Helga Zepp-LaRouche, president of the Schiller Institute–Germany, participated in the 13th Beijing Xiangshan Forum, Sept. 15-17, a platform for international, expert dialogue on defense and security. Founded 20 years ago, the forum this year convened under the theme, “Build Consensus on Stability, Advance Security Governance Together.” The following is the text, as prepared, of her presentation to the panel titled, “Global Security Governance and China’s Role.”

China’s economic rise since Deng Xiaoping’s Reform and Opening Up policy—unprecedented in world history, whereby China managed to go from a relatively poor developing country to the strongest economic nation in terms of industrial production, export volume, and GDP by purchasing power and innovative capacity—by no means represents the oft-cited “Thucydides Trap,” but is, on the contrary, the most important strategic factor when it comes to preventing a global world war that would endanger the existence of the entire civilization. President Xi Jinping’s four global initiatives furthermore represent the only comprehensive framework proposal at the government level for how a new international security and development architecture can be created that can guarantee the interests of every nation on this planet. Everything will depend on actually realizing this new security architecture, in reality,—including all nations—in a timely manner.

Instead of understanding the end of the Cold War as an opportunity to establish a peace order for the 21st Century—as the Schiller Institute did in 1991 with the proposal of the Eurasian Land-Bridge—the neocon establishment of the Anglosphere began disregarding all promises made to President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev not to expand NATO one inch to the east, to build a unipolar world order with the help of precisely these NATO eastward expansions, regime changes, color revolutions, unilateral sanctions, weaponization of currencies, and interventionist wars. The experience of the impact of these policies, which cost millions of human lives, had an enormous blowback effect on the part of the states of the Global South, above all because China’s rise, occurring in parallel, offered these nations for the first time the chance to overcome the consequences of colonialism through industrialization.

Both NATO’s war against Russia in Ukraine and the unprovoked war of aggression by the U.S.A. and Israel against Iran are, regardless of all historical and ethnic particularities, an expression of the continuing attempt to maintain the dominance of the Western liberal world order under Anglo-American hegemony. The West has actually already lost both wars. In the case of Ukraine, the so-called “Coalition of the Willing,” with the continued sacrifice of Ukraine, has crossed countless Russian red lines and, according to leading politicians, is preparing for the unavoidably imminent war with Russia—the strongest nuclear power, mind you—which is supposed to result in a “strategic defeat of Russia.”

In an openly demonstrated provocation toward Russia’s nuclear doctrine, which states that any aggression by a non-nuclear state, with the participation or support of a nuclear power, is considered a joint attack and will result in Russia’s use of a nuclear response, members of the British Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) were bragging that Ukrainian MICH-2000 drones were systematically knocking out Russian Tu-95 strategic bombers—part of the Russian nuclear triad—at Engels-2 Airbase, which was previously regarded as untouchable.

Iran, through its resilience—completely underestimated by the U.S.A. and Israel—has lastingly put the previous security architecture in Southwest Asia out of operation: A “middle power” has shown the limits of the “strongest” military power, the U.S.A., and of another very strong military power.

Elbridge Colby, Undersecretary for Policy in the U.S. Department of War, demanded at the beginning of this month that the threshold for a nuclear war and the use of tactical nuclear weapons be lowered, which brought the long-running debate in U.S. military circles about the winnability of an allegedly limitable nuclear war into the broad public.

Given the danger of escalation of these two theaters of war to the nuclear level, the warnings of Dmitri Medvedev, Deputy Chairman of Russia’s Security Council, must be taken seriously, that the West has brought the world to the brink of nuclear apocalypse, in which all of humanity can be annihilated.

In the Global South, which would likewise be annihilated in the event of a nuclear war, the view is widespread that the collective West will not agree to a global solution such as that proposed in China’s four global initiatives, which, with regard to the above, amounts to a resignation to the end of humanity.

To overcome this danger, it is urgent and indispensable that the broad population in the European nations, (and the Commonwealth states), and the U.S.A. be informed about the real strategic danger and about the way out shown by China—which is currently not the case due to the dominant narratives in the mainstream media. Since these media report virtually nothing even about events such as the recent Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Bishkek, the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, and the BRICS summit in New Delhi, a forum must be created in which the voice of the Global Majority warns urgently and unmistakably of the danger threatening civilization and presents the new paradigm of a shared future of humanity, so that it comes realistically before the eyes of every single citizen.

China has already successfully demonstrated that, with win-win cooperation, the nations of the Global South have a more advantageous option than that based on security cooperation without development in a U.S.-dominated unipolar or even multipolar world order. Now the historical moment has come in which the concealing of one’s own strength—or “continue to hide your strength and bide your time, while actively doing what needs to be done” (tāo guāng yǎng huì, 韜光養晦)—must be powerfully replaced by an optimistic, peaceful future perspective for all nations in cooperation with China and the Global Majority.

I am convinced that it will win over the majority of people in the West as well for the idea of the One Humanity, if they can clearly recognize the available options!