The following is an edited transcript of the April 9, 2025 Schiller Institute dialogue between Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute, and U.S. Ambassador Jack Matlock. A career diplomat, having served as Ambassador to the Soviet Union during the period of its collapse (1987-1991), Matlock provides a unique perspective on U.S.-Russia relations from that period to the present—as well as insights on other crucial matters. Subheads have been added. The video is available here.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: Good day. Let me welcome our audience, and especially our guest today, Ambassador Jack Matlock, who is one of those outstanding eyewitnesses who has been in crucial positions at key branching points in history—namely the end of the Cold War.

You were the Ambassador of the United States in Moscow at that time and participated in many of the crucial discussions which really laid the basis for an incredible chance in history, which in my view—and I think you share that to a certain extent—was lost. But before we come to this period, which is very relevant for what is happening today, let us start by hearing what you think about the turmoil taking place on financial markets right now as a reaction to the measures by U.S. President Donald Trump, who has put tariffs on imports from every country on the planet. It seems chaos is developing, and there are very few people right now in the whole world—including in governments—who have any idea where this is going.

Do you think President Trump has a clear-cut plan? Does he have a clear idea of how to execute that plan to reach whatever his goal may be?

Ambassador Jack Matlock: Thank you for inviting me to take part in this discussion.

No, I think that President Trump is completely deluded in the way he is proceeding to use the tariffs. I think he is proceeding from incorrect assumptions, and the advisor that is possibly urging him to do this thinks it will bring back widespread manufacturing to the United States. I think that probably is not going to happen, and instead it is disrupting much of the world’s trade, and the extent of these things is now putting much of the economy in turmoil.

The value of our stocks now has been decreasing for the last four or five days, and the stock markets just opened recently today here, and they’re continuing their downward slide. So, I don’t think this is going to work, and probably the effects are going to be felt not only by the countries to which the tariffs are directed, but by American consumers. So, I think their policies are bad for everybody.

Now, some say he only wants to negotiate lower tariffs and more trade. Well, we’ll see. But the extent of these, I think, is so totally unreasonable that they’re going to hurt a lot of people. I think you’re going to see in the United States increasing opposition to them. For the average consumer, it may be a few months before they feel it, but certainly some of our workers— Like automobile factories are already laying off workers because of the tariffs on parts and other goods that would be coming in. I think we’ll see, but certainly I would say these have been a very destructive force so far.

Zepp-LaRouche: It seems that this is already affecting the financial markets a lot. For example, many banks are starting to unwind their derivatives positions. Given the fact that the trans-Atlantic financial system is so over-indebted, and that you have a derivatives exposure that some experts are estimating to be $2 quadrillion in outstanding derivatives contracts, once this [unwinding] process starts, we could see a real big financial crash. That is my question, because let’s say Trump wants to undo globalization. Arguments could be made that there is a legitimate reason for doing so, because the globalization as it has developed over the last decades has made some people more rich—more millionaires, more billionaires—and many, many people more poor all over the world. So, a correction of this system is desirable, one could argue.

But my biggest concern is that you can’t just bully people all over the world; pushing people. It may be Trump’s famous style, but I think the proper way to have done it would have been to call for a big international conference, like a New Bretton Woods conference, and discuss the principles of how this reorganization should be done. And then put the details to a taskforce and expert groups and work it all out in goodwill cooperation. But that doesn’t seem to be what Trump is up to. What do you think?

Matlock: No, that is definitely not Trump’s style. And as I said, I think this is going to backfire. But how soon he is forced to change—if he is forced to change—we simply don’t know. So, I think there are a lot of uncertainties ahead. But certainly his style is one to shake things up, and to show that he’s the one in charge. He is clearly an authoritarian-type leader, and because of our very convoluted politics over the last actual decade or more in the United States, he did win the election. But the fact is, neither of our political parties gave us a candidate who was dedicated to peace. And peace is important for us and for the entire world. Instead of continuing wars in various places, we should have been trying to dampen them down.

