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Feb. 14—The Biden Administration, with a very bad misjudgment of the real condition of Afghanistan after 20 years of NATO’s war there, made a rushed pull-out and then moved to seize all the country’s cash and punish its people with no food, medical care or shelter in the dead of winter. It never even told America’s NATO “allies” what it was doing. It’s leaving a country destroyed.Can the Biden White House now be allowed to make an even worse disaster in Europe—even a nuclear disaster—in a crisis, the “Ukraine crisis,” which could set off a war to destroy humanity itself? The more and more angry and aggressive bluffing of Russia by the Biden Administration over Ukraine has brought us closer to nuclear war than we have ever been since October 1962, when the whole world was terrified by the Cuban Missiles Crisis. One possibility is that Biden and his dubious national security team is looking for a victory to sell at home, by telling us Russia will invade Ukraine next week, tomorrow, any minute … and then when Russia does not invade, telling us Biden’s threat of crushing economic punishment stopped Putin. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said this was the “elaborate charade” yesterday on Twitter. Former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock put out the idea in a column today, writing for the American Committee for U.S.-Russia Accord. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in her own way, hinted at it Sunday on “ABC This Week”: “If we were not threatening the sanctions and the rest, it would guarantee that Putin would invade…. So, if Russia doesn’t invade, it’s not that he never intended to. It’s just that the sanctions worked.” But we cannot rest on hope that this is political fakery. The Biden White House is punishing Afghanistan incompetently, but with a vengeance. It wants to punish Russia and destroy its economy. Senior White House officials said it in a background press briefing Jan. 25: The goal is “hit Putin’s strategic ambitions to industrialize his economy quite hard…. Undercut Putin’s aspirations to exert influence on the world stage.” The officials vowed, “we’re talking about denying to Russia downstream products that are critical to its own ambitions to develop high-tech capabilities in aerospace and defense, lasers and sensors, maritime, AI, robotics, quantum, etc. … And so, as we build this effort with our allies and partners, we’re willing to work with any country in order to deny Russia an input that it needs to diversify its economy.” With that goal, Biden’s team—which had “everything under control” in Afghanistan—is daring Russian President Putin to go to war. It is squeezing Ukraine’s President Zelensky so hard that he feels compelled to contradict every Russian invasion forecast that London and Washington make. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, in her widely read analysis Feb. 6, said “We Are 100 Seconds to Midnight on the Doomsday Clock: We Need a New Security Architecture.” Two European bankers put out a call for France to block Ukraine’s entry to NATO and leave the NATO strategic command, now, anything to stop the march toward war. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz went to Ukraine today to say, “The issue of [Ukraine’s] membership in the alliance [NATO] is not on the agenda,” so Russia should stop worrying about it. But the NATO weaponry America is pouring into Ukraine and around it is unprecedented: Ukraine’s Defense Minister admits it now has far more anti-tank missiles than Russian tank targets. We all need to mobilize ourselves, not to “watch and wait,” as most were scared into doing in October 1962. There is no John F. Kennedy here to solve this. The solution is to compel more breaks toward negotiation, and to attack the cause, the threat of hyperinflationary collapse which the Biden Administration and Federal Reserve have done so much to bring on themselves and us. Our next D-Day is Saturday, Feb. 19, the Schiller Institute’s all-day conference with the message of Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s Feb. 6 article: We need a new security architecture, one based on economic recovery and development. Register for the conference and organize others.

