This article appears in the May 27, 2022 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

October 29, 1977

NATO in Caesar’s Foolish Footsteps

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

[Print version of this article]

Editor’s Note: This article was first published in EIR, Vol. 4, No. 44, Nov. 1, 1977, pp. 7-14.

The last article in the October issue of NATO Review, by former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Robert Strausz-Hupé, is representative of the way British influences have corrupted United States policy to the grave disadvantage of our nation’s actual vital interests. Mr. Strausz-Hupé is not a gifted thinker. He is rather well-informed and his article is not only semi-official, but an orderly, clinically relevant representation of the kind of disorientation we must finally extirpate from our policy-formulating processes.

The Britain Issue

Since I have had the strongest reasons to lambast the damned British in print (and elsewhere) during recent weeks, I should interpolate a qualifying comment on that fact here before turning fuller attention to the special case of Mr. Strausz-Hupé.

During 1976 and into 1977, I had good reason to hope that the United Kingdom of Prime Minister James Callaghan, the United Kingdom of the Trades Union Congress, of Barclays Bank and other representative institutions, was in the process of remedying its perspectives. It was ostensibly moving according to the combined light of experience and of the pressures of the present monetary decline and deepening world depression.

I hoped that Mr. Roy Jenkins and what he represented was as safely tucked away from British government as most members of the Labour Party had hoped when Callaghan’s supporters shoved that potential “Ramsay MacDonald,” Jenkins, off into the European Economic Community Commission. The situation in England began to deteriorate visibly at approximately the close of 1976, although only barely noticeably. It grew bad during the late Spring, and took a decided turn for the worse with the untimely death of Mr. Crosland and Mr. Crosland’s succession by a Denis Healey protégé, present Foreign Secretary David Owen. From about the end of May of this year, the United Kingdom turned monstrously evil. Most influential British citizens and institutions, grumblingly or otherwise, either actively or passively subscribed to this unwholesome policy turn.

We hope for a change. In course, England must come to her senses. She must cast her lot according to the actual self-interests of her citizens, cast her lot with the nuclear energy development and high-technology-exports policies adopted by leading forces in France, West Germany, and other countries.

However, even if that happy change develops, the caution I underlined in my book, The Case of Walter Lippmann,[fn_1] early this past Spring will continue to apply. British ideology is a hideous heritage, which the majority of British people must extirpate from their mental habits before other nations can be confident of that nation’s qualifications to be raised to the level of equal among nations united by a community of principle.

It is the British ideology to which most British institutions and people have become habituated which made the United Kingdom susceptible to becoming the instrument for the evil policies of Mr. Jenkins and his accomplices. It is that British ideology, as it permeates Anglo-American and NATO policies, and as that same mental disease continues to impair the judgment of America’s policy-making strata, which we confront in a specific form in Robert Strausz-Hupé’s NATO Review piece.

It is politically and practically indispensable to pinpoint Mr. Jenkins in this connection. However, just as it is necessary to recognize that many within the Labour Party share, to one degree or another, our estimate of Jenkins, Healey, and others of the same ilk, it is necessary to emphasize that behind Jenkins, outside the Labour Party, stands the presently institutionalized form of that cumulative evil of its ideology since the Stuart Restoration of 1660. Just as forces of the British Guelph monarchy, its Foreign Office and the circles of Lord Shelburne, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and Thomas Malthus, linked to the Barings’ financial interests, represented the evil against which the American Revolution was fought during the 18th century and the War of 1812, that same essential combination of forces is mobilized behind the façade of Jenkins, Healey, and Owen today.

It is not so much Jenkins himself that is our present problem with Britain, but rather his key role as the instrument of an institutionalized force, an evil ideology traceable directly to the traitorous Cecils of the late 16th century.

Without understanding those facts about Britain, we cannot understand any major problem confronting the United States during the present crisis, and cannot understand that British ideological influence for folly and subversion which we must root out of our leading institutions now in our nation’s most urgent and vital interests.

The Roots of Strausz-Hupé

The present struggle of the United States against the evil forces around Roy Jenkins and others is a continuation of a struggle between humanism and nominalism which is documented as the central feature of Mediterranean and European civilization over a span of at least 3,000 years. It is a struggle by humanism for a form of society based on realizing the creative mental powers of the human mind through the fostering of scientific and technological progress, through the effort of city-builders to lift mankind out of the evil and moral imbecility of bucolic primitive cultures. Against humanism have been constantly arrayed the would-be builders of empires, empires based on a policy of looting and a philosophical conviction whose modern expression is variously known as nominalism and neo-Malthusianism.