We’ll have to see how these various things work out, but certainly on the economic front, we Americans should remember that we are now running a deficit of more than $36 trillion. How much longer the dollar can retain its value with such a heavy debt load, and given Trump’s plans to cut taxes and the fact that inflation is going to continue, I see that the U.S. debt may continue to rise. It’s already much too high. So that, I think, is something that is waiting to bring not only the United States, but the world, into an economic recession and crisis of sorts.

A Return to Normalcy with Russia

Zepp-LaRouche: When President Trump came in, many people were extremely hopeful when he started to show signs that he wanted to normalize relations with Russia; this was the most important thing. It was like, at the end of the previous Administration, we had come dangerously close to a real escalation because of the U.S. long-range missiles being launched into the territory of Russia and so forth. We were sitting on a volcano. So, in the beginning, it looked as if Trump was serious about having peace with Russia; that’s naturally not to be done in 24 hours and maybe not even in weeks, but there was a chance.

I think that chance still exists, but in the meantime, many other things have complicated the picture. For example, Trump had promised not only to end all wars, but not to start new ones. But he started the bombing campaign against Yemen; there is still the dark cloud of what will happen with Iran. So, I would like to hear your thoughts about that, and the fact that the Europeans—at least some of the Europeans, not all of them, but the Northern Europeans—want to form a so-called “coalition of the willing” to keep the war in Ukraine going. This is unbelievable! Volkswagen is once again producing armaments which are to be used against Russia. This is only 80 years after the end of the Second World War. So, I think we have never had a world picture—at least in my lifetime—which was so complicated and fraught with both hopes and dangers. But don’t you think that Trump should be encouraged to go ahead with this peace with Russia? I think that is the most important element in the whole picture.

Matlock: Yes, I do think it’s very important for Europe and the United States, and most of all Ukraine, that there be an end to this war, and a settlement that will bring some stability. I think the increasing armaments in Western Europe are almost tragic. Because, first of all, they’re unnecessary; Russia does not threaten the countries that are now in NATO. And the problem has been that we’ve been treating a very unrepresentative government in Ukraine as if it were a NATO member, which has been a red line for Russia for decades. Yet what we have done by sending arms in—we and our European allies—is the most we would be required to do if it were a NATO member. The Russian leadership has been making it clear for over 20 years that this is an absolute red line, sending Western armaments into Ukraine, or, I would say, [intervening in] Belarus. Frankly, we should understand that, because our own countries—particularly the United States—would not tolerate armed bases in countries next to it—Mexico or Canada or the Caribbean—armed by some foreign power.

I think to say that the war in Ukraine was unprovoked is simply a misrepresentation of the facts. And now in order to settle it, it cannot be settled by the establishment of borders that were created by Stalin and Hitler. We should not forget that these borders, in bringing what is now Western Ukraine and uniting it with Ukraine, were a creation of Stalin and Hitler. And why we want to have Ukrainians die and have their country destroyed in order to defend the heritage of Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler boggles the mind. I just do not see it, and I can’t understand how both the United States and our European allies have been the victims of such a delusion that somehow Ukraine is entitled to all of those borders, regardless of what it does and in regard to its very large minority of Russian speakers. Because what happened over time was that they took away the cultural rights of these people. And let’s face it, much of the violence has been created by neo-Nazis who have all of the symbols and have put up monuments to some of the worst war criminals from World War II, who were involved in the execution of Jewish inhabitants in what was then eastern Poland but is now Western Ukraine.

So, it seems that European policies are historically myopic, and they forget the history of these problems and have tunnel vision. Because in looking at the past to the extent we do, you forget much of the relevant facts.

Consequences of Ignoring History

Zepp-LaRouche: I find it hard to understand how history can be forgotten—I don’t know if that’s the right English word—how much the Europeans have indeed totally shrugged off the memory of the history of 80 years ago. You said that Russia does not have the intent to conquer other European countries, which is right now the big narrative for why this militarization is being promoted. They don’t have the capacity to conquer the rest of Europe, and I don’t think they have the intention, because Russia has turned away from Europe and toward Asia, toward the BRICS. So, I cannot even see a motive, and I don’t see the capability for them to attack.

