London has launched an extermination war against Russia, politically and economically. Do you understand the consequences? British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss demands “forever” sanctions against Russia; U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin admits the policy is to permanently “weaken” Russia; and EU foreign affairs secretary Joseph Borrell says the Ukraine issue has to be settled militarily, not through negotiations. Seriously?!?
This week’s discussion with EIR Ibero-American editor Dennis Small centered on why, to stop a war, you first have to have a policy to win the peace.
Transcript
May 6—Fireside Chat With Lyndon LaRouche:
DENNIS SPEED: Good evening, and welcome to Thursday’s Fireside Chat with Lyndon LaRouche for Thursday, May 5, 2022—also known as Cinco de Mayo. Tonight actually, I want to give almost all of the time to Dennis Small, who besides his work with the Ibero-American desk of EIR as such, has been monitoring very carefully the discussions that are coming largely out of Russia, as well as China in a different way, concerning the creation of a new financial monetary and economic architecture in the world. These discussions, while they may appear to have been precipitated by the unfortunate that have had to occur around Ukraine, really is a discussion that does not originate there. It originates in an extended dialogue involving Lyndon LaRouche from sometime in the early 1970s, and most emphatically in the period of the 1980s on; with particularly the then-Soviet Union—later Russia—China, and for that matter a large number of nations in what people today call the Third World.
The nations that met on April 18, 1955 at Bandung in the Afro-Asian Conference, and the aspirations of those nations, and in one sense in a different way, the aspirations that Lyndon LaRouche expressed for the United States’ role in the aftermath of the Second World War. Aspirations that had been made very clear by Franklin Roosevelt’s designs of 1944-45, which he did not live to implement. It was approximately almost 30 years later in 1975 that Lyndon LaRouche began to put forward those ideas. And importantly, one voice that joined Lyndon LaRouche in putting forward those ideas, was a man by the name of Fred Wills, former Justice Minister of Guyana, and its representative to the United Nations as well. Dr. Wills was someone that Dennis Small knew very well; he passed away in 1992. But in 1976 he gave a talk at the United Nations representing the Security Council at that time—Guyana was the moderating nation at that point—and made a call at that time for an International Development Bank. It was a proposal that Lyndon LaRouche had written, and presented as of April 1975. Fred Wills put that proposal forward to the United Nations in an official capacity the following year. This is the 30th year anniversary of Fred’s death. Importantly, he also played a role at a conference when he called for a New Bretton Woods system, Development Is the New Name for Peace. This was in 1987, and it was held in Andover, Massachusetts and was attended by Lyndon LaRouche and Helga Zepp-LaRouche. So in the last five years of his life in particular, Fred had played a certain role also in that conception.
Now, this fight for a new economic architecture, and the fight that we are talking about today for a new security and development architecture may seem to people to be an uphill battle, a fool’s errand, an impossibility, whatever. Actually, however, there is no basis, no reason whatsoever to believe that. Number one, it was the policy that was established in the United States through its Revolution from 1776 to 1783, particularly in the later economic writings of Alexander Hamilton. Though the seed crystal of Hamilton’s work was already there in Ben Franklin’s work as early as 1729 in various of Franklin’s writings. So, it’s the basis of the United States; not the United States perhaps of today, but the historical United States. And of course, that is the United States of today to the degree that people decide to keep the republic that they were bequeathed by Ben Franklin and others. That is exactly the issue that plagues us at the moment. You have the specter of thermonuclear war, and I’ll just reference that there have been a few remarks made recently by military people like Colonel Larry Wilkerson, who was interviewed by Paul Jay on something called the Doomsday Machine. This is just recently. His point was that after decades of gains, computer simulations in which people try to figure out what happens if you only drop one nuclear bomb? Various people are talking about low-yield nuclear weapons placed on top of cruise missiles, or a pocket-sized nuke that only takes out a few blocks. Larry Wilkerson’s point is that no matter what kind of scenario you draw up, what happens is that it all comes out to be the case that the reaction to that becomes unpredictable. That essentially total war has to be presumed. The problem we have though today, which Wilkerson is aware of and others are too, the problem we have today is that there is not only a danger of strategic miscalculation, there is a practice of strategic miscalculation. And you can see that in the impact that the sanctions are having in the trans-Atlantic world, for example.