During the 18th century, the forces of evil centered around the British ruling Guelph monarchical house and the heirs of the evil nominalists, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, occupied themselves in the study of the fall of the Roman Republic and the emergence of the Roman Empire. This study was directed to the purpose of adducing from the study of the Roman Empire a political art by which the British monarchy and its accomplices could develop a global rule of Pax Britannica as the intended successor to the Pax Romana.

In reaction against this British venture, the humanists of that century identified themselves with such figures of the Roman Republic as the Gracchi brothers. The fight between the Gracchi and the emerging faction of the Caesars was viewed by both sides of the 18th century as the precedent of reference for the struggle of the humanist leaders of the American Revolution and their European allies against the evil British anti-humanist effort to establish a British Empire, an empire based on the same conceptions of law, of man, and of economy which had characterized the Roman Empire as the disaster which set back human progress probably for more than a thousand years.

It is true, of course, that modern academic opinion predominantly locates the emergence of the British Empire during the middle of the 19th century. It is true that self-esteemed Marxists occupy themselves with the same historical delusion. The fact of the matter is that the policy of establishing Britain as an empire was consciously adopted by the circles gathered around Shelburne during the mid-18th century, and that the empire was established in political fact by the 1815 Treaty of Vienna. It is true that it was not until the later part of the 19th century that Britain fully developed the means to realize that policy generally, and not until the later part of that century that the resistance to such a policy from within Britain itself was effectively broken. The British Empire, as policy, was established a century earlier.

If this British conception of empire is set directly against the contrary policies of humanist leaders of the American Revolution, the profundity of the distinctions shows most readily, and in consequence the true spiritual ancestry of Strausz-Hupé’s thinking is exposed as definitively not the American heritage.

We have amply set forth the principled distinctions between humanism and bestiality in other published locations now in general circulation. We need not elaborately develop those distinctions from the ground up here. It is merely necessary to emphasize those aspects of that distinction which bear most directly on the subject before us.

The most efficient approach to the subject in the present context is to treat the economic distinctions as the determining source of the other practical distinctions.

The humanist outlook (in strict modern language, the Neoplatonic humanist outlook in the tradition of the Ismailis, the Hohenstaufens, the early Freemasons, Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, Erasmus of Rotterdam, and so forth) defines the origin of wealth to be those increases in the productive powers of labor realized through the practical application of advances in scientific knowledge. In short, technological progress. This also means that for humanists there are no fixed kinds of natural resources for once and for all; rather, the nature of natural resources is constantly redefined to man’s advantage as technological progress diminishes the social costs of old kinds of resources and defines entire new kinds of resources.

The anti-humanist or bestialist outlook is properly called bestialist because, like Thomas Hobbes or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, it denies any qualitative distinction between man and the lower beasts. It denies any fundamental importance for scientific knowledge—and, most frequently, has stated that qualitative advances in scientific knowledge have been virtually exhausted, as Bertrand Russell and John Dewey insisted during the 1920s, as the rabid nominalists insisted earlier during the 13th and 14th centuries, and as the evil Al-Ghazali professed, to the consequent ruin of Baghdad and Cairo during the 11th century.

Denying the essential importance of technological progress, bestialism, as did Al-Ghazali or Bertrand Russell, repudiates that which uniquely distinguishes man from the lower beasts, man’s mental-creative powers for progress in self-perfection of knowledge of the lawful ordering of the universe. Thus, denying the positive role of science for progress, the bestialist denies the positive value which a single individual properly has for his or her entire society—the fact that a single creative mind, variously by discovering or transmitting advances in scientific knowledge for social practice, makes a universal practical contribution of permanent value to society as a whole.

By degrading man to a fixed level of technological practice as the normal limit of progress, the bestialist degrades man into the likeness of a baboon, a creature of a fixed capacity for range of social behaviors. The bestialist, like the evil Francis Bacon and his protégé Thomas Hobbes, would strip man of what Christianity designates as the human soul, the power of mental creative powers of self-perfection in knowledge of universal law. The bestialist thus degrades man to the lower-beastlikeness of a mere biological individual of fixed, heteronomic feelings and localist judgmental impulses.

