This article appears in the June 22, 2018 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
LAROUCHE’S FOUR POWER CONCEPT
The Miracle of the Singapore Summit
[Print version of this article]
June 18—The summit between President Donald Trump and Chairman Kim Jong-un in Singapore on June 12 was certainly one of most important transformational meetings of our time. This event will be recognized in history as confirmation that, as President Trump said in his concluding press conference: “Real change is indeed possible. The past does not have to define the future. Yesterday’s conflict does not have to be tomorrow’s war. And, as history has proven over and over again, adversaries can become friends. We can honor the sacrifice of our forefathers by replacing the horrors of battle with the blessings of peace. That’s what we’re doing, and that’s what we have done. . . . Anyone can make war, but only the most courageous can make peace.”
President Trump announced after the summit that he had ordered a suspension of U.S.-South Korean military exercises. He told the press that he eventually wants to pull U.S. troops and military bases out of South Korea, but that the exercises, which were both extremely expensive and a serious “provocation” to the North, would be suspended immediately, and remain so as long as the negotiations continue in good faith. This move is in keeping with the standing proposal by both China and Russia for a “double freeze”—the North suspending testing of nuclear weapons and strategic missiles, while the United States and South Korea suspend military exercises.
The old paradigm of imperial division, zero-sum geopolitics, and economic decay is being relegated to the dustbin of history. The new paradigm, now most active in Asia, is extending itself to the entire world through the New Silk Road—a pathway of universal cooperation dedicated to a world of peace and prosperity.
Three Key Meetings in the Unstoppable
Silk Road Spirit
Over the weekend of June 9-10, preceding the epoch-changing meeting between President Trump and Chairman Kim Jong-un on June12, three other meetings occurred that reinforce and build on the dramatic change in the course of history for the better, in a manner which cannot be reversed.
The G-7 meeting in Quebec, on June 8-9, shattered the alliance of the once all-powerful leaders of the so-called “free world.” President Trump made clear that the institution was impotent without Putin at the table and received support from the new Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, and implicitly from Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. The U.S. President left the fractured G-7 event before it ended, skipping the climate change panel.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit on June 9-10 in Qingdao, Shandong Province, China represented nearly half the world’s population, including notably both India and Pakistan. President Xi Jinping opened the SCO summit by quoting Confucius, who came from Shandong Province: “What a joy to have friends coming from afar”—beautifully capturing the Confucian nature of the win-win approach underlying the Belt and Road Initiative.
On that same weekend of June 9-10, the Schiller Institute sponsored a conference titled, “Dona Nobis Pacem—Grant Us Peace, Through Economic Development,” and was concluded by a concert the next day featuring the Schiller Institute Chorus performing Beethoven’s Mass in C Major. The conference was keynoted by Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche. She was joined by a high-level panel of speakers from Russia, China and the United States. Those speeches were published in full in the June 15 EIR. The intent of the conference, as stated by moderator Dennis Speed, was “expressed in the concert poster featuring Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy, and Ludwig van Beethoven. Choosing creativity as opposed to tragedy has been the hallmark of the Schiller Institute.”
The Korean Miracle and Asian Unity
For the past 68 years, a state of permanent confrontation on the Korean peninsula has not only divided the Korean people, but also has provided the architects of the Cold War in London and Washington with a “cockpit” for war between the West and China and Russia. All nations were instructed by the imperial forces to line up on one side or the other—as John Foster Dulles was fond of saying, “You are either with us or against us.” President Barack Obama launched his Pivot to Asia, moving much of the U.S. nuclear strategic forces to Asia, in a ring around China and the Russian Far East, lying all the time that this was necessary to contain North Korea.
Step back and look, through your mind’s eye, at the map of Asia. For the very first time in all of history, the entirety of Asia is united behind a unitary concept of peace through development—Russia, China, North and South Korea, Mongolia, Japan, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and all of Central Asia and Southeast Asia. The breakthrough in Korea demonstrated an initiative of extraordinary courage by Trump and Kim, but it was only possible because all of Asia, every country without exception, was in accord.
It was, and is, recognized across Asia that ending the Korean division opens up a vast expansion of the New Silk Road process—already begun in Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and South Asia—into East Asia, and Russia’s Far East. Both Japan and South Korea, in particular, have the technological capacity needed to bring development to the vast, underpopulated, and resource-rich regions of the Russian Far East and the Arctic, and both nations see their future in terms of cooperation across Eurasia. In addition, the highly skilled work force in North Korea, combined with Russian, Japanese and South Korean technology, can play a crucial role in developing the new frontier for mankind represented by the Russian Far East and the Arctic.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in, during his April 27 summit with Kim Jong-un at the border town of Panmunjom, presented Kim with a thumb drive containing a series of development project plans that could be implemented in North Korea, and through North Korea into China and Russia, virtually immediately, if denuclearization and security guarantees for the North could be achieved. President Trump, in his meeting with Kim, showed a ten-minute video posing similar developments which were possible in the North with the success of the negotiations, including pictures of China’s High-Speed Rail.