Nevertheless, this is the narrative, and there has now been a very important development which I think bears on that. That is the fact that the New York Times, maybe a week ago, had a 13,000-word article which was on a year-long investigation they did. They interviewed 300 people from many countries. The long and short of it is, that they admit that from mid-April 2022 onward, the entire Ukraine war was commanded, carried out, technically assisted, and so forth, from the U.S. military headquarters for Europe and Africa in Wiesbaden, Germany. They brought in top Ukrainian military leaders in plain clothes in mid-April 2022. The article then describes in great detail that practically the entire war was conducted by the Americans from Wiesbaden, and that the Ukrainians really had a very subordinate role; basically being the cannon fodder for this operation.

Now, this is a very important admission, because the whole narrative of NATO and these Northern Europeans is that this was an “unprovoked” war of aggression. If any journalist or commentator would doubt that, you are at this point in Europe in danger that you will be fined if you even question that narrative. And if you say that there was a prehistory to it going back to the NATO expansions— You mentioned that de facto we have a reverse Cuban Missile Crisis, because all of these offensive systems are very close to the Russian border. Some of these systems have a warning time of maybe six minutes to Moscow. Anybody who would look objectively at the situation would say it was not unprovoked.

So, what do you think is the consequence of this New York Times article? They still, in my view, have a certain amount of cover story, because they say the Americans did everything right. It was just that the Ukrainians didn’t obey the orders of the Americans properly, and that’s why the war was lost. I don’t think that quite fits the story either. But in my view, my sense of justice, if you don’t reintroduce truth in this debate, we cannot find a solution. Don’t you think it would be appropriate that all the journalists, all the politicians who kept repeating the narrative of the “unprovoked war of aggression,” should basically make an apology and say that at best they were in error?

Matlock: Well, of course there should be an apology, but I’m sure there will not be.

You might say our foreign policy elite, those concentrated in Washington and many in think tanks, financed by our weapons manufacturers, have actually constructed a completely false narrative, I believe, of the situation. What has happened is, although they’re telling the American people that, “Well, we must defend Ukraine. This is a poor, innocent, democratic country that’s been invaded by bad old Russia.” Well, Ukraine has been invaded by Russia, that is true. But that invasion has not been as complete as the American invasion of Iraq, back in the second Bush administration, when Iraq was no threat to the United States whatsoever. The United States took many of its NATO allies into that war. So, there is a precedent of the United States carrying out an aggressive war without provocation.

And now, the United States is accusing Russia of an aggressive war, ignoring the fact that the provocation was there. Russian President Vladimir Putin began warning, in his speech in 2007 in Munich at the Wehrkunde Conference, of the things that were happening that were, I would say, stressing the peace with Russia. Most of these were based upon the expansion of NATO, and not only the expansion of NATO, but the placing of military bases in the East European countries close to Russia. Russia had been signaling ever since the 1990s that that was unacceptable.

We forget that when Vladimir Putin came into office, he not only straightened out Russia’s economy when it had been virtually bankrupt. He brought it back into productivity, and paid off the foreign debt of the Soviet Union and Russia, in about three to four years. He brought some regularity into the Russian economic system. So, at that time, he considered himself an ally of the West and was trying to bring Russia into the West. And repeatedly, the efforts to create a security system that would include Russia, as well as the other countries, were simply ignored by the Western countries and the United States. Instead, there seemed to be an effort to pull away former parts of the Soviet Union, parts that were legally in the Soviet Union, like Georgia and particularly Ukraine, from Russian influence. And that, for obvious reasons, was unacceptable.

But the idea that somehow Russia is always aggressive, forgets the fact that it was actually a Russian leader who broke up the Soviet Union. It was Boris Yeltsin’s meetings with the leaders of Belarus and Ukraine that brought down the Soviet Union. That was not a victory for the West, and that was not when the Cold War ended. The Cold War ended earlier. And the United States at that time, during the first Bush Administration, did not want the rest of the Soviet Union to fall apart. We had always wanted the three Baltic States to regain their independence; we never recognized that they were legally part of the Soviet Union. The other 12 republics we did recognize were legally there; and as the first President [George H.W.] Bush told the Ukrainian parliament in 1991, he asked them to avoid suicidal nationalism. And yet, the suicidal nationalism—the sort that had earlier affected Georgia and brought war there—began to be dominant in Ukraine. This was simply ignored by those who now argue that we must defeat Putin or else he’ll be a threat to others.

