Jan. 22, 2025 (EIRNS)—The Jan. 20 inauguration of President Donald Trump and his flurry of statements and executive decrees over the following 48 hours have riveted the attention of a world in commotion. “The whole world is looking at the United States, and depending on what political camp you are in, between hope and fear,” Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche commented today, at the outset of her weekly Dialogue webcast. The situation, she added, is “complicated and multi-faceted,” and Trump’s actions are not all coherent with each other. He is impulsive and innovative at the same time.
But far too many people are wasting time debating whether the glass is half empty, or half full, listing off the good and the bad things Trump is doing and saying—when what is actually happening is that the entire nature of the “glass” they think they are looking at has changed dramatically. And that transformation demands our immediate action. “We are now experiencing a tectonic change, where the 500 years of colonialism is coming to an end, and the BRICS countries are trying to create a system which allows for the economic development of the Global South.” They have become protagonists in the shaping of Man’s future.
Despite his uninformed (and counterproductive) attacks on the BRICS, President Trump has stated his desire to prevent World War III, to normalize relations with Putin’s Russia and end the Ukraine war, to cooperate with China to make the world a better place for all nations. This change has created a strategic opening that must be quickly leveraged to bring about a new reality “on the ground.” The most urgent—perhaps also the hardest—place for that to happen is in Southwest Asia.
The Israel-Palestine crisis, including the genocide in Gaza and increasingly in the West Bank, can only be solved by reconstructing the entire area along the lines proposed by Lyndon LaRouche’s Oasis Plan. Abundant fresh water, power, high-speed rail lines, a rebuilt health and education infrastructure are all within reach. Only by getting to work on building that infrastructure can real optimism for the future be created, an optimism that both Israelis and Palestinians so desperately need.
To those who argue today that a political solution is needed before the economics can proceed, Lyndon LaRouche responded 35 years ago, on August 21, 1990: “For years, our proposals for economic development, have been repeatedly brushed aside, with the advice that a political settlement must come first, and then an economic cooperation for general development of the region, might become possible. We have repeatedly said, and rightly so, that that line of argument is wrong, and even dangerously absurd. The simple reason is, that without a policy of economic development, the Arabs and Israelis have no common basis for political agreement: no common interest.”
The LaRouche Oasis Plan can work—especially if the United States and China cooperate to bring it about. As a Jan. 22 lead editorial in the semi-official Chinese daily Global Times stated, reflecting thinking in Beijing: “What is certain is that as Trump begins his second presidential term, there is widespread hope for a mature and stable China-U.S. relationship. For both countries, there is a lot of potential for various forms of cooperation; the key is whether they can meet each other halfway…. A return to rational and pragmatic policies toward China is the shared aspiration of the peoples of both China and the U.S.”
The Oasis Plan is a good place to put that commitment into practice.
