FROM EIR DAILY ALERT

Secretary Pompeo—A Truly ‘Ugly American’ Touting the ‘Superiority’ of the Old Paradigm

March 13, 2019 (EIRNS)—Speaking yesterday before the annual CERAWeek conference of national and international energy producers in Houston, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo offered a truly disgusting example of why British geopolitics must be defeated and replaced with a beautiful New Paradigm, based on Lyndon LaRouche’s Four Laws, and to free President Donald Trump from the neo-con noose around his neck.

U.S. oil and energy producers can rule the world, Pompeo said, and actually become instruments of U.S. foreign policy—winning allies over by showing that “our model is superior,” and that “markets, not governments, have proven more adept from the commanding heights.” This is a question of U.S. national security, as well, he stressed, not just business. By encouraging countries to do business with the U.S., “we’re reminding them that we’re simply better to do business with than Russia, China or Iran.” Thus, the rest of the world “should get on board” with America’s project to meet the world’s energy demands—choose “innovation” not “subjugation,” he said.

This, he said, is the way to spread the U.S.’s “commercial value system” of free enterprise and the rule of law “to our friends and partners,” while punishing “bad actors.” Moreover, “our model matters now, frankly, more than ever in an era of great power rivalry and competition where some nations are using their energy for malign ends, and not to promote prosperity in the way we do here in the West.”

Pompeo singled out China as a country that doesn’t do things “the way we do,” and “doesn’t play by the same set of rules.” The fundamental difference the U.S. has with China, he said, is that “we’ve never had another country of the scale of China, with the military of the scale of China’s which has now expanded into space and property that they do not have a lawful claim to.” Aside from trapping poor African nations into debt and deceiving them, he claimed, China is engaged in “illegal island-building in international waterways,” and “blocking development” in the South China Sea “through coercive means.” The nations of the Indo-Pacific, he went on, are so anxious to have U.S. investors come in, “to help them stand up to the coercive behavior of China,” but don’t dare say so publicly, he asserted. Readers are encouraged to read the EIR interview with Philippines Secretary of National Defense Delfin Lorenzana in the March 15 issue to discover just what these nations truly are anxious about.

The Secretary of State included “influence peddling” by Russia, Syria, Iran, and Venezuela in his attacks, reserving special venom for Iran, which he said, uses its oil to export “undue influence” in the region. Not to worry, though: “our pressure” has already caused Iran’s oil exports to drop, and “we have every intention of driving Iranian oil exports to zero just as quickly as possible,” until it acts like “a normal nation.”