LAROUCHE'S U.S. FOREIGN POLICY
A World of Sovereign Nation-States
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
April 28, 2003
The following was released by the LaRouche in 2004 campaign committee. It is a summary statement of the U.S. Foreign Policy of one of the currently leading candidates for the 2004 U.S. Presidential nomination by that nation's Democratic Party. Although this statement will be widely circulated inside the U.S.A., it is intended to serve as a compact summary, as suited for translations, which might be desired as information by governments and citizens of other parts of the world at this time.
The candidate is currently the leading Democratic Party contender in number of contributors who have supported his campaign to the present date.
The 1989-1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, created a state of world affairs in which the U.S.A., then under President George H.W. Bush, assumed the role of a virtually unchallenged world power.[1] Unfortunately, this occasion was used to unleash a strategically motivated, looting-down of the physically productive aspects of the economies of not only both the former Soviet Union and former Eastern European Warsaw Pact members, but also the intent, aided by Balkan wars, to bring about a cumulatively significant weakening of the so-called "rival" economies of pre-1989 European continental allies, Germany most emphatically.
This combination of developments encouraged the presently continuing insurgence of two varieties of imperial intentions already lurking among some of the most powerful political factions within the United States. One of these factions represents a U.S. liberal-imperialist impulse copying the British tradition known by that name. The second is an echo of the Roman imperial legions and Nazi international Waffen-SS. The latter, fascist impulse was pushed unsuccessfully, during 1991-92, by then U.S. Secretary of Defense Richard "Dick" Cheney and his so-called neo-conservative ("neo-con") associates. However, later, that same policy has been pushed, since Sept. 11, 2001, by the same Cheney, now Vice-President, and also by the same set of associates of Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as then.[2] The utopian Cheney-Rumsfeld clique's nuclear-airborne parody of the international Waffen-SS has been known otherwise, during recent decades, as the U.S. "Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA)."
So, the practical difference between those two kinds of imperialist impulse within today's U.S.A., is between a slower, more cautious liberal approach, and that explicitly fascist, quick-march plunge into the Hell of a planetary new dark age. The latter is represented by Cheney and his long-standing crony Donald Rumsfeld. It is the latter, explicitly fascist policy, which must be repelled, urgently, explicitly, and directly, now.
The recent partial successes of the virtual twins, Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, in foisting certain crucial parodies of Nazi policies upon the administration of President George W. Bush, Jr., has resulted in a demoralizing state of mind among governing circles of those nations, in Europe and elsewhere, whose interest is to defend themselves against this new strategic threat. However, even those same governments which resist the threat, have also tended to waver, out of fearful regard for the hope that they might minimize the risk of becoming virtually a declared adversary of the U.S.A.
This currently ominous trend in U.S. military affairs, is accompanied, and accelerated, by a presently on-rushing economic collapse of the 1971-2003, "floating-exchange-rate" form of world monetary-financial system. The present unwillingness of the U.S. Bush Administration even to consider allowing urgently needed monetary-financial reforms of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) system, represents, as I shall show here, a matter for concern as crucial as the ongoing, pro-fascist military threat.
It is unfortunate, for all of us, that I am not yet the incumbent President of the U.S.A. However, in my role as the Democratic candidate currently leading in popular financial support, I represent a significant force for those ideas around which concerned leading forces around the world could, and should now rally, to present to the people and leading institutions of the U.S.A. and other nations, an image of the changed, better future role of the United States which would be consistent with the true interest of the world's respectively sovereign nations.
Presently, the impetus for this needed change in the world's outlook, must, probably, come from within the U.S.A. itself. Currently, no different prospect is to be seen from around the world. Essential contributions have come from France, Germany, Russia, China, and elsewhere. Nonetheless, it is the fearful imperial power enjoyed by the U.S.A., today, which fosters what I see as an underlying, potentially fatal tendency for vacillation shown by many leading governments when faced with U.S. bullying. His Holiness Pope John Paul II excepted, perhaps it is only from a spokesman from inside the U.S.A., a Presidential candidate who knows, and feels the global power of the U.S.A. in this respect, and who knows, confidently, how to use that power to the marginal effect, that groups of leaders from other nations might be encouraged, as I seek to encourage them now, to join in acting in concert for those urgently needed reforms which are presently in the urgent interest of us all.
The basis for such an approach is to be found in that history of the creation of, and internal partisan battles within the United States, a history which has been scarcely remembered, and little-understood in Europe and elsewhere today. I situate my U.S. foreign policy against the following summary of relevant elements of that history; define the principled adversary to be defeated; define the root of the present economic crisis; and then state that intended U.S. foreign policy which I submit as a proposed active premise for practice among nations, even at the present moment.
The American Revolution
My foreign policies as a present and former candidate for President of the United States, have always been premised on the stated American Whig tradition of President John Quincy Adams, leading economist Henry C. Carey, and President Abraham Lincoln. That set of policies is neither a slogan, nor an algebraic formula, but a principle. It is a principle, like any valid principle of physical science, premised upon a stipulated history of human experience. In this instance, that history is, as the great German Classical poet and historian Friedrich Schiller would agree on principle, the experience of the U.S.A., as situated within the development of European civilization since Solon of Athens.
