departed from that downward spiral. In both his creative, non-violent work on behalf of what was termed “civil rights,” and his vigorous denunciation of America’s evil role in the Vietnam War, he was defending the Constitution of the United States in exactly the way that Lincoln had done, and for the cause that FDR had embraced, including his plans for the post-war United Nations and its International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the “World Bank. “
Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche, in two documents—"Ten Principles for a New Security and Development Architecture” and “Gandhi’s Vision for a New Paradigm in International Relations, a World Health System, and Direct Non-Violent Action in Times of Social Breakdown”—has provided the conceptual access-point for world leaders, and those who would advise them, as to how to reach that mountain-top, from the summit of which the world can, even at this late date, not only survive, but prosper. Economist Lyndon LaRouche’s Oasis Plan, updated from his 1975 “How the International Development Bank Will Work,” shows how to carry out, today, in Southwest Asia, what Lincoln and Hamilton’s United States promised would be our mission to the world—to end colonialism, not perpetuate it. That was Martin Luther King’s vision, and what the vision of the Presidency should be today.
