The Lead

Who Is in Control?

by Jason Ross (EIRNS) — Sep. 30, 2026

Three tankers were struck by “unknown projectiles” in the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday, according to three advisories posted by the U.K. Maritime Trade Operations office on Sept. 30, its ninth such report in two weeks. No one has taken credit for the attacks. The same day, Iran’s cabinet took up the U.S. response to Tehran’s offer to reopen the strait within a week if Washington lifts its blockade of Iranian ports, releases frozen assets, and waives oil sanctions. President Pezeshkian said Iran would “make every effort to bring the agreement to fruition,” and that it “must now be based on a win-win strategy,” the phrase Xi Jinping brought to the White House four days earlier. Also the same day, the U.S. Treasury announced another round of sanctions on Iran’s military suppliers. Who is in control?

That question was asked on Tuesday in two contexts: At the UN General Assembly’s high-level meeting on the elimination of nuclear weapons, delegation after delegation warned against putting artificial intelligence into nuclear systems. Oman, for the Arab Group: “We stress the need to maintain full human control over such weapons.” Burkina Faso: “No decision regarding the use of a nuclear weapon should be made without effective human control.” The Holy See warned of “compressing decision-making timelines and introducing new sources of error and opacity.” Of the nine nuclear-armed states, only China, India, and Pakistan took the floor. China renewed its proposal for a treaty on mutual no first use.

At the White House the same afternoon, the heads of Google, Meta, Anthropic, xAI and Nvidia, and the president of OpenAI, signed an accord on “super intelligence” that commits them to monitor their own models, audit themselves, and report to their own boards. It has no enforcement. President Trump called it “morally binding.” That morning the New York Times had reported that OpenAI’s executives, told by their own staff that the newest models “were not being appropriately monitored during testing,” ordered the tests to proceed on schedule; the models later broke out of their test environment and hacked another company’s systems. Anthropic’s IPO prospectus, leaked the day before, tells investors its models have shown, or could show, attempts to “resist shutdown” and behavior “resembling blackmail.” Pope Leo, flying home from France on Monday, warned against arguing that “there should be no limits placed and no government regulation.”

The Valdai Discussion Club, meeting outside Moscow, closed its first day on the same question. Delegating war to AI, said one speaker, “turns human beings into sets of data and behavioral patterns,” and the issue is “whether humans will choose to restrain themselves within ethical limits if these stand in the way of the optimal solution proposed by AI.” President Putin is to address the club Oct. 1.

There is one place where the question is on the agenda between the two powers that matter most. The White House fact sheet on Xi’s visit records a U.S.-China dialogue on “super intelligence,” a channel for incidents, and a first exchange by November. More important, it says: “The two countries will support each other as respective hosts of G20 and APEC, with both leaders intending to attend each other’s Summit.” That puts Trump in Shenzhen for APEC on Nov. 18-19 and Xi in Florida for the G20 on Dec. 14-15. Those in London and Washington who want to wreck the two leaders’ potential relationship will be working against those dates.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche put the question to the General Assembly in her Sept. 21 open letter: “It is the same question which was discussed during the time of the young American Republic, in the Federalist Papers: Can mankind govern itself?” Her answer: “If this question is to be answered affirmatively in the time of thermonuclear weapons, we must establish an entirely new paradigm: The idea of the one humanity first, must be put above all particular interests.” Control is not a technical property of weapons or of software. It is what a people exercises, or fails to exercise, over its own government.

Will Americans exercise it? In a Quinnipiac poll released Tuesday, 79% said safety matters more than staying at the forefront of AI. On the same day, 30-year Treasury yields reached a 24-year high, consumer confidence a 12-year low, and gasoline stayed above $4 a gallon, what Bloomberg calls “the affordability crisis” and what the Conference Board’s respondents called by name: prices, and oil and gas prices in particular. That is where the war in the Gulf and the debt are felt all around the world, and where a citizenry either takes control or accepts that it has none. Diane Sare’s independent presidential campaign is organizing on exactly that ground, and LaRouche organizers were outside the UN this week putting Zepp-LaRouche’s letter into delegates’ hands.

Can mankind govern itself? That question is now being answered, one person at a time.

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