LaRouche Assesses
Clinton Foreign-Policy Revolution
On October 25, 1995, Democratic presidential primary candidate Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. hailed the positive results of President Clinton's October 23 "summit" meeting with Russia President Boris Yeltsin as part of a Clinton administration "return to the U.S. foreign-policy principles of the pre-April 12, 1945 period, a return to the anti-Churchill, nationalist tradition of Hyde Park's President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and, also, of patriots such as Benjamin Franklin, Washington, Monroe, Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams, and Lincoln earlier.
The text of LaRouche's October 25 statement follows.
While most of his Republican and other rivals were celebrating their vaudevillean reenactments of Belshazzar's feast, President Bill Clinton used the setting of the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations Organization to unleash a revolution in U.S. foreign policy and strategy. What has happened is fairly, and most simply described as a return to the U.S. foreign-policy principles of the pre-April 12, 1945 period, a return to the anti-Churchill, nationalist tradition of Hyde Park's President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and, also, of patriots such as Benjamin Franklin, Washington, Monroe, Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams, and Lincoln earlier.
Some of the elements of the past days' diplomacy, such as the October 23 "summit" meeting with President Boris Yeltsin, are of history-making importance in their own right. Others, such as the President's new rulings on anti-drug and anti-money-laundering policy, also would be of at least leading importance in their own right, but have a crucial strategic significance when situated as part of the same strategic package as the new U.S.A.-Russia partnership and the President's strong affirmation of his China policy.
Boris Yeltsin said to the journalists at the Hyde Park press conference, following the summit discussions, "You are the disaster!" Yeltsin's quip sent tears of rollicking laughter running down President Clinton's happy face. Yeltsin himself was rumbling with merriment, sharing President Clinton's pleasure in that sweet moment of truth. The popular news media had solemnly warned that that summit would be a disaster; now the two Presidents were laughing merrily at the most discomfitted pack of journalists standing there, journalists who looked mostly like hyenas who had just been cheated of their feast by the liveliness of the intended victim.
Nonetheless, the subsequent questions from the journalists demonstrated, that the popular news media were still clinging hysterically to their false predictions of the preceding two days. Until today, even after that press conference, no more than a relative handful of senior behind-the-scenes policy-shapers from around the world, has grasped the historic significance of what the President is doing.
The various elements of Clinton's revolution in U.S. foreign policy might be described as pieces of a mosaic; one has to see the picture as a whole, to appreciate the significance of each and all of the parts. Therefore, take the emerging, new foreign-policy initiative from the top, down.
The Global Strategic Crisis
Although there are clear indications in the public domain which reflect the President's view of the matters he is addressing in this round of negotiations, all of us who must operate outside the privacy of the President's own mind, must interpret his actions from the standpoint of knowing both the nature of the problems confronting his administration, and the probable impact of his response to those matters. For my part, the strategic problem which confronts the United States, is summarized in my own October 11, 1995 Presidential-campaign release, The Blunder in U.S. National Security Policy.[1]The President, as head of state of the world's leading, and most powerful nation, is confronted with an ongoing spiral of global monetary, financial, economic and social crises, which threaten the United States, and which can not be solved without an appropriate leading role by the President of the United States. This present crisis can be compared to an onrushing hurricane. The global monetary and financial crisis is already here; the only question is: during which month, or week will it strike with full force?
He is faced with the fact, that this combination of interconnected monetary, financial, economic, and social crises demonstrates, that the policy-shifts which have been introduced during the past twenty-five years have proven a disastrous error. President Clinton has very little time, during which to pull together that desperately needed new partnership among leading nations, which is indispensable for overcoming the effects of an imminent collapse of the world's leading monetary and financial institutions.
These crises, which will probably hit with full force before the November 1996 U.S. Presidential election, also mark the end of that period of current world history, which began with the most untimely death of President Franklin Roosevelt, on April 12, 1945. The death of Roosevelt made possible the replacement of Roosevelt's policy for the post-war world, by the neo-imperial and balance-of-power policies of Prime Minister Winston Churchill's British Empire. Thus, what Roosevelt had derided as British imperialism and "British Eighteenth-Century methods,"[2] have dominated U.S., as well as British and UNO policies, during the fifty years since Roosevelt's death. These policies have proven a disaster; not only the former Soviet Union, but the entire world, is a collapsing shambles today.
