Kiron Skinner and The Toynbee Factor in British Grand Strategy

May 7, 2019 (EIRNS)—Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s unconscionable attacks against “Chinese activities, Chinese history, Chinese practices” while in Finland for the May 6-7 Arctic Council meeting, went so far as to imply that China’s alleged ethnic “re-education” policies are comparable to the Nazi concentration camps of the 1930s.

Finnish daily Helsingin Sanomat questioned Pompeo yesterday about his attack on China in his speech prior to the meeting. “All I did today was to lay down some basic facts that are indisputable about Chinese activities, Chinese history, Chinese practices,” Pompeo replied. He argued that China is a greater threat than Russia, because, while there are tensions with Russia, Russia is “a historical power,” and its economy is not growing. China, however,

“has 1.5 billion people. They have a million ethnic minorities that they’ve put into re-education camps. That is a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions. We haven’t seen things like that since the 1930s. But it is a growing country....”

Pompeo’s arguments echo those made by State Department Policy Planning Director Kiron Skinner at the New America Foundation on April 29, whose report in the Washington Examiner shocked China: both in why China is defined as the great threat, and the attack on Chinese civilization itself as the enemy.

This is no surprise. The Office of the Policy Planning Staff was created in 1947 as the critical point of British policy control into the U.S. State Department as part of the Churchill/Truman drive to root out the Franklin Roosevelt tradition from the U.S. government. Its assigned task is to shape U.S. strategy to conform with the British oligarchical outlook on history, culture, and the nature of man. The propagators of such ideas function at a higher level of power than the mere Mike Pompeos of this world, as Lyndon LaRouche developed in his July 1982 book-length study, The Toynbee Factor in British Grand Strategy.

The current Policy Planning Director, George Shultz protégé Kiron Skinner, is but latest in a long line of Anglophile policymakers who have held that post over the decades, including Paul Nitze, Walt Rostow, Winston Lord, Paul Wolfowitz, Anne-Marie Slaughter, among them.