With the sounding of a “Russian coup coming in Ukraine” siren by British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss on Jan. 22—to push the British demand to hit Russia now with the financial super-sanctions that were supposed to be threatened to deter war—it has become clear that there is no “unity of the NATO allies and partners” on dealing with Russia in the Ukraine missiles crisis.Rather, there is a British drive to force Russia to invade Ukraine or capitulate; a beleaguered but definite German opposition to the British war drive; a French President who wants to negotiate but is trying to look good and get re-elected; and a weak American President who would like to avoid war. If war, even world war, comes, it will be war imposed on the weakened American Presidency by the City of London and Britain. Not a second Crimean War, but a war for revenge against Russia and China for resisting and ruining the grand Glasgow global climate summit in November, leaving the British ministers who ran that summit in angry tears as it ended in failure. That included Prime Minister Boris Johnson, “BoJo” the nasty clown, who is discredited and inches from a no-confidence vote by his own Conservative Party MPs. “His resolve has hardened” against Russia, his spokesman announced on Jan. 22. The New York Times coverage of the new fake was headlined, “Britain Pursues More Muscular Role in Standoff with Russia on Ukraine,” although it’s always U.S. muscle Britain uses. Even the nervously hyper-aggressive U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken did not respond to the newest British war fable, beyond “We’re taking that seriously,” when it was thrown at him today by “Face the Nation’s” anchor Margaret Brennan, who raved as if she had taken some British meth with her coffee before the program. Against the London-Kiev demand that the supposed financial super-sanctions be imposed on Russia tomorrow, Blinken noted the obvious, “We’re using them as a deterrent. You would lose their deterrent effect.” He did not include the equally obvious, “and push Russia toward war”—the British intent. Blinken repeatedly stressed two points: “We have rallied allies and partners across Europe in a very intense way in recent days”; and “We are also responding to some of Russia’s concerns in further talks, and we expect them to respond to our concerns.” The Russian Embassy in London stressed today that the British were outside the process of negotiation with Russia: “The U.K. Foreign Office continues with a series of provocative statements on the situation around Ukraine…. These rallying cries come against the background of an obvious deterioration of British expertise on Russia and Ukraine. …The words by Foreign Secretary Elizabeth Truss about Ukraine having suffered from various invaders, ‘from the Mongols to the Tatars,’ is one example. Then came the ‘news’ of Russia intending to establish a puppet regime in Kiev led by a former Ukrainian MP—one that happens to be under Russian sanctions for being a threat to national security,” referring to Yevheniy Murayev. Germany does not want to allow the British war drive to succeed. Its Navy Chief Vice Adm. Kay-Achim Schönbach was forced to resign by media attacks, when he stated that what Putin “wants is respect. And my God, giving someone respect is low cost…. It is easy to give him the respect he really demands—and probably also deserves.” It is now widely reported that Chancellor Olaf Scholz was asked to Washington for consultations with President Biden and declined to go until some later time. Germany will not permit Baltic nations to which it has sold German weapons to pass them on to Ukraine, and the breakneck British shipments of lethal weaponry are having to be flown over Danish airspace because the U.K. does not dare ask Germany for flyover permission. The Biden Administration is about to respond in writing to Russian President Putin’s proposed agreements to keep NATO missiles and warfighting arrangements out of Ukraine and off Russia’s border—“and stating our concerns” about Russia, Blinken said today. The United States has decided it wants Russia to agree not to publish these responses, most likely because such publication will either infuriate the warmongers around BoJo’s government and inside the City of London, or cause more doubts in Germany, France, and perhaps other “allies and partners.” The most important question now is, what will American citizens do to direct their flailing government toward solving the most important problems facing humanity? That requires cooperation with at least Russia and China as a means to reverse the American industrial economy’s decline toward “green” suicide, and involve the United States in building new public health systems and infrastructure development programs around the world. London’s Malthusian policy of deindustrialization by war can’t be tolerated.

