Here is a transcript from the Nov. 20 EIR seminar.
Dennis Speed: We want to go right to the panel and to begin now with Helga Zepp-larouche, the editor in chief of Executive Intelligence Review, as well as the founder of the Schiller Institute. And she’s speaking to us from Germany. Welcome, Helga.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche: We are assembled here to put out an analysis of what the dangers are if the United States goes ahead, and goes for a regime change operation in Venezuela, but we are also intending to portray how the world can get out of this crisis. Now, the operation in Venezuela, which is more or less ready to go, if you look at the number of warships assembled close to Venezuela, is not a thing in itself. We should remember that President Trump had won the election, especially his second term, with the promise that he would end the endless wars of America. And a lot of his base, the MAGA base, is basically intending to insist that he sticks to that policy. Now, this takes place at a moment where Trump is already having enormous difficulties with the support of his base, as was demonstrated through his attacks on Marjorie Taylor Greene and some of his other supporters, over the issue of the release of the Epstein files. So it’s a very fragile moment for President Trump to risk more rifts between him and his base.
We have to differentiate between the narrative of what is at stake, and what is the real issue involved. If you look at the official statements, it’s all about Maduro being the head of the Cartel of the Suns. And while President Trump a couple of days ago said he was still potentially open for direct talks with President Maduro, only hours afterwards, the State Department and Marco Rubio put out a statement declaring the Cartel of the Suns a terrorist organization, and Maduro the head of it. And this is supposed to go into effect on Monday, whereby this would legitimize any kind of military operation. There are also reports that the orders have been given already for CIA covert operations inside Venezuela, and so forth and so on.
Now, there are many military experts, and I will only touch upon it because I’m sure that others on this panel will give more insight into that, that the argument that fentanyl is coming from Venezuela to the United States cannot be maintained at all. There is already a huge outcry internationally over the fact that the U.S. military changed their policy of interception of drug boats and bringing the alleged drug pushers to trial, by simply shooting at these boats and killing people. I think altogether 83 people were killed already, outside of any legal framework, and without any due process. If you look at all of that, the big question actually is, what is this really all about? In the context of mounting tensions between the United States and Russia, China, the BRICS, it is quite noteworthy that there is an article in Foreign Affairs written by Elliott Abrams, which spills the beans in the most direct form, an article which says how to topple Maduro. He says that to remove Maduro, is really to end the cooperation of Venezuela with China, Cuba, Iran and Russia, because Venezuela gave them a base of operation in Latin America. So Trump, he advises, should end all ambiguity and not only fight against the symptoms, which are the drugs, the migrants, the trafficking in human beings, but go for the root causes, which is to remove the Maduro regime.
He (Abrams) also then accounts that according to the New York Times, Marco Rubio secretly met with leaders of the House and the Senate, to tell them that the ousting of Maduro is not the objective. But he says, if that’s not the objective, then it is very difficult to explain why such a gigantic armada of U.S. warships is close to the coast of Venezuela; and then basically giving out travel warnings to American citizens not to go into Venezuela, describing the internal domestic condition of Venezuela as practically hell on Earth. Then he reiterates, that given the fact that Cuba has already supported Maduro’s bureaucracy and military against potential coups, that American prestige, and Trump’s prestige, and America’s credibility is on the line. And he urges his advisers to urgently persuade Trump that he is already at a point of no return—the game is on—either he wins, or Maduro wins. I think that shows you the kind of manipulation which is attempted by what one clearly can call the neocons in the Trump administration, of which Marco Rubio is obviously a key proponent. I think it’s very important that Foreign Affairs, which is the magazine of record for what you can call the official establishment of the neocons in the United States, says quite openly that the issue is China, Cuba, Iran and Russia.
