Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche appeared Aug. 20 on Pakistan Television’s “Experts Corner,” on a panel examining the deepening U.S.-Iran stalemate.
Asked about President Trump’s announcement of the “most crushing economic operation ever taken against any country,” she said she agreed with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi that it was an attempt to divert attention from the economic and financial problems Trump faces at home—noting that U.S. federal debt had passed $40 trillion that same week. Iran has not lost this war, she said, and the United States has certainly not won it.
She brought out the alternative to the war policy: the Schiller Institute’s Extended Oasis Plan, which treats the region from India to the Mediterranean and from the Caucasus to the Gulf as a single area to be developed through economic corridors—extending the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and connecting the North-South Transport Corridor, including the Rasht-Astara line in northwestern Iran—so that southwest Asia becomes again “the hub between Asia, Africa and Europe, as it used to be during the time of the ancient Silk Road.” She pointed to China’s record of greening deserts in Xinjiang and the northwest, transforming “territories the size of Germany” into forests and arable land.