In consequence of this the bestialist (nominalist, empiricist; linguistician, systems analyst) defines wealth in the terms associated with the crudest early 18th-century physiocratic views: in terms of a fixed bounty of nature, in terms of a fixed array of natural resources each finite in magnitude. To the bestialist, the essential struggle is a competitive struggle for such fixed natural resources—mineral resources plus looting of agriculture and forestry in a fixed mode of exploitation.

This bestialist outlook is the characteristic of all the notable empires. China and India stank in Yin-Yang cycles of bestiality for centuries. Babylon, Persia, Hellenic culture, the Roman Empire, and the British Empire are the most notable examples of the calamities which bestiality has imposed upon civilization.

Between the two outlooks, the humanist versus the bestialist, there has been and is a struggle for world hegemony. That was the understanding of the innermost circles of the United States’ Founding Fathers. The United States was founded by a conspiracy, a collaboration among Americans associated with Benjamin Franklin and European humanists centered around the heirs of Colbert, Descartes, and Leibnitz. These humanists fostered the republic’s establishment on the Atlantic Coast of North America as a crucial movement in a conspiracy to establish world hegemony for humanist principles. In the view of those who have the knowledge to understand that issue, the same struggle exists today.

Fools might imagine from that that this struggle for world hegemony means a choice between a humanist empire as against a bestialist empire of the sort agreeable to Mr. Roy Jenkins or kindred Orwellians. That is the crux of the matter to be taken up in connection with Strausz-Hupé’s blunderings in NATO Review. The humanist conception of world hegemony is based on an absolute rejection of any sort of empire, in favor of a system of humanist republics.

The Notion of the Republic

Throw away the dictionaries and the run of ordinary academic texts and encyclopedias on this matter. Unfortunately, those dubious sources have submitted their glosses on the word “republic” from ignorant academic babblers, whose assimilation of linguistics is necessarily in direct proportion to their increased imbecility in philosophy, epistemology, and political science.

The development of the term “republic” has nothing to do with elections, parliaments, or such differentia. The notion of “republic” is associated with the notion of natural law as knowable to man in a self-perfecting way. In other words, that humanity, and specific nations of humanity, have proper fundamental interests and obligations as wholes, interests and obligations which exist independently of aggregates of individuals taken one at a time. The state as a whole has a real, knowable interest and obligation which stands above the relatively heteronomic perceptions of interest by any of its citizens.

However, that general interest of the state as a whole is, if properly known, the essential basis for satisfying the interests of its individuals. Thus, in the crudest sort of illustration, an economy in a depression can not satisfy the material requirements of even a majority of its individual citizens. There is no equitable division of a pie which taken as a whole is insufficient to keep all the would-be sharers alive.

The resolution of the specious appearance of contradiction between state and individual interest is that the progress of the state depends upon the contributions of the individual. Therefore, the development and realization of the creative mental and productive powers of the individual are the essential interest of the state. To be exact, it is that sort of causal connection between the reciprocal interests of the individual and state which most efficiently defines the interest of both in a common, coherent single notion. That notion is the essential conception of a republic.

It happens that the kinds of constitutional, institutional forms established by the Founding Fathers represent a rigorous assessment of preceding centuries of European civilization in the light of immediate experience. Hence, provided the intent and content of those institutions is properly apprehended—as the federal courts have lately largely lost the power to comprehend constitutional law—what is properly understood as the U.S. constitutional form of republic is that most agreeable to the purposes of a republic under capitalist conditions of technological progress.

For example, as we have noted in other locations, the experience of the obscene behavior of the Pennsylvania legislature in the matter of the Bank of North America during the Confederation period warned Thomas Paine and other Federalists that a single federal legislative body, as in Pennsylvania, allowed the irrational caprices of a transient majority to do irreparable damage to the interests, and even the integrity, of a state. It was necessary to provide impediments to the will of a current majority opinion, so that the commitment of forebears and the interests of posterity might be brought efficiently to bear to prevent temporary passions from destroying the republic.

How a republic ought to evolve, what are the best choices of institutions, should always be a concrete question, and an important one, but the forms most agreeable to a particular case are not invariant qualities of a republic as such. They are means adopted for achieving the purpose of a republic. The notion of the republic is more fundamental.