I don’t like what Putin has done internally. I certainly don’t like the invasion. But I warned, from the late 1990s, not to expand NATO, and particularly not to put military bases there, in Eastern Europe, without security guarantees to Russia; that it would be catastrophic. Almost all of us who knew that Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev had negotiated the end of the Cold War, made that clear when the question was being debated in the United States. And it is a tragedy that our prediction now has been brought about.

I’ll make another point: We and our Western European friends are destroying Ukraine in this process, in an attempt simply to weaken Russia. We all need Russia to cooperate, in what are the great challenges at the present time and the future; the ravages of environmental degradation—and we see every day more fires, more floods, and so on. And yet, these wars are preventing us from really dealing with climate change. They are bringing about even more massive migrations, which are a stress to all of our countries. Instead of uniting to try to deal with these problems, we are fueling fights not only in Ukraine, but even worse, in the Middle East. We are tolerating a genocidal policy that Israel is following regarding Gaza and increasingly the West Bank. The coverage of this in our principal media is simply heavily biased.

How Did We Arrive at This Juncture?

Zepp-LaRouche: I thank you for your voice of humanity, which you express so clearly. What is your explanation why? I can only say that the speeches given by Putin repeatedly, when U.S. President Clinton visited Moscow in 2000, and when Putin spoke to the German Bundestag in 2001—he even spoke in part in German—he quoted all the German poets and expressed a very warm attitude toward Germany, which I think was very remarkable, given the fact that Germany had, after all, a leading role in the Second World War, killing 27 million Russians—which is still very, very active in the minds of people talking about the Great Patriotic War.

So, I thought the Russian behavior in the time of German unification and even afterward was extremely generous! They agreed to let Germany be part of NATO—if there would be no expansion of NATO to the East. And what I’m really struggling with is how can these, my contemporary Germans, how can they be so negligent and ignorant and indifferent to German history? We should be grateful to Russia that we had this peaceful revolution, which was historically a tremendous chance. We could have had a peace order. We could have moved into a completely different era of human civilization. I’m still struggling with the question: why do they hate the Russians so much—or some people do—that they bring about the potential destruction of all of civilization, rather than admitting that they were in error?

Matlock: Well, I think you’re quite right, in many respects. I was present when our Secretary of State [James Baker, III] repeatedly assured President Gorbachev and the Soviet Foreign Minister, Shevardnadze, that if they agreed to the unification of the then-two German states, and unification on terms that had been set by West Germany, which was simply to absorb the German Democratic Republic into the West German constitution—in other words, the East German Länder would simply become part of Germany.

The Soviet position earlier was that there had to be negotiations between the two states. But events within East Germany made that impossible, when the elections in February 1990 brought in the CDU which got the plurality of votes in the German Democratic Republic. In any event, there was an agreement then that when Germany was united, although there was nothing about NATO expansion in the agreements, there was a provision that there could be no foreign troops or nuclear weapons in what had been the territory of the German Democratic Republic. Now, actually the assurances given by the American Secretary of State and the German Foreign Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, and, I understand, the British Prime Minister, John Major, at that time were that there would be no NATO expansion to the East. As Secretary Baker said at one point, “Not one inch.” He was talking about the territory of the German Democratic Republic at that time, but obviously this would have applied to Eastern Europe. They weren’t talking about Eastern Europe, because at that time there was still the Warsaw Pact.

There was never any thought that we would be expanding it further. The talks were about East Germany. At that time the treaty did prohibit any foreign bases. So, later, when we began to expand NATO, President Putin at that time did not object to the first expansion. He did not even object to the expansion to the three Baltic States. When that was being discussed, he came to New York and made a speech at Columbia University. I was teaching there then, and I asked him directly, at a public meeting, what his position was on inclusion of the three Baltic countries into NATO? He said he thought it was unnecessary, but he would not oppose it, so long as there were no foreign bases there.

