Schiller May Conference: The Cultural Determinants of a Competent American Foreign Policy

April 15, 2025 (EIRNS)—Both Presidential Special Envoy Steven Witkoff and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov are laboring mightily to attempt to normalize Russian-American relations. “President of the United States Donald Trump has said many times already that the decision by the Joe Biden administration to drag this country Ukraine into NATO was a major mistake," said Lavrov in an interview with Kommersant on April 14. Of his April 11 discussion with President Putin, Witkoff told Fox News:”I think we might be on the verge of something that would be very, very important for the world at large."

But what could stop that from occurring, is ceding economic policy to Milton Friedman and Chicago School “voodoo economics.” The appearance in Argentina of U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent with “voodoo chile” President Javier Milei—remember Milei’s May 2024 rock concert appearance where he belted out, “I’m the king of a lost world! I’m the king and I will destroy you!”—was as bizarre, in its own way. In a macabre reference to a remark once made famous by Ronald Reagan, “government is not the solution—government is the problem,” Bessent in Argentina denounced China’s economic investments in Africa as “rapacious deals marked as aid where … they’ve taken mineral rights. They’ve added huge amounts of debt onto these countries’ balance sheets … guaranteeing that future generations are going to be poor and without resources. And we don’t want that to happen any more than already has in Latin America.”

Note that these remarks were being delivered to a nation whose poverty rate under the Milei Administration has gone from an unacceptable 25% to 53%, the highest level in 20 years. More generally, International Monetary Fund and World Bank policies toward South and Central America, carried out by Wall Street and the City of London have done precisely what Bessent accused China of, for the past 50 years, and are doing it at this very moment in the very Argentina in which Bessent delivered his comments. Other factors, including “tariff wars,” will exacerbate such situations throughout the South American continent, and the world. Is the attack on the Chinese anti-colonial economic policy of the Belt and Road Initiative the prelude to a pivot to first economic, and then kinetic warfare?

It has recently been pointed out by astute commentary that Russian and Chinese economic policy is informed by the ideas of the American System of physical economy, as expressed in the economic writings of Alexander Hamilton, and Hamilton follower Friedrich List of Pennsylvania and Germany. It must also be pointed out that the Trump Administration is at present unable to access the American System’s economic ideas as the premise for the formulation of a successful foreign policy. Why is that?

In an April 14 interview with the British publication UnHerd, J.D. Vance demonstrated why and how the Trump White House is capable of sabotaging the relations it seeks to establish with Russia, and other nations. “The President really loves the United Kingdom. He loved the Queen. He admires and loves the King. It is a very important relationship. And he’s a businessman and has a number of important business relationships in [Britain]. But I think it’s much deeper than that. There’s a real cultural affinity. And of course, fundamentally America is an Anglo country.”

The economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche did not agree with this evaluation. “Since we dumb, generous Americans—which is to say, non-liberal patriots—have permitted the Fabians, the neo-Fabians, the pragmatists, the revisionists, the behaviorists, and what-not-else to control most of the flow of governmental and privately generated funds into supporting the Anglophile liberals, and away from sustaining honest scholars and professionals, because financial houses linked to the City of London control most of our mass-circulation periodicals, the book-distribution business, the electronic media, and the promotional side of the ‘entertainment industry,’ we have fostered Anglophile treason to the point of dominance of our ‘liberal arts’-related life.”

America is not fundamentally an “Anglo country.” America is not even a country first. America is an Idea first, and a place second. Unlike Great Britain, which does not even have a written constitution, the United States is the product of the most intense deliberations conducted prior to forming a republic in human history. The five members of the committee that drafted the Declaration—Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Wilson and Robert Livingston—reviewed every known form of government that had preceded theirs. It took 13 years before that early effort resulted in the deliberations among the United States to adopt the Constitution, superseding the Article of Confederation. And the Federalist Papers, written by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison, serialized by Hamilton in what is today known as the New York Post, attest to the level of literacy that the American patriot faction demanded of the citizenry that was called upon to decide that Constitution.

This illustrates what must be corrected in the thinking of the Executive Branch, immediately, in this 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. That is the responsibility, and therefore the job, of not only all Americans, but all people of good will. There are two illustrations of how private citizens are seeking to assist in this correction.

Filmmaker Oliver Stone, who has played a central role in the release of the files in the Kennedy assassination for the past 35 years, has announced that he is going to attend the May 9th Russian commemoration of the end of the Second World War. "I’m going to Russia with a small group, including ex-CIA expert on Russia Ray McGovern, on May 9th to honor the 80th anniversary of their enormous sacrifice in defeating the forces of fascism in WWII. The world owes them a great debt, and distorting that history is probably the worst propaganda the United States and NATO have created in their hunger to destroy.

“I was a soldier once, let me remind you, who served my country honorably in one of its most useless wars and learned, from the suffering I saw, the meaning of peace…. China, Russia, and Iran … I keep repeating like a frustrated schoolmaster, are not our natural enemies. Reexamine your prejudices and deepen your history. I will always fight for peace and understanding until the day I die.”

The second instance was a chamber concert performance of the newly-arranged Antonin Dvořák choral setting of a new American National Anthem, composed to the poem “My Country ’Tis of Thee” together with Dvořák’s “American” string quintet composed in Spillville, Iowa in 1893. This was the work of the Schiller Institute, including the anthem’s four-part arrangement for voice by Fred Haight, as well as members of the Virginia and New York Schiller Institute choruses, and the Leesburg Chamber Players.

Czech composer Dvořák had been brought to the United States by musician and philanthropist Jeanette Thurber of New York for the purpose of establishing a National Conservatory of Music, a project that, while successful, was never supported by the United States Congress. Dvořák explicitly objected to the idea that an American national anthem would not be set to music composed for that purpose, rather than merely adapted from the British national anthem, “God Save The King.” The performance, which also featured the Mozart String Quintet in G-Minor, K. 516, was intended to place the audience in mind of the significance of the 250th birthday of America, the oldest and most successful federal republic in human history, and of the sacred duty to uphold its original mission.

Panel Two of the May 24-25 Schiller Institute Conference, “A Beautiful Vision for Humanity in Times of Great Turbulence!” to be addressed by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder and leader of the Schiller Institute, and author of the Ten Principles of a New International Security and Development Architecture, will discuss why poet Friedrich Schiller and his thinking provide the cultural standpoint from which a new “harmony of interests” of humanity can be forged in a time of greatest turbulence, if one starts from the premise that humanity is good.