Helga Zepp-LaRouche Asks, Will Humanity Have International Law in Outer Space, or Law of the Jungle?

Aug. 22, 2020 (EIRNS)—In her lead article for the Aug. 27 (No. 35) issue of the German weekly Neue Solidarität, Helga Zepp-LaRouche takes up the current crises, including the existential dangers of the war policy promoted by Mike Pompeo et al. and of the evil design to transpose geopolitics into space. Her article, as translated by EIR, begins:

“There are now a multitude of events that appear to be independent of one another, but which taken together, produce the atmosphere and the dynamics of a prewar period. The crucial question is whether the human species has within itself the moral resources to deviate from a course in international politics that will inevitably lead to a new world war.

“U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo is obviously on the warpath and clearly believes that the will for power suffices to lure all other nations into the confrontation against Russia and China, including if need be, through the extraterritorial application of U.S. sanctions against Iran and all countries that do not give in to U.S. arbitrariness. It’s really quite astonishing: Last week the UN Security Council rejected a U.S. resolution to reinstate sanctions against Iran under a clause of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JPCOA). Russia and China voted against, France, Germany and Great Britain and eight other states abstained, and only the U.S.A. and the Dominican Republic voted for. The case was thus clear-cut.

“But that did not prevent Pompeo from submitting another letter one week later to the UNSC, in which he expresses the expectation that the sanctions against Iran will automatically enter into force within 30 days, and will concern all countries that maintain any kind of trade relations with Iran—primarily Russia and China, but also European and other countries. China’s and Russia’s foreign ministries made clear in their comments that Pompeo’s view is absurd, since the JCPOA Treaty was adopted under UN Resolution 2231 and is therefore valid international law, while the U.S. withdrew unilaterally from that same Treaty on May 8, 2018. To invoke a treaty which one has revoked, reflects a worrisome degree of self-deception.

“The Foreign Ministers of France, Germany and the U.K. also indicated that they consider Pompeo’s move to be incompatible with their own support for the JCPOA Treaty. Pompeo’s argument that Iran has not respected the agreed-upon conditions of the nuclear agreement is just as transparent, since everyone knows that it was only in reaction to the U.S. exit from the treaty that Iran began to increase its reserves of enriched uranium. Pompeo’s triumphant claim to Bret Baier of ‘Special Report’ that Iran would no longer be able to purchase Russian air defense systems and Chinese tanks clarifies what the real purpose is, namely, confrontation with Russia and China.

“While President Donald Trump has repeatedly stated and demonstrated, that he actually wants to improve relations with Russia and work out a new nuclear disarmament agreement, Pompeo’s policy toward Iran is identical with that of Trump’s National Security Adviser John Bolton whom he fired, and about whom Trump tweeted not so long ago: ‘if I listened to him, we would be in World War Six by now.’ There are good reasons to assume, however, that there will not be a sixth world war, since mankind would in all likelihood not survive the third one.”

Zepp-LaRouche underlines further in her article that Trump’s policy, including that of withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria, has been largely undermined by the coup attempt and the collusion between the Obama-Bush intelligence agencies and the British secret service. Lest anyone has forgotten what the policy of the military-industrial complex is, Colin Powell made it clear in his “appalling speech” at the Democratic Party Convention, she notes.

To that picture, Zepp-LaRouche adds the attempts to extend geopolitical confrontation to the area of space, as spelled out by the new commander of the U.S. Space Command, Gen. James Dickinson, as well as in a report recently produced by the Defense Innovation Unit of the Pentagon. That means, she comments, that “the area in which the common aims of mankind, such as space exploration, could be realized, opening the way to a new era of cooperation among all nations, is supposed to be poisoned by the same Cold War mentality that is already poisoning international relations.”

The idea of a “space warfighting culture,” which is the expression used by Dickinson, is condemned by Zepp-LaRouche as outright “perverse.” It is the projection into space and into mankind’s future of

“the bigoted geopolitics that caused two world wars and endless suffering in the 20th century. What visionary minds such as Hermann Oberth, Krafft Ehricke and Lyndon LaRouche regarded as the ‘extraterrestrial imperative,’ as the chance to raise mankind to a higher level of culture, in which scientists and astronauts of all nations and cultures would jointly explore and overcome the great unknown challenges of our universe, is thus subjugated to the same depraved logic of profit that has brought the world to the brink of the abyss, where we stand today.”

While negotiations and diplomatic initiatives are very important to find the way out of these crises, Helga Zepp-LaRouche concludes, what is necessary to ensure survival “is the grand vision of how mankind can move from the current state of barbarism into a new era of an inspiring renaissance of great ideas, worthy of mankind. The idea of an international Moon Village, an international city on Mars and joint interstellar space travel in our galaxy and then, at some point, beyond—this is not something for the small-minded, but for the Mahatmas of history.”