What we ignore when we say that it’s just NATO expansion, is that it’s NATO expansion—plus foreign military bases. We mustn’t forget that the anti-ballistic missile systems that were later established in Poland and Romania use missiles that, by a change in software, can be offensive. So, there is a good solid reason for President Putin to have opposed this. So, yes, the current war in Ukraine is an utter tragedy, most of all for Ukraine, but also for Russia, because it is going to create hostility for generations between the two countries. But the fact is, for the peace of Europe, you’re going to have to have a settlement on a basis other than a total restoration of the borders that Hitler, Stalin, and in the case of Crimea, Khrushchev, created. That, I think, is the fact. And why that isn’t understood more widely in Europe, and particularly in Germany, is hard for me to understand.

Zepp-LaRouche: The head of state of Georgia, President Mikhail Kavelashvili, just basically said that he thinks that the Europeans are now a “Deep State,” or they are in affinity with what people call the Deep State in the United States. I think it’s geopolitics; I think it’s the British Empire. People think that the British Empire has vanished or it no longer exists. But I think it exists in a different form. First you have the Commonwealth; you have the Five Eyes [U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand] intelligence cooperation. Then, the financial powers in Wall Street and the City of London, which are sort of an extension of the British Empire, because they control much of the conditions of credit, trade, and so forth. If you look at the role of the British in this conflict, they have been instigating again and again. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer came to Washington in the last phase of President Joe Biden’s Administration, egging him on to use long-range missiles into the territory of Russia.

Can you say how you see the role of the British in the Anglo-American special relationship?

Matlock: I think you have correctly diagnosed it as a sort of empire nostalgia, this casting Russia as, you might say, an eternal enemy. Because there was a contest, of course, in the Crimean War, and then a contest over control of Afghanistan, which goes back to the 19th Century, and so on. So, yes, I think that in many minds, the Americans have become, in effect, the enforcers for re-establishing a sort of British Empire, inspired by the same attitudes.

But I don’t think this is in the interests of the people in the United Kingdom. Again, I think that both of our governments— We also shouldn’t forget the aggressive invasion of Iraq which the second Bush Administration carried out based upon false evidence—which they knew was false—when we look back. Who were our main allies in that? Well, the British. Again, I don’t think this is really in the interests of the British people, but you have maybe the committee of the emotion of thoughts of empire, particularly in regard to places like Crimea, which, of course, in the 19th Century was attacked by the British.

By the way, you know the great writer Leo Tolstoy, later a pacifist, was actually a Russian artillery officer in the defense of Crimea during the Crimean War. Any of these things that today we are fighting over, emotionally for Russians are a very integral part of their own history. So, one of the things the West Europeans and Americans should understand is that this conflict is largely a civil war, among East Slavs, as to who controls what and where they’re oriented.

Like other civil wars, the interference of others simply exacerbates it. This could have been settled without a total war if the Minsk Accords had been observed. But that violation was by the signatories, France and Germany. You hear now, “Oh, you can’t trust Vladimir Putin.” If you actually look at what he said and what others have said, I would say France and Germany have broken more agreements than he has. Everybody has broken some, but in this case, I think we have seen an attempt to trim down Russia and limit its influence. Of course, it is weaker than the United States, but the fact is that in trying to—as our former Secretary of Defense [Lloyd Austin] said—to weaken Russia, we actually are doing more to divide the world up and to create, I’d say, larger problems for ourselves and all of humanity.

Zepp-LaRouche: The United States is also in a crisis. At the Bandung Conference—the first Asian-African conference of the Non-Aligned Movement—President Sukarno of Indonesia and Prime Minister Nehru of India were discussing that the War of Independence of the United States was the first anti-colonial war of any country. I think that the people of the United States should simply go back to look at their own history and look at what was the intention of the American Republic of Benjamin Franklin, of the Founding Fathers, of John Quincy Adams, who famously said it’s not the purpose of the United States to go abroad and look for foreign monsters. The American System of economy was set up by Alexander Hamilton. This was actually a time when many people around the world looked up at the American Revolution as a branching point in history, because Europe was still under the control of monarchies and oligarchies, and the American Republic was meant to be a republic. It was devoted to the common good, not only of the present people, but of future generations as it is stated in the Preamble of the Constitution.

