Schiller Institute Special Report

Development Drive Means Billions of New Jobs, No Refugees, No War

This study was commissioned Nov. 10 by Schiller Institute founder and leader Helga Zepp-LaRouche, and will be circulated in multiple languages. An international team of researchers produced the report: Dean Andromidas, Rainer Apel, Marcia Merry Baker, Claudio Celani, Richard Freeman, Paul Gallagher, Kevin Gribbroek, Rémi Lebrun, Stuart Lewis, Sébastien Périmony, Jason Ross, Dennis Small, Philip S. Ulanowsky, Helga Zepp-LaRouche.

Nov. 24—The reported decision by the lame duck U.S. President Biden administration to allow Ukraine to use American ATACMS ballistic missiles for strikes into Russian territory, starting with the targeting of the Kursk region, brings the world into the immediate range of being possibly a few days away from a strategic, unstoppable escalation. Given the fact that these missiles, like the German Taurus and the British Storm Shadow missiles, technically cannot be operated by the Ukrainians, but must be aided by specialists from NATO countries, this means that the moment they are deployed, we are in a full war of NATO against Russia.

It was exactly in response to such escalations, including the deployment of increasingly powerful weapons to Ukraine by the nations of the Collective West, that in September 2024 Russian President Vladimir Putin announced proposed changes in Moscow’s “nuclear doctrine” to include the possible use of nuclear weapons in response to any attack that poses a critical threat to the sovereignty of Russia, including attacks by a non-nuclear state when backed by a nuclear state. Putin explained this change in the following, very precise way:

“The updated version of the [Basic Principles] document is supposed to regard an aggression against Russia from any non-nuclear state but involving or supported by any nuclear state as their joint attack against the Russian Federation.…We will consider such a possibility once we receive reliable information about a massive launch of air and space attack weapons and their crossing our state border.”

He added: “I mean strategic and tactical aircraft, cruise missiles, UAVs, hypersonic and other aircraft. We reserve the right to use nuclear weapons in the event of aggression … including the case when the enemy, using conventional weapons, creates a critical threat to our sovereignty.”

The widely reported announcement of the Biden administration ATACMS decision clearly crosses that red line. Nevertheless, Western politicians and so-called military experts keep ignoring the Russian warning, and continually talk about “Russia is bluffing,” “defeating Russia militarily,” etc. In a delusionary way, they ignore the fact that Russia is presently the strongest nuclear power and therefore cannot be defeated on the battlefield. What can very well happen in the short term, instead, is that all life on the planet could be annihilated in a global thermonuclear war.

We have at the same time the escalation of the crisis in Southwest Asia. The Israeli military action in Gaza, which the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) have characterized as ongoing genocide, has led to catastrophic hunger, which threatens the lives of 400,000 Palestinians. The international community has essentially remained idle while watching this. Lebanon is now experiencing a similar fate. If this war were to expand to Iran, targeting its nuclear facilities, that war would quickly draw in larger powers. We would then be at the cusp of a global nuclear war.

The previously dominant unipolar world has crumbled, and the effort to prevent a multipolar world from establishing itself is futile. That is the main reason for the strategic crisis.

In October of this year, the annual summit of the BRICS took place in Kazan, Russia, with the participation of the 9 BRICS member states and 13 new partner states (as well as additional guests), representing 4.7 billion people, or 57% of the world population. These countries are determined to overcome 500 years of colonialism and establish a new, just world economic order, new development platforms, and a new credit system and trade mechanism, in order to stop being raw materials exporting countries, develop the full value chain in their own countries, and overcome poverty and underdevelopment forever.

Consider the potential if the United States and Europe were to cooperate with the BRICS, and with China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), to unleash science-driven industrialization worldwide. There are now 151 nations from all continents that have joined the BRI (see Figure 1), and China’s President Xi Jinping has repeatedly extended an invitation to all nations—including the United States and in Europe—to participate in the massive infrastructure projects, which already total over $1 trillion in investment worldwide. The BRI has already lifted some 40 million people out of poverty, and created about 400,000 new jobs.