As the notion of a republic is inseparable from the notion of technological progress, the wealth and power of a particular republic does not depend so much on natural resources as technological progress. Because the citizens of such a republic have greater productive powers than those of more backward nations, their influence tends to be hegemonic. This potentiality demands, of course, that republics committed to those same principles be aggregately a sufficient power in the world to defeat combinations of anti-republican force otherwise afoot.

The most noted Renaissance figures attempting to solve the problem of a republican world order are Dante Alighieri (De Monarchia), Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (De Concordantia Catholica and other relevant writings), and Erasmus of Rotterdam and his followers. Prior to John Milton’s and allied efforts to develop non-monarchical alternatives for republics, Cusa’s work is probably the most important, both for its profundity and for its awesome influence among leading thinkers into the 17th century. Cusa is important otherwise because his was the first notable effort to define the existence of national republics within a humanist world secular order. Out of this line of humanist thought emerged the effort to conceptualize a system of national republics bound together by a community of humanist principle.

In general, in a world order dominated by humanist republics in the balance of power, there is no purpose nor advantage in empires.

The point is most directly illustrated today by noting that no nation is presently large enough to contain within its borders all the kinds of industries it requires to produce the consumer and capital goods of modern culture and technology. This is further well illustrated by contrasting the McNamara policies for the World Bank, or the closely related colonialist doctrine euphemistically cloaked under the name of the “Common Fund,” with the kind of world order and power relations arising in a policy of technologically vectored industrial and agricultural expansion in the developing sector.

In the latter case, the developing world sorely needs the high-technology exports of the United States, Western Europe, and Japan. If a concert of developing nations were to not only reject such relationship, but attempt to replay the OPEC folly with “Common Funds” swindles, the industrialized nations would find massive factions within the developing nations which would overthrow any petty-barbarian government adhering to a “Common Fund” or related policy. (Would we foster such corrections? We should and would! However, we would gain nothing and lose much by dabbling in imperial or satrapal arrangements.)

However, if a government attempts, as Britain did and as Jenkins et al. still propose to do, to subject the developing sector to bucolic economic imbecility, and to regard control of the revenues from a fixed order of natural resources as the ruling determination of wealth among nations, then suppression of impulses to technological progress in those nations becomes a matter of imperial urgency, and a source of bitter competition among nations sharing such imperialist follies.

In the case of Strausz-Hupé’s cited article, he consistently connects his proposal for a new, NATO-ruled world imperialist order with a bestialist’s physiocratic doctrine in which natural resources are regarded as the fixed, fundamental form of wealth. On that account, not only are Strausz-Hupé’s proposals the most deadly sort of nonsense—imminently radioactive nonsense—but they represent the sort of muddleheadedness which must be extirpated from United States foreign policy formulations if vital U.S. interests are to be served.

The Warburg Legacy

The crises building up in the United States from 1877 into the devastating 1905–1907 crisis objectively demanded a prompt return to the national banking principles which had proven themselves so successful under Hamilton and Biddle, and which had been employed, at least in thrust, in the most crucial aspects of Abraham Lincoln’s Administration. Instead, interests gathered around Warburg and his protégés Colonel House and Bernard Baruch preempted the impulse for a national banking approach by introducing a Federal Reserve System based on the British monetarist model.

This misfortune was succeeded by Baruch’s key role in developing the war-reparations features of the Versailles Treaty on behalf of a Warburg (“Daddy Warbucks”) constellation of Anglo-American investment bankers and their French dupes. The same Baruch was the guiding influence behind the proposal known more popularly as the “Morgenthau Plan” for reducing post-war Germany to a vastly depopulated pastoral obscenity, until wiser influences prompted him to back away from that conception somewhat. The same Baruch was the author of the swindle known as the “Baruch Plan” for control of nuclear technology at the close of World War II.

A myth concerning nuclear technology has become so enshrined in official U.S. mythology that an interpolated comment is wanted here.

The supporters of the Baruch Plan argued that the Soviets (by 1943–1944 already the intended adversary among British and connected U.S. circles) would be incapable of replicating the results of the Manhattan Project for 10, or perhaps 20 years. Later, as the Soviets developed a nuclear bomb within several years after the war, and developed an operational hydrogen bomb before the United States, the myths were circulated that either Soviet spies had stolen “the secret” or that “captured German scientists” had worked the miracle. The fact of the matter was that Soviet work on nuclear energy was under way during the 1920s, under the leadership of one of the most qualified scientists in the world, Vernadsky, an associate of the Pasteur Institute, where he had been associated with Pasteur’s heirs, the Curies. Most of the facts relevant to that point were variously remembered or belatedly discovered by European and North American specialists after Sputnik. However, the basic facts were knowable during the 1940s.

