The Lead

By Its Actions, the U.S. Has Opened a Pandora's Box of War and Chaos

by Dennis Small (EIRNS) — Jun. 25, 2025

In remarks to an emergency session of the UN Security Council on June 22, made right after the June 21 American B-2 bombing runs against Iran were made public, Russia’s Ambassador to the United Nations Vassily Nebenzia warned the world: “Through its actions, the U.S. has opened a Pandora’s box, and no one knows what new consequences this may lead to.”

Whether intended or not by President Trump, three global sea-changes were set in motion by his decision to attack Iran, changes which are now irreversible, absent a prompt and fundamental change in the world’s security and development architecture. The last-minute ceasefire organized by Trump between Iran and Israel (after encouraging the launching of the war between them!), cannot withstand the policy gale now sweeping the planet:

First: “The entire international order is in shambles,” Helga Zepp-LaRouche stated on June 23. International law has been pronounced irrelevant; the UN Charter prohibiting wars of aggression has been ignored and made inoperative; and arms control and nuclear non-proliferation are now a dead letter. “We are really in a chaotic breakdown of the world system,” Zepp-LaRouche warned. The era governed by the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia and the sovereignty of the nation-state, is being replaced by a return to the Middle Ages, with government by tyrants and Leviathans.

Second: Iran-style preemptive war has also been threatened against any nation of the Global South seeking its own sovereign development, including the peaceful use of nuclear energy. The BRICS, Russia and China are all in the crosshairs—and they know it.

Third: The U.S. Constitution has been torn up by Trump’s not consulting Congress before launching a war; the MAGA movement is splitting as a result of Trump’s betrayal of his own promises to stay away from foreign wars; and the conditions of blind political polarization are being created for another attempted assassination of President Trump.

President Trump may fancy himself the super-actor dominating the world stage, but he is actually doing little more than playing the role—with dramatic flourishes and fanfare—scripted for him by the British Empire and its envoys. He has stepped into their trap of orchestrating a global showdown with Russia and China, in order to preserve Britain’s bankrupt global financial empire.

In all of this, the elephant in the room that no one wishes to see (let alone clean up after) is that the drive for war—whether in Ukraine, or Iran, or eventually Taiwan—is driven by the bankruptcy collapse of the trans-Atlantic financial system. The frenzied effort to keep their $2 quadrillion speculative bubble alive with a new round of funny money, has led to the legalization of stablecoins under the misnamed GENIUS Act in the U.S., which will allow private individuals or corporations to each issue their own “money”—much as occurred in every medieval fiefdom—with no regulation or government guarantees. The cancer has just been made chief medical officer in the oncology ward.

Lyndon LaRouche repeatedly addressed Americans’ obsessive fascination with “money,” as if it had some sort of magical intrinsic value, which is at the root of current disastrous policies. In a statement issued on April 25, 2004 by the LaRouche in 2004 Presidential campaign committee,

“The Uniquely Needed Doctrine for U.S. Economic Survival Today: Why `Fiscal Austerity’ Is Insane,” LaRouche wrote:

“First, any kind of money, even at its very best, is a brainless idiot, at any time in the past, present, or future history of our planet. When issued as paper, or even gold or silver coins, it has no better monetary value than that which society chooses to assign to it. In a real economy, it is the physical action which counts—and counts, and counts, until the point that the fallen hero felled by faith in the magical powers of money may never get up on his feet again…

“As I have emphasized earlier, money is, by its nature, a worthless idiot. It has no intrinsic value. Its value is that which is imputed to it by the power of governments.… In fact, the value of money reposes in the power of government, or in the hands of an institution which has subverted the proper authority of sovereign governments. When the time comes, that the amount of pressing claims for redemption of money with physical values, greatly exceeds the magnitude of the prices of the relevant physical values available, the idiocy of money becomes apparent.

“Some silly people speak of ‘real money,’ as a proposed alternative. No such ‘real money’ ever did, or ever could exist, except within the bounds of a delusion by the believer. Money at its best, is a means of exchange, best created by, and regulated by responsible government, and that best through the methods of national banking which are only typified by the arguments of our first Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton. The only means by which the perils of money’s intrinsic idiocy and recklessness can be checked, is through regulation….”