The creation of the U.S. Federal constitutional republic, as an intended echo of the tradition of Solon, was led as a combined effort of many of the leading figures, scientists and others, from both sides of the Atlantic. These forces saw the birth of the U.S. republic as Lafayette once described it, as a temple of liberty and beacon of hope for all mankind.
Unfortunately, as the post-July 14, 1789 events in Paris, the Jacobin Terror, the rampages of Napoleon Bonaparte, and the Metternich-Castlereagh roles at the Vienna Congress attest, modern Europe then had not yet attained that degree of political maturity which it should have derived from the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, the ability to enable it to erect true and stable republics.
Nonetheless, even under the conditions of isolation and periods of decadence which the United States suffered, from 1789 until President Lincoln's victory over Lord Palmerston's asset, the Confederacy, the U.S. Constitution has proven itself, repeatedly, to be a remarkably durable instrument. President Franklin Roosevelt, who picked the United States up from out of the cumulative acts of wrecking of our institutions under Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, demonstrated the continued vitality of that Constitution when it were placed at the disposal of faithful and competent hands.
The underlying purpose of the American Revolution and its leading European supporters, was, from the beginning, to establish the U.S.A. as a republic which would contribute, in the manner of a seed-crystal, to inspiring the emergence of a community of principle among the independent sovereign republics of the world. That was the goal expressed by one of our greatest statesmen, John Quincy Adams, the policy summarized by President Lincoln in his celebrated Gettysburg Address. This same commitment was invoked by President Franklin Roosevelt's warning to British Prime Minister Churchill, that, he, unlike the later President Harry Truman, was committed to a decolonized post-war world. On this account, one must understand the unique importance for the world, then as now, of the Preamble of the 1787-1789 drafting of that adopted Constitution.
That intention should be copied as the unifying statement of purpose among the majority of peoples now. This intention, which properly defines the founding law and self-interested foreign policy of the U.S.A., were made efficiently clear, when the principled nature of the authority of the Preamble of the U.S. Federal Constitution were understood. I explain, as follows.
Admittedly, the U.S.A. has often violated that principle of law on which it was founded. Since 1763, the leading political currents of English-speaking North America have been divided chiefly between two opposing principles. The one, the patriots who created the U.S. republic; the other, those, like the leaders of the Essex Junto, who were known, by name, as "American Tories," from the time of Benjamin Franklin through President Franklin Roosevelt, as by me today. These American Tories were originally allied in business and philosophy with the British East India Company and have continued that philosophical heritage of Lord Shelburne, Aaron Burr, and Jeremy Bentham to the present day. These American Tories represent the essential root and continuing political-philosophical base for both of my nation's pro-imperialist factions. The sometimes wild swings in U.S. policy-shaping express nothing as much as the pattern of resurgence and ebb of that patriotic tradition of which I am a veteran representative today.
Franklin Roosevelt's Presidency was a time of a great resurgence of the American patriotic legacy. Since the combined aftermath of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the launching of the U.S. war in Indo-China, and Richard M. Nixon's 1966-68 campaign for the Presidency, the American Tory legacy has been predominant in all notable U.S. political parties, until the present crisis.
Despite the differences in policy and shifting relative strength, between the two factions, it is the current of Benjamin Franklin, which I represent today, and which President Franklin Roosevelt represented, which crafted the 1776 Declaration of Independence according to principles defined by Gottfried Leibniz, and which composed the Preamble of the Federal Constitution.
That Preamble expresses three principles which were adopted as expressions of natural law. These principles are, by name, the principle of perfect national sovereignty, the principle of the general welfare, and the principle of dedication to posterity. No interpretation of any other feature of the Constitution were allowable, nor amendment, nor any enacted law, which were read in a way which were inconsistent with the combined impact of those three principles. The notion of the extension of those same principles to a community of principle among a community of perfectly sovereign nation-states, has been the variously stated, or implied intention of every thoughtful spokesman of past generations of my nation's patriotic party. It is the thrust of U.S. history, that its military policy should be, similarly, a reflection of that goal of desiring, and defending a durable such community of principle among the nations of the world.
Then Secretary of State John Quincy Adams' letter to his President James Monroe, launching the 1823 Monroe Doctrine for the defense of the perfect sovereignties of the emerging republics of the Americas against the predatory powers of Europe, as soon as the U.S.A. were able, is a leading expression of this principle. This U.S.A. acted so, when it were first able, when the defeat of Lord Palmerston's asset, the Confederacy, provided the opportunity for the United States to expel Napoleon III's military forces supporting the murderous tyrant Maximilian, from Mexico.
The task for today, is that leading nations of the world must act now to establish an effective form of such a principled order for peaceful collaboration among all willing nations, once and for all.
It is the implicit historical conviction of my nation's continuing patriotic tradition, that the role of European civilization, from Solon of Athens to the present, must be to serve the promotion and practice of those principles, in our nation, and our common contribution to the world at large. This policy has been the essential premise of our actual national interest since the beginning of our struggle for national independence. These three principles, which the founders of the United States took largely from the influence of circles associated with Gottfried Leibniz, have deep and ancient historical-philosophical roots in the history of globally extended European and other civilizations.[3] I describe them, summarily, as follows.
