EDITORIAL

If Roosevelt Had Lived

[Print version of this editorial]

May 10—Coming amidst the completely unprecedented developments of the recent weeks, yesterday’s celebration of V-E Day in Moscow, and particularly President Putin’s deeply moving tribute to those who unstintingly gave all to defeat the Nazis, call to mind our American President, Franklin Roosevelt, who had succumbed, worn out, just weeks before the final defeat of Nazism. Roosevelt’s death at that moment cheated that generation out of the promise of the postwar world, and the postwar America, for which he had so long planned and fought.

Lyndon LaRouche’s New Delhi address of Dec. 3, 2008, “The Time Has Come for a New System,” in which he again proposed the “Four-Power Agreement,” reproduces Franklin Roosevelt’s thinking of back then, through the prism of LaRouche’s more advanced concepts up through the present.

Lyndon LaRouche said, “We have to have a coalition of forces on the planet, which is strong enough, and understands its mutual self-interest sufficiently, to restore the kind of control which the United States attempted to promote under Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt, in dealing with China, and dealing with the Soviet Union, and other countries, toward the end of the war, said, you don’t have to like the other country; you don’t have to like its government; you don’t have to like its policy. What you have to do, is establish an international system of control, under which you don’t have things running loose, which are menaces. Simply having treaty organizations or similar things tantamount to treaty organizations, where people have such an interest in maintaining the treaty organization that they will regulate themselves and their own country. And you can get cooperation on this.”

This was the way in which Roosevelt intended to compose a postwar world with Stalin’s Russia, China, and India. But his successor, Harry Truman, offered to meet Stalin just as soon as he could come to the United States—which he well knew Stalin would never do. The model for postwar Germany was to be what we have seen in Austria—neutrality freed from foreign military occupation. A united Germany would have flourished—but that was not to be. The Korean War, which has loomed over us from its beginning in 1950 until the present moment, offered Stalin a way to punch back against Anglo-American military pressure in Europe, through an unguarded back-door in Asia. In retrospect, another sort of nightmare followed after World War II, because Roosevelt died and his plans and ideals were buried with him by British imperialism.

Within his proposed four-power agreement, LaRouche proposed using the uniqueness of the U.S. Constitution to anchor the issuance of massive amounts of credit-generation for productive investment, emphasizing infrastructure. There is no way to set about transforming the millions of unskilled labor in India, for example, into skilled labor, without massive infrastructure creation.

Back then, in 1945, we had failed to create the postwar world which our heroes expected and deserved. Instead of that bright promise, we spent an entire lifetime under the threat of nuclear war—a threat which persists today. But today, a new alternative is opened thanks to Lyndon LaRouche’s creative vision, centered in the Belt and Road Initiative launched by China’s President Xi Jinping, which over one hundred countries have joined in with.

Today, Mahathir Mohamad, at age 92, was re-inaugurated as Prime Minister of Malaysia 15 years after he last left that position, becoming the world’s oldest elected leader. Mahathir Mohamad is very well-known internationally for his open agreement with Lyndon LaRouche, for instance, concerning George Soros. He assumes office as a world leader who is a Muslim, who is also a foremost partisan of the Belt and Road initiative, which he said today he had suggested in detail in a personal letter to President Xi Jinping. Today, our phones are ringing off the hook with people calling to tell us how important Mahathir Mohamad’s fight for the Belt and Road is for the Middle East, which is being threatened by dangerous proxy warfare. It’s true. The Belt and Road is the answer for Southwest Asia—as Lyndon LaRouche has proposed for over 40 years, and as Franklin Roosevelt would agree.