So, there’s a different way to look at this issue of establishing a new development architecture, a new economic and security architecture. And that is, that you can win these battles based on principle against odds that seem to be overwhelming. Cinco de Mayo actually does refer to one such case, and Dennis will discuss that maybe in the course of what he has to say tonight. The Battle of Puebla in Mexico, which is the origin of the celebration. Again, that was the case of a country battling Spain, the United Kingdom, and France; all three of which were looting the hell out of it. A revolution was being conducted against that, which was successful, with the help, by the way, of the United States, particularly Abraham Lincoln’s assistance to Benito Juarez.
Today in what we find ourselves in, although we may represent a small force, we represent powerful ideas; what Lyn used to call “heavy ideas”. Ideas that are more powerful than nuclear weapons. But we have to wield those ideas; we can’t be afraid. In our case, we definitely want to launch all of our weapons, especially the heaviest of them, in the form of the heavy ideas that can create a kind of shock to the system of world geopolitics. We’re in a position to do it, and that’s one of the reasons we’re gathered here tonight. So, what Dennis will do is give the briefing and then we’ll go right into questions.
DENNIS SMALL: Lyndon LaRouche, on a number of occasions, presented the following concept of how you wage and win a political war, which seems paradoxical. He said, you launch one fight and you lose that; and you launch another one, and you lose that; and you launch another one, and you lose that; and you keep doing that, and you lose them all, and then you win. That may sound like either a word game or paradoxical or silly, but what LaRouche explained was that the way this actually works is that you pick and choose your battles in such fashion that regardless of the immediate outcome, you shifted the terms of the battlefield itself. You’ve chosen a flank; you’ve chosen an issue, you’ve chosen a rallying point which changes the entire structure of the battlefield. Then, you do that again, and you do that again until such point where you’ve changed the entirety of the shape of the nature of the battle itself. That’s the actual nature of victory.
Now, the Cinco de Mayo that Dennis was referring to is, in fact, in one sense of that sort. It was the occasion in which Mexico was resisting an invasion by the French, and around the city of Puebla outside Mexico City, they were able to hold off the French in a very nasty, bloody siege. But they were able to hold off the French, and that served as a rallying point for Mexicans in a war that they ultimately won. Now, shortly after the battle of Puebla, they lost. The French won some battles, and so on. But ultimately the victory was Mexico’s with the expulsion of the French from Mexico, and Benito Juarez’s bringing Emperor Maximilian and Empress Carlotta to their just end before a firing squad in Mexico.
The point here—everyone always focusses on the firing squad—but that’s not the point. The point here is the way you actually conduct war and conduct battles. I think we need to look at the current situation today with that concept in mind. The current strategic showdown underway between the global NATO—you can call it the British Empire or Global NATO, or the US-UK NATO combination, or the City of London, Wall Street combined on the one hand. And on the other side, most immediately Russia, but very soon, with the same force, China. It resembles nothing so much as a chicken game, which you’re probably all very familiar with. The adolescent or pre-adolescent game of chicken where two cars drive full speed at each other, and the question is who swerves out of the way first; who’s the chicken. Now, this game and other games like it of something called game theory as applied to economics, as applied to strategy and so on and so forth. And believe it or not, much of international geopolitics is modelled on computers playing games with different variants of the chicken game. The way the chicken game works, as you may be aware, is that if neither of the two swerve away, that’s the worst result for both of them. If they swerve away, they both lose face, but at least they live to play the chicken game another day. If you’re the person who doesn’t swerve and the other guy swerves, then you’re the big winner because you out-macho-ed him and you didn’t lose you honor, and you survived also. He, on the other hand, survives, but he doesn’t get as many points because he chickened out.