The common root of all of these principles, is the notion of human nature as specifically apart from, and above that of the beasts. For example, the great Russian scientist V.I. Vernadsky addressed this matter in his definition of a higher order of existence, which he named the Noöphere, as distinct from, and superior to the Biosphere. Only the human individual has the inborn capacity to do what no beast can do, to create and build a Noösphere: to accomplish this by the discovery and employment of universal physical principles which are invisible to the senses, and, yet, are universally efficient.[4] The sharing of that experience of discovery of efficient universal principles, and of the benefits of those powers, within contemporary society, and in efficient transmission of such knowledge from past, to present, to future generations, shows us that the true practical, and immortal, meaning of individual human life, resides in those uniquely human qualities. It shows that the interest of mankind lies essentially in this principled distinction of man from the beast.
For such reasons, the natural yearning of civilization has been to craft forms of society which efficiently uproot those traditions under which some persons hunt or herd other persons as dumbed-down human cattle. This correction requires a mode in society in which each individual is encouraged to participate consciously in the generation and replication of those acts of discovery of universal principle which are the means of mankind's progress in self-development. This defines the principle of the general welfare, as derived from that notion of justice known as agape, in the ancient Greek of Plato's Republic, and in the Christian's I Corinthians 13, and otherwise known as the common good. This defines the principle of dedication to posterity, the true principle of history as a lawful process.
Implicitly, it also defines the principle of perfect national sovereignties.
The partial realization of that goal of statecraft occurred in birth of modern Europe, during the Fifteenth Century. This was expressed by the birth of those first nation-states, France under Louis XI and that England of young Sir Thomas More established under Henry VII. These were states committed to the principle of the general welfare. Although expressions of contrary ancient and medieval imperial law persisted, the admittedly troubled emergence of the modern sovereign nation-state, against reactionary, pro-medieval institutions, has been a great net boon to mankind as a whole. The Preamble of the U.S. Federal Constitution adopted that as its governing constitutional principle. This works to the following intended effect.
The rightful sovereignty of a nation-state lies in the uniquely appropriate and obligatory function of government to promote the causes of general welfare and posterity efficiently, and the responsibility never to act contrary to that.
The effectiveness of that sovereignty depends upon the development, sharing, and preservation of knowledge. This must be accomplished by a continuing process of improving the existing culture of that people, including the crucial language-culture within which the social processes of deliberation chiefly proceed. Without that use of its culture for the development of the human individual, the names for the rights of the individual tend to become empty phrases, and a people is effectively disenfranchised by its own ignorance, in that way. Thus, the freedom and development of the people, and the perfect sovereignty of the nation-state are inseparable principles.
In the end, the principles of the universe are expressed as a coherent, expanding body of knowledge. Yet, to achieve that knowledge efficiently, a people must come to it by means of use and development of the culture they have, including the language-culture. The most essential feature of that language-culture is not what are regarded as those literal meanings of words and phrases which might be plucked from a dictionary, but, rather, those subtleties of metaphor and other ironies which are, as Percy Bysshe Shelley points out, the medium through which a people is capable of imparting and receiving profound and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature.
The goal of bringing into being a true community of principle among sovereign nation-states, is therefore a reflection of a universal, and natural principle of law.
Old Hobbes, the Enemy from Within
The chief internal adversary of today's globally extended modern European civilization, has been the social empiricism of that one-time tyrant of Venice, the Paolo Sarpi whose conception of neo-Ockhamite empiricism was reflected through the activity of his lackey Galileo Galilei. This empiricism emerged, under Galileo's tutelage, as the root of the hideously misanthropic conceptions of Thomas Hobbes. From Hobbes, through such as John Locke, Bernard Mandeville, Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Huxley, Friedrich Nietzsche, and H.G. Wells, came today's widespread, principled misconception of man, as instinctively a feral, existentialist beast. The modern international fascism of such followers of the late Professor Leo Strauss and his ally, the synarchist Alexandre Kojève, as Vice-President Cheney's circles of so-called "neo-conservatives," is a typical, Hobbesian-Nietzschean outgrowth of what is fairly described, variously, as the contemporary existentialists' bestial, dionysian, or satanic misconception of human nature.
This misconception of man, so exemplified, is the single greatest danger to global humanity today.
The present condition of our planet, its population, its technologies, does not permit the continued existence of civilization according to a regime ordered by the percussive interactions of persons and institutions, a regime to be recognized as the legacy of the social empiricist Hobbes. The maintenance of present or higher levels of population on this planet, requires the defense, and further improvement of those man-made physical-capital improvements in nature which are among the most obvious distinctions of the Noösphere. The combat against the lack of added improvements to that stock of physical capital, and combat against the want of a richer education and for improved living conditions of the populations generally, define indispensable measures for preventing the slide of mankind into a planetary new dark age.
That hateful destructiveness typified by Hobbes, includes today the wont for the outlawed practice of preventive nuclear war, as expressed by the fascist policies of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their neo-conservative lackeys; the latter is a threat to civilization which this planet itself could not tolerate.
The fascism of Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al., is admittedly a wild extreme within the larger legacy of Hobbes, but we must not evade the fact, that as long as the practice of statecraft were informed by a notion of inevitably percussive relations within and among nations, there would be not only a recurring tendency toward fostering of useless conflicts, but an insensibility to those measures which would supersede old issues by means of urgent and beneficial actions in the common interest. Much Hobbes breeds too many Cheneys.
