The Neo-Liberal System Is Failing,
As LaRouche Forecast

by Harley Schlanger

[Print version of this article]

July 3—It suddenly seems to have dawned on some strategic geniuses in the City of London that it would help to have an industrial economy if they wish to engage in further provocations against Moscow, wage a proxy war against Russia, or perhaps enter into a full-fledged military land war against Russia in Europe.

Such recognition of reality seems to have escaped UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, both in his two high-profile meetings and photo-ops in Kiev in the last month with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, and in his posturing during the just concluded NATO summit in Madrid. Johnson has made himself a spokesman for the “heroic” Ukrainians who are dying on behalf of London’s strategic interests, claiming that, backed by the “iron resolve” of a unified NATO, they are defeating Putin!

He cited the fake story that “Ukrainian heroism and sacrifice saved Kiev from Russia’s armored assault,” in an op-ed published in The Times of London June 18, as proof that the war against Russia can be won. In that piece, he claimed that the “UK and our friends” are acting to ensure “that Ukraine has the strategic endurance to survive and eventually prevail.”

In a typical example of his imperial bravado, he concluded that, “Putin may not realize it, but his imperial design for the total reconquest of Ukraine has been derailed.”

Johnson’s manic rhetoric was reflected in a flight-forward message delivered the next day by Gen. Sir Patrick Sanders, the new Chief of the General Staff of the British Army. Speaking to his troops, Sanders’ comments were covered in most of Britain’s pro-war press. He asserted:

There is a burning imperative [for the UK] to forge an army capable of fighting alongside our allies and defeating Russia in battle.... We are the generation that must prepare the Army to fight in Europe once again.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine underlines our core purpose to protect the UK by being ready to fight and win wars on land. [The Army has to] deter Russian aggression with the threat of force.... It is my singular duty to make our Army as lethal and effective as it can be.

Concluding in the grand tradition of British military hyperbole, he said, “The time is now and the opportunity is ours to seize.”

Such threatening bluster coming from Johnson, who is the current frontman for the City of London’s War Hawks, and his closest allies, has not been overlooked by leading Russian military spokesmen, who are painting a bulls-eye on London. The Speaker of the Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, was quoted in TASS saying,

London seeks to convince Europe of the need to fight against Russia until the last Ukrainian, claiming that efforts to settle the conflict in Ukraine will only lead to growing instability in the world. The United Kingdom’s habit to live at the expense of others is the reason, which the country seems unable to break.

Other Russian spokesmen have been more blunt, stating that any attacks on Russia could result in a military strike on London.

It is unlikely to have escaped the notice of Kremlin strategists that Sanders is facing a significant cut in the size of his Army, due to budgetary constraints. The cuts were a subject addressed by Defense Minister Ben Wallace in a speech to the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) on June 30. RUSI bills itself as the oldest and most prestigious British military think tank. At RUSI’s “Land Warfare Conference 2022,” Wallace demanded an increase in defense spending. He was seconded there by Sanders, who compared what he called the “brutal aggression by Putin” to the threat from Hitler before World War II, calling this a “1937 moment.”

Call for an ‘Industrial War Economy’

Is Great Britain prepared for such an undertaking as engaging in a land war in Europe? Not according to two reports by military officials, who warn that the British economy is inadequate for such a mission. In an article titled, “The Return of Industrial Warfare,” published by RUSI, retired American Lt. Col. Alex Vershinin warned of the inability of the UK to sustain a war economy. He pointed to the declining industrial economies in the West to note that, in contrast to Russia, the West lacks the industrial capability to engage in a prolonged war.

A country must either have the manufacturing capacity to build massive quantities of ammunition or have other manufacturing industries that can rapidly be converted to ammunition production. Unfortunately, the West no longer seems to have either.

Col. Vershinin, whose bio notes that he had “frontline experience in Iraq and Afghanistan” and that he did war modelling and simulations for the U.S. Army and NATO, concludes by stating that, “If competition between autocracies and democracies has really entered a military phase,” as pro-war think tanks such as the Atlantic Council insist, “then the arsenal of democracy must radically improve its approach to the production of matériel in wartime.”

His concerns were echoed in testimony delivered to the House of Lords by Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, the Chief of the Defense Staff. Radakin decried the constraints imposed on the military by the decrepit condition of the UK’s industrial capacity, acknowledging that the “rate of expenditure” of weapons being sent to Ukraine and the inadequate “industrial capacity to backfill” orders has become a “significant issue” in the present effort to defeat Russian forces. After calling for the government to “ramp up production,” he lamented that it could take “five to ten years” before the UK could deploy a division with the capabilities to fight alongside U.S. forces.

LaRouche’s Forecast of the
Collapse of the USSR

The collapse of the physical economy in most of the West—reflected in the difficulty cited in the two reports—to produce enough weaponry to adequately resupply Ukraine, as well as replenish the depleted stocks of NATO arms, is due to the effect of the neoliberal economic policies of the last fifty years, exacerbated by the anti-science dogma of the Green ideologues and the utopian military policies embodied in the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs.

Lyndon LaRouche warned repeatedly of the danger explicit in the adoption of this approach, and he intervened to reverse this economic collapse with his work with the Reagan administration in the early 1980s, proposing to use the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), in collaboration with the Soviet Union, to eliminate the danger of nuclear war, while using new physical principles required to successfully deploy the SDI as a “science driver,” to advance economic productivity for the economy as a whole for both nations.

In his negotiations with the Soviets in 1982–3 on behalf of the Reagan administration, he told them that while they could likely match the SDI advances of the U.S. militarily, it were unlikely they could “enjoy the same rate of economic growth in the economy … as a result of civilian spinoffs” as would the U.S. In February 1983, he warned Soviet officials that their economy would collapse “in about five years” should they reject President Reagan’s offer to jointly share and deploy the SDI, and instead choose to conduct an arms buildup without deploying the new technologies to revolutionize manufacturing.

As the Soviet economy was teetering five years later, after rejecting Reagan’s 1983 offer, LaRouche, speaking in Berlin on Oct. 12, 1988, forecast that the Soviet system would soon collapse.

In reviewing these discussions during a webcast on Oct. 12, 2005, LaRouche stated that the Soviet officials had agreed that his proposal made on behalf of Reagan “was feasible, that it would work.” But, they said (as LaRouche expessed it), “We reject it because the United States will benefit more from it than we will, because the United States has more advanced technological potentialities. And that the Soviet Union has its own plan for dealing with the United States.” To which he replied, “If your government follows the policy you have just outlined, as I understand its policies and capabilities, the Soviet Union will disintegrate within about five years.”

LaRouche added that if the West did not change from the economic policies of the post-August 15, 1971 “so-called ‘social paradigm shift’,” then it would also eventually collapse. As demonstrated by the comments from Vershinin and Admiral Radakin, combined with the runaway inflation, breakdown of supply chains, etc., LaRouche’s forecast about the West has proven to be as accurate as his warnings were to Soviet officials about the collapse of their system.[fn_1]

Some strategists in the Empire today may believe that a war buildup can overcome the overall economic degradation resulting from five decades of deconstruction of the physical economy by adherence to the dogma of neoliberal economics. That would be a devastatingly wrong conclusion. Without a shift to a new global economic architecture, based on mutual benefit by cooperation among sovereign nation states, the wars being pushed by trans-Atlantic leaders will escalate, threatening the extinction of the human race.

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