These BRI projects are complementary and consistent with the BRICS process that is underway. Consider a half-dozen basic physical economic parameters of the 22 BRICS members and partner states (see Figure 2).

As noted, this BRICS-Plus grouping of 22 nations makes up well over half the population of the planet (57%); they produce 54% of the wheat, 40% of the oil, 74% of the coal, and 75% of the steel; and they have 61% of the electrified railroads in existence. Their share of speculative stock market activity, on the other hand, is relatively small, with only 21% of the total world stock market capitalization.

These physical-economic parameters are indicators of activity in key productive areas: food, raw materials, transportation, etc. They don’t measure actual economic value as such, however; that is a matter of the power of the economy to achieve continuing breakthroughs in science and technology, to make these resources useful. That measure of power is what the American economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche referred to as Potential Relative Population Density.

The source of that power is human creativity; and the greatest wealth is human beings—especially youth. Africa today has about 1.5 billion people, but it has by far the world’s most rapid population growth rate and is expected to have 2.5 billion inhabitants by 2050, one generation from today. These underlying demographics are reflected in the fact that Africa has a disproportionately high percentage of its population (40%) in the under-15 population, whereas in the U.S. it is 18% and in Europe 16%. This in part reflects the lower average life expectancy in Africa today, but that is significantly improving as development spreads across the continent (see Figure 3).

Why do the forces in the West not rejoice at this fantastic perspective? Because the West is experiencing a profound cultural crisis—it has lost its way; and because the Western financial system is laboring under a deadly $2 quadrillion speculative bubble that demands the imposition of global genocide.

If we don’t overcome the evil of geopolitics, which resulted in two world wars in the 20th Century, there is the danger of the world dividing into two separate blocs: a Global NATO on the one side, and a BRICS-Plus Global Majority on the other side. In that case, we will face not only economic chaos, but also the immediate danger of a global nuclear conflagration.

The obvious and easy way to overcome the danger of war and confrontation is to convince the countries of the Collective West—the European nations and even the U.S.—to stop confrontation and adopt a mode of cooperation with this growing Global Majority. If the West would join hands with the BRICS and help the Global South to industrialize, we could not only stop the geopolitical competition, but could also start to overcome the migrant crisis in the only human way possible: namely to create conditions where the people who are now refugees, instead have a perspective to be involved in the build-up of their own home countries.

Rather than condemning millions of people to go on death marches through the Sahara to then drown in mass graves in the Mediterranean, or end up in refugee camps, which Pope Francis has called concentration camps, or to cross many countries, facing hunger, drug gangs and terrorism, to then be pushed back at the Mexican-American border, we must help them to industrialize their nations.

We are calling on the UN or the BRICS to initiate a working dialogue between the BRICS and the countries of the West (since the G20 neglects this urgent challenge), to declare their intent to create 1.5-2 billion new productive jobs in the countries of the Global South in the short term, and to create a total of 3 billion new productive jobs by 2050. Such an announcement, followed by concrete steps to ensure the complete electrification of all the countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as well as the immediate beginning of the realization of game-changer infrastructure and other development projects, would be a powerful message to announce an era of hope.

The building of the largest deepwater port in Latin America, the Chancay port in Peru, with the prospect of building a bi-oceanic railway connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific, is such a project. Likewise, the building of the Grand Inga Hydroelectric Project and the Transaqua project, which will help to irrigate and industrialize several countries in the heart of Africa, are such projects.

In order to overcome the danger of war for good, we need to establish a new international security and development architecture, which takes into account the interests of every single country on the planet. This should be done in the tradition of the Peace of Westphalia, which ended 150 years of religious wars in Europe, because the warring parties realized that there would be nobody left alive if the fighting continued. How much more is that true in the age of thermonuclear weapons!

Let us unite for security and development, to usher in a new era for Mankind.