And that is very interesting, because we have to look at the larger picture. And what is the larger picture? The attempt by the Western establishments to establish a unipolar world at the end of the Cold War, based on the Anglo-American special relationship, which as we now have seen, completely backfired. There was a gigantic blowback, because all the measures which went along with that effort to establish an unipolar dominance in the world, including regime change, color revolution, sanctions, unilateral sanctions not legitimized by the UN Security Council, the weaponization of the dollar, and many other such measures; not to forget the interventionist wars, like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya. The sum of all of that has led to a situation, combined with the rise of China, that the countries of the Global South, basically saw for the first time, that they could overcome the condition of 500 years of colonialism by allying with China, with the Belt and Road Initiative, and with the BRICS countries, with whom they are now in the process of establishing a new economic system; which got another major step ahead with the SCO, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting on the 31st of August and Sept. 1st, an organization which explicitly is not meant as a counter-bloc to NATO, but is an organization which is open to any country who wishes to cooperate, including the United States, including European nations. However, the Western nations, at least some of them, especially in Europe, the Coalition of the Willing, have obviously tied their fate so much to the neoliberal system which attempted the unipolar world order, which, however, did not function. They insist on not giving up on the war in Ukraine, by insisting that Russia must suffer a strategic defeat, even if everybody who thinks clearly, knows that a strategic defeat of Russia is not possible, given the fact that it is the strongest nuclear power on the planet, and an attack on Russia, followed by a global nuclear war and global nuclear winter, could lead to the annihilation of the human species as a whole.
So therefore, we now have a situation, which unfortunately is still in the line of strategic ambiguity. President Trump did obviously attempt to remedy the relation with Russia, which was the purpose of his meeting in Anchorage, Alaska. And just yesterday came the news, both from Steve Witkoff and Kirill Dmitriev, that what was already discussed in Alaska, namely, an agreement to end the Ukraine war, by making an agreement whereby Ukraine would give up most of the territory lost in the war, the Donbass, Crimea, agree to halve its military, but then have security guarantees from the United States, this would be part of an overall security arrangement involving all of Europe. Naturally that has been rejected by the Coalition of the Willing so far, but it is now a renewed proposal on the table, and it is also very clear that the Trump administration did want to leave the Ukraine war, because that war is clearly coming to an end, simply because of a lack of manpower. This war has been exhausted.
So when the United States put out their recent new security doctrine, it said that the main emphasis of U.S. interest will be the Western Hemisphere, which observers already were worrying could mean treating Latin America not only as the U.S. neighborhood, as Marco Rubio called it the other day, but as the so-called backyard, whereby they would try to eliminate any kind of presence or influence of Russia, China and other countries. So this is the context in which this operation is taking place. And I think if it goes ahead, and leads to a regime change, driving President Maduro out of Venezuela one way or another, including military operations and covert operations, it could lead to an absolute disaster for the United States. In all likelihood, it would absolutely increase all the problems it is supposed to be a remedy against. It would increase poverty, it would increase drug trade, it would massively increase the migrant crisis. It could lead to an alliance of many Latin American countries against the United States. And in the worst case, it could lead to an entanglement with Russia, if not China.
So that is what is at stake. We have been maintaining for a very long time, that the only way we will get out of this geopolitical crisis, will be to get the Western nations, including the United States, but also European nations, to stop the geopolitical confrontation in the effort to contain China and Russia and other BRICS countries, and to simply switch to a mode of cooperation. If the United States would drop the effort to drive China out of Latin America, and instead start to cooperate with the Bi-Oceanic Railway, to use the fact that China successfully has built the Chancay deepwater port in Peru, and simply agree to the kind of infrastructure projects which have been on the table since Alexander von Humboldt in the 19th century, and which would eliminate the reason for migration, because it would give people an incentive to stay home and build up their own economies. Then all the problems could be solved.
Now, that would basically mean that President Trump would go back to his MAGA policy, make America Great, by concentrating on the economic buildup of the United States. And one can only hope that reasonable forces, both inside the United States and in all of the Western Hemisphere, could cooperate to put that on the agenda.
