The Lead
Nicholas of Cusa and the Future of U.S.-Russian Cooperation
by Dennis Small (EIRNS) — Oct. 25, 2025
Fortunately for Mankind, the string of current events over weeks and months does not actually determine history. It is rather the dynamic sweep of history, shaped by society’s underlying cultural and philosophical outlook, that defines the trajectory of what are normally considered “current events.” Lyndon LaRouche frequently emphasized this point, and made it central to the functioning of the intelligence service he created, Executive Intelligence Review.
In the Author’s Acknowledgments of his 1983 book There Are No Limits to Growth, LaRouche explained his thinking:
“The news service’s functioning was distinguished most significantly from the work of most leading newsweeklies on two points. The editorial standpoint adopted has been that of fifteenth-century, Golden Renaissance humanism, the standpoint typified by Leibniz and, more or less efficiently, Dr. Benjamin Franklin. The method of approach to current events has been emphasis on deep historical studies of the political and intellectual history of the general populations and factions existing in each area of specialist responsibility.”
“Our brief mortal lives are so much with us,” LaRouche wrote, “and the immediate problems of this year, the preceding year, and the next, so fiercely grip our attentions, that we tend to exaggerate the authority of that aspect of knowledge we call ‘experience.’… Ordinary day-to-day experience, even over a span of several generations, is not a competent array of empirical evidence from which to adduce the actual, deeper laws of human behavior. To understand breaking developments in a European-culture dominated world of today, it is more or less indispensable to know the internal history of that European culture over a span of approximately 2,500 years.”
It is from that standpoint that we draw the reader’s attention to the deeper significance of the speech delivered on Oct. 25 by Pope Leo XIV to a crowd of some 10,000 pilgrims from 93 countries who had gathered in St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City, on the occasion of the Jubilee Audience. The Pope focused his address on the contributions of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa in the 15th century, “a cardinal who is still little-known today,” the Pope confessed. He emphasized Cusa’s central concept of the Coincidence of Opposites, stressing its enormous importance for today.
The Pope spoke pointedly of “another troubled age, the fifteenth century,” when “many of his [Cusa’s] contemporaries lived in fear, others took up arms and prepared new Crusades.” Cusa, however, “believed in humanity. He understood that there are opposites which must be held together.” The Pope implored: “Let us become a people in whom opposites are brought into unity”; even though it does not exist, with Cusa we must “hope for what is not yet seen,” a future worthy of the dignity of Man.
The Pope’s words were wise, and much needed. But to fully understand the revolutionary nature—and significance for Mankind’s survival—of Cusa’s concept of the Coincidence of Opposites, the serious reader and political activist will need to turn to the extensive writings of Lyndon LaRouche on the subject—for instance, his 2007 For Today’s Young Adults: Kepler & Cusa, and to the ongoing work of the Schiller Institute under the leadership of Helga Zepp-LaRouche, herself a recognized Cusa scholar. For instance, Zepp-LaRouche explained in an April 25, 2020 article, The LaRouche Legacy Foundation:
“He [Cusa] came to develop a method of thinking which he was very self-conscious about, and he said: ‘I’m now saying something which no human being has ever thought before,’ and that was, the principle of the coincidentia oppositorum. This is the idea that the One has a higher value and higher magnitude than the Many, and that the human mind can always overcome contradictions by developing a level of reason on a higher plane which gives you a way to solve problems which were not soluble on the lower plane.”
An excellent application of exactly such thinking is the LaRouche movement’s long-standing promotion of the Bering Strait Tunnel project, which would physically connect the United States and Russia and embark both nations on a path of mutually beneficial economic and strategic cooperation, rather than confrontation. On Oct. 22, EIR held an historic international conference on just this subject.
This weekend, Kremlin special envoy Kirill Dmitriev arrived in Miami to meet with his American counterpart, Steve Witkoff, to try to get peace negotiations between the two countries back on track. Dmitriev reiterated his full-throated promotion of the Bering Strait project in interviews with American mainstream TV networks CNN and Fox News:
“It’s not just the project itself; but once, as the political difficulties are overcome, we believe there’s lots of economic cooperation that can happen, and this economic cooperation can be the foundation for a peaceful relationship between Russia and the U.S. And we need that foundation, because the security of the whole world depends on it.”
Nicholas of Cusa would agree, and approve.
Contents
New World Paradigm
- Pope Leo Discusses Cusa with 10,000 Jubilee Pilgrims in St. Peter's Square (↓)
- Dmitriev in Florida To Meet with Witkoff: 'We Are Reasonably Close to a Diplomatic Solution' (↓)
- Dmitriev Explains Bering Strait Tunnel Proposal to U.S. TV Audience (↓)
Strategic War Danger
- ‘Coalition of the Willing’ Meets in London (↓)
- Russian Diplomat Charges Europe with Interfering with U.S.-Russia Communications (↓)
- ‘Spannungsfall’ and the Todenhöfer and Bolz Cases: German Government Prepares for War? (↓)
- Rubio Says No UNRWA in Gaza (↓)
U.S. and Canada
Collapsing Imperial System
- Russian Central Banker Nabiullina Announces High Interest Rates Will Continue Longer Than Expected (↓)
