When U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee tells Tucker Carlson that “it would be fine” for Israel to claim all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates, and fourteen governments issue a joint condemnation within 48 hours, and the administration’s own tariff proclamation simultaneously admits that the United States faces “fundamental international payments problems"—including the worst current account deficit since 2008, one of the most negative net international investment positions of any developed country—the gap between the fantasy world inhabited by American policymakers and the real conditions of life on this planet becomes impossible to ignore.
What is the actual policy of this administration? Huckabee invokes biblical title deeds to other people’s countries. The Pentagon flies B-52s along the First Island Chain in a provocation that sent Chinese fighters scrambling, while Japan and the U.S. hold “Extended Deterrence Dialogues"—a polite phrase for planning nuclear war. The tariff regime, struck down by a 6-3 U.S. Supreme Court majority, is replaced within hours by a stopgap measure under a statute never before invoked, which can only last 150 days and which required the President to formally declare the economy in crisis in order to justify it. This is not a strategy. It is bluster atop a crumbling foundation.
Meanwhile, the world that actually exists—the one where people need medicine, transport, electricity, and productive employment—continues to present both urgent needs and evidence that progress is possible. The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that trachoma, the leading infectious cause of blindness, is 94% closer to elimination than it was in 2002—a result of surgery, antibiotics, and clean water applied systematically across dozens of countries. Japan has retrieved rare earth minerals from 6 km beneath the Pacific. Construction is set to begin this year on an 830 km rail line connecting Zambia’s copperbelt to Angola’s Atlantic port of Lobito—infrastructure that will cut freight times from 45 days to 7.
These are not footnotes. They are proof of what is possible when nations commit to development rather than domination. The United States was once the country that understood this better than any other. It built the transcontinental railroad while fighting a civil war. It put human beings on the Moon within eight years of committing to do so. These were not acts of empire; they were acts of development—expressions of a national policy that understood the wealth of a nation to lie in the creative powers of its people, not in the territory it could seize or the financial instruments it could inflate.
In 1995, Lyndon LaRouche addressed a conference on the unfinished mission of Martin Luther King, a leader he considered to be morally qualified to be President of the United States. LaRouche described King’s unique quality: While others, “faced with a challenge from which many people would pragmatically have retreated, he moved ahead.” That is the quality now required of American citizens. Not passive spectatorship, not the comfortable cynicism that mistakes commentary for action, but the willingness to find within yourself, as LaRouche challenged his audience, “some of that quality of Martin…. If you can, if enough can, then we can win. And the time has come to win. And the time for preparation is growing very short.”
The question is whether enough Americans will rise to that challenge—whether a citizenry can be organized that demands an end to the march toward war against Iran and China, an end to the complicity in what has been done to Gaza, and a return to the tradition that built railroads, conquered diseases, and reached for the Moon. Without that vision, the people perish. With it, everything changes.
LaRouche independent candidate for U.S. President Diane Sare will offer her view of a vision for the future of the country and the world when she delivers her State of the Union address at 8 p.m. ET on Monday, Feb. 23.
