This article appears in the February 10, 2017 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

Four Powers To Bury the British System:
From Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon LaRouche

by J. Philip Rubinstein

[Print version of this article]

Feb. 1—On October 10, 2009, Lyndon LaRouche delivered an address to the Seventh Annual Session of the World Public Forum Dialogue of Civilizations, on the Island of Rhodes in Greece,¹ wherein he stated:

Therefore, the task, as I defined it, is, if Russia, and the United States, and China, and India, agree, as a group of countries to initiate and force a reorganization of the world financial and credit system, under these conditions, with long term agreements, of the same type that Franklin Roosevelt had uttered before his death, in 1944, under key nations, the intention of Roosevelt all these years later, could have been realized, and we could do that today.

What FDR, and LaRouche, foresaw as the way to replace the inhuman British System of world finance, would now be in effect were the United States to join Russia, India, and China with its One Belt One Road policy of Eurasian development—the latter, in fact, a part of LaRouche’s World Land-Bridge. Presidents Putin and Xi have been especially committed to this and have offered an open invitation to the United States to join. Donald Trump has been brought to the Presidency of the United States not by a chaotic, populist impulse in the U.S. electorate, but by a global change brought on by the collapse of the London-Wall Street system, and the live potential of a new economic world as seen in China. This Four Power combination would effect the complete replacement of the two hundred-plus years of the British Empire.

That 2009 intention of what Lyndon LaRouche proposed was echoed by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in a speech delivered on January 25 of this year to the lower house of the Russian Legislature, the Duma:

We believe that as Russia, the United States and China build their relations, this triangle should not be closed or directed toward some projects that could worry other states. [They should be] open and fair. I am convinced that the economic structure of Russia, the United States and China is such that there is a great deal of complementarity in the material and economic sphere.

As for international security problems, these three countries play a very important role. Russia and China have restrained attempts to introduce confrontational, force-based solutions into world politics. We expect that Donald Trump, who has confirmed his commitment to focus primarily on US [domestic] problems and to abandon interference in the internal affairs of other states, will do the same. . .

The Chinese Foreign Ministry’s spokesman, Hua Chunying, responded to Lavrov’s statement, saying, according to Tass, “China, Russia and the United States are the leading global powers, and they are the permanent members of the UN Security Council. We have great responsibility for global peace, stability and development.” Beijing has been deepening relations of strategic partnership and cooperation with Russia, and has also been making efforts to develop trust-based relations with the United States, she said, “Therefore, China plans to intensify cooperation with the United States and Russia and to make common contribution to solving the tasks and challenges of the modern world.”

She also noted that the Russian side has repeatedly said that it attaches great importance to Russian-Chinese relations and gives a high assessment to them. “We welcome this,” she said, adding that the relations of strategic partnership and cooperation between the two countries have reached the highest level, and both sides plan to jointly work on the issues of regional and global peace, stability and development.

Carol M. Highsmith Room Three of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, Washington, D.C.

The fourth of the “Four Powers” named by Lyndon LaRouche, and organized earlier by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his own struggle to put an end to the world rule of the British Empire—is India. On January 26, India’s Republic Day, Russian President Putin sent greetings to India’s President and Prime Minister, which said that the special and privileged strategic partnership with India is an invariable priority in Russia’s foreign policy.

What is it that, up until now, has kept the United States out of this Four Power arrangement of peace and economic cooperation? What opposition does President Trump now face were he to act as Lyndon and Helga LaRouche have proposed?

Consider: Why did FDR’s death mean, that his vision, the vision of the man who led America out of the Great Depression and to victory in World War II, would fade until seventy years after his death? Why has Lyndon LaRouche been nearly alone in the fight for FDR’s conception in the United States?

The following may help produce a basis for an insight into this, and how to change it now, with the opportunity provided by the recent Presidential election.

The Imperial ‘Special Relationship’

The present Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Theresa May, herself ironically raised to Prime Minister by the resignation of her predecessor in the wake of the British vote to leave the European Union, raced to be the first leader to meet President Trump. Her mission: to assure the continuation of the cherished “Special Relationship,” coined, if not created, by Winston Churchill.

