This transcript appears in the November 17, 2017 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

Trump, Xi, and the New Opportunity
for Humanity

This is an edited transcript of Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s webcast of Nov. 9.

[Print version of this transcript]

Harley Schlanger: Hello, I’m Harley Schlanger from the Schiller Institute and I’d like to welcome you to this week’s webcast, featuring Schiller Institute Chairwoman Helga Zepp-LaRouche.

Obviously, the lead topic for today, is the historic visit of President Donald Trump to China, as part of his extended visit to Asia. Now, if you’re looking for reporting on this in the Western media, forget it. Just look at some of the headlines—the Washington Post had a headline today, “How Will China Play Trump?” The New York Times featured an Obama Deputy National Security Advisor, Tony Blinken—of Winken, Blinken and Nod—and Blinken had a comment, whose title was “Trump Ceding Global Leadership to China.” And you have the Democratic Senator from Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal coming out in a press conference, accusing Trump of “colluding” with China.

We really need to get a picture of what’s happening and its full strategic significance, and for that we turn to Helga Zepp-LaRouche.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: Hello. I think from what I know know today, which is the second day of what I would call an historic visit of President Trump to China—I think it is exactly what I expected would happen: That both sides know perfectly well that the future of mankind depends on the relationship between the United States and China, as the most important two nuclear powers and economic powers in the world. And I think it went very well. The statements by President Xi Jinping characterizing the meeting as a strategic new beginning, a mutually beneficial relationship of historic importance which can solve not only the problems of the two peoples, but of the whole world—I think this is absolutely to the point. And President Trump was very enthusiastic: He praised China and its great President, for whom, according to his Tweet, he has very warm feelings—this is really good. Because if the two Presidents understand each other and can make it work, then I fully agree, there is no problem in the world which cannot be tackled.

View full size Xinhua/Rao Aimin China President Xi Jinping (left), in a moment of the grand ceremony to welcome U.S. President Donald Trump on the square outside the East Gate of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, Nov. 9, 2017.

I think this is a gigantic step forward, and I think it’s also interesting that Trump, who has spoken a lot about the trade gap between the United States and China, said nevertheless that he does not blame China for it, because he understands that President Xi has done everything he could for the maximum benefit of his own country and people. Instead, Trump blamed previous U.S. Administrations for having allowed this trade gap now to have come about. And remember, the Chinese have always wanted to import much more from the United States, but the previous administrations, which pursued a confrontation, containment, and encirclement policy towards China, refused to sell many of the products which China had wanted to buy, with the pretext that they had “dual use.” They claimed they could be used both for civilian and military purpose—but of course, you can use almost anything for either peaceful or not so peaceful purposes, depending on the intent of your policy.

View full size Xinhua/Li Xueren President Xi (2nd from left), his wife Peng Liyuan (1st on left), and U.S. President Trump and his wife Melania Trump watch a performance at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, that was part of the grand ceremony to welcome the Trumps Nov. 9, 2017.

I think this is very good. They concluded, I think, somewhere in the range of $250 billion in deals, ranging from infrastructure, transport, and energy, to agricultural exports from the United States to China—just a very wide variety of economic deals. They also decided to not only improve and strengthen the relationship between the two Presidents, but to increase the cooperation on all levels, and to strengthen the four permanent dialogues which had been arranged in Florida in April, one of them dealing with economic cooperation. And I think all of the basis has been laid to continue to develop this relationship to the benefit, not only of China and the United States, but really for the whole world.

They agreed fully on the need to solve the North Korea problem, on which they want to work together, and Trump also expressed his confidence that with the help of China, and Russia, as he said earlier, that the problem can be brought to a positive solution.

While I have not seen any direct mention of the United States working with the Belt and Road Initiative as such, I know that that is the mindset of President Xi, and I also think that coming out of the 19th Congress of the Communist Party of China, where Xi Jinping has set the goal of building a “community of a shared future of mankind” by 2050—that this trip by President Trump has been a gigantic step in the right direction. And I think the Chinese really know how to make conscious to visitors the 5,000-year history of China, and that Trump was really treated very well. They had a one-day or several hour special tour of the Forbidden City, which was closed to the public, and they performed three Beijing operas, and showed him the restoration of ancient artifacts. So Trump was very, very happy, and he sent a message to Xi Jinping saying that he and Melania will never forget this experience. So I think this is very positive from a human standpoint.

And these journalists should just be ashamed of themselves. They are so cynical that nothing ever moves their hearts and minds, and probably these minds are dried out like old prunes anyway—so I wouldn’t worry about what they’re writing. I think these two presidents have made a very positive step, moving human history forward.

Schlanger: It’s also significant that there is a group of businessmen who are part of the delegation that will be involved in meetings, and I think that’s where we may hear later, more of the specifics on the Belt and Road connection with the Chinese.