During the 1947 period that the Baruch Plan was much discussed, it was argued by others of us—this was my own first significant post-war advocacy of that time—that the establishment of agreements devoting finite fissionable resources and their processing for nuclear energy projects (e.g., Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace”) was the obvious alternative to Baruch’s nonsense. Subsequent historical investigations would have shown that Baruch was not himself seriously persuaded that his efforts would prevent the Soviets building a nuclear bomb—all his available specialist advisors would, in majority, have advised him that he had no means to prevent such an early development one way or the other. Baruch’s plan was determined to prevent the development of nuclear energy-production as a new energy source.

This point of view was not new to Baruch. All his public life, Baruch was a wild-eyed monetarist physiocrat, who applied that physiocratic ideology to nuclear energy. He foresaw nuclear energy as a danger to the ability of his circle of investment banks to control the world economy through extending their control over world petroleum marketing. In fact, James Schlesinger’s proposed energy policy is nothing but Baruch extended to the point of ultimate absurdity.

Baruch and Schlesinger represent an outlook which has been the consistent—bestialist, to be exact—policy of a circle of Anglo-American investment bankers and their social-democratic and liberal political allies throughout this century. Theirs is essentially a Malthusian policy, a policy of holding back technological progress, in order to use investment bankers’ control of the marketing of natural resources on the world market as a means for maintaining and enhancing their world power at the expense of the material well-being of humanity in general. In other words, this is the old colonialist policy of the British imperialists in a slightly altered outward political form. It is the policy of a group of Anglo-American investment bankers which to this day uses the old British establishment, and that establishment’s vast intelligence apparatus-networks throughout the world, as the political reference point of its global developments.

Heretofore, Malthusian and neo-Malthusian policies such as those axiomatically embedded in the Baruch Plan have not proposed a total obstruction of technological progress. What has been characteristic, represented in the extreme by the Nazis’ Schachtian variant on Keynesian policies, is the policy of looting large areas held in relative backwardness to prop up a narrow, “privileged” area of industrial and agricultural development.

Eighteenth century England is illustrative of this. British policy was to hold back technological progress and industrial development in England; any contrary perception or report is outright nonsense—as the emigration of skilled British workers to expanding French industries illustrates. However, while working to abort its own internal development, England sought to maintain industrial hegemony over the rest of the world by enforcing relative backwardness in “competing regions.”

The same British principle nearly wrecked the prospects for SALT II negotiations during the early months of the Carter Administration. Ironically, at the same time that the London International Institute for Strategic Studies was coordinating vicious slanders against Major General George Keegan, Paul Nitze and others were in fact working strenuously to bluff the Soviets into abandoning the very sort of advanced, strategically relevant research which General Keegan had reported. The point was that the NATO countries could not proceed with slashing research and development, deindustrialization, and the “Schlesinger energy package” as long as the Soviets were proceeding on a high-technology research and development orientation. Therefore, demanding that the Soviets abandon the advanced edge of their own research and development was seen as indispensable to instituting a Malthusian policy in the advanced capitalist nations.

Historically, British Malthusian policy has converged on actual or implicit cartelization. This aims at limited industrial and related progress in some designated sectors, to the accompaniment of a virtual triaging of industrial and related development outside the bounds of the cartel. While the cartel or its equivalent is predominantly governed by an anti-technological policy, at the same time it accepts limited productive capital-formation and some technological progress to the extent that technological industrial agricultural hegemony demand. In other words, a pragmatic attitude toward technological progress within a dominant Malthusian policy for the world as a whole.

The general failure to understand this British policy has been aggravated by the prevailing social-democratic and communist doctrines concerning imperialism. Lenin, duped by Hilferding and Hobson, among notable influences to that effect, was nonsensical by contrast with Rosa Luxemburg on this point.

As the case of the United States’ development ought to suggest to any sensible analyst, political hegemony over and import of capital into colonial and semicolonial regions by industrialized “metropolitan” sectors does not in any way lead in and of itself to relative backwardness in such regions; rather, quite the opposite. This, the backwardness, contrary to Lenin, must be derived from some other element than hegemony and import of capital.

