EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR FRIDAY, MARCH 12, 2021

Take Off the Geopolitical Spectacles: The U.S. Must Work with China

March 11 , 2021 (EIRNS)—“Anybody who does not have geopolitical spectacles on their nose can see that, unless the two largest economies in the world—the U.S. and China—work together to tackle problems such as the pandemic, poverty, and famine, the world will be a miserable place,” Helga Zepp-LaRouche asserted in her weekly international webcast today. “And therefore some of these military doctrines which declare Russia and China to be the enemy are really stupid.... The end result can only lead to war.”

Zepp-LaRouche referred specifically to the recent Dr. Strangelove-type rampage of Adm. Philip Davidson, the head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, who defined China as the leading strategic threat to the United States. But the dangerous policy outlook originates in imperial London and extends deep into both the Republican and Democratic parties—and also into an all-too-gullible American population.

The simple fact of the matter, as Lyndon LaRouche stressed repeatedly, is that we are in the throes of a systemic breakdown crisis of the entire trans-Atlantic system, characterized by both a bankrupt financial system and plunging real living standards of most of the world’s population, which has unleashed pandemics, famine, and cruel poverty. And solving that crisis, LaRouche also insisted, requires mustering the combined physical economic capabilities of China and the United States, in a science-driven global infrastructure program such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Whether London’s ideologues like it or not, China cannot be absent from the real-world solution to these problems. It not only launched the BRI and made it available to all nations, regardless of ideology; China has also succeeded in lifting 850 million Chinese out of extreme poverty over the last 40 years—the single, greatest contribution to the growth of physical-economic productivity worldwide, emphatically including real productivity inside the U.S.

Consider the plight of Yemen, where millions—including children—are facing mass starvation, in what World Food Program director David Beasley painfully described, after a visit to that country this week, as “Hell; it’s the worst place on Earth. And it’s entirely man-made.”

So, too, with the explosion of new strains of COVID across the Americas, centered in Brazil, where the Bolsonaro government’s policy of arrogant inaction has encouraged the spread of the disease to crisis proportions. The new P1 Brazilian strain of the coronavirus is apparently twice as contagious as the original strain; and it is reportedly capable of re-infecting those who had COVID in anywhere from 25-60% of cases. Brazil, with its 211 million population, one-quarter of whom live in abject poverty, shares borders with 10 out of South America’s 12 countries. Do you really think this can be contained within Brazil?

But just as the crisis is man-made, so, too, is its solution: The accelerated development of Southwest Asia, Africa, Ibero-America, and elsewhere, based on the extension of high-tech BRI corridors throughout these regions, in which China and the U.S. must play the keystone roles. The upcoming Schiller Institute/ICLC conference will present a detailed blueprint for such an approach.

China, and Russia, are also both natural allies of those in the United States and Europe who rightly view the Green New Deal as a threat to economic development and human existence itself. As Helga Zepp-LaRouche stated in her webcast:

“Behind all of this so-called ‘climate’ and anti-nuclear question, there are quite different motives: namely to reduce the population, and that is what is not being accepted by Russia and China. This self destruction of the West by deindustrializing, by reversing the level of industry and agriculture to pre-industrial times, means that the west is weakening itself drastically. And naturally, this increases the war danger, because Russia and China have no intention to do likewise.”