So I want to stop here and leave the word to others.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s Concluding Remarks:
The question of integration has been brought up by both Dennis and Mr. Almeida and I think that is a very important conception right now. Because when López Portillo invited my husband to help him to defend the peso against capital flight, my husband not only responded to that by writing a program for the defense of Mexico, but for the integration of all of Latin America. He called it Operation Juárez, referring to the historic cooperation between Benito Juárez and Lincoln, to emphasize the fundamental joint interest between the different Americas. López Portillo started to implement Operation Juárez on the 1st of September 1982. He imposed capital controls, and he wanted to proceed, then his term ended too early to go through with the whole program. And the problem was at that time, the other key debtor countries, Brazil and Argentina, did not show solidarity with López Portillo’s efforts, and therefore, it did not go all the way. But he started to implement it, and it just so happened that on that same day, the 1st of September 1982, Lyn and I were having a meeting with the leadership of the Kreditanstalt for Wiederaufbau in Frankfurt. And as López Portillo was imposing capital controls, we, in Frankfurt, were just greeting each other and saying hello, and in comes the largest trader of exchanges from the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. And he said, “Oh, everything is finished. The Latin Americans have declared the debt bomb, the banking system is finished.” And Lyn and I were just smiling, and said, no, no, don’t worry, this is not the debt bomb. This is just an effort to have an orderly reorganization of the Latin American debt, which was at that time $200 billion, which, compared to the sums today, was the proverbial peanuts. But it was enough to scare the banking system and Wall Street, that the Latin American countries would use the debt bomb against them. And my husband started to explain, no, this is just an effort to reorganize the totally bankrupt system and transform short-term debt with high interest, into long-term credit lines with low interest, in order to have new credit for investment in productive infrastructure and other projects for the Latin American integration.
Now, if that approach was valid in 1982, now, more than 40 years later, it is still an absolutely valid point! Because if there is no addressing of this everything bubble, the $2 quadrillion of outstanding debt derivatives, the AI bubble, and the military industrial complex bubble interwoven, we are sitting under the Damocles’ sword of that. But the approach, which was proposed by Lyndon LaRouche in 1982, would still be the method to have an orderly reorganization, and turn the unpayable debt, through reorganization, into credit lines for investment. And given the fact that the BRICS countries are absolutely trying to find a new payment system and develop (their) own economic system, the effort to create the Shanghai Cooperation Bank as quickly as possible, as an additional means to other institutions, like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank or the New Development Bank, to try to save the world financial system, or their part of the world financial system, from the impact of the pending collapse of the everything bubble. I think if the BRICS would approach the United States, and basically offer some kind of cooperation to have such an orderly reorganization, I think it could go a long way, maybe not with everybody it concerns, but maybe there are other channels who could be activated around that.
Now, I think the need to come to a different method of thinking is absolutely there. President Trump has acknowledged publicly that he thinks that the building of the Bering Strait tunnel is an interesting idea, when this was asked of him after the Alaska Conference. Also, there was the head of the Russian sovereign wealth fund, Kirill Dmitriev, who is a known proponent of the Bering Strait tunnel. He has talked about the enormous economic benefits it would have, opening up all of the East of Russia, Siberia, the Arctic region, where there are all the elements of the Periodic Table, but not yet developed.
President Trump acknowledged that he finds that an interesting idea. If you build the Bering Strait tunnel, you could very soon, a few years later, build a fast train system which would connect a rail line from the southern tip of Argentina and Chile all the way up through the Americas, crossing the Darien Gap, going through the Central American countries, reaching North America, Canada, Alaska, going through the Bering Strait tunnel, going all the way through Eurasia to Gibraltar, Portugal Spain; build the Gibraltar Tunnel and connect through a fast train system all the way through Africa to the tip of the Cape of Good Hope. And you could, in a few years, travel with a fast train system all around the world, because other networks would go to India and Indonesia, and with the other means connecting the world in this way.