The pace of intensifying U.S.-Russia tension over Ukraine increased over this past weekend, so that what seemed within hope of stabilization two weeks ago when Presidents Biden and Putin video-conferenced, now looks more and more like a countdown toward war in Europe involving the nuclear superpowers.A senior White House official, quite possibly National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, told CNN on Dec. 19, Sunday, that there is only a “four-week window” to prevent Russia from invading Ukraine. “What we have been doing is very calculated,” the official said. “But we only have about a four-week window from now.” The official said U.S. planned sanctions “would be overwhelming, immediate and inflict significant costs on the Russian economy and their financial system.” The next day, Dec. 20, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov told journalists that the Biden Administration had not responded to President Putin’s on Dec. 15 proposed treaties on arms control, according to the EurAsian Times news site. They included the assurance that Ukraine would not join NATO and that further forward deployments of U.S. and NATO forces and missile systems toward Russia’s borders would stop. "‘No, they [the Americans] have not responded yet," said Ryabkov; “we are waiting, we will see what they answer. So far, we have seen only all sorts of public statements.” Among those public statements was a NATO general’s plan for U.S. troops’ forward deployment to Bulgaria and Romania, to NATO bases at the Black Sea. And both Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko and Arms Control Negotiator Konstantin Gavrilov ominously referred to “Russia’s military-technical and military means” as the only alternative to a negotiation on Russia’s treaty proposals. Ukraine’s own government continued, in the person of Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba talking to the Washington Post Dec. 19, to demand more “military means” and troops from the United States and the U.K., and to demand that the United States spell out publicly the “overwhelming and immediate” damage that the U.S. Treasury is preparing to do to the Russian economy and financial system, and do it with London whether the continental European allies agree or not. In October 1962 it was the U.S. southern border that was being approached, closely, by Soviet soldiers and missiles in Cuba, which threatened a devastating first strike. Today, it is the relentless march of NATO closer and closer to Russia’s borders. Sixty years ago President John F. Kennedy said, “Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island.” And, he said, that this, “in an area well-known to have a special and historical relationship to the U.S., is a deliberately provocative and unjustified change in the status quo which cannot be accepted by this country.” [emphasis added] Moreover, in 1962 U.S. military chiefs were demanding an invasion of Cuba to destroy missile and other forces, and President Kennedy was holding them back, with difficulty. Had Kennedy and Khrushchev not reached a negotiated resolution to the Cuban Missiles Crisis, what was likely to have happened? Hundreds of millions of people around the world were terrified of an imminent nuclear war. How were President Kennedy’s demands—that the Soviet Union remove, and never again try to place nuclear-capable missiles and aircraft virtually on the U.S. border, and “in an area [with] a special and historical relationship to the U.S.”—different from President Putin’s agreement proposed on Dec. 7 to President Biden, that the United States ensure that Ukraine would not join NATO and thereby have U.S. and NATO forces and missiles of various types placed right on Russia’s border? And “in an area with a special and historical relationship” to Russia, in fact for centuries part of it. Here is the difference: Kennedy and Khrushchev both wanted a solution, and not one in which the other President and nation were humiliated, or crushed by “overwhelming, immediate” national damage! That is what must be negotiated between Presidents Biden and Putin now, putting to the side the war-hawks—some of whom are clinically insane, to publicly propose a nuclear first strike on Russia as Sen. Roger Wicker did on Dec. 7. But it must and can happen if citizens now stand up to demand it, and remain optimistic that these two nations can block the ominous path of escalation and superpower war. Let them spend their efforts instead in providing food, healthcare and reconstruction to Afghanistan. Listen to Kenney’s Oct. 22, 1962 address here.

In the incoming German government there are two 'Green' Party ministers—Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock and Economics and Energy Minister Robert Habeck—who epitomize a grave threat also emanating from others in governments across the trans-Atlantic nations. With one hand they are anti-carbon climate extremists, who demand sacrifice of the economy—reliable power, heat, livestock growing, farming, industry and all—to "the planet"; with the other, they demand war preparations and diplomatic and military confrontations with Russia and China, two of the major nations that refuse to sacrifice their economies to "the planet." At a much higher level than these two new ministers, among the financial oligarchy whose centers are the City of London and Wall Street, there are the likes of British central banker and now UN envoy for Climate Action and Finance Mark Carney, who organizes bankers publicly to order companies—"Get out of fossil fuels and carbon or disappear." Carney's close "Green Deal" colleagues and friends are Prince Charles, Sir Michael Bloomberg and like billionaires, for whom President Joe Biden spoke at the "FLOP26" so-called climate summit in Glasgow, when he said that China's President Xi and Russia's Putin "would have to answer to the world for not showing up" at that summit. Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, along with the elites of the Atlantic Council, Chatham House/Royal Institute of International Affairs, focus their confrontations and provocations on the claim that Russia's about to invade Ukraine, and China is about to attack Taiwan. But the more and more obvious failure of the "Green New Deal" and the threat of energy hyperinflation and financial crisis, makes them take blaming adversaries for that failure to its extreme—which may bring on war. As former Army Colonel and former Virginia State Senator Richard Black warned yesterday, either of these confrontations could become nuclear war. Just at this crisis point, a Nov. 30-dated report from the New York Federal Reserve Bank began to acknowledge that the very strategy associated with banker Carney and Prince Charles—"shifting the trillions" of investment funds out of all carbon-related industries and into a green finance wave, or bubble—is hastening the global banking crisis they are afraid of. The report, "How Bad Are Weather Disasters for Banks?" found that these disasters are not bad for larger banks at all, to put it mildly. But more seriously for the Carney-Bloomberg "shift the trillions" cabal, the report concluded that "our findings suggest that potential transition risks from climate change warrant more attention than physical disaster risks." We emphasize "transition risks" because "the fundamental transition" has become the underhand for Green New Deal among Prince Charles/Carney forces. Here is Charles at Glasgow: "What is needed is a vast military-style campaign to marshal the strength of the global private sector. With trillions at its disposal ... it offers the only real prospect of achieving fundamental economic transition." Now the International Energy Agency, a creation of the Davos World Economic Forum, has upped its already economically absurd "forecast" of global additions to electric power capacity in the next five years, to say that 95% of it will be wind, solar and biomass electricity. Back in 2018 the London Guardian, writing about then- Bank of England Governor Carney, observed that "climate risk" for many companies was the risk that Carney's carbon-disclosure bank committees would go after those companies and force them to go green or face disinvestment or bankruptcy. Now, the New York Fed admits "banks could face outsized losses" from the "transition to a low-carbon economy"—in other words, from the Green New Deal. These findings are summed up in a Dec. 2 op-ed by Michael Shellenberger, "The Real Threat To Banks Isn't From Climate Change: It's From Bankers," featuring Mark Carney on its cover photo. That is exactly the direction from which a banking crisis and financial crash are now coming. For a decade, central banks have been printing money to inflate away the vast "everything bubble" of primarily corporate debt since the 2008 crash. It didn't work until the addition of the Green New Deal, the drive to "shift the trillions" to unreliable and anti-productive zero-carbon technologies, which are unleashing hyperinflation and chaos. So the financial elite and political leaders driven by them want to distract with anger, hatred, in some cases even hysteria against the adversaries, Russia and especially China, which continue to push for economic development in underdeveloped countries as well as at home, and which stiffen resistance in the developing world to "climate colonialism." Now, as Helga Zepp-LaRouche said today, we go to a Putin-Biden videoconference "summit" tomorrow midway between peace and war, "that gives you an idea how close we are actually to a brushfire which could go all the way up to nuclear war." Insisting on development in the countries which have suffered the worst crimes from the war party—she is focused on Afghanistan—is the way to fight that threat.

It is clear from the remarks of Prince Charles’s central banker Mark Carney, Sir Michael Bloomberg, and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink at the Glasgow “Suicide Summit” called COP26, that they have a) great financial momentum in organizing the worldwide 1% to cut off new fossil fuel investment, and b) a great problem—the “green finance” investments are failures.New, greenfield investment in fossil fuel energy for power and heat has essentially stopped worldwide, outside of two great Asian national powers. A horrifying 90% of all new electric power capacity additions in the world in 2020-21 were wind and solar power installations, according to the heavily biased International Energy Agency. But this worldwide anti-productivity energy transition, together with its inseparable companion, trillions in money-printing by major central banks, has unleashed disastrous power failures from Texas to Northern Europe to the Indian Subcontinent and even to China, and triggered waves of hyperinflation. Faced with this failure, the biggest honchos of the global Green New Deal promised a “war-like” mobilization, in Prince Charles’s words. This mobilization, he and Mark Carney made clear, is of the 1%—what they are pleased to call “the private sector” but is really the trans-Atlantic world’s biggest banks, money-managers, and billionaires—to cut off fossil fuel