It’s actually very interesting. I was just reading up on this a little bit before this call. They’ve done chicken games with computers facing off against each other. And it’s actually quite interesting, because the entire theory of economics is based on game theory, which is, how do you respond given your relationship with other people playing the game, who are also maximizing their own situation. And there are modern variations of this where they say, “Well, we can’t assume that everybody acts rationally. Some people act subjectively irrationally and have other motives besides pure pleasure and pain.” So, that’s all taken into account in these computerized games. So, it’s quite interesting that if you set up two computerized drivers in a chicken game, the result of indeterminate. Meaning there is no way of predicting what’s going to happen; whether there’s going to be a crash or there isn’t or what’s going to happen.
I mention this for a variety of reasons; not just to have the image of the chicken game and how close we are, the one minute to midnight image of how close we are to nuclear war and economic nuclear warfare as well. But, because the method of decision-making, the approach to this being taken by the Global NATO crowd is essentially based on a computer-simulated model of human behavior, it is fundamentally flawed axiomatically because of its assumptions about the way the human mind works. I should probably correct that—they don’t even agree that the human mind exists; it can just be replaced by a computerized brain—much more efficient than our biological brain because it computes more rapidly. But their entire model is premised on that approach. And that is how they are going at this issue of nuclear warfare, which is why the comments that Dennis mentioned at the outset from Larry Wilkerson are so relevant. What he said was, every time we have gamed this out, and remember, he was an advisor to Colin Powell, and they had endless war games—as are now going on as well. Every time they had these desktop computerized war games that began with the launching of just one tactical missile, it immediately escalated to global full-scale strategic thermonuclear warfare. There’s a reason that would happen in exactly that fashion. In other words, what Wilkerson is demonstrating is what Ted Postol has also said, and Helga Zepp-LaRouche has constantly reiterated; which is that the idea that you can simply launch one little tiny nuke and then everyone will act rationally and recalculate their positions is fundamentally nonsense. It’s not how human societies work, it’s not how the nuclear domain works. And yet, that is the approach that is now being taken.
Just consider, I’m going to quickly run through recent developments over the last week, and then also the last 24 hours. You have a situation where the British are leading the way in seeing how far they can push Russia before they cross the red line; or, even cross the red line. They’re pushing the envelope. Liz Truss, the British Foreign Minister, said we’ve got to push this all the way in Ukraine; we’ve got to win, we’ve got to back them up 100%. General Lloyd Austin, US Defense Secretary, in meetings at Ramstein air base in Germany, earlier this week, said, yes, our strategy is to weaken and downgrade Russia. Which is, of course, what the Russians had feared all along. You’ve got Joseph Borrell, the Foreign Secretary for the EU, saying this cannot be negotiated, this is going to have to be won or lost on the battlefield. Put yourself, as I’m going through this, in Putin’s shoes in the Kremlin, or Shoigu the Defense Minister, or anybody in a position of responsibility in Russia or China looking at this insanity coming from the West. Besides those statements, you have the United States is shipping phenomenal amounts of weaponry into Ukraine. There was testimony presented by Generals Austin and Milley before Congress this week where, under Congressional questioning, they stated that yes, they have so far sent in about 5000 Javelin anti-tank weapons, and they agreed that that constituted approximately 1/3 of the United States entire reserve of Javelin anti-tank weapons. On Stinger missiles, they have sent 1400; that’s about 1/4 of our national supply. Now of course, Austin and Milley assured the Congressmen that the US military-industrial complex would be able to rebuild all of the capabilities very quickly. We’d produce more of these things as quickly as they could be shipped to Ukraine, where we can then train the Ukrainian military so that they can stand up armies and so forth to go after the Russians in waves to try to produce a two-year long war which through attrition will wear down the Russians so that we can bring about regime change in that country. But this is openly stated. The United States, the British, and the Europeans are training Ukrainians to use these weapons, and then we’re shipping in the weapons. We are actually co-belligerents by any Constitutional or international law definition. We are co-belligerents, and therefore the Russians would be, should they decide to act on it, fully within their rights within international law to respond militarily. Because we are involved militarily against Russia; NATO has declared war on Russia, that’s the simple fact of the matter. Now, the Russians haven’t yet responded in that fashion, but when will that happen? Well, these adolescent chicken game lunatics running the show in London and Washington want to see how far they can push it. They’re gunning the accelerator, waiting for somebody else to swerve.