Now, if you think about the long arc of history, that will happen, if we don’t blow ourselves up! It is natural that infrastructure, which started at riverways and oceans, and then when the railway was invented, people opened up the interior of the continents. And we are now looking at the last phase of the opening up of all continents through infrastructure development, making it livable for all people on this planet. Now, as I said, if we don’t blow ourselves up in a thermonuclear war, this will happen. It may be interrupted, but that is the natural course of development of the human species. So why can’t we take this program of the “New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge,” which is a study we published in 2014 after President XI Jinping announced the New Silk Road, and put that on the table, because it would solve all the problems. It would solve the problem of poverty in migration, migrants in Latin America, in Africa. We could reconstruct the Middle East with the Oasis Plan. Why can’t we elevate the human mind to the level of the interest of everybody? Create a new paradigm, which puts the idea of the one humanity first. And since Dennis mentioned it, the concept for that, is the method of thinking of the coincidentia oppositorum, the coincidence of opposites, which is a revolutionary method of thinking which was invented by Nicholas of Cusa, who was a Cardinal from the 15th century. He is the inventor of the modern nation-state, because in his writing Concordantia Catholica, he presented, for the first time ever in history, the concept of the representative system: the idea that the government is only legitimate with the consent of the governed, and that the representatives have a reciprocal relationship between the government and the governed, and they have to make sure that there is the interest of both represented. But he was also the author of the idea of a concordantia, that concordance in the world at large, can only be if all microcosms develop and regard as their self-interest the development of the other microcosm, meaning the other nation.
Now this method of the coincidence of opposites, is a very fascinating concept, and I would need a lot more time to explain it. He himself was aware that this was a completely revolutionary way of approaching things, because he said, “I’m now thinking something which no human being ever before was thinking.” And he came to it naturally through a theological discussion, which I will shorten now. It’s basically that there is a capability of the human mind to always think the higher One, which is of a higher magnitude, and a higher order, than the Many.
Naturally, he came to that idea through a theological reflection. But it is a method which can be applied to any problem, any field of science or culture. I have made it my habit for actually several decades, to apply that method of thinking, of the coincidence of opposites, because it helps you tremendously, to not get stuck in little details, or not to get stuck in secondary or tertiary contradictions, but to always think the One, which is maybe something new. Nicholas also said you have to have always prescience, foreknowledge, of what you are looking for, because if you don’t know what you are looking for, you may find something, but you don’t know if it is what you were searching for. So you have to have that prescience, and that prescience, if it’s based on a methodological approach, will always guide you to come up with the solution on a higher level.
Now, I think historically, that higher level must be, that we make a jump to think not “nation first,” not MAGA, not America first, or Russia first, or Venezuela first, or Brazil first, but to think the One humanity first, and then define the national interest in cohesion with that One. I think the statesman who also has been thinking that way for a long time is Xi Jinping, because he is talking about the shared community of mankind. And he has also, by the way, developed four global initiatives: the Global Security, Development, Civilizational, and Governance Initiatives, which in totality, represent exactly an approach which we, from the Schiller Institute, have also pursued now for several years, which is the idea that we absolutely need to have a new security and development architecture, which must take into account the interest of every single country; because it does not function if you leave out one or two countries. You can actually go back to the Peace of Westphalia, which did bring peace, because it did develop this concept, that the interest of the other must be taken into account. And whenever that principle was applied, you find peace. And whenever that was not applied, like in the Versailles Treaty, it was the prelude to the next war.
So I think what we urgently need, and maybe we can take this discussion today as a jumping point, to have more such panels, maybe involving all of the think tanks of Latin America, and maybe also other parts of the world, maybe we have some think tanks in the United States who would be suitable to participate in that, and let’s start to discuss how we can give ourselves a governance system which allows the survival of humanity as a whole. That was the topic in the Federalist Papers in the young American Republic. And if we don’t have that discussion on a global scale, well, then we are not doing our job as human beings.
