On Monday morning, April 27, four events of strategic consequence unfold in three cities, and they should be read as a single report on the state of the West.
In Washington, King Charles III arrives for a four-day state visit to celebrate, Buckingham Palace tells us, the “historic connections and the modern bilateral relationship” between Britain and the United States—on the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution that severed those connections by force of arms, in defense of the proposition that all men are created equal.
In New York, the 11th Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons opens at UN Headquarters, where it will sit for nearly a month, attempting to salvage a regime that the U.S.-Israeli unprovoked bombardment of Iran—an NPT signatory in good standing, which has at no point been credibly demonstrated to have been pursuing a nuclear weapon—has already eviscerated.
In Islamabad, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi returns from Muscat to continue consultations with Pakistan’s leadership, before flying on to Moscow. Iran has made its position clear: there will be no negotiations under the gun of a U.S. naval blockade.
And in Washington, the city about to host the British king, federal investigators are processing the apprehension of Cole Tomas Allen, a 31-year-old Caltech-trained mechanical engineer with no criminal record, who Saturday night attempted to shoot his way into the very ballroom where the President of the United States and members of his Cabinet were dining.
What strange convergence, appearing on the eve of a British king’s lecture to the U.S. Congress!
Britain has come to Washington to celebrate an Anglo-American “special relationship” which has consisted of attempts to turn the United States against its revolutionary anti-imperial founding. Most recently, this has included dragging the United States into a war of aggression against Iran—a war whose combined effects, eight weeks in, include over a billion barrels of lost oil production, the Pentagon’s expenditure of more than 1,000 Tomahawks and up to 2,000 air-defense interceptors that will take six years to replace, extensive Iranian damage to U.S. military bases throughout the Gulf, the spread of fertilizer and food crises into already conflict-stricken regions of Africa and Asia, and the de facto collapse of the global nuclear non-proliferation regime.
Calls for a Dialogue of Civilizations are being heard. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, interviewed by Pakistan TV on Friday night—not long before Araghchi’s arrival—said that the only path forward is the construction of “a new security and development architecture which has to take into account the interests of every single country on the planet.” On April 15, the Schiller Institute and the Beijing-based Academy of Contemporary China and World Studies held a joint seminar in Berlin precisely on the subject of “Global Governance as well as Civilizational Exchange and Mutual Learning.” Pope Leo XIV, returning from Africa last Wednesday, denounced “the delusion of omnipotence” that has fueled the Iran war, and called for a “new culture of peace” to replace the default recourse to violence whenever conflicts arise.
For this new culture of peace to take hold, the world must act to ensure that the citizens of the United States—on the 250th anniversary of their independence from precisely the imperial power Charles III represents—act accordingly.