Essentially, Britain was aided mightily in maintaining relative backwardness in Britain itself by a policy of savage “cultural relativism” in the colonial and semicolonial sector. That “cultural relativist” policy was maintained both by political means and by imposing upon the victims a massive debt structure, through which looting of marginal revenues from primary commodity extraction, production, and—above all—marketing provided the home base with massive added revenues at the expense of the real economy.

This latter point is underlined by developing sector politics today. As developing sector governments reject technological progress in favor of “native traditions” and such ideologies, those governments are aligned with the City of London, aligned away from the pro-development perspectives of the Non-Aligned group at Colombo, Sri Lanka. In reality, those developing sector forces which support the UNCTAD proposals of Gamani Corea, or the “Common Fund” nonsense are de facto agents of British imperialism—and they ought to be told so with most undiplomatic frankness. The characteristic impulse of the labor movements and industrialist forces throughout the developing sector is, and has been, technological progress and industrial development.

The significance of nuclear energy development has been, since the end of World War II, that not only does nuclear development weaken the energy-marketing oligopoly, but it represents the spearhead of a whole range of technological breakthroughs, which would once and for all end the ability of the monetarist investment banking circles of London and Manhattan to keep the world on the edge of recurring depressions and general backwardness.

The arguments of the Naderites and their apologists are efficient illustration of the point. James Schlesinger has argued that threatened shortages of energy, including dangers of new OPEC embargoes, require drastic measures of “energy conservation.” When it is proposed, counter to this, that therefore the United States and other countries ought to press ahead with development of the more efficient nuclear energy programs, the argument is made that such programs would undermine “energy conservation.” Is anyone stupid enough to take the “energy conservation” argument against nuclear power seriously?

The same forces argue that the rising price of petroleum imports requires the United States to cut back energy use in the interest of the balance of payments and the economy generally. They propose to wipe out whole sectors of industry, to drive much of the world back to a vastly reduced, labor-intensive form of production, as a way of solving the inadequate production of wealth reflected in the sagging balance of payments.

Such arguments as we have cited show that the proponents of anti-nuclear “energy conservation” are either outright liars or cretins. If liars, which all informed spokesmen must be, then their worse-than-silly arguments must be judged as mere demagogy, a disguise for some other motivation. The Baruch Plan points to that real motivation, as does the foolish chatter concerning “the dangers of nuclear proliferation.”

What sort of a world are such lunatics proposing to shape, and by what means do they propose to establish such an Orwellian nightmare order? Strausz-Hupé indicates the answer to those queries.

What Strausz-Hupé Proposes

The following is a fair summary of the relevant aspects of Strausz-Hupé’s “NATO in Midstream.”

He argues against the assumption that NATO is properly viewed as a bulwark against Soviet aggression into Western Europe. He more or less correctly reports that Soviet Clausewitzian strategy toward Western Europe is a war-avoidance posture, necessarily dependent upon a credible war-fighting capability. He proposes that the Soviet goal in Europe is that of securing President Charles de Gaulle’s “Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals” policy, a sphere of economic cooperation and mutual political security which nullifies NATO. That latter observation has the advantage of at least some resemblance to the truth: it represents one option the Soviet leadership would seriously consider under certain circumstances.

He argues that the Soviet long-term strategic perspective is identical with the official Peking line, of an erosive wave of anti-capitalist developments in the Southern Hemisphere which have the effect of the “countryside encircling the cities,” the cities being the advanced capitalist countries.

Within that perceptual framework, Strausz-Hupé proposes that the Soviets have in fact gained much in their progress toward “encirclement of the cities.” NATO, he proposes, must qualitatively shift its purpose and efforts to counter “the true purpose” of the Soviet thrust.

He does not develop his proposal beyond that, but rather proposes what is in effect a new charter conference for NATO. What he is proposing, in fact, is well known: a new series of developing-sector treaty organizations such as the still-in-progress South Atlantic Treaty Organization (SATO) and the recent, abortive effort to reconstitute CENTO.

Within this outline, he includes two elements of primary relevance for understanding his strategic outlook as a whole. First, he emphasizes the principle of control of primary commodities marketing as the crucial feature of his overall policy. Secondly, he emphasizes the importance of the social-democratic “left” and its Eurocommunist subsidiaries as key to international management of the majority of advanced capitalist countries. In short, the anti-nuclear energy reforms which propose to contract industry in favor of a “labor-intensive” emphasis, and which pursue “quality of life” and “structural reform” means to institute such an Orwellian reformist order of bucolic economic imbecility.