Man is born to do good. The potential ability of a child from any part of the planet to be developed as a virtual genius, to be an individual who loves discovered truth and the common good, and devotes his or her mortal life to its meaningful outcome for those yet to be born: That typifies that inborn goodness which is specific to human nature. It is providing the circumstances and motivation for that development of the individual's potential, which is the pervasively underlying true mission, and duty of the sovereign nation-state republic.
If, instead of such a view, the policy of states were premised on the axiomatic assumption that man is a predatory beast by specific natural disposition, the practice of societies would continue to be that of man as beast to man. If every man were considered such a beast, every man were to be regarded in a Hobbesian view, as a war-like threat to every other. The consequence of that were perpetual, global "preventive warfare" in the mode of the Adolf Hitler regime and the policies of the fascist circles of that modern echo of the celebrated medieval scoundrels "Biche and Mouche," Cheney and Rumsfeld—or, perhaps Burke and Hare.
The specific feature of Sarpi's empiricism which leads to such malignant expressions of hatred, is the denial of the existence of that specific power of the human individual which sets the human species apart from, and above the beasts. The expression of this specific power which is called the potentiality of the individual human soul, is typified by both the discovery and sharing of those efficient universal principles of the universe which can not be, and are not the objects of mere sense-certainty. This specific kind of power, so termed by Plato, and sometimes called spiritual, is also expressed and thus typified, in a similar way, by great Classical artistic composition.
This specific power of mankind is illustrated in practice as the Classical humanists, such as Friedrich Schiller and Wilhelm von Humboldt, recognized. This includes those beneficial advances in technology by means of which mankind has progressed from the potential relative population-density of a higher ape, to one which is three decimal orders of magnitude greater than that, today. The cultivation of social relations to similar effect, through great Classical art, expresses the same specific distinction of the quality of every member of the human species. The attempt to degrade science and art to the level of statistical interpretation of mere sense-certainty, expresses a culture which seeks to degrade man into the likeness of a mere beast. This bestiality is the assumption of Galileo's pupil Hobbes; this degradation is the axiomatic root of Hobbes' view of man as a beast to man. This is the axiomatic root of the bestiality of such followers of the late Professor Strauss and Kojève as the neo-conservative accomplices of Vice-President Cheney.
The commitment to specifically human progress in science, art, and their application, is a form of practice without which society tends to degenerate into the behavior of a beast-like creature. The goodness of mankind, of nations, is assured only when the circumstances of life are afforded under that state of affairs which is consistent with an environment of that quality of progress, a progress which expresses the appetites of the soul's true, higher nature.
Therefore, let us not design societies to fit a population largely conditioned to behave as beasts. Let us not be sophists who use the Hobbesian-like degradation which our nations' follies have imposed on the culture of our people, as an excuse for treating our citizens and their children, or those of other nations, as if their nature required zoo-like cages to restrain them.
The Present Strategic Situation
The circumstances under which Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their fascist lackeys were not prevented from taking concerted action to usurp much of the constitutional authorities of the President, the Congress, and the Court, were chiefly economic conditions. As in the case of the actions of certain financier circles, from London, New York City, and elsewhere, to award Adolf Hitler dictatorial powers on Feb. 28, 1933, the policies foisted upon the U.S. Bush Administration following Sept. 11, 2001, were not caused by, but were nonetheless a reflection of the relatively hopeless state of dilapidation of the existing monetary-financial system.
The 1932-1933 actions of the London/New York City circles of Montagu Norman, to rescue the Nazi Party financially, to deploy Hjalmar Schacht and other German assets of London to foist Hitler upon the German government, and to secure Hitler dictatorial powers on Feb. 28, 1933, were intended to ensure that no German Chancellor who might follow the plan of Dr. Wilhelm Lautenbach would be in that position, at the moment that U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt were inaugurated. The virtual coup d'état organized by Vice-President Cheney, immediately following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has been steered to the effect of preventing the methods of President Franklin Roosevelt's economic recovery from being considered for application to the presently ongoing economic collapse of the bankrupt 1971-2003, floating-exchange-rate, monetary-financial system.
Then, as now, the purpose of the fascist usurpation was world-wide war as the means for avoiding the needed economic reforms on behalf of the general welfare.
Today, we must assimilate and apply two lessons from that experience.
First: Knowledge of the historical role of certain financier interests, in backing the trans-Atlantic synarchist (fascist) operations of the interval 1922-1945, such as Mussolini's and Hitler's rise to power, and, also in the U.S.A. today, affords us insight into the exemplary connections between the events of 1932-1934 in Germany, and the relevant post-Sept. 11, 2001 developments in U.S. policy-making.
Second: Notably, despite an assassination attempt and one famous coup plot, the elected President Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated, to launch the economic recovery which prevented a fascist takeover in the U.S.A., and which secured the ultimate defeat of Hitler and his allies. This experience of 1932-1945 is key to reversing the threat to global civilization today.
The kind of permanent world war which such followers of Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Alexandre Kojève as Cheney and Rumsfeld intend, must be recognized as a new expression of the same root as the two so-called "world wars" of the past century. In effect, that pair's war for the cause of what U.S. neo-con Michael Ledeen terms "universal fascism," should be understood as the intent to unleash "Geopolitical World War III."
