At the end of his press conference on Monday, a reporter asked Scott Bessent why, if “Operation Economic Outcast” is the greatest financial offensive ever marshalled against an adversary, the sanctions do not take effect immediately.
The Secretary of the Treasury answered: “Well, we are giving everyone the opportunity there to remedy bad behavior. Why would I want to blow up the global financial system?”
He is telling the world what his financial weapon would actually do—not to Iran, but to the globe. Moments earlier he had threatened not Iran but everyone who trades with Iran: “they should expect that they will leave the dollar system.”
Helga Zepp-LaRouche told associates on Monday that Bessent and his fellow sanctioneers are doing this because they have no military options left. Five months of war did not defeat Iran; American stockpiles of missiles and interceptors are low; and Iran has routes Washington cannot close—overland to China through Central Asia, across the Caspian to Russia, through Pakistani ports.
Canada answered Washington’s tariffs with duties on 700 American products, while conceding it will spend more supporting its exporters than it collects—and both governments left oil, gas, potash, and minerals alone, because both know what would follow.
This is an empire that can still threaten and can no longer act.
What is being prepared to replace it, by the same people, is worse: a neo-feudalism in which the power of the state is dismantled and private structures under billionaire control take its place. Their model of civilization would be cities in which the rich live on the hill behind walls and private security, while everyone else lives in slums.
Now the other half of the week. In Moscow, Putin received India’s Foreign Minister carrying a letter from Modi, and singled out fertilizer shipments—"we are doing everything to resolve this issue for Indian farmers.” In Beijing, Ajit Doval met Wang Yi for the twenty-fifth round of border talks. Xi may take as many as four hundred officials to New Delhi for the BRICS meeting next month. In Tehran, Oman’s foreign minister put forward a plan to clear the Strait of Hormuz of mines.
There are two ideas of security available. NATO rests on the absolute kind: the safety of its members secured against everyone outside it. The Mecca agreement, Zepp-LaRouche noted, carries a cooperative security clause—the security of one cannot come at the expense of another—with heavy emphasis on joint development. Bangladesh now says it wants in. And it is a premise with evidence behind it: The Nanjing study we reported Monday found the 146 countries that worked with the Belt and Road better off, their debts more payable rather than less.
What is missing is not more meetings. It is a higher level of order.
An open letter initiated by Jack Gilroy, Peter Kuznick, and Ivana Nikolić Hughes of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, co-signed by Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche and many others, asks Pope Leo XIV to convene the heads of state of the three principal nuclear powers—as John XXIII appealed to the powers to keep talking in October 1962. It is now on the front page of the Mexican Journalists Club’s site, and the Vatican’s Foreign Minister was with Lavrov on Tuesday and Putin’s foreign policy aide on Wednesday.
Signing it is the smallest part. The letter is also an instrument of education—most people who read only the mainstream press have no idea how close this has come. Make it succeed: put it in front of every legislator, editor, bishop, and neighbor you can reach, this week, while the channel is open. And bring them on Sept. 4 to the EIR roundtable on the bi-oceanic railway, which is what the higher order looks like when it is built.
The instruments of destruction have seized up in the hands of those holding them. Attempts to fire them would strike the whole world. The choice is not between order and disorder. Will we create a world of walled villas in the hills, or one where the security of one is not bought at the expense of another?