Then you have the Declaration of Independence. When I founded the Schiller Institute 41 years ago, I was looking for what document could be the basis for the constitution of the Schiller Institute. I then thought that the one closest to the ideas of what this was supposed to accomplish was the Declaration of Independence. So, I changed only six words, like where it says American colony, I said developing countries; where it says the colonial master, I said the financial credit system or financial control of the system. By just changing five or six words, I made it applicable for the whole world. I wanted the Americans to remind themselves of their own proud tradition, and I wanted the Americans also to see that other countries have the same rights as they have; and that the other countries see what is the better genius of the United States.

What, in your view, would be necessary to revive that proud tradition of America and reject the British Empire grip?

Matlock: I think at the end of the Cold War, Americans and our West European allies simply adopted a false doctrine. We seem to have adopted, with minor changes, the former Soviet idea that communism was going to sweep the world by revolution, and that therefore it was their historic duty to support revolutions in various countries. Well, of course, the fact was that these revolutions did not produce the socialism that Marx had described. They produced totalitarian systems. But there was another assumption there, that if you were what they called “socialist,” that is, dominated by the Soviet Union, they would be friends. Of course, this was a matter of Soviet domination. But then other countries, like Marxist Yugoslavia, Albania, pulled away; China pulled away under Mao Zedong. So, actually, this idea that this was going to be the future of the world was simply incorrect.

Now, as the Soviet Union was breaking up, we had our philosophers [Francis Fukuyama] saying this was the end of history; and, following sort of a distortion of Hegel, that this time it was going to be democracy and capitalism that were going to sweep the world. And that it was the duty of the United States as the principal democratic and capitalist country to spread democracy to the rest of the world.

There are several things wrong with that. One thing that is certainly not necessarily true, is that simply because you’ve got the same form of government, you’re going to be friends. Whether you’re friends or not depends on a lot of things. The second is that one country cannot create democracy in another. As Lincoln said at one point, government of, by, and for the people. Then how can another country create it? In fact, if a country gets involved in the internal politics of other countries, it’s apt to do more harm to the people it wishes to help.

You quoted John Quincy Adams quite aptly, because when he warned against and said, “America goes not abroad seeking monsters to destroy,” he also said in his very flowery language that if the United States gets involved in disputes in Europe, backing one side or the other in these disputes, America itself will become an empire. He warned against it. Now what we have is a President who very much admires President McKinley, who served at a time when the United States turned into an openly imperialistic mode. American foreign policy has vacillated in a number of different ways. But when we began to expand outside North America, it was under McKinley. McKinley seems to be the idol of President Trump. He often quotes him, and he even wanted to rename the Alaskan mountain Mount McKinley again, instead of Denali, which had been its original name given by the people there. So, this is one of our problems. Trump seems to want to go back to a period which actually was proven to be not very successful in the long run. But I would say that American policy does vacillate; it always has. It has not been a straight line by any means. I think that what we’re going to see is in many ways a failure of the current policy, and certainly the current belligerent way that tariffs are being used. We’re continuing to fuel wars in the Middle East, and give the arms for what is clearly a genocidal war against Gaza and so on.

I think many things are happening now that are not going to work out well. But I would also say that there can be unexpected turns fairly quickly. When I was advising President Reagan on how to end the Cold War, we took what had been a very tense situation, and within three years we turned it around. So, I think that unexpected things can happen. But one thing I would say is that the idea that there is going to be a future in trying to divide the world between East and West and to use military means is, I think, going to be disastrous for everybody. The sooner we come off that, the better off everybody is going to be.

A Potential Turning Point

Zepp-LaRouche: I have believed for a long time that we have reached a point in human history where we have to make a new chapter, a new paradigm, which must be as different as the modern times are from the Middle Ages. If you think about the 14th Century, which was the Black Death, you had superstition, belief in witchcraft; the Peripatetics were debating how many angels could sit on a pin. It was really one outlook which was very backward.