Before Trump came to China, he was in South Korea and Japan. I wonder if you have some thoughts about those meetings and their significance?

Zepp-LaRouche: I think they were significant, but I think the upcoming meeting in Vietnam is going to be more important. Trump may meet with President Putin tomorrow, and I think that meeting will also be very important. Because President Putin just wrote an article ahead of that APEC summit, where he said that what will be discussed at the APEC meeting, in the context of the already-ongoing integration of the Belt and Road Initiative with the Eurasian Economic Union, is the Russian presentation of a major plan for the development of the Far East of Russia. This will be a national priority for the 21st Century, where many infrastructure projects are to be built, but also industrial parks and other investments; and he emphasized the positive cooperation among Russia, China, Japan, and the Koreas.

View full size White House/Andrea Hanks Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (left) greets President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump on Nov. 6, 2017, on the Japan leg of Trump’s Asia tour.

I think what is clearly emerging, is more and more an integrated new economic system, where basically it is very clear, that as long as the Europeans, or at least the EU and the German government, remain in their stand-offish attitude—it is as one businessman said recently, “if they don’t jump onto the train, then they will see the lights of the caboose leaving the station, and they’ll be left behind.”

The center of strategic importance is clearly moving towards Asia right now. And hopefully this U.S.-Chinese relationship will continue to expand.

View full size White House/Andrea Hanks Above, President Trump (center rear, waving) participates with other leaders of the region in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in Da Nang, Vietnam, Nov. 10-11, 2017. Below, President Trump at the APEC summit talking to President Xi (right), Viet Nam President Tran Dai Quang, (2nd from left) and Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong (3rd from left).

View full size White House/Andrea Hanks

Schlanger: And one other thing I’d like you to comment on, I’m sure it’s very interesting to you, given the importance that you put on the cultural exchange and the understanding of other cultures, is President Trump’s [six-year-old] granddaughter singing Chinese songs to them on video. Did you get a chance to see that, Helga?

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes, yes. I think this was very sweet, and obviously while the little girl was not there, her video was presented, and I think it expressed a spirit of profound appreciation for Mandarin culture, and I think it was very well taken.

Schlanger: Now, when you talk about the journalists with their nonsense in their coverage of this, and attempting to keep the real story out, you are seeing some breaks with the whole Russia-gate story. And of course, we’ve been covering this very extensively, but in the last couple of days there was the report that Bill Binney, the former NSA technical expert, met with Mike Pompeo of the CIA at Donald Trump’s urging; Pompeo talked with him, at Trump’s urging, to discuss the fact that there was actually no Russian hacking. What do you make of that?

‘Russiagate’ Lies Exposed

Zepp-LaRouche: I think this is very important. It clearly shows that President Trump is fully aware of the revelations of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), of which William Binney is a member, and that means that President Trump is also not afraid of Russia-gate. Because by asking Pompeo, the current head of the CIA, to meet with Binney, that is now on the record, so to speak, and now the investigation which the FBI never did, obviously has to follow. And the key argument which Binney made previously at our event in New York and on other occasions, is that there is forensic evidence that there was no hacking, but rather this material was downloaded on site to a storage device, because the speed with which it occurred is four times higher than you could get from the Internet. And the VIPS presented this documentation at a Schiller Institute event in New York a couple of months ago. That will now be investigated, and they will come to exactly the same conclusion, that there was no hacking, and with that I think the whole Russia “spook” story will just vanish.

View full size CSPAN CIA Director Mike Pompeo

That will liberate Trump to carry out policy as a President should do. The whole purpose of the Russia-gate, was to prevent him from making a change in the attitude towards Russia and China. I think this is clearly backfiring.

View full size dd/Tim Pierce Donna Brazile

Then, you have all these investigations now, which we mentioned last week, with the Donna Brazile book, saying very clearly that Hillary did steal the election, in a way. In a certain sense, this whole story can turn totally the other way: There are the ongoing investigations in the Senate and in the Congress on the British role [in interfering in the 2016 election], which is now becoming much more prominent in the discussion—that U.S. intelligence services from the Obama period used foreign intelligence against a U.S. Presidential opponent—I mean, that’s more than “opposition research,” it’s potentially something very criminal. And that may all come out now.

Schlanger: Two other footnotes on that: One is that Binney referred to Russia-gate as “mindless drivel,” and if you think about it, that’s what the American people and the people in Western Europe have been fed for a full year now—mindless drivel.

The other thing that I think is interesting, is the interconnection between the Hillary Clinton exposé from Donna Brazile and the whole Fusion GPS story, because this story is now coming out of all the interconnection, leading back to London. So, as you’ve been pointing out, it looks as though this whole thing will come to the forefront soon.