You have a situation where, just over the last 24 hours, Brigadier General Hilbert announced that he had been involved in training 23,000 Ukrainians in Germany over the last number of years. And he took the occasion to say in discussing this, “I would like to relay to the West a message that was given to me by the Ukrainians that I’ve trained, which is that the Russians made one fundamental mistake. They waited eight years to respond.” Now, that’s a very interesting statement, because contrary to the propaganda line that’s out there that Russia’s move against Ukraine was unprovoked, there was no reason for it and so on, what is in fact the case, and we have insisted over and over again, and we are in the process of documenting in detail, this was very provoked going back at least eight years, and actually more like 30 years of pushing Russia into a corner; goading the Russian bear. And now, here you have an open statement of the policy; we don’t have to prove anything more. It was stated by one of major trainers himself that that’s how the Ukrainians viewed it; the Russians waited eight years.
Then you have reports out in the New York Times today which say that the United States has provided active field intelligence to the Ukrainians that has allowed them to have real-time targeting of Russian troop movements, which has allowed them to kill 12 generals in the field of battle so far, which is an extraordinarily high number. It requires incredible real-time intelligence to do something like that if they in fact did that. But there have been very significant deaths on the Russian side. So, here’s the New York Times quoting an unnamed source saying that the US has been providing that intelligence. Now, it is the case that later today that was denied, not very emphatically, by a spokesman for the National Security Council, saying, “Oh no, we don’t provide intelligence so they can kill generals; we provide intelligence. They combine that with their other views of things, and the Ukrainians do their own activities.” Kirby at the Pentagon also denied the report in the New York Times, but again, in that kind of mealy-mouthed way, saying, “No, we are one of many sources of intelligence for the Ukrainians for them to carry out this activity.”
The Russians can add 2 + 2. This is exactly the sort of stuff that has been going on and that the United States is capable of doing. We are clearly pushing the envelope; seeing how far we can go with the red line before the Russians respond. But, let me tell you, before we find out where and when the Russians respond, it will be too late to stop the likely obliteration of the human species. It’s no less serious than that. Look at what the Russians have done. The Russians have claimed, and they have demonstrated in the field of battle in Ukraine that they are capable of deploying and effectively using the Kinzhal hypersonic missiles. They fly at 20-30 times the speed of sound; hitting their target with great accuracy. They’ve also been using supersonic weapons a little more regularly, but use of the Kinzhal was a proof of principle, and it was a very clear message combined with what the Russians have stated all along. We have weapons you can’t stop. Did you know the Russians have more nuclear warheads than we do? To play this kind of chicken game with the Russians, where they have said that the only occasion in which they would use nuclear weapons is if they are attacked with nuclear weapons, or if their very existence as a nation is threatened; to push them to the point where we are explicitly by name in stated terms threatening their very existence as a nation, is not very smart. It’s extraordinarily dangerous, beyond what words are capable of communicating.
And the Russians have made it very clear also in their economic measures that they have adopted. Putin just two days ago adopted a new decree which allows the government to break all international agreements and export contracts and so on with any country that is a hostile country and is putting pressure on Russia through sanctions. That means they can instantly stop exporting everything they now export if they so decide to do it, and they can take over assets in their country and so on. It’s not wise to question Russia’s resolve on this; they showed that was exactly what they meant, and they were not bluffing, in cutting off the natural gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria, because they did not follow and pay in rubles. They didn’t just cut them off; they provided the terms of payment, which these countries refused to agree with, and therefore they cut them off.