It is notable that a former U.S. Ambassador, Strausz-Hupé, proposes exactly that policy which forces in the City of London are following in their present efforts to bankrupt the U.S. economy (with Saudi help) and to establish City of London hegemony over most of the world’s economy.

It is notable that Strausz-Hupé’s proposed foreign policy for the U.S.A., West Germany, Italy, and other relevant nations flows from a definition of vital interests based on a large-scale deindustrialization of those nations. Like the old Roman Empire, Strausz-Hupé’s NATO would be a society rotting at home, seeking to preserve that order at home by savage looting of the remainder of the world.

He is also proposing, whether or not he is sensible of that fact, an early general war. The combination of advanced capitalist nations driven desperate by neo-Schachtian internal erosion with an aggressive NATO-linked encirclement of the Warsaw Pact is a circumstance which does nothing but drive the Warsaw Pact toward an otherwise avoidable general war.

That was, of course, the growing danger during the period Strausz-Hupé was (until 1977) U.S. permanent representative to NATO, and was the continuing, deadly thrust of affairs until the recent Summer. The Carter-Gromyko draft, in a climate of efforts by leaders of key nations of continental Western Europe, has momentarily pushed that ugly menace a bit into the background. If the forces allied with Georgy Arbatov in the Soviet Union are defeated in the present factional affray in that nation, the possibilities of war-avoidance from the Soviet side are vastly improved.

What Strausz-Hupé is now proposing is a resumption of the same foolish strategy from which we are presently in the process of escaping. This folly on his part does not indicate that Strausz-Hupé is some uninformed fool. It reflects what is otherwise shown in his article; he is stuck in that same wretched British-ideological misperception of an Anglo-American alliance which Warburg and Bernard Baruch formerly represented. He cannot get out of the British ideological mind-set, the physiocratic, Malthusian dreams of a Pax Anglo-Americana. I do not suggest that Strausz-Hupé desires an early general war. He is merely so helplessly attached to a British ideology, which in itself leads toward war these days, that he refuses to consider seriously any consequences which expose the folly of British ideology itself.

The End of Imperial Delusions

The United States needs no empire, no “American Century.” We require only an updated version of the policy of the Founding Fathers. We have established in our nation a skilled and semiskilled labor force which represents labor of the greatest productive power on this globe today. Provided we develop the capital formation in basic industry to match that productive power of labor, and foster scientific and technological progress in education and capital-formation policies, the United States has not only awesome economic power, but the potentiality of growth rates in industrial and agricultural output beyond the imagination of most of our citizens at this moment. That is our national power, which we must develop and properly exert. If we proceed thus, we can laugh at the delusions of those who would build empires.

There are nations in the world, notably France, West Germany, and Japan, which are the United States’ immediate allies for a proper policy of global, high-technology-oriented economic growth in industrial and agricultural expansion. That global policy, firmly pursued by those forces, coincides with the fundamental interests of the Comecon nations, so that those nations are obliged in their self-interests to cooperate with us in pursuit of such global policies. With that correlation of forces among sovereign republics allied around common global economic-development policy, there is no force in the world which could resist that policy.

Based on the hunger of nations for the high-technology exports the United States has unmatched potential for producing, we represent a force capable of ensuring our vital interest on a global scale without any foolish dabbling in imperialist delusions.

For the immediate period ahead, the perceived potential-adversary relationship between NATO and the Warsaw Pact will persist. The issue of “deterrence” will persist. This will cost both NATO and Warsaw Pact nations valuable economic resources for military expenditures we all wish might be expended otherwise. It would be simplistic to imagine that that institutionalized problem could be swept away by mere exertion of rhetorical will. NATO or something like it will probably persist. It will evaporate only when acceptable institutional alternatives have evolved under circumstances of global economic cooperation and matching, mutually credible political-security agreements among the principal powers.