Zepp-LaRouche: There is another interesting thing, which I think people should reflect upon. Because all these accusations against Putin as a dictator, against Xi Jinping as a “new Mao,” and all of these insinuations that these countries are not democratic and are dictatorships—well, look at the Democratic Party, and I emphasize Democratic Party—it now is established that the DNC picked their candidate, Hillary Clinton, one year before the national convention, and then manipulated the whole electoral process in such a way that Bernie Sanders, who probably would have won against Trump,—or at least there was a good chance that this could have happened—was sidelined, and obviously betrayed.

What does that say about “democracy”? I think people should reflect on the fact that this present party system, as it has developed with the very large influence of Wall Street in it—given the fact that people need $5 million, $10 million in order to run for a Congressional seat—that system clearly is not working. And I think it is time to change a lot of things, to change not only the set of relations among nations internationally, but also to go back to a discussion like that in the Federalist Papers in the United States, for example: Can a people govern itself? I think this is a very important question, and I think this democracy is just a joke. The Democratic Party did their very best to prove exactly that.

Schlanger: We’re also learning more and more about how this was an operation to take money from the state parties, and that’s one of the reasons the Democrats have been losing every race until recently. Interesting, also, I think, just to make a note of this, is that Donna Brazile referred to “three titanic egos,” those of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, stripping the core out of the Democratic Party, and I think that’s what most people see.

Now, Helga, the other thing I think is really crucial that we need to hear your thoughts on, is what’s happening in the Middle East right now. As is typically the case, when there are developments like the Trump-Xi Jinping meeting, the enemy is operating elsewhere to cause serious disruptions. We see the events unfolding in Lebanon, with a possible Saudi-Israeli involvement in a war in Lebanon and the ongoing events in Yemen. You just participated in a conference a couple days ago via video, in Yemen, about the Chinese Silk Road extension to that part of the Arabian Peninsula. Why don’t you give us a little bit of a report on that, and what your thoughts are about this very dangerous situation emerging in the Middle East?

Zepp-LaRouche: It is very dangerous because just at the point when the ISIS forces were as good as defeated in Syria and Iraq, you had this operation, obviously run by the young Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, where, when Prime Minister Saad Hariri of Lebanon was on a visit in Saudi Arabia, conveniently U.S. intelligence—at least that’s what some Israeli reports are saying—provided Saudi Arabia with the information that there was an assassination plot against Hariri, so he resigned and stayed in Saudi Arabia. And that naturally aggravates the situation in Lebanon, which is very tense anyway, because this country has as many refugees as it has citizens, which means a totally tense situation as it is.

Then there was this strange incident about a missile, shot from Yemen into Saudi Arabia—now that is very strange, because what would be the purpose of one single missile? Naturally, the Saudis claim that it was from Iran via Hezbollah, and that is now heating up the whole situation. The worst thing about it, is that the Saudis blockaded all ports and entry points into Yemen. This has dramatically worsened the situation in Yemen, which is already one of absolute danger of starvation of millions of people—so that even the UN Human Rights Commission and others came out and said there is an immediate danger of seven million people dying of hunger and epidemics, cholera, and similar things in Yemen, and that they demand that all ports and other such routes be opened immediately and the blockade be ended.

I think this is something which must get international attention—because this is genocide taking place before the world public—and this absolutely must end.

We should not forget that the dossier which we published about Robert Mueller, which details that the apparatus which went after my husband and his organization in the ’80s and ’90s, is the same apparatus which is covering up for 9/11, and is the apparatus which is still deploying against President Trump. And these are absolutely forces similar to those behind this operation against Yemen.

All this hangs together, and requires absolute, important investigation. People have to really get mobilized, so this genocide is stopped.

Schlanger: And in spite of the desperate situation in Yemen, it seems from the report I saw—the conference you addressed a couple of days ago—there’s tremendous spirit. Again, the optimism of the New Silk Road is coming into that country, isn’t it?

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes, yes. There is a very delightful reading group. People have been studying the report which we published, The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge, for quite some time. That obviously includes the extension of the New Silk Road into Yemen. And people are really taking this as the hope for their future.

I think it would be very good if people in other countries around the world would do likewise, because there is this alternative plan! And the chances are that it will lead to cooperation among Russia, China, and the United States, in rebuilding the region, getting Iran and Saudi Arabia to the table and overcoming this terrible conflict between the Sunnis and the Shi’ites, which has been played by the British for a very long time; and that we move to a different era of mankind. I think this is the imperative demand of the hour.

Schlanger: And just to come back to the overriding theme of the U.S.-Russia-China relationship, I guess we’ll see that again in action, with the meetings still to come in Vietnam and the Philippines, that President Trump is going to have on his trip.

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes. I think that that will be tomorrow, so people should pay attention to this summit, because I think major things will occur there.