Now, the latest development from today is that Charles Michel, who is the President of the European Council, this is the guy who heads the executive body of the European Union. He has called for taking the assets of Russia that have been frozen until now, and confiscating them; in other words, formalizing the theft, saying, “They’re ours.” Now, what is this guy doing, acting on the Communist Manifesto? Here we accuse China and Russia of expropriating property, and here the head of the European Council is talking about expropriating the Russian assets in Europe; that’s what the world has come to. And of course, the Russians know exactly what this all adds up to. There are voices in Russia such as that of Sergei Glazyev, a well-known economist, former advisor to Putin, currently a Minister in the Eurasian Economic Commission. He’s presented a full plan for a top-down war economy on Hamiltonian terms, complete protectionism for Russia; breaking with the dollar system; establishing non-dollar trade and investment with the countries of Eurasia—in particular Russia, India, and China. And to go about building what he calls a new international economic architecture.
So, that’s sort of the lay of the land in terms of that chicken game, which is the nuclear one. But then, today, we have a picture that has come together in some detail of a similar chicken game being strategized vis a vis China. The strategic doctrine behind this chicken game is called Mutually Assured Destruction—appropriately named MAD—which Kissinger was one of the principle proponents of. What is now being proposed by the Atlantic Council in Washington, which is one of the main central think tanks and headquarters for the economic war on China, the attacks on Russia, and so on. One of the leading authors from the Atlantic Council, also formerly with the International Financial Institute, which is the old creditors’ cartel, the Ditchley Group. He did a study where he said, well, we may have to go to the point of an economic mutually assured destruction; economic nuclear warfare against China. And he went through the tabletop computer scenarios on what could be done, and he said, there is a problem here. We could freeze and steal and later confiscate all of China’s assets abroad. How much they hold abroad is not exactly known; they have a total of $3.2 trillion in foreign reserves. That compares to Russia’s $650 billion, of which they lost half. But there was just a meeting of the People’s Bank of China on April 22nd, according to the Financial Times, where they discussed what measures could be taken to protect themselves under conditions of asset seizure of those $3.2 trillion. The Atlantic Council crowd responded with sort of a war-game scenario of “What if we did this, and they would do that? Well, let’s say we froze or stole all of their $3.2 trillion?” Well, there’s a little bit of a problem, which is that China has in its territory $1.9 trillion of foreign direct investment; they could seize that. There’s another $2.7 trillion in foreign debts they could refuse to pay; another $1.2 trillion in stocks. Basically, somewhere in the range of $6-7 trillion that the Chinese could retaliate with if we proceed to pull on them what we’ve pulled on the Russians. But of course, the Atlantic Council guys had to admit, there’s even more at stake here, because after all, there is trade. In other words, there’s a real economy. What about, as with Russia that has gas and oil and fertilizer and all the things that we can’t do without, what happens if we decouple completely with China? That’s what they are doing desktop war game scenario mongering on. It’s the chicken game, and it’s completely, totally insane.
You have to ask yourself, “Don’t they understand what they’re doing? Did they really not think of the effect on Europe by forcing Russia into a situation of cutting off all gas supplies and oil? Are they really not thinking what the effect will be on the rest of the world if China is decoupled entirely?” I have to say that the answer is, yes, they do know; and yes, they did think of it; and they are proceeding both because they are crazy, but also because they are strategically required to do so because of the blow-out of their system. This is something we’ve been talking to you about for a long time. LaRouche was talking about this for 50 years. He said this day would come. 50 years ago, Lyndon LaRouche said this day we are in now would come if the policies didn’t change. The entire post-Bretton Woods system would blow out, and therefore the financial interests controlling it would be driven to fascism and to war to control the blow-out when it happens. Not to avoid a blow-out, that’s no longer possible. But control it and try to pick up the pieces and run things after that actually happens.