The explosion of economic and related power of the U.S.A. during and following the defeat of Lord Palmerston's Confederacy asset, resulted, from about the time of the 1876 Centennial celebration, in a great surge of admiration for the achievements of the U.S.A. up to that point. This was expressed by admiration for the world's leading economist of that time, Henry C. Carey, and for the kindred views of the German-American economist Friedrich List. The economic policies of Bismarck's Germany; the industrial development launched by the impetus of D.I. Mendeleyev under Russia's Alexander II; the influence of Carey over the Meiji Restoration's economic policies, in Japan; and related developments in a post-Napoleon III France; typify a powerful convergence, centered in transcontinental Europe, for accomplishing there, what the United States had accomplished, in agro-industrial growth by aid of its railway-centered, transcontinental development.
Circles of the Palmerston-trained British Prince of Wales, and especially the Fabian Coefficients, reacted with their so-called geopolitical schemes for pitting the nations and peoples of continental Eurasia against one another's throats. Aided by the virtually criminal folly of pettiness exhibited by the relevant heads of state, World War I occurred.
Similarly, Adolf Hitler was brought to power in Germany, with the intention of the London sponsors, at that time, that London's asset Hjalmar Schacht would arrange the financing of the build-up of Germany's military forces for a strike east, for the invasion and destruction of the Soviet Union, with France to strike later at Germany's rear when German forces were bogged down in the Soviet Union. London's subsequent discovery that, under an incumbent Hitler dictatorship, Germany's military policy would be to begin with a strike westward, prompted London's impulse to seek U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt's cooperation in preparing for the rescue of London from Hitler's coming attack.
For the present-day Anglo-American utopians of their nuclear-airborne age, the prospect of a peacefully cooperating continental Eurasia, is an intolerable affront to the cause of geopolitical fantasies. For the circles associated with Cheney's and Rumsfeld's neo-Nietzschean neo-cons, peaceful cooperation within Eurasia, is a prospect to be crushed by the persistent force of a perpetual warfare in continental Eurasia, using the targetting of the Muslim populations as the inflammable human potential to be ignited for the purpose of disrupting the continent as a whole.
The conditions under which the fascist clique around Cheney and Rumsfeld acquired their present influence, have been built up over more than forty years, beginning with the cumulatively shocking impact of a succession of terrifying events, events typified by the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the series of attempted assassinations of France's President Charles de Gaulle, the unsolved assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, and the launching of U.S. utopian warfare in Indo-China. The eruption of the anti-progress rock-drug-sex youth-counterculture, the integration of the Ku Klux Klan tradition into the 1966-1968 Nixon campaign, the 1971 wrecking of the world's fixed-exchange-rate, regulated monetary system, and related subsequent economic developments of the 1970s, transformed the U.S.A. from the world's leading producer nation, into an increasingly predatory, post-industrial consumer society, as ancient Rome's economy and morals had degenerated similarly, from approximately the aftermath of Rome's Second Punic War.
The moral collapse of the U.S. political-party system, under the combined impact of the accelerating material decline in the incomes of the lower eighty percentile of U.S. family-income brackets, and the eradication of entire categories of independent farmers and other true entrepreneurs, has put the Democratic Party, for example, under the bureaucratic control of a right-wing formation known as the Democratic Leadership Council. The typical eligible voter from the lower eighty percentile of family income brackets, is left with the prevalent belief that there exist only two apparent choices: "Buy" selections from the shelves which that political mall called political parties' displays; or stubbornly shun the elections, because he or she believes that they have no efficient representation in those parties.[5]
This moral collapse within the political parties, fostered the momentary lack of any significant opposition to the fascist impulses and related economic-policy follies which the Cheney-Rumsfeld clique foisted upon President George W. Bush, Jr.
If significant leaders from relevant nations combine their resources, we, together, can present a genuine alternative to the chaos which the combination of ongoing monetary-financial collapse and fascist schemes represents today. However, that means returning the agenda of governments and political parties, back to the crucial issues of economic insecurity gripping the nations and their populations. Ending the currently continued, ongoing attempts at a fascist coup in Washington, is essential, in and of itself. The constitutional functions and separation of powers must be restored, and the recent usurpation ended. That task can not be evaded by persons of good will.
However, that necessary restoration of the United States to its Constitution, will not be successful unless such remedial action is provided a relevant, international economic basis. The potential for constructing that basis exists, provided relevant degrees of cooperation among at least most of the nations of Eurasia, provide the pivot on which needed, broader, global measures of monetary-financial stabilization are premised.
Some of the exemplary preconditions for Eurasian continental cooperation already exist. Under a reformed world monetary system, using successful features of the 1944-1958 interval of the original Bretton Woods system, long-term, protectionist agreements on credit, tariffs, and trade, would allow the realization of an accelerating growth in Eurasia, which could be the catalyst for the greatest known, and most equitable improvement in the condition of mankind to date. It must also be a remedy for the genocide and related injustice which overreaching power has imposed upon Africa, and the looting of peoples of Central and South America under the 1971-2003 floating-exchange-rate monetary-financial system.
For those of us of a civilized persuasion, China and India today are important powers, representing the weightiest components among a group of nations which must seek large-scale, long-term, technology-sharing arrangements with Europe for meeting the requirements of expansion to meet the needs of its own populations. Europe, in turn, urgently requires exactly those markets to bring Europe out of an increasingly perilous internal economic collapse. Russia's role, in strategic cooperation with western European nations grouped with keystones such as Germany, France, and Italy, is also of pivotal significance for its own part in the de facto Russia-China-India triangle of Asian cooperation in security and economic development.