heat and power, nitrogen fertilizer, carbonized steel, cement and construction materials, and industrialization from the billions of the 99%, and greatly reduce their numbers. The director of the British government’s Green Finance Institute, Rhian-Mari Thomas, informed Bloomberg News Green, “This is the finance COP”; and the political leaders there are all imploring the “private sector”—i.e., London and Wall Street—to take over. Carney, in his presentation Nov. 3, said that $130 trillion in investment capital has been promised, under certain rules to ensure cut-off of new fossil fuel investments, including by 35 of the 50 biggest banks in the world. Carney signed the banks up to his and Sir Michael’s Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ). All the big City of London, Wall Street, and Frankfurt banks have joined GFANZ. Results? Sure. About 90% of all electric power additions in the world in 2020-21 have been wind parks and solar farms. Disasters, not profits, have followed. The Prince of Wales’s one-percenters have two problems. The first is that those 35 megabanks in GFANZ do not include any Asian giants, from China, Japan, India, or South Korea; nor, of course, any Russian financial institutions. Like their governments, these banks refuse to commit to Carney. China, in an extraordinary blast in the Global Times CCP paper today, accused Indian leader Narendra Modi of betraying the poor of India by making any kind of zero-carbon pledges at Glasgow. That made it crystal clear where China stands: Economic development and fighting poverty, not “climate,” come first. And secondly, the new “green finance” investments look good only on glossy paper. Already on Nov. 2 at Glasgow, Fink said that “deploying that capital is going to be far harder than securing the commitments. On Nov. 3, Carney acknowledged it:”There needs to be some—only some, limited—financing for a transition," Carney said—meaning a transition by energy companies from fossil fuels to so-called renewable power sources, battery storage schemes, green farming schemes, etc. “And there have been problems with the transition.” And again today, when Carney claimed in his speech that the pot behind him had $130 trillion in it: “The money is here—but that money needs net zero-aligned projects.” Carney told Bloomberg News in a Nov. 1 interview that the banks in GFANZ want “a wholesale rewiring of the global financial system so that every financial decision takes climate into account.” Dreams of Schachtian control as in the Nazi economy of the 1930s. That takes the power of central bankers. And Carney has that, in the Network of Central Banks and Supervisors for Greening the Financial System. What he doesn’t have, is new technologies for “green finance” that are productive, energy-dense, reliable, and which alert populations will tolerate. And he doesn’t have real banks! Instead he has immense “zombie banks” which are loaded by their central banks with trillions in deposits, speculate with half of them, and don’t lend the other half. The best way to make the wheels fall entirely off Prince Charles’s and Mark Carney’s $130 trillion green finance mobilization to try to hurry us to our deaths, is to break up those banks with Glass-Steagall Acts in every major nation.

The statement of Sept. 5 by Schiller Institute Chairwoman Helga Zepp-LaRouche, “Can ‘The West’ Learn? What Afghanistan Needs Now!” has gotten wide circulation and support. It lays out that the United States, having withdrawn its troops from Afghanistan at last, has the opportunity and the responsibility to cooperate in rebuilding its crushed economy. This is how to really end perpetual wars: The United States, China, and Russia cooperate in bringing economic development, along with other nations in Asia.But a terrible decision made by U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Aug. 15, and not reversed since, tries to make Afghanistan a basket case instead, a failed state, by seizing all its national financial assets. For the past six weeks Yellen’s Treasury has been holding colonial dominion over Afghanistan like a British colonial currency board administrator in Africa, Asia or South America. This is preventing Afghanistan’s few financial resources from being used in developing the nation in cooperation with its Central Asian neighbors. According to Ajmal Ahmady, the Ghani government’s head of Afghanistan’s central bank (the Da Afghanistan Bank, DAB) at the time the Taliban took over Kabul, Afghanistan had approximately $7 billion in assets at the New York Federal Reserve Bank. These consisted of $3.1 billion in U.S. bills and bonds, $2.4 billion in World Bank Reserve assets, $1.2 billion in gold, and $300 million in cash. Afghanistan also had $1.5 billion in other assets, according to Ahmady’s tweet on Aug. 21, held in “other international accounts” (apparently private banks in New York and London). Ahmady also said that Afghanistan was “reliant on obtaining physical shipments of cash every few weeks” from the New York Fed, in order to have any currency in the country for the population to use. So New York banks led by the Fed also had complete colonial financial control of “our” government in Afghanistan, before the Taliban takeover. No surprise, then, when NATO forces withdrew, that Afghans showed they did think of it as their government, and abandoned it. But Yellen’s brutal decision made the country’s subjection even worse—freezing the funds. Already on Aug. 17 it was reported in the Washington Post that on Aug. 15, as the Taliban forces approached Kabul, “The