However, British actions during 1977 demand an immediate basic change in NATO ... and within the EEC as well. It was Britain’s intelligence establishment that plotted and deployed in the Middle East to the purpose of consolidating [missing words in the 1977 original article—ed.] mitted to alliance with the City of London. This was against continental Western Europe, against the vital interests of developing nations generally, and against the vital interests of the United States. It was British intelligence which most immediately directs the current wave of international terrorism, in concert with British-influenced circles in Peking. Britain must therefore undergo a diminution of its role in correspondence with the reality of the bankruptcy and the mismanagement of the internal British economy.

NATO has not been a trans-Atlantic alliance, but has been in fact a form of Anglo-American political rule over continental Western Europe. This was understood by President Charles de Gaulle, who withdrew France from NATO while preserving France’s alliance with the United States on that account. It was for the same reason that de Gaulle blocked Britain’s entry into the EEC, and enjoyed support from his ally, West Germany’s Konrad Adenauer, in that policy. It is Washington and London which run NATO, with other member-nations degraded to very, very junior partner status in matters of policy making.

Britain is not the United States’ ally, but our principal liability. Our immediate advanced sector allies are France, West Germany, and Japan, and—once that nation is freed from internal British controls—Italy. It is those Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) nations whose institutionalized vital interests bring their policies into correspondence in principle with self-interested U.S. policies. That is the nature of the shift which must immediately develop in all relevant features of U.S. policy.

The SATO Example

The folly of Strausz-Hupé’s policies is efficiently illustrated by examining the current crisis in southern Africa, one leg of the proposed SATO arrangements.

The Republic of South Africa is properly perceived as the mediator of high-technology-oriented economic development throughout the region. This requires, of course, that the nation’s internal and external policies be brought into agreement with equitable economic development treaties with its predominantly black neighbors, and the issue of Namibia resolved in that context. Contrary to what the Washington Post and London Times would have one believe, the industrialist factions in the government of the Republic of South Africa have repeatedly attempted to move in that direction. To our direct knowledge, at several points, just as the Republic of South Africa was about to enter into serious discussions (under some form or another) with representatives of the black “front-line states,” the London crew and its Institute for Policy Studies allies have activated some destabilization in southern Africa for the purpose of disrupting such negotiations.

Granted, the British MI-6 agents running about southern Africa as putative “black consciousness” leaders feed upon genuine issues of oppression. A more instructive picture is obtained if one considers the policies which they propose as “solutions” to black oppression. What they propose are the genocidal policies (against blacks) of the London investment banks and Robert McNamara’s World Bank. Their objective is not to aid oppressed blacks, but to dupe blacks into aiding in the imposition of World Bank policies which mean, directly, genocidal hunger and slave labor for the black population.

A solution to the problem means that the Republic of South Africa must negotiate through (most probably) Mozambique, and must establish both détente and economic cooperation with Mozambique and Angola. In that case, a treaty-negotiating commission initiated with participation of the Republic of South Africa, Mozambique, and Angola will lead toward rapid and substantial improvements in all matters throughout southern Africa—provided that continental Europe and the United States support this effort.

The role of France and the United States, who should mediate OECD support, would be to kick Britain out of Africa to all significant effect, and to participate indirectly in the negotiations in something more that an amicus curiae fashion. Our role is to offer to participate in establishing a regional development bank, or an equivalent institution, through which to foster external trade and related internal development for the region as a whole.

With that approach, all the problems of southern Africa are susceptible of rapid solution in principle and credible progress in fact.

On the other side of the SATO-designated region, the Rio de la Plata project, providing rapid industrial and agricultural development in a region including north Argentina, Uruguay, and southern Brazil, is the vehicle for solving the principal threats to political stability in that region.

The role of the United States for the Rio de la Plata is the same in principle as for southern Africa. Establish a regional development bank outside the area of existing debt as the vehicle for fostering external trade and development of industry and agriculture relevant to external trade.

The same approach is appropriate to Central America, to the Middle East, or to India. Concentrate the available and potential credit of the world for hard-commodity short-term and long-term loans and investments, in development projects which expand industrial and agricultural production by emphasizing high-technology and fostering rapid increase in the productive powers of labor.

By activating in this way, the vital interests of sovereign republics in perpetuating high-technology-vectored industrial and agricultural development, the economic power of the United States is employed to establish spreading areas of community of principle, along modern versions of the conception adopted by our own Founding Fathers.

If the economic power of the United States is properly used in alliance with a kernel of OECD countries led by France, West Germany and Japan, we rightly laugh at the schemes of a NATO Pax Britannica being concocted in the fantasy pits of London.

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