The Lead
Lyndon LaRouche: 'You Might Call It Neo-Colonialism'
by Dennis Small (EIRNS) — Feb. 15, 2026
On Jan. 3, 2026, the United States of America invaded Venezuela, kidnapped its President Nicolás Maduro, and today holds him hostage and is dictating all major policy to the blackmailed government of interim President Delcy Rodríguez.
On Jan. 29, 2026, U.S. President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order authorizing major tariffs on countries supplying oil to Cuba, a policy designed to strangle that energy-dependent island and turn it into “Gaza West,” unless they submit and agree to regime-change in Cuba. Like Palestinians, it’s likely that Cubans will fight and endure hunger rather than be turned into a satrapy.
According to still unconfirmed reports, Washington will next force Venezuela to altogether abandon its national currency, the bolívar, on March 1, and replace it with the dollar.
What is confirmed is that precisely that policy of dollarization has been actively on the drawing boards in Washington and Wall Street since at least March 2025. The gameplan, as elaborated in brazen detail in a Feb. 12 article, “Ahead of the Future Fight, Washington Should ‘Enlist and Expand’ Regional Partnerships for Dollarization,” published in the Small Wars Journal, a military policy discussion forum which prides itself in having brought about “the intellectual transformation of the U.S. and allied militaries and national security communities,” proposes to:
• Use military and financial warfare to force the nations of the Western Hemisphere to drop their national currencies and dollarize. The case of Ecuador’s forced dollarization in 2000, after massive financial warfare against the country, is the prime case study promoted in the article as a model for today.
• Seize their raw materials and other natural resources to ensure that “the hemisphere is to function as a true rear area in great-power war” against China, and establish “resilient supply chains tied to the hemisphere’s industrial rear.”
• “Tether (these countries) to the U.S. financial system,” to guarantee that China does not “entrap governments under the guise of Belt and Road progress.”
The neo-colonial policy of seizing the Global South’s natural resources by force is hardly a new policy. One of its modern versions was Henry Kissinger’s notorious 1974 National Security Studies Memorandum (NSSM) 200, which shamelessly called for Malthusian population reduction in the planet’s most populous nations, so that the U.S. and allied West could seize and use their natural resources for themselves.
NSSM 200 stated: “The important potential linkage between rapid population growth and mineral availability … flows from the negative effects of excessive population growth on economic development and social progress.… The real problems of mineral supplies lie, not in basic physical sufficiency, but in the politico-economic issues of access, terms for exploration and exploitation, and division of the benefits among producers, consumers, and host country governments.”
Today that policy is being coupled with the de facto annihilation of the nation-state itself, as reflected in the dollarization policy.
The reader should not think that this policy is only meant to apply to the Western Hemisphere. In the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy document released on Dec. 4, 2025, the section discussing the entire Global South states:
“With the world’s deepest and most efficient capital markets, America can help low-income countries develop their own capital markets and bind their currencies more closely to the dollar, ensuring the dollar’s future as the world’s reserve currency.”
In other words, the entire Global South is to be held hostage and forced to bear the burden of the $2.4 quadrillion speculative bubble which has metastasized across the entire trans-Atlantic financial system.
The renowned physical economist Lyndon LaRouche had some choice words to describe this policy of dollarization. Within days of Ecuador’s announcement of dollarization in the first days of 2000, LaRouche warned on Jan. 23, 2000 that dollarization was imposed on Ecuador as an “intentional” policy of enforced “slavery” and “genocide.” It is “an intent to destroy the nation,” LaRouche said. “They were not merely out to impose conditions. The deliberate purpose, by people such as the Inter-American Dialogue, is to eliminate the existence of the nation-state of Ecuador. And if we don’t stop them, they’ll do it.”
And in a June 21, 2000 interview with Peru’s Gente magazine LaRouche again warned that Wall Street’s “policy internationally is to push through dollarization in the hemisphere … and to impose increasingly limited sovereignty upon states in the region. You might call it neo-colonialism…. It will absolutely destroy the nation and its people…. What this amounts to is a straight looting of the people and the country, by means of manipulating a currency the people don’t control. It actually is a method of mass murder, in effect, if you look at what the inevitable consequences are.”
LaRouche continued: “Dollarization is just another way of trying to print fictitious currency, which they can put in the banks of the bankers, so the bankers can pretend not to be bankrupt for one more day. Otherwise, you can compare it to a John Law bubble from the 18th century, or the Tulip Bubble from the 17th century. It’s the same principle as is involved in dollarization.”
But fortunately, the story doesn’t end there. The vast majority of the world’s population, including those associated with the BRICS and the SCO, have no intention of surrendering their sovereignty, and they have every intention of putting an end to 500 years of colonialism in all its forms. If Wall Street and the City of London continue to destroy the value of the dollar through rampant speculation, and then try to shove that down the throat of every nation on the planet, starting with the Western Hemisphere, they will only hasten their own demise. The Global Majority will create alternative trading patterns to foster their own development, and design a new credit system to ensure the flow of tens of trillions of dollars to urgently needed great infrastructure projects. They will deliberate on the principles underlying a new international security and development architecture.
And they will appeal forcefully to the people of the United States and Europe to join that effort, and bury the legacy of despicable Epstein economics once and for all. That will be the central agenda at EIR’s March 2 international roundtable dialogue, “Epstein and the Bottomless Depravity of the ‘Elites’—Urgent Need for a Cultural Renaissance!” Sign the statement and get others to do the same; and attend the roundtable and invite others to also join.
Contents
Strategic War Danger
- China Warns World About Resurgent Japanese Militarism (↓)
- U.S. and Israel Keep Jacking Up 'Maximum Pressure' on Iran (↓)
- Trump Pushes Regime Change in Iran (↓)
- Starmer at Munich: U.K. To Deploy Aircraft Carrier to Arctic This Year 'To Deter Russian Aggression' (↓)
- Russia Says 20,000 Foreign Mercenaries Have Fought in Ukraine (↓)
Science and Technology
New World Paradigm
U.S. and Canada
- Hegseth Kills Another Boat, While Dope, Inc. Laughs All the Way to the Bank (↓)
- Overreach! U.S. Tells Neighbors, Forget China; Your Resources, Militaries, and Currencies Are Ours (↓)
- Two ICE Agents Commit Perjury in Shooting Incident (↓)
Harley Schlanger Update
Watch The Daily Update with Harley Schlanger, a short video update available every weekday morning from The LaRouche Organization.