This role of Eurasian development is a matter I have discussed widely under the complementary headings of what are known, respectively, as the "Eurasian Land-Bridge" development[6] and "New Bretton Woods" proposal.[7] These measures are part of, and are typical of a cluster of emergency economic and related reforms.
The Present Options
The success of such an alternative depends upon agreement to several measures of reform in relations among nations.
First, the U.S.A. must exchange that "rambling wreck" which is its current imperial influence, for a different, more durable vehicle. We must recognize the moral responsibility for promoting the welfare of other nations, which our acquired power imposes upon us. The U.S.A. must act in way consistent with the power it has accumulated among nations, but also consistent with the intent expressed, and otherwise implied, by its own 1776 Declaration of Independence and Preamble of its Constitution.
All nations of the world acknowledge today's relative power of the U.S.A. as a fact. Most, I suspect, believe they must deal with that fact. So must we in the United States itself. The distinction to be made, is not whether or not nations must deal with that fact; the question is, whether the United States will deal with other nations as partners, or as clients of an empire. We must manage the problems of the world at large, but the authority and responsibility for what happens in the international arena must lie in the cooperation among equally sovereign powers.
Therefore, it is my intention to call the representatives of nations together, in an emergency conference sponsored by the U.S.A., for a general reform in bankruptcy of the presently bankrupt monetary-financial system. Governments must face the challenge, that the present system is hopelessly doomed, and that the following types of measures are therefore urgently required.
- Under such a reform, all relevant monetary-financial institutions, including relevant central-banking systems, would be taken in receivership by the sovereign authority of the relevant nation-state. This and related measures would require the support and cooperative assistance of all the governments party to the agreement.
- The first concern is to prevent a chaotic degeneration of the existing essential, public and private institutions of deposit, to protect the personal, modest financial assets of individuals and households, sustain the pensions of ordinary people, maintain the traditional institutions of supply of credit, and, in general, to ensure the orderly continuation and improvement of essential production, trade, local government, and general welfare. Financial assets with the character of gambling, such as financial derivatives, would ordinarily be eliminated, and many other forms of debt taken in custody for reorganization.
- Within the framework provided by such measures, which put the sick system into bankruptcy-reform under receivership, we must mobilize sufficiently increased employment in sound investments to bring the total current costs and expenses of the national systems above annual breakeven levels. The principal stimulant for this will be governmental operations in basic economic infrastructure, or government-sponsored investments in regulated public utilities which are either partly, or entirely government-owned. In cases deemed appropriate, a public utility may begin life as government-owned, and later shifted to private ownership.
- Under such conditions, the future of the individual national economies will depend largely on national and international mechanisms of and among governments, for generating low-cost, long-term credit-issuance with maturities of between a quarter and half-century: one or two generations. Generally, this means borrowing costs for credit created at standard rates not in excess of 1-2% annual simple interest. This were not a feasible proposition outside the context of a well-regulated, fixed-exchange-rate monetary system whose design were modelled on the best features of our experience under the pre-1971 Bretton Woods monetary system.
- Two kinds of sources for the creation of state credit are available. The first, is a national banking system of the type implicitly specified by the U.S. Federal Constitution. The second, is credit generated by long-term treaty agreements on trade and investment, between, or among sovereign states. A third method, the Keynesian-multiplier factor specific to central-banking systems of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal model, is not admissible under the extreme conditions which will continue during the several or more years of general monetary-financial reorganization.
It must be taken into account, that the economic revival of Europe during the two decades following 1945, depended upon the unique role of the gold-reserve-backed U.S. dollar. This exceptional position of that dollar, during that interval, enabled the IMF system to shield European and certain other currencies and their credit systems, until the sterling-dollar crises of 1967-1971. In today's crisis, we must accomplish a similar benefit at a time the U.S. dollar is inherently weak in real-value content. Keynesian supplements to a solid system are not tolerable at this time.
Take the case of the U.S. Federal Reserve System as an illustration of the present challenge.
The resort to "wall of money" tactics which continue to use electronic and other monetary printing devices, especially since October 1998, to bail out implicitly bankrupt portions of financial markets, has produced a hyperinflationary potential within large-scale areas of what are fairly described as "financial bubbles" in the tradition of John Law's escapades. This defines the U.S. Federal Reserve System, among affected other central-banking systems, as bankrupt. This condition of the U.S. Federal Reserve System is reflected, in large part, in the currently zooming U.S. Federal deficit and related deterioration in U.S. balance of payments accounts. At the moment, the prevalent thinking of the U.S. Presidency and Congressional parties, if it could actually be called thinking, has no connection with the real universe.
Thus, were I President at this moment, my Treasury Secretary and key leaders of the Congress would be scheming in preparation for placing the Federal Reserve System under the protection of receivership in bankruptcy reorganization. As in the fairly comparable instance of President Franklin Roosevelt's "bank holiday" measures of 1933, the most immediate object of this action would be threefold: a.) to prevent a disorderly chain-reaction collapse within the domestic monetary-financial system; b.) to maintain the unbroken continuity of the nation's essential public and private economic functions; c.) to clear the way for a vigorous expansion of employment, with large emphasis on credit for public works of the Federal, state, and local governments.
