The unhinged explosion recorded in the Sunday Times of London by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair against U.S. President Joe Biden, over American forces’ withdrawal from 20 years’ war in Afghanistan, has underlined just what an opportunity Afghanistan represents, to replace poisonous British geopolitics with economic development and peace. Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche emphasizes that we owe this to humanity, which needs the development cooperation of major powers which could be launched in and around Afghanistan. That country stands in economic relation to its region and to South Asia, as America’s Deep South did to the United States as a whole before Franklin Roosevelt’s Tennessee Valley Authority transformed it.
But Blair’s outburst reminds us, we owe it as well to America’s history of struggle against the British Empire and its centuries of exploitation of nations as its colonies and Commonwealth “partners.”
Tony Blair began America’s era of endless “regime change” wars with his 1999 speech to the Chicago Council of World Affairs. He declared the Treaty of Westphalia principle dead, and demanded a new era of NATO war against developing nations for the “right to protect” (as in the “protection” the mafia once offered on the streets of Chicago and many other cities). Blair’s foreign intelligence service MI6 hoked up the dodgy dossiers of phony “intelligence” which launched George W. Bush’s Iraq War, as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had “stiffened the spine” of Bush’s father for his Desert Storm. London needs American NATO muscle to run the world financially from London, frequent economic crashes and all. Geopolitics, the doctrine that one country’s or alliances interests are always pursued by screwing others, is British doctrine.
And so Blair bellowed to the Times about America’s “imbecilic political slogan about ending ‘the forever wars,’” which he feared would relegate “Global Britain” to “the second division.” His tuneless shrieking was accompanied by a chorus of other British notables, named and unnamed by the newspaper.
We have just passed the 50th anniversary of Aug. 15, 1971, when the U.K. government, the Bank of England and the City of London banks forced a fatal decision by Richard Nixon which shaped all of economic and human history for the worse since then. That was the ending of the dollar’s link to its gold reserve basis. It was the replacement of Franklin Roosevelt’s Bretton Woods monetary system with floating-exchange-rate system which set off a half-century of more and more unhindered pure speculation, more and more frequent financial crashes of debt bubbles fostered by central banks. Working people around the world earn 12% less of economic output as a result; but London has re-emerged as the world’s financial center. The end of Bretton Woods produced “Britain’s Second Empire” as proven in the documentary of that name.
On that 50th anniversary we celebrated the contributions of the late statesman Lyndon LaRouche with an international conference. He was the only economist in the world who both forecast, in the 1960s, the British-engineered breakup of Bretton Woods, and stood against it when it happened, forecasting eventual economic depression collapse and pandemics as its result.
But we also intend to reverse it, bringing about the launch of a New Bretton Woods credit system geared to capital goods exports from the major technological powers to the underdeveloped nations, for the great projects of economic development which are the precondition for peace. Afghanistan’s Ambassador to China Javid Ahmad Qaem told Global Times July 16 “The only place where they could really cooperate, and at least there could be a starting point to cooperate between these rivals, if I can call them that, is Afghanistan,”—referring to China, the United States and India, but could have included Russia. If this opportunity for development and peace is taken, that New Bretton Woods credit system is in sight.