That is what’s going on right now. One has to think, if one looks at the speed, the desperation, and the utter insanity of the measures that are now being taken against Russia and China; you have to, first if you have a black sense of humor, you might recall the old joke of the kidnapper who takes hostages and he’s got them all tied up and he’s got a pistol and so on. And the hostages are starting to give him trouble; he yells at them all, and he puts the gun right at his own head and says, “One false move, and I’ll shoot.” If you have a black sense of humor, that’s kind of the situation that’s going on with Global NATO. But the other aspect of this is that they are facing a blow-out of such proportions that they have no choice but to move, and to move fast. This also is what LaRouche talked about.
I’ll leave you with this thought, which is, also this week, really part of this nuclear chicken game to see who, if anyone, is going to swerve first, the Federal Reserve Bank raised interest rates by half a percent; 50 basis points. This was long awaited; everyone knew it was going to happen. They did it, they said they’re going to do it again—supposedly to control inflation. They say they’re going to wind down the $9 trillion in quantitative easing. This isn’t going to work. They do have to do it, but it cannot work, because some part or another of the everything bubble is going to blow out. Third World debt is going to blow out; they will not be able to pay their debt with rising interest rates. Just today, across the entire developing sector there was a wave of interest rate increases to try to keep up with the Fed increase, so that they don’t lose all of the carry-trade money that flowed into their countries. But they’re going to lose it anyway. The Indians, the Brazilians, all the major countries in the Third World are going to be doing this. That’s going to blow out. The corporate debt in the United States is going to blow out; the mortgage market is going to blow out. People can’t do this. Prices are rising out of control; we don’t have diesel fuel; we don’t have food to put on our tables anymore. Everything is going out of reach, and it is emphatically the case that what the Secretary-General of the United Nations Guterres said this week is true. He doesn’t say many true things, but he did say one true thing, which is we will not be able to prevent global starvation unless we get Russian and Ukrainian and Belorussian food and fertilizers back into the world economy. And that is exactly what the guys playing the chicken game are preventing and are trying to ensure does not happen.
Therefore, what needs to be done is that the entire architecture, the entire premise of the chicken game, the entire concept of mankind that is based on this idea that people respond as in a chicken game—it’s a zero-sum game; a win-lose game—as opposed to the concept that Lyndon LaRouche always presented of the benefit of the other is my benefit. In other words, it’s not only a philosophical concept; that concept does not work in a world dominated by $2 quadrillion of debt. It only works if you put the world through bankruptcy reorganization and gear the economy towards productive physical activity. Then, you have the possibility of defining identity in the real world for all human beings on the basis of win-win. If you allow this financial system to say in place, then it is, no matter how many times you repeat that we would like to have the Treaty of Westphalia and we’d like to have win-win, if that bubble stays in place, it is win-lose; or rather, lose-lose as those two speeding cars crash into each other and the world blows apart, either in thermonuclear warfare or in the economic equivalent of the same. That’s why we’re mobilized the way we’re mobilized in terms of the youth movement; that’s why we’re building a new international economic and security architecture; that’s why we are on a letter-writing and phone call-making with the American Congress. This train wreck has to be stopped while it’s still possible to do so. And that’s my battle report for Cinco de Mayo.
SPEED: OK, let me just say in respect to what Dennis was just saying, there are multiply-connected campaigns that we’re running. On this question about the Congress, it should be noted that it doesn’t take more than 10-15 persons from a particular Congressional district to get the attention of the people in that Congressional office. One of the reasons for that is the inactivity and apathy of much of the rest of the country, but more importantly, in this present circumstance where there is already a deep questioning about the advisability of going to war, or trying to go to war, or talking about going to war, with the other major thermonuclear war-fighting power in the world, that if people stand up quickly and in their own voice, what will happen—and the Congress is still, I believe at home tomorrow and through the weekend, so you may be able to reach in some respects, there may even be a few public meetings of this type. But this is the time to actually go ahead and reach out, and ask what the hell these people think they’re doing. This is a pivotal question to be taken up in that form.
Also, there’s our petition calling for the convoking of a conference on the economic and security architecture. We have some people in the queue, so we’re going to get right to questions. There may be some people who have reports about some of that activity that would also be useful. But if people have questions about why and what we think needs to be done, definitely get on to ask those.