Before taking such action, I would be obliged to assure relevant governments as to the nature of the measures to be taken whenever that might occur. Those actions would prompt immediate confidential discussions occurring in or near Washington, D.C., with representatives of governments. These discussions would lead toward relevant treaty agreements establishing a new world monetary-financial system.
My issuing this present report of my intention at this time, takes those considerations into account. Government must sometimes act to surprise the onlookers, but those surprises should be few, and never violate previously stated principles.
Under the U.S. Federal Constitution, the creation of public debt is a function of the Executive, within the bounds of the consent of the U.S. Congress. This includes a Federal monopoly on the emission of legal currency, and obligations implicitly incurred against the future issue of such currency. This power is the principal source of relevant net credit-expansion by the government. This power were prudently used to create the credit used by both the Federal and state governments, chiefly for both Federal and state infrastructure-building programs. I have already designated the principal kinds of programs I intend to launch or support, and have supplied guidelines for some of these.[8]
- The advantage of reforming the IMF according to the model of the regulated, 1944-1958 fixed-exchange-rate system, lies in the contrast of the successes of the former to the systemic failure of the both a.) the 1964-2003 shift of the U.S.A., U.K., and notable other economies, from a successful model of producer society to the currently bankrupt form of consumer society, and b.) the presently bankrupt, 1971-2003 floating-exchange-rate system. The principled features of the emergency reform to be made now, have the advantage of experience: a change premised on the proven success of the fixed-exchange-rate producer-society model, in contrast to the calamitous cumulative failure of the subsequent, doomed, deregulated, floating-exchange-rate model.
The world's Titanic monetary-financial ship is sinking; reality will show little patience with the passengers and crew who demand that all of us stay with the recent tradition of that doomed ship.
Therefore, once it could be assumed, that the bankrupt, floating exchange-rate form of the IMF is being replaced by an essentially global, regulated, fixed-exchange-rate version of the Bretton Woods system, it is feasible to use the intended monetary system as the context for long-term, reciprocal, bilateral and multilateral trade and tariff agreements of 25-to-50 years span, with charges in the range of 1-2% per annum simple annual interest-rates.
These treaty life-spans of such duration are defined chiefly by the dominant role of component elements representing long-term programs of development of basic economic infrastructure, under such headings as: regulated generation and distribution of power; mass-transportation systems for freight and passengers; water resources development and management systems; forestation, and other large-scale land-management and related systems; sets of urban-industrial complexes; and health-care and educational systems. These programs, typified by the multinational Mekong development agreements, and the presently expanding array of China's infrastructure programs, define the market for stimulation and financing of expanding arrays in the entrepreneurial and related production of marketable goods.
The long-term infrastructure elements define the market which is the economic water within which the happy entrepreneurial fish swim. The life-span of the relatively longest-cycle infrastructure investments, defines the span within which payments must be resolved by pre-agreements on financing, tariffs, pricing, and trade.
The global system required is broadly defined for illustration as follows.
The principal impetus for such long-term agreements comes chiefly from continental Eurasia. This means a Europe led by a set of nations gathered together with France, Germany, Italy, and Russia; with a Eurasia group gathered together around Russia, China, and India; and, hopefully, a Middle East group functioning as a developing cross-road of economic growth between the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean.
The second largest component is cooperation within the Americas.
The third component is Africa.
Other regions dovetail with those three.
The common feature of each of the regions, is that each is defined by the fossil and related raw materials resources concentrated within each of the components. The improvement and management of the Biosphere, and its essential, long-term raw materials component, defines the principal features of functional relationships among raw materials, habitation, and production within each of the regions.
In the special case of Africa, the accumulated effects of imposed looting, genocidal practices, and suppression of most of Africa by present and former pro-colonialist agencies has reduced the per-capita, and per-square-kilometer development of the continent to such a degree, that Africa presently lacks sufficient internally generated capital resources to develop the primary elements of basic economic infrastructure indispensable for its healthy development. Large-scale outside aid, in the mode of graduated technology-transfer programs, are needed to provide strategically crucial, large-scale elements of main-trunk basic economic infrastructure, thus to enable Africa to develop its own means for both operating and maintaining the primary systems, and developing the secondary systems interfaced with the primary ones.
Such indispensable assistance for Africa would not be possible without a climate of vigorous development within Eurasia and the Americas generally.
The Matter of Strategic Defense
The experience of the U.S. War of Independence, the continuing development of the concept of strategic defense by France's "Author of Victory" Lazare Carnot, the related role of the Prussian reformers around Wilhelm von Humboldt and Gerhard Scharnhorst, and the Nineteenth-Century development of the U.S. West Point and Annapolis academies, pointed toward the foreseeable, if still distant end of the kind of military policies associated with ancient Rome, feudalism, and Eighteenth-Century cabinet warfare. The defeat of the fascist Napoleon Bonaparte on the initiative of Czar Alexander I and his Prussian-reformer allies, and the Soviet defense and counteroffensive against Hitler's invading forces, demonstrate a notion of a fresh view of the principle of strategic defense as the presently overdue replacement of those notions of war so pathetically parodied by Secretary Rumsfeld's revolting notions of military affairs.
