Western Economies Sink Into the Maelstrom, Refuse Lifeline of Cooperation with China and Russia

Dec. 28—Strategic stupidity has its consequences. By driving relentlessly for a showdown with Russia over NATO’s expansion into Ukraine, and with China over Taiwan’s independence, the financial Establishment holding the reins of power in the United States, the United Kingdom and the EU is decoupling the West from its only hope of long-term survival: a new international security and development architecture to get past the current breakdown crisis of the trans-Atlantic financial system.

The Russian government is responding to the reality before it. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov gave an extensive interview to TASS yesterday in which he stated bluntly: “Maintaining a normal conversation with the Biden’s administration, which declares a strategic defeat to our country as one of its aims, is objectively impossible.” He added that “the EU’s Brussels followed in the footsteps of the U.S. and NATO to wage a hybrid war against us,” and that “naturally, there will be no more ‘business as usual’ with such counterparties.” Lavrov drew out the conclusion: “Thank God, the world is not just the European Union for us and we have lots of friends and like-minded nations elsewhere.”

The Russians are putting their money where their mouth is. Natural Resources and Environment Minister Alexander Kozlov announced that future exploration for natural gas would occur mainly in the country’s east, in order to focus on exports to China and other Asian countries. “There’s not one, but more pipelines going in the eastern direction,” he said. Trade Minister Denis Manturov similarly announced that Russia’s world-scale metal production and export capabilities will now be redirected to China, Turkey, Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa.

Meanwhile in the trans-Atlantic sector, the only thing growing is financial speculation, with total world financial aggregates—80% of which are derivative bets backed by zero real economic activity—rapidly closing in on $2 quadrillion. This cannot possibly be paid back, yet to keep this financial bubble going, over the last 50 years the real physical economy has been looted to the bone. The result, as Lyndon LaRouche warned for decades, has been the plunge of potential relative population density, with predictable consequences: wars, collapsing living standards, pandemics, drug devastation, and ultimately outright population reduction.

Just look at the United States today, where the average life expectancy has dropped in just two years from 78.8 years to 76.4 years. This rate of collapse has not happened in 100 years in this country.

As Lyndon LaRouche warned nearly 40 years ago, in his June 1983 masterpiece, There Are No Limits to Growth:

“At the point the society’s potential relative population-density falls below the population-density of the existing population, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse enter. Famine promotes desperate strife. War and bloody civil commotions worsen the conditions of famine. The famine-stricken population becomes a breeder of diseases, spiraling into epidemics and pandemics, as was the case during the early fourteenth century Europe. The breakdown of agriculture and hygienic institutions promotes the eruptions of pestilences. The society is conquered, collapses, or changes its ways abruptly.”

That requisite abrupt change is being charted by the LaRouche movement, led by Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche. As part of the Schiller Institute’s campaign for a new international security and development architecture, Zepp-LaRouche has joined with dozens of other political and social leaders from around the world in addressing an open letter to Pope Francis, in support of his offer for the Vatican to serve as a venue for negotiations among all the parties in the Ukraine conflict, with no preconditions. That letter states:

“We intend to convene a Fourth Seminar of Political and Social Leaders of the World To Stop the Danger of Nuclear War in early 2023 to further this push for peace and to stop the danger of nuclear war, and we extend an invitation to a representative from the Vatican to attend.”

Read, circulate and support this call, and get others to do the same.