Second Chance for Mankind

Schlanger: I just wanted to bring another thing to the attention of our listeners: This has been a week of anniversaries, and I think it’s important to get a good, competent historical perspective of what’s happened. You had just a couple days ago, the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, which has a lot to do with the British Empire’s destruction of the Middle East and the ongoing activity there. There was the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution yesterday. And then today, is a very important day in Germany: It’s the 28th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and you were very active in that period. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that the idea of the Silk Road grew out of the effects of the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the potential with the reunification of Germany.

I’d like you to say something about that, because you are uniquely situated to put this history together in a way that makes sense for people.

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes, that is absolutely true. My husband, Lyndon LaRouche, had forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1984. He then said that if they stuck to their then-existing policies of the Ogarkov Plan and similar things, and to primitive accumulation against their own economy, they would collapse in five years. And that’s exactly what started to happen with the fall of the Wall. Then he forecast in 1988, that the Comecon would collapse soon—he made that prognosis in ’88, one year before it happened—and that there would be soon German unification with Berlin as the capital, and that a unified Germany should start to develop the countries of the Comecon, with modern technology and infrastructure. He proposed the first such country should be Poland.

View full size EIRNS/Dean Andromidas Lyndon LaRouche at his press conference in West Berlin, Oct. 22, 1988.

Therefore, when the Wall came down, it was not really a surprise for us. As a matter of fact, we were the only ones prepared for that occasion, and we developed the idea of a Productive Triangle of Paris-Berlin-Vienna, which was a highly industrialized area of the size in territory of, let’s say, Japan. We proposed it should be upgraded through infrastructure, maglev trains, HTR nuclear reactors, the Sänger project for sub-orbital Mach 1-2 planes. We proposed that, and we were ready when the Soviet Union then collapsed—as a matter of fact, we had that report ready in January of 1990, about six weeks after the fall of the Wall.

View full size Fall of the Berlin Wall, 1989.

This would have been a peace plan at that point. But as we know, the powers that be, the neo-cons in the United States, Margaret Thatcher, Mitterrand in France—they all had their own geopolitical reasons to prevent that. But when the Soviet Union collapsed in ’91, we just extended the Productive Triangle concept to the Eurasian Land-Bridge, proposing economic transportation development corridors along the Trans-Siberian Railway, and along the old Silk Road. What is happening now with China and the Belt and Road Initiative could have happened in 1991.

It didn’t happen. I published documentation about the developments from that time, which is called “The Lost Chance of 1989,” because that opportunity was not used. People remember that “shock therapy” was imposed on Russia, in order to turn Russia from a superpower into a Third World, raw materials-exporting country, which was what happened in the Yeltsin period. And so this entire decade of the ’90s was one of genocide for Russia, and people have written books about that, including Prof. Sergey Glazyev and others.

When Putin came in, he started to undo that, and that is why he attracted so much hatred from people who had wanted to put Russia into a corner. He is now doing a lot to undo that, and what I said earlier about the development of the Russian Far East, is a very important component of it.

In a certain sense, this is the second chance. This time I think the possibility that it will be used to establish a true peace order for the 21st century, ending the period of geopolitics, is very close. If the relationship which was clearly brought forward in a gigantic way between Xi Jinping and Trump, if that consolidates as the relationship between China, Russia, and hopefully the United States as part of that triangle, then maybe India will change its mind, and maybe even the Europeans will get onboard. We can enter a completely new set of relationships among countries.

And I invite all of you, our viewers, to become an active part of this. The Schiller Institute is a membership think tank. You can become an active member in the Schiller Institute, by contributing research, by doing all kinds of things. You can actually help to bring such a new era of civilization about, by joining us: So I want to invite you do exactly that, to celebrate the moment.

Schlanger:I think you made very clear to people, how devastating losing that opportunity of 1989 has been—with the 28 years of degeneration in the United States, the wars, the terrorism and so on—we have to take this chance. And this is where the optimism comes from, that there are countries that are already doing that.

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes. It will sink in, that that situation is there, and if the Russia-gate in the United States stops, I think the world can become better. And even in the United States, people can join this hopeful perspective. And I think they need it so badly, because the infrastructure is in terrible shape, the drug epidemic is there; in Europe you have a situation where many youth, especially in the south of Europe, have neither a job nor an education. But with the New Silk Road, people have a future and a perspective to really end poverty, to end the miserable life for so many, and focus on the common aims of mankind. There are so many riches to be discovered, so many discoveries to be made. It’s about time that we give mankind an order which is worthy of the character of the human species.

Schlanger: Well, the next few days will be very important, and I think it’s very important that people join us again next week to get the update on the completion of President Trump’s trip‘ and the implications for us in the West.

So Helga, thank you very much for joining us, and for all of you listening, we’ll see you next week.

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes, until next week.