Biden Administration froze Afghan government reserves held in U.S. bank accounts…. The decision was made by Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen and officials in the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control…. An administration official said in a statement, ‘Any Central Bank assets the Afghan government have in the United States will not be made available to the Taliban.’” However: These were not assets of the Taliban; they are assets of the nation of Afghanistan. And the assets of this nation were held in banks in New York, with the U.S. government having unilateral authority for disposition of them. That is colonialism; it is wrong; Americans should not tolerate it. The same thing is true of the oil revenues of Iraq up to this time; they are deposited in the New York Federal Reserve Bank until used. Where NATO could not win or end its wars, the Treasury is trying to exercise colonial domination by financial seizure. Afghanistan’s neighbors agree: Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi told the press he would say, at the UN General Assembly: “I think freezing the assets is not helping the situation. I would strongly urge the powers that be that they should revisit that policy and think of an unfreeze.” Reuters headlined Sept. 17, “Unfreeze Afghan Assets Abroad, Neighbor Uzbekistan Says.” Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev said at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization heads of state/government summit on Sept. 17: “Considering the humanitarian situation, we propose looking into the possibility of lifting the freeze on Afghanistan’s accounts in foreign banks.” The Biden Administration must give up colonialism and join in economic development. Janet Yellen must abandon her usurped power as a colonial administrator. Both the assets of the Afghan nation, and the oil revenues of the Iraqi nation, must be ceded back to those sovereign nations. President Franklin Roosevelt already made this commitment to the then-colonies of the European empires, in the Atlantic Charter and the UN Charter. And it is the “American System” method to follow through with high-technology industrial development.

The unhinged explosion recorded in the Sunday Times of London by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair against U.S. President Joe Biden, over American forces’ withdrawal from 20 years’ war in Afghanistan, has underlined just what an opportunity Afghanistan represents, to replace poisonous British geopolitics with economic development and peace. Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche emphasizes that we owe this to humanity, which needs the development cooperation of major powers which could be launched in and around Afghanistan. That country stands in economic relation to its region and to South Asia, as America’s Deep South did to the United States as a whole before Franklin Roosevelt’s Tennessee Valley Authority transformed it.But Blair’s outburst reminds us, we owe it as well to America’s history of struggle against the British Empire and its centuries of exploitation of nations as its colonies and Commonwealth “partners.” Tony Blair began America’s era of endless “regime change” wars with his 1999 speech to the Chicago Council of World Affairs. He declared the Treaty of Westphalia principle dead, and demanded a new era of NATO war against developing nations for the “right to protect” (as in the “protection” the mafia once offered on the streets of Chicago and many other cities). Blair’s foreign intelligence service MI6 hoked up the dodgy dossiers of phony “intelligence” which launched George W. Bush’s Iraq War, as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had “stiffened the spine” of Bush’s father for his Desert Storm. London needs American NATO muscle to run the world financially from London, frequent economic crashes and all. Geopolitics, the doctrine that one country’s or alliances interests are always pursued by screwing others, is British doctrine. And so Blair bellowed to the Times about America’s “imbecilic political slogan about ending ‘the forever wars,’” which he feared would relegate “Global Britain” to “the second division.” His tuneless shrieking was accompanied by a chorus of other British notables, named and unnamed by the newspaper. We have just passed the 50th anniversary of Aug. 15, 1971, when the U.K. government, the Bank of England and the City of London banks forced a fatal decision by Richard Nixon which shaped all of economic and human history for the worse since then. That was the ending of the dollar’s link to its gold reserve basis. It was the replacement of Franklin Roosevelt’s Bretton Woods monetary system with floating-exchange-rate system which set off a half-century of more and more unhindered pure speculation, more and more frequent financial crashes of debt bubbles fostered by central banks. Working people around the world earn 12% less of economic output as a result; but London has re-emerged as the world’s financial center. The end of Bretton Woods produced “Britain’s Second Empire” as proven in the documentary of that name. On that 50th anniversary we celebrated the contributions of the late statesman Lyndon LaRouche with an international conference. He was the only economist in the world who both forecast, in the 1960s, the British-engineered breakup of Bretton Woods, and stood against it when it happened, forecasting eventual economic depression collapse and pandemics as its result. But we also intend to reverse it, bringing about the launch of a