Then came the Italian Renaissance, and you had the beginning of modern times; urbanization played a bigger role. The role of the individual became more distinct; the role of science and technology to improve the living standard of people became a factor; you had book printing. The modern times had very different axioms in what people were thinking about the image of man, the nature of the universe. I think we have reached a point in history where we have to really think about a new paradigm. Leave behind us imperialism, oligarchism, greediness of this unrestricted type we experience today, and really think of what puts us as one humanity on a completely different plane. Because of all the creatures known in the universe, the human species is the only creative species. We can again and again come up with solutions to solve problems. We can make scientific discoveries which completely change the mode of living, improving life expectancy and living standards of more and more people. I think we are really challenged now to give ourselves an order which allows the survival of all nations on the planet, taking into account the interests of every nation on the planet—sort of like the way the Peace of Westphalia did that for the first time; to really think that you have to consider everybody’s interest, or else nobody’s interest is taken care of.

I hope that some leading people in the world would come up with the idea of creating a new paradigm, a new security and development architecture which does exactly that. So, if you would be so kind as to tell me what you think about such an idea?

Matlock: I think you’re right that we need to find a way to a world system that will tolerate different cultures. We have to recognize that, as important as some of the ideas of the Western Renaissance and development of international law are, there were other periods as well, like during the Dark Ages in Western Europe. Byzantium and the East were much more successful. Also, in the early Middle Ages, many aspects of Muslim society, particularly that in Spain, I would say were more liberal and more perceptive than the prevailing Western ideas. So, the rise of Europe, and what was for a time its domination of the rest of the world, was a temporary condition, and it carried with it the burden of implicit racialism; a domination of colonies elsewhere. We’re still seeing developments beyond that.

But I think today, when we worry about, say, Chinese influence, I look out and it seems that influence is being brought about by Chinese economic policies; by Chinese investment and sales in various countries. China, so far as I know, has no military bases outside its borders except some of these disputed islands in the South China Sea; whereas the United States has over 800 bases in over 80 countries. It seems to me that talking about a Chinese military threat is ridiculous.

Of course, China has not excluded using force against Taiwan; but God forbid we get into a war over that. If that should happen, it’s not at all clear that China would not prevail. I think today the idea that excluding export of things like advanced chips is going to bring about a situation where China simply leapfrogs the United States in some of these technology areas. I think there has been sort of a blindness to this. But behind much of this has been the force in the United States of what I call the military-industrial and congressional complex; the idea that somehow we have got to find peer competitors in order to finance a bigger and bigger so-called defense budget—defense which has become increasingly offensive. I don’t think that’s in the interest of the American people, and I don’t think that’s in the interest of the rest of the world.

Zepp-LaRouche: Ambassador, this has really been a breath of fresh air to listen to you, because I’m talking mostly to Europeans these days. What you are saying is so much more reasonable and enlightened. Would you be so kind as to tell our audience at the end here, or even Ursula von der Leyen, your warning? And now we have a new government in Germany, [incoming Chancellor Friedrich] Merz. They all want to militarize; they want to make Germany war-ready. Can you, based on your experience, tell the Germans and the Europeans how they should change their thinking about these matters?

Matlock: I think that Germany in particular, but also the rest of Europe, is not going to be able to fulfill its full potential without cooperation with Russia and the East. Russia simply is too large; it contains so many resources. And of course, it has a culture which is European and one of the most important cultures for Europe. It seems to me that Germany can never flourish if it is cut off from Russia. After all, the whole matter of energy inputs is going to be cheaper from Russia. German industry very much depends upon that. These current tariffs from the United States, I think, if they are continued, are going to be really disastrous. To act as if Russia is a threat to Germany, I think, is simply a very dangerous delusion.

Zepp-LaRouche: Thank you so much! Let me express my thankfulness to you, and spontaneously tell you that you are a fantastic human being, and I hope you give us this joy again in the future. Thank you so much.

Matlock: Thank you for the compliments and for the privilege of being on your show.

Zepp-LaRouche: ’Til very soon.