EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 1 , 2021

A Tempestuous Decision by the American Presidency

Aug. 31, 2021 (EIRNS)—“This decision about Afghanistan is not just about Afghanistan. It’s about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries.” The American Presidency, as represented by Joe Biden, has, as of Aug. 31, potentially shut the door on more than three decades of post-1989 trans-Atlantic triumphalism by the Project for a New American Century; by Bush #41 Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney’s neocon 1990 “5/20 Committee;” by Margaret Thatcher’s and George Bush’s 1990-1991 “Desert Shield/Desert Storm” Gulf War; by Tony Blair’s 1999 Chicago “responsibility to protect” speech; and by the “forever wars” of the post September 11, 2001 period.

With respect to Afghanistan, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin has offered, not an admonition but a sound proposal:

“Any action taken by the [United Nations] Security Council, including the timing, should help to ease the conflict instead of flare up tensions, and facilitate a smooth transition rather than plunge the country back into chaos.... We hope that relevant countries will realize the fact that withdrawal is not the end of responsibility, but the beginning of reflection and correction.... The U.S. and some other Western countries should provide Afghanistan with urgently needed assistance for the economy, livelihood and humanitarian needs, help Afghan people overcome difficulties as soon as possible and start peaceful reconstruction at an early date. What they should not do is to simply take to their heels and leave a mess behind....”

The end of geopolitics is the beginning of wisdom here. And not mere “geo-economics” replacing geopolitics. A new idea, the idea of increasing the potential relative population-density of the planet as a whole, by strategically increasing population to increase the physical wealth of the planet as a whole—including the biosphere itself—through the enthusiastic cooperation of sovereign, independent nation-states, is the “outrageous” idea to which the trans-Atlantic world has to be won, on behalf of humanity as a whole. It won’t be easy. But “You cram these words into mine ears against /The stomach of my sense” need not be the presumed response from all factions of the United States and the trans-Atlantic world. The living body of work contained in the economic proposals of Lyndon LaRouche, including how to resolve the seemingly insoluble problems of each area of a world now embroiled in the tempest of conflict, disease surge, and underdevelopment, must now be set free to rebuild the Earth. That is the actual mission of our LaRouche Legacy Foundation archive project, one which must over the course of the next months make available in video, written, and oral form the method of problem-solving contained in the hundreds of works of LaRouche.

While other nations, particularly those that have initiated and affiliated with the Belt and Road Initiative, have clearly manifested their desire and capacity for self-development, Lyndon LaRouche’s approach to physical economy, and his invention of the “development corridor” as the physical basis for an upshift in the evolution of the biosphere as a whole, is qualitatively superior to every notion of future progress presently underway. Transmitting LaRouche’s unique contribution to world knowledge, as well as to the reproduction of human creativity, is our purpose, particularly in the next days to months. Afghanistan is a presently unique situation, the theater of vast potential transformation by means of which a multiply connected process of world economic development can be triggered throughout the planet. In this way, we avoid the seemingly inevitable onset of this greatest of still-impending, but rapidly onsetting human tragedies. If it seems to be inexorable, that is only to those that lack the courage to change their axioms.

Though LaRouche is not physically here to witness it, as in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the winds of destruction, blowing the lethal three-part pandemic of disease, war, and famine/poverty to the shores of the Atlantic world, have delivered the enemies of humanity to the judgment of current history. That current history will not tolerate the silly self-eliminating utopianism of the Green New Deal. Even as the Scottish National Party mistakenly brings the Greens into government for the first time, and Angela Merkel gives her keynote speech at the 50th anniversary of the founding of the German chapter of Greenpeace, the world recognizes the vapid promises of green bliss are a recipe for death. “No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil/No occupation; all men idle, all, and women, too.”

We must now orchestrate, not an ending, but a new beginning to an Afghanistan circumstance that becomes, if not a convivencia, at least a dialogue of civilizations. Politics as art—not “the art of the deal”—is the only recourse the world now has there. In “Laughter, Music and Creativity,” Lyndon LaRouche says: “The crux of the genuine issue is the principle of Freedom in respect to Necessity. The analogy of the creative musician to the creative physicist bears out here most emphatically.... The essence of creativity is problem-solving. In the final analysis, all creative problem-solving subsumes man’s mastery of nature, mastery of the implicitly adducible laws of the material universe.” [Emphasis in original.]

This new American era of cooperation, of a return to the “human foreign policy” of Classical scholar John Quincy Adams, the Secretary of State and American President who later successfully defended in court the kidnapped Africans of the slave-ship Amistad, must take into account the true interests of everyone in the world. The Helga Zepp-LaRouche-proposed World Health Platform, including public sanitation, clean water, medicines, and food, as World Food Program director David Beasley has recently demanded for Afghanistan, is the means to tame the sea of troubles facing the world, and by changing one’s axioms, end them.