Aug. 2—While London and Washington remained obsessed with their NATO frontal assault on Russia in the Ukraine theater, sinking further into the bog of an unwinnable land war that leaves only the nuclear option available, Russia turned the strategic flank with its just-concluded Russia-Africa Forum in St. Petersburg. Along with its Chinese allies, Russia is fully incorporating Africa into the emerging new global development architecture being built around the Belt and Road Initiative, the BRICS-Plus and associated groupings.
As Russian International Affairs Council expert Dmitri Trenin wrote in RT on Aug. 1, the Russia-Africa meeting “testifies to a sea-change in Moscow’s worldview and international positioning toward the world’s rising non-Western majority.” This is a “paradigm shift in Russian thinking and actions towards Africa,” he went on, “which is turning formerly ‘exotic’ states into normal and valuable partners.”
This is London’s and Washington’s exposed, weakest flank: Their collapsing, bankrupt, detested global financial system, and the horrendous poverty and misery it has caused in Africa—as well as other continents. Lyndon LaRouche addressed this decisive strategic issue in a historic EIR seminar in Washington, D.C. on June 18, 1997, under the title: “The Evil We Have Tolerated in Africa, Has Caught Up With Us!”
The Russia-Africa Forum will now be followed by the Aug. 22-24 BRICS summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, to which all of the nations of Africa have been invited by the host government, and which will deliberate on two principal agenda items: 1) currency alternatives to the toxic, speculative dollar, to permit trade and productive investment among nations; and 2) expansion of the BRICS into the “BRICS-Plus” (40 nations have expressed interest in joining the original five; 22 have formally applied for membership).
The only arguments or alternatives that the West has been able to muster to try to stop this process, is a trip by the State Department’s Victoria Nuland to South Africa and other African nations, where she has patronizingly dismissed the life-and-death discussion of a new currency as “just talk.” That, and non-stop articles in Bloomberg and Reuters reporting on supposed intractable differences within the BRICS nations over if and how to expand into the BRICS-Plus. More to the point is the financial warfare that countries such as Argentina and Egypt are being subjected to by the IMF and their creditor banks, to blackmail them into not joining the BRICS.
The deeper strategic issue at stake in the current breakdown crisis was recognized by Timofey Bordachev, the Program Director of Russia’s Valdai Discussion Club think tank, who wrote on July 28 that it is necessary to “create an alternative arrangement” to today’s unjust international order to “avoid a nuclear catastrophe.” That, he explained, is “not just a technical but a philosophical task,” a task toward which “Russia will have to cooperate in order to avoid universal annihilation.” China, Bordachev noted correctly, is already doing that on the basis of its Confucian worldview.
Bordachev falls short, however, of recognizing the philosophical tradition in the West that is the proper interlocutor for that urgently required dialogue of civilizations: the tradition of Cusa, Leibniz, the Treaty of Westphalia, and the American Revolution itself, with its universal commitment to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Fortunately, that task was already accomplished over the last 50 years by Lyndon LaRouche, and is being carried forward today by Helga Zepp-LaRouche in her Ten Principles of a New International Security and Development Architecture, first presented on Nov. 22, 2022 at a Schiller Institute conference.
These concepts are the foundation of the upcoming August 6 Humanity For Peace rally at the United Nations, and sister events around the world. They are the concepts needed to escalate the mobilization after that date until a new international security and development architecture is brought into existence.