Among the principal other crises facing the United States, is the combination of a massive drug-epidemic with the recent resurgence of international narco-terrorism, to which the "Iran-Contra" drug-weapon-money-laundering enterprises of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and George Bush contributed a major part.
In this setting, President Clinton invited President Yeltsin to join with him at former President Franklin Roosevelt's Hyde Park residence. Could any symbolic gesture be more obvious!
Nor, was this the first time the President's household has made signal reference to the Franklin Roosevelt tradition. Hillary Rodham Clinton invoked memory of Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt's role as the President's wife, in speaking at the June 19, 1994 dedication of Mother Teresa's Home for Infant Children, in Washington, D.C. Just days before the Hyde Park "summit, a full column by Hillary Clinton, on the subject of the Eleanor Roosevelt "model," could be read in the Oct. 22, 1995 edition of the Chicago Sun-Times.
This is consistent with the President's record as a student at Georgetown University. Every major news medium has this record on file for ready reference by editors and reporters. Day to day "politicking politics" aside, President Clinton's White House references the memories of President John F. Kennedy and President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Taking all such and kindred facts into consideration, nothing is less surprising, than that President Clinton should consider picking up the reins of foreign policy, where President Roosevelt had dropped them in April 1945. President Clinton's adversaries within the British establishment understand all of this very clearly, which is why they hate Clinton and seek to destroy him. Why are American journalists and editors so dumb as not to recognize such clear facts?
Why does anyone imagine Russia's President Boris Yeltsin was so happy? Does anyone think that the President of Russia is such a fool as to consider Bosnia and NATO as primary issues in and of themselves? Will some in Moscow challenge the returning President Yeltsin slyly: "So, Boris Nikolaievich, what have you brought back from your meeting with the American President? Has he conceded to our demands on Bosnia and NATO?" President Yeltsin will answer, that those are no longer important issues; he has returned with some really good news: "We have partnership. We shall deal with the differences as partners should."
The primary issue is, whether the United States has, or does not have, a partnership relationship with a constellation of powers including Russia, France, and Germany. Clinton acted to make the two nominal issues of NATO and Bosnia virtually non-issues, and focussed on the crucial strategic issue of reviving the kind of partnership which President Franklin Roosevelt had intended.
Lest there be any doubt of that characteristic of the discussions with Yeltsin, consider President Clinton's next bit of "summit" diplomacy, with China's President Jiang Zemin. Contrary to the British monarchy, to Sir Henry A. Kissinger KCMG, and to Mrs. Thatcher's favorite political pit-bull, George Bush, the United States is committed to a "one China" policy today, as it was under Franklin Roosevelt, up to the moment he died.
Consider the way in which the Hyde Park meeting was pre-arranged, first, by preparatory meetings of President Yeltsin with France's President Jacques Chirac, and by complementary telephone discussion with Germany's Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Next, to offer Britain herself the chance to be sensible about the new arrangements being built, and, then, on to Japan.
What is the historic significance, for past and future, alike, of a U.S.A. sponsorship of a France-Germany-Russia-China-Japan axis of Eurasian economic development? Think back to the 1890s of France's Gabriel Hanotaux, Germany's Wilhelm Siemens and Karl Helfferich, and Russia's Count Sergei Witte, with the project for building railway corridors of development across Eurasia, from Brest at the Atlantic Coast of France to the shores of the Pacific and Indian Ocean, including a direct railway connection into Japan itself.
What is President Clinton doing? He is putting into place, stone by stone, the bridge from the present crisis to foundations of a future global economic recovery, the future likelihood of global peace and security, through economic-development partnership. Partnership among France, Germany, Russia, China, and Japan, is not an exclusive club, but the indispensable core-sponsorship for the kind of measures of economic cooperation wanted if any nation is to be enabled to confront the onrushing hurricane of global monetary-financial collapse.
NOTES
1. LaRouche, Lyndon H., Jr., "The Blunder in U.S. National Security Policy," Leesburg, Va.: Committee to Reverse the Accelerating Global Economic and Strategic Crisis: A LaRouche Exploratory Committee, Oct. 11, 1995.[return to text]2. Roosevelt, Elliott, As He Saw It (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1946). [return to text]