This behavior has numerous precedents in the interval from FDR to the present. The British know they cannot rule without the United States. This became crystal clear when their creation, Adolf Hitler, instead of going East and attacking Russia in 1940, as British elites intended, instead turned West as Hitler’s military command knew they must. Britain’s “Frankenstein’s monster,” Adolf Hitler, thus forced the British to ally with their original target, the USSR. This was a bitter lesson for the London oligarchy. As Churchill put it, “After this war, we will be weak. We will have no money and no strength, and we will lie between the two great powers of the USA and the USSR.” (Six Months in 1945 by Michael Dobbs, p.103). For the British Empire to survive, after 1945, this meant that Britain had to control the United States and pit America against the Soviets, which could not be done with Roosevelt alive.

This is the real theme of the last seventy years in different variations. Looking backward in time, we have Tony Blair, in Chicago in 1999, enunciating the Regime Change policy of “Right to Protect,” and the end of Westphalian Sovereignty. This led to a policy of perpetual war under George W. Bush, a policy which intensified under Barack Obama. It was Blair who was the author of the lie that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction in the infamous “dodgy dossier.” He claimed that Iraq could deliver a nuclear bomb on forty-five minutes notice, and he became the key confidant to Bush in the second Iraq war. The result was the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians and a disaster for the United States. With these credentials Blair then became the chief proponent and mentor of Obama.

A bit further back we have Margaret Thatcher, famously “stiffening the resolve” of George H.W. Bush—clearly the Bush family had some limitations despite their loyalty to the Crown. This gave us the first Iraq war. A decade earlier, when Reagan evinced some reluctance to join the British in the Malvinas war, Thatcher turned to anglophile Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger to draw the United States in on the British side, violating the Monroe Doctrine.

This is not to say these efforts always succeeded. The British failed in the case of the Suez crisis of 1956, when Eisenhower refused to go along. The Prime Minister of the time, Anthony Eden, was forced to resign. Despite these singular exceptions, since Roosevelt’s death, the UK-USA “Special Relationship” has been the core British necessity for maintaining the Empire.

Roosevelt Battles the Empire

This reality governed the relationship of FDR and Churchill through World War II. Churchill intended from the very beginning to direct the U.S. war effort. Within days of Pearl Harbor he arrived at the White House, to stay for over a month. His goal was to ensure some control over the U.S. military actions, but even more to guarantee the primacy of the alliance with Britain.

US Army Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill at the Tehran Conference, 1943

Franklin Roosevelt, however, had other ideas, as did General Marshall and others, both regarding military, as well as political questions. For Roosevelt, this was an alliance of necessity, but it was a difficult one, and it showed most clearly on the issue of the colonies, the special economic rules for them, as well as on the question of the Soviet Union. For FDR, World War II was to be a war of liberation from the very system that was destroying the world with depression and war. There was no point to fighting fascism only to continue the inhumanity of colonialism. As reported by Elliot Roosevelt and others, Churchill became furious at even the suggestion that India, the crown jewel of the Empire, might gain independence at the end of the war.

Through the course of the war, FDR, as well as Generals MacArthur and Eisenhower, realized that general war was no longer a means to settle political disputes among nations. The horror of modern warfare was too great, even before the arrival of nuclear weapons. Roosevelt envisioned a United Nations Organization (which was the name of the war-time alliance) as a place to debate and find solutions to conflict among sovereign nations freed from colonialism. FDR had a clear idea of the development needed to truly liberate colonies. His vast geographical knowledge was essentially a map of needed development projects, such as he envisioned when he flew over North Africa and proposed to an uninterested Saudi king Ibn Saud. The great Four Corners projects that he had led in the United States were the paradigm for what Roosevelt envisioned globally.

At the same time FDR saw the need for a core of leading nations to make this effective. Despite their differing war “objectives,” the Big Three of World War II (America, the Soviet Union and Britain) were a military necessity. For the post-war period, this would become a Big Four. In fact, it was Roosevelt who insisted that China be part of a Big Four during the war, despite the opposition of both Stalin and Churchill. The future would require a solid foundation with the United States, the Soviet Union, leading developing and newly independent nations, and the nation called the United Kingdom.

FDR’s conception was not a pipe-dream, as it is often portrayed today. Nor did he think he could manipulate Stalin by some personal tie. There was good reason for Stalin’s belief that the West did not mind the USSR taking the brunt of the war, and a great deal of distrust had to be overcome. FDR also knew that Stalin and the Soviets were aware that they would need ten to twenty years to rebuild after the destruction of the war, and that they would need help from the West. Therefore by developing some common basis in securing peace and development, trust could be built, and a new global directionality might be realized.

China and India

China, at the same time, was an independent nation and represented the future of the underdeveloped world. FDR’s confidante and global representative Harry Hopkins, in a report in August, 1945, stated,

If I were to indicate a country in which the United States, for the next hundred years, had the greatest interest from political and economic points of view, I would name the Republic of China. With the defeat of Japan, China will become one the greatest land-powers on earth. I do not say that she will be one of the most powerful for many years to come, but she will have regained her heritage in Manchuria, and we hope there will arise out of the welter of war a unified China.

It is clear that this was Roosevelt’s concept of the postwar era.

Churchill was appalled by all of this. He viewed India and China with typical racist arrogance. FDR had approved Chiang Kai-shek visiting Mahatma Gandhi in India to attempt to organize his support, at least logistically, against Japan. For Gandhi and India there was little to choose between the British Empire and the German-Japan axis. Churchill refused to allow Chiang to meet at Gandhi’s home and interfere in India. Despite this, they did meet for five hours, after which Chiang received a letter from Gandhi, in which he wrote to Chiang, that “I consider the five hours of frank discussion that we had in Calcutta as the most satisfying and unforgettable experience in my life.” Following this, Chiang sent a note to FDR on the need for Britain and Holland to copy the American example in the Philippines and unequivocally promise full independence to all their colonies. This, Chiang said, was the only way to ensure the true loyalty of colonial peoples to the allied cause. In his message he quoted at length from his conversation with “an Indian friend.” FDR passed this on to Churchill, who was outraged, not just at the call for India to be independent, but the mere audacity of China and America to meddle in Imperial affairs (The Generalissimo by Jay Taylor). When FDR intimated a comparison of India with the United States, he was told, “it is none of your business.”

Two Incompatible Visions

The British held the same view at Bretton Woods. This was not simply some peculiarity of Churchill. At Bretton Woods, while preaching free trade, as usual, the entire British delegation rejected any discussion of trade preferences with their colonies.

As to the Soviet Union, British strategy was always to allow the Soviets to fight it out with Hitler, or minimally, to bear the brunt of the war. When Hitler turned west, the alliance with the USSR became necessary, but the destruction of the Soviet Union remained paramount policy. At the same time, everything was done to keep Roosevelt from succeeding in organizing a relationship with Stalin based on the need for economic development. To this day, the lie is repeated that FDR was weak at Yalta and deluded about his ability to influence Stalin. In truth, FDR was dying, but it was the British who were waiting for him to pass, to overturn his leadership. Roosevelt’s strategy, throughout the entirety of the war, was clear, and he stuck to it. His distance from Churchill was due to a divide over the peace and the future. For Roosevelt it meant the end of the colonial world and the end of want, the key to the Four Freedoms.

Churchill was in fact preparing for the cold war, already referring to the “iron veil” well before his Fulton, Missouri speech, and prior to FDR’s passing from the scene. Churchill insisted on blowing Yalta up over Poland, but the truth is, that he had proposed the boundaries already to Stalin, just as he had proposed the division of the Balkans on a piece of paper he handed to Stalin in a private meeting—so much for the hero of the neo-cons.

The role of the British in stalling the Western Front is well known. Less well known are its effects. It should be clear that FDR and Chief of Staff General Marshall saw the Western Front as the only way to win the war and alleviate the enormous pressure on the Red Army. The constant sabotage by the British, ironically, gave Stalin a stronger hand and even moral advantage, given that the Red army did by far most of the fighting to the end. Fully two thirds of the German soldiers killed during the war were in the East. Overall, eight million Russian soldiers were killed or missing versus 416,000 Americans and 383,000 British. Even more, total Soviet losses were twenty-seven million, including civilians. These losses were incomparable and staggering.

As the British intended, the divide between the Russian and American allies became much more intense with the death of FDR and the dropping of the A-bomb. Stalin was not told of the developments around the bomb until the very end. Truman, Churchill and others, like confederate Secretary of State James Byrnes, viewed the bomb as the great equalizer to the Soviet advantage on the ground—really more than equal.

Truman and Churchill were almost giddy when news of the successful bomb test was received at Potsdam. The nuclear cold war was on, if not won, and the likes of Bertrand Russell were calling for nuclear bombing of the Soviet Union. Russell wanted nuclear superiority to enforce world government.

FDR’s vision of a UNO secured by a Four Power agreement of America, Russia, China and Britain (France was viewed as a partner of the British) emphatically meant a developing relationship to a rebuilding of the Soviet Union, as well as of China, as a future force representative of the developing sector. He had expressed this in the Four Freedoms: from want, from fear, of speech, of belief. After 1945, all this was twisted into unrecognizable form, into a stratagem of more war and poverty. All that was to be left was the “Special Relationship” with the British Empire.

Despite figures like Eisenhower, MacArthur and JFK, this orientation increasingly took over, until it finally dominated U.S. policy making, down to the present day. By the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, with the subsequent Bush and Obama administrations, it appeared that the takeover was complete. The Achilles Heel, however, was foreseen by LaRouche even as the Wall fell. The London-Wall Street Axis was rotten ripe itself. There has been an ongoing collapse of the trans-Atlantic British financial system of increasing intensity, especially since 2007-2008. The seventy year long “Special Relationship” is now at a dead end, and there is no way out.

A Return to Roosevelt’s Vision

FDR’s Four Powers, as exemplified in the policy of the World Land-Bridge, is the active policy of China, supported by Russia, in effect today. Other nations are increasingly taking part, led by the BRICS group, most especially India. This includes building new financial institutions like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) with up to seventy or more participants.

As can be seen in the quotes with which we began, Russia and China, under the leadership of Putin and Xi, are fully committed to this policy, and have offered an open hand to the troubled United States. Without the “Special Relationship,” the British System is doomed to be replaced by a New Paradigm. The question that will determine the possibility of avoiding a catastrophe of war or chaos provoked by this dying Empire is—Which way the United States?

EIRNS Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche (left) conversing with Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan at a campaign event in New Hampshire in 1980.

During the American Presidential campaign, Donald Trump pledged to reinstate FDR’s Glass-Steagall banking regulation, separating out speculative financial activity. This would open the door to the full LaRouche policy of Hamiltonian credit and crash scientific programs to increase the productivity of labor, making the United States a full partner in world progress. Lyndon LaRouche, as a young man serving in the India-Burma theater at the end of the war, pledged himself to fulfill FDR’s mission, and with the backing of a knowledgeable American people it can be done now.

Allow yourself a few moments of unfettered imagination; imagine a world where the United States—the only nation to put men on the Moon and bring them back—reinvigorates its nearly destroyed space program, by joining with the active and highly successful Chinese program, with the Russian capabilities, with the India that successfully launched an orbiter to Mars in 2013, with the European space program, and others—in a Four Powers-led Extra-Terrestrial Policy for the future of humanity. Or, imagine a truly unified effort to tackle the breakthroughs needed to utilize fusion power and solve further problems in our knowledge of the micro-world. What can be done in advancing conceptions of biology using the mixture of science available globally?

How many high level jobs would be needed? How many highly developed youth with a breadth of education and character to create for the further future would be needed? What would we begin to know about each other? What would it mean for our knowledge of Mankind?