Trump and the Four Powers
While the war mongers in Europe and the United States howl about President Trump “coddling dictators” and “capitulating” to Kim Jong-un’s demand to end the military exercises, their evil intentions are recognized by a rapidly expanding majority of the citizens of the United States. A group of 15 Democrats in the House of Representatives, led by California Congressman Ro Khanna, are now supporting Trump’s initiative with North Korea, and have attacked the leaders of the Democratic Party for sounding like the neoconservatives in the Republican Party. Some have (accurately) accused the likes of Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi of preferring nuclear war, rather than supporting the President on anything.
There are other “cockpits” for war in the world, such as the India-Pakistan conflict, and the Middle East imbroglio—both created by the British with the intention that such seemingly intractable conflicts and permanent warfare would provide the necessary “divide and conquer” context for the lords of the global financial system to maintain power over the world.
Now, a solution for the India-Pakistan conflict is within reach, through cooperation in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). And, following the Singapore summit, Israel’s Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan (the number two lawmaker on the Likud party’s Knesset list) called the event “a tremendous achievement.” Asked if Trump should hold a similar summit with Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani, Erdan responded: “Given Trump’s values, both as expressed during the election and afterwards in his actions, it would not be terrible if such a meeting happens.” Indeed, both Russia and China would be most willing to facilitate such a meeting, which could result in discussions aimed at resolving the entire regional crisis, starting with the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Syria. This will clearly be on the agenda of the expected summit between Trump and Putin in July.
President Trump’s cooperation with the Asian nations to bring about this transformation provides a model for resolving the other crises around the world. Lyndon LaRouche has long insisted that the root of depression and war in the world today lies in the looming bankruptcy of the world monetary system centered in the City of London and Wall Street, and that the only means of ending that danger is the coming together of the four great powers and cultures in the world—Russia, China, India and the United States—as we see it coming into being today.
Speaking on Oct. 10, 2009 at the Seventh Annual Session of the World Public Forum—Dialogue of Civilizations on the Island of Rhodes in Greece, LaRouche said that he had forecast the financial crisis of 2008, but that the failure of the Bush and Obama administrations to implement the banking reforms he had proposed, based on Glass-Steagall restoration, meant that “it is no longer possible to do what I proposed then, back in 2007.” The crisis had become global, threatening a breakdown of the entire world financial structure. He continued:
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 those 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. That’s our chance: Either we do that, or we go under. Can we have the United States, under an improved Presidency—and it does require improvement—can we have the United States, Russia, China, and India, become a bloc of countries, which each have different characteristics, but if they recognize among themselves, that they have a common interest, they will adapt to each other, and respect each other’s different characteristics. The result of this, will be the elimination of the monetary system of the world that has been dominating European civilization since the Peloponnesian War.
The imperial systems of the world, are not the United Kingdom, for example, but the British system is an imperial system. It’s an imperial system because of its role in an international monetary system. We no longer have nations which control their own money: We have an international monetary system that does control their money. If you control the monetary market, the monetary system, you control the world. The monetary system is now a disease. We have to put the power over monetary systems, back in the hands of sovereign governments.
The “four power” agreement LaRouche spoke of back in 2009 has now been placed squarely on the agenda of world history in the making, through the breakthrough in Korea, resolving a problem that many considered unresolvable. Whether or not the United States extends its cooperation to fully embrace the New Silk Road, and bring this cooperation to bear in an overall reform of the western financial system, as laid out in LaRouche’s Four Laws, will depend on the actions taken by the citizens of the western nations to drive this process forward.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche has taken the first step in mobilizing such actions, as presented in this issue of EIR. In her article, “EU Summit Must Follow Singapore Example! History Is Now Written in Asia!” Zepp-LaRouche poses that the extreme crisis in Europe, driven by economic decay and the drastic refugee situation created by the perpetual war policy in Southwest Asia, could and must be resolved by transforming the upcoming EU summit into a forum on the development of Africa and Southwest Asia, inviting Chinese and African leaders to attend. She concludes:
The crisis in Europe, the migrant crisis, the crisis of the German government—have all assumed such dimensions, that the opportunity for a change in direction of policy absolutely has arrived. Needed now, are the people to make the change.
As President Trump said after the summit: “It’s a very great moment in the history of the world.” Or, recasting Benjamin Franklin’s famous comment, upon successfully establishing a “more perfect union” for Americans in the 1787 Constitution: “It’s a New Paradigm, if you can keep it.”
