Things are not going well for the neocons and oligarchs in Wall Street and the City of London. As the U.S. and Israeli war in Southwest Asia stumbles on, combined with the new forms of economic warfare being waged against any nation deemed to be an “enemy,” these policies are visibly reaching the end of their effectiveness. It seems almost as if with each passing day another shoe drops in the increasingly rapid disintegration of their post-Cold War unipolar order—though what the alternative which will replace has yet to be determined.
The latest in this series of failures is now being experienced by U.S. “ally” Saudi Arabia, a large portion of whose oil export capacity has just been shut down due to the U.S.’ reckless actions. Yemen’s Houthis now have significant control over the Bab el-Mandeb Strait in the Red Sea, and have announced a blockade of any Saudi-linked vessels. Then, as of late last week, Iraqi resistance forces severely damaged Saudi Arabia’s East-West Crude Oil Pipeline—which had recently become a major lifeline following Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz. With gas and diesel prices soaring and no end to the conflict in sight, it is clear to all that the Trump administration has not only sparked a growing conflict across this region, but it has caused a cascading crisis in the world economy that will take years to reverse.
Oil jumped to over $110 a barrel on Sep. 14, while 10-year U.S. Treasury rates soared past 5% for the first time since 2023. Trump and George Soros-buddy Scott Bessent are desperately seeking to assure voters and investors that all will soon be fixed, but no one seems to be buying it.
Adding to its military and economic failures, the U.S. policy of imperial intimidation is also having the opposite effect than what was intended, as can be seen in the recently-concluded BRICS summit in New Delhi. This year’s BRICS Summit showed that the group is increasingly unified, and even countries like India and China that have strained relations are becoming closer. Despite the many differences among its members, the BRICS Joint Declaration unanimously denounced the policy of sanctions and the operations against Ibero-America, in a clear gesture toward the U.S. Iran and Russia—often claimed to be isolated on the world stage—were granted central roles at the gathering, while major advances toward establishing non-Western payment systems and more independent trade routes were made. And the BRICS New Development Bank, up until now hamstrung as a result of its being tethered to the U.S. dollar and thus obligated to observe Western sanctions against Russia, now appears likely to move in a different direction.
But before assuming that this situation is a linear process, and can be explained as simply being between the “good guys” and the “bad guys,” think again. As Friedrich Schiller said, the establishment of a true system of political freedom among peoples is “the most perfect of all forms of art,” because its medium is the necessarily free—and creative—human being. The challenge the world is confronting must not be reduced to a simple equation, but rather uplifted to the true nature of what it involves.
As Lyndon LaRouche posed the challenge in his 2004 work “The Coming Eurasian World":
“The principle of the sovereign nation-state republic cannot be reborn from a Xerox machine, or built under the guidance of stolen secret diagrams; it must be grown up from a living seed, as any other living organism. The knowledge of that principle must be developed within each existing national culture, that from the universal principle common to all human nature. That principle appears as like a seed of the discovery of universal knowledge which exists within each member of a national language-culture. The development of this seed, within the process of that culture, is the only true basis for the principle of national sovereignty, the only true basis for the modern sovereign form of nation-state republic.”
Far from some a-priori formula of “international relations” as lectured by the U.S. State Department, the principles of dialogue and statecraft must be discovered by those working to create the future relations among the nations of the world. Toward this end, last week’s September 11 memorial concert, “Beethoven’s Ninth—A Pathway Out of War,” should be required viewing for anyone interested in being a part of that effort.
