Patrick Lawrence, one of the few honest journalists in the U.S., together with economist Marshall Auerback, published a piece in Scrum on Wednesday that identifies the extraordinary joint statement by Presidents Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin on Feb. 4, in the same manner that Helga Zepp-LaRouche and EIR have stated and the British Empire’s Daily Telegraph admitted negatively—a new era, an era without geopolitics, has emerged, based on the respect for all humanity’s right to security and development. As Lawrence and Auerback put it in their title: “The World Just Turned—Ukraine and the Putin-Xi Statement.”
Some quotes from this important article:
“[W]e are living it and cannot see it historically without great effort. But we are living through a passage of the 21st century whose long-term significance is hard to overstate. The future is arriving, to put the point another way. Who would have guessed it would come to us by way of the ongoing morass in Ukraine?
“On the ground, the crisis in Ukraine sharpens by the day. This is the point of Washington’s incessant efforts to provoke Russia into an incursion that will justify a proxy war on the part of the U.S. and those few allies hawkish enough to follow its lead into the cesspit of corruption and crypto—Nazism on the Russian Federation’s southwestern border.
“But on the ground is not where to look if we want to understand this long-festering crisis and its likely outcome—not as of last week. When Presidents Putin and Xi issued a declaration of mutual solidarity as the Winter Olympics opened in Beijing last Friday, all changed, changed utterly. What the Russian and Chinese leaders had to say in 5,300 words puts the mess in Ukraine in a fundamentally new perspective. What happens there will stand as a mile marker and nothing more on the way to a global order most of humanity has awaited throughout the postwar decades—all seven of them.
“This is immensely positive.”
They describe the Joint Statement (published in full in this week’s EIR) as a “document of historic magnitude.” comparing it with the joint statement at the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia, of the formerly colonized nations, declaring the principles of freedom, sovereignty, the right to development, and respect for all nations. Xi and Putin fully backed Russia’s call for a new security architecture which, following the OSCE, insists that one nation’s security can not be at the expense of another.
But the Xi-Putin statement is universal, they write: “Now what might have been resolved by way of a new settlement on European and Russian security has become a question of a genuinely new global order. This is what happened in Beijing last week. Secretary of State Blinken, his spokesman, Ned Price, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, the Pentagon, the intelligence apparatus, the NATO leadership in Brussels: None of these appears capable of addressing this new reality.” The authors point to an emerging “Eastward diplomatic démarche French President Emmanuel Macron is currently leading, compared to an”American campaign of propaganda and disinformation that is almost certainly the match of anything marshaled during the Cold War," pointing to the absurd, unsubstantiated accusations flowing from the White House and the State Department on a daily basis about Russian dirty deeds. The two gleefully reference AP’s Matt Lee’s showdown with State Department spokesman Ned Price, in which Lee referred to wild stories as “unhinged conspiracy theories, in Alex Jones territory.”
The authors point to the color revolution in Ukraine in 2014 as the “first major misstep” of the unipolar world’s hubris. Putin, they note, quickly called the referendum in Crimea, arranged a $400 billion natural gas deal with China, and launched a “global hands-across-the-water tour of Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to begin expanding relationships with non—Western nations.” Now, Xi and Putin have “submitted nearly 40 times since the Kiev coup. What began on the economic and trade side now has political and military dimensions.”
The Xi-Putin statement, they write, “is a bilateral statement announcing a new world order altogether, with an attendant aspiration to advance sustainable economic strategies worldwide.” They quote from the statement, that “a trend has emerged towards redistribution of power in the world; and the international community is showing a growing demand for leadership aiming at peaceful and gradual development”; they also note the statement’s attack on “certain states” who are, the statement says, “flouting democracy and go against the spirit and true values of democracy. Such attempts at hegemony pose serious threats to global and regional peace and stability and undermine the stability of the world order.”
The two authors conclude by pointing to the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence which Zhou Enlai signed with India, which were then incorporated into the 10-point declaration at the 1955 Bandung conference. They print all 10 points verbatim, adding: "We quote them in full because it is instructive to read them next to the Joint Statement. They are historical ballast. They remind us that there is nothing very strange or outré, and certainly nothing overly ambitious, about the world Putin and Xi envision: It is the world two-thirds of U.N. member nations and more than half of humanity desired before the Cold War buried their postwar hopes and aspirations. The Russian and Chinese leaders have just demonstrated that these hopes and aspirations were never extinguished. Maybe it is as simple as this.
“Hardly do Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping propose an easily, swiftly completed project. (And hardly will a solution of the Ukraine crisis prove easy or swift.) Great movements in history never work that way. And that is what Putin and Xi have just described.”