The City of London’s flagship daily, the Financial Times, summarized the state of the world ten days into the New Year with the following headline: “Trump Takes On the World in Week of Shock and Awe.”
The article first took stock: “A trigger-happy, expansionist Trump launched a military operation to capture Venezuela’s strongman leader Nicolás Maduro and vowed to run the country for the foreseeable future, while issuing new threats to take over Greenland from Denmark, a NATO ally, and warning that Cuba and Colombia could be next in America’s crosshairs.” After “the U.S. doubled down on enforcing a full naval blockade” on Venezuela, the U.S. Coast Guard “pursued a Russian oil tanker across the north Atlantic Ocean,” and later forcibly boarded it. FT reminded readers that Trump had told the New York Times just days ago that only “my own morality [and] my own mind” could stop him. “I don’t need international law.”
Then the FT came to the central point: “On Truth Social, he [Trump] casually announced that he would be demanding from Congress a 50 percent increase in defense spending by 2027, a whopping rise from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion.”
We remind readers that today’s U.S. defense budget of $1 trillion—which is largely siphoned off by Wall Street and the City of London through its controlled intermediaries such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman—amounts to about 14% of the total 2025 federal budget of $7 trillion. Current interest payments on the federal government’s $38 trillion (and counting) debt constitute another $1 trillion (i.e., another 14%), at least half of which also goes to Western banks.
If Trump’s new defense budget goes through, it will eat up more than 20% of the national budget!
This is Schachtian economics, named for the policies implemented by Hitler’s central banker Hjalmar Schacht, to use a monumental military buildup to impose genocidal looting through war, in order to maintain a bankrupt speculative financial bubble.
If you put it all together, including the escalating drive to nuclear war against Russia, what we are witnessing today is best described as a policy of “Schacht and awe”—the use of pure terror and raw power to impose the will of a collapsing empire on the planet.
But does the physical, economic and political universe answer to shock and awe? Fortunately, it does not.
The vast majority of the world’s population has no intention to continue as vassals of Wall Street’s dollar. They are determined to end poverty, and bring high-tech development to each and every nation. They are wrestling with ways to organize a new international security and development architecture for all nations, and not just the wealthy or powerful.
And, crucially, they are turning their eyes to the United States, in the hope that leadership will emerge in that country to stop the drive to war, to respect the sovereignty of other nations, and to return to its founding principles of working with other sovereign nations to achieve progress for all.
On Jan. 10, Diane Sare held a campaign meeting in New York City to announce her candidacy for President of the United States. As Sare was finishing her address, a political leader in the nation of Venezuela—a nation that on Jan. 3 was militarily attacked by the United States, whose President was violently kidnapped by the United States—sent off an urgent message to this news service: “Congratulations! If I were an American, I would vote for Diane Sare.”
Behind that simple statement is the deeper reason why “Schacht and awe” can be defeated. It shows that there is no permanent reason for the United States to be feared and viewed as a dangerous enemy by peoples and nations across the planet. And that there is every reason for the U.S. to return to being a hope and leader for all Mankind. That was the promise of Lyndon LaRouche, and it is today the promise of the Sare campaign.