Contrary to the followers of the empiricist Thomas Hobbes, war is neither a natural nor necessarily permanent institution of mankind. As long as nations must be prepared to fight justified wars of defense, relatively powerful, well-developed military capabilities remain necessary. However proceeding from such lessons as the genius of France's Louis XI, the part played by Mazarin and Colbert in the negotiation and implementation of the Treaty of Westphalia, as continued by Carnot's representation of a principle of strategic defense, and the original work of the pro-Classical Prussian reformers, points us toward what should become the natural process of phasing well-trained military-logistical capabilities into a time when the role of capable military institutions blends into a role of a broadened notion of a corps of military engineers.
The brutish incompetence of Secretary Donald Rumsfeld respecting the conduct of the U.S. war upon Iraq, contains an illustration of that point.
Admittedly, the government of President George W. Bush, Jr. violated moral and treaty law, and the U.S. Constitution, in the recent, continuing invasion of Iraq. However, once U.S. forces had invaded and occupied Iraqi territory, those military forces were, and remain responsible for the general welfare in the territory they occupied. Well-trained and adequately supplied heavy divisions are indispensable for competent military operations under even the circumstances of such a depleted military opposition as poor Iraq's. Such divisions represent the bulk of the effective capability to assume efficient responsibility for the peaceful, and beneficial occupation of the inhabited and other territory they have occupied. Using a lightened force relying largely on post-adolescents trained largely in video-game point-and-shoot routines, does not typify the conduct of a competent U.S. Secretary of Defense.
The continuing role of engineering and related military functions in the closing period of combat operations, presages the way in which a policy of strategic defense leads toward the supersession of warfare. The policy of Gen. Douglas MacArthur's leadership, of winning a war by controlling the largest territory with avoidance of unnecessary combat, contrasted with the immorality of President Harry Truman's totally unnecessary nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, points in the same direction. The object of the justified practice of warfare lies in the early success of its peaceful outcome. Military and related strategic capabilities designed and deployed for actually accomplishing the durably peaceful outcome not presently in sight for Afghanistan, Iraq, or the Middle East generally—not in sight for as long as Cheney and Rumsfeld remain in control, are a necessary capability for reaching the higher goal of humanity's exit from war itself.
The history of the impact of the fortifications by Vauban, as these were understood by Carnot, and later appreciated by "Old" Moltke, testifies to that principle.
Today, the increasingly apparent fact of globally ominous lunacies of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their neo-con lackeys has the perverse sort of usefulness of pointing to the urgency of those kinds of economic reforms which defeated the cause of fascism during President Franklin Roosevelt's terms in office. The solution is to be seen in the fact, that even for that typical family which may not be remarkable for its knowledge of science or theology, traditional morality finds its practical expression in the good which one generation intends to contribute to the children's and grandchildren's generations, and beyond. It is through the engagement of peoples in creating the improvement of mankind's condition, through great works of progress, especially in cooperation with other nations, that we foster an efficient sense of a moral connection of oneself to future generations of mankind.
The danger is, that if greedy and small-minded men and women continue to quarrel over the diminishing scraps of a collapsing economic system, rather than bringing the needed new system quickly into being now, such stubborn clinging to the old habits of the presently bankrupt monetary-financial system, would, almost certainly, doom all humanity to an early plunge into several generations of a new, planetary "new dark age." If, however, we make the kinds of changes which I would introduce, as a currently prospective next President of the U.S.A., we may find we have entered a safer world, in which widespread warfare would never come again.
[1] In 1983, I had forecast, that if Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov continued to refuse President Reagan's offer of SDI cooperation, current Soviet policy would lead to the collapse of the Soviet economy, "in about five years." It collapsed in approximately six years. On Oct. 12, 1988, I delivered a statement in my function as a U.S. Presidential candidate, in West Berlin, forecasting the imminent economic collapse of the Soviet bloc, with anticipated reunification of Germany, with Berlin probably designated to become the future capital of a reunified Germany. This Berlin statement featured my policy for U.S. "food for peace": cooperation in economic rebuilding of the nations of the Soviet bloc. That televised Oct. 12 Berlin press conference was featured in a U.S. national television-network broadcast a few weeks later that same month.
[2] It is notable that the wilder notions of Defense Secretary Cheney were checked by the administration of President George H.W. Bush, Sr., but largely adopted under Bush, Jr. and Vice-President Cheney.
[3] For example, the U.S. 1776 Declaration of Independence, crafted under the direction of Benjamin Franklin, features Leibniz's concept of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," as Leibniz counterposed this concept to the pro-slavery "life, liberty, and property" of John Locke.
[4] For example, in experimental physical science, we can sense the effects of gravitation, the principle of quickest time, the principle of universal least action, and the effects of the complex domain generally; but, we can not sense those demonstrably efficient universal physical principles themselves. This is not only modern knowledge; it is the principle of powers emphasized by Plato in such locations as his Theaetetus dialogue.
[5] I am acting to bring the citizen's voice back into the party's deliberations, a prospect which is generously hated by the presently aging DLC bureaucracy itself.
[6] "The Eurasian Land-Bridge: The 'New Silk Road'—Locomotive for Worldwide Economic Development," EIR Special Report, January 1997.
[7] "Now's the Time for LaRouche's New Bretton Woods," LaRouche's Committee for a New Bretton Woods, June 2000.
[8] "LaRouche's Emergency Infrastructure Program for the U.S.," EIR Special Report, November 2002.
