The following event will take place on Monday, Jan. 12, at 10 a.m. (ET), and will be live-streamed on YouTube in English. Spanish, French, and German simultaneous interpretation will be available via Zoom.
What the world witnessed on Jan. 3, 2026—the U.S. military assault against Venezuela, and the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores to stand trial in the United States—is not just a return to Teddy Roosevelt’s “gunboat diplomacy” and “big stick” policies. It is not only the theft of Venezuela’s oil. It even involves more than the explicit threat to give the same bloody treatment to Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, Brazil, Iran—and many other nations—unless they submit to being Wall Street and the City of London satraps.
The Venezuela events have to be considered alongside the Dec. 29 massive drone strike launched by NATO-backed Kiev forces on the home of Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Novgorod region, a strike intended to assassinate President Putin. The attack was an overt attempt to cross Russia’s nuclear trip-wire, to launch a “decapitation strike” which could have rapidly escalated into full-scale nuclear war.
These events, taken together, mark a dramatic phase-change in the global strategic situation: the plan to immediately end the era of international law, of respect for national sovereignty and non-intervention in the internal affairs of other states, and of the principles set forth in the UN Charter which have helped guide international relations since the defeat of fascism in World War II. Now we are to descend fully into an Era of Bestiality, of Thomas Hobbes’s “war of every man against every many” in which a global “Leviathan” imposes his will—to the greater glory of maintaining the bankrupt trans-Atlantic system under conditions of a breakdown collapse of its $2 quadrillion speculative bubble.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller was eloquent in his savage advocacy of this concept of Man and society in a Jan. 5 interview with CNN: After asserting that “the United States of America is running Venezuela,” Miller proclaimed: “We live in a world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”
A Jan. 6 editorial in China’s semi-official daily Global Times responded clearly: “The overwhelming majority of countries are unwilling to return to a Hobbesian international jungle governed by the law of the strong preying on the weak.”
It was British intelligence agent, and sometimes philosopher, Thomas Hobbes who famously stated in his 1651 Leviathan: “Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power [Leviathan] to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man.… To this war of every man against every man, this also is consequence; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place.”
Is this to be the concept of Man and society that will now prevail? Has U.S. President Donald Trump, with his brazen attack on Venezuela, at the same time, destroyed any prospect of a cooperative relationship with Russia and China? That would be London’s intent, and that is the crucial strategic issue posed today.
Or is Mankind not the unique creative species, the only one thus far known to exist, who can govern his affairs according to reason, who can flourish based on promoting the general welfare and the good of the other? Can we not develop a new international security and development architecture, a new paradigm worthy of the dignity of Man?
Join the deliberation on these issues at EIR’s Emergency Roundtable Dialogue on Monday, Jan. 12, from 10 a.m.-12 p.m. (ET), with simultaneous interpretation in English, Spanish, French and German.
English: YouTube https://www.youtube.com/live/nj1xmBNdrIs
Spanish, German, French are available on Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89446605109
Panelists will include, among others:
Helga Zepp-LaRouche (Germany): founder, Schiller Institute
Prof. Zhang Weiwei (China): professor of International Relations at Fudan University, Shanghai
Ambassador Chas Freeman (U.S.): former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, China scholar
H.E. Donald Ramotar (Guyana): former President of Guyana (2011-2015)
María de los Angeles Huerta (Mexico): former Congresswoman
H.C. von Sponeck (Germany): former UN Assistant Secretary General
Dennis Small (U.S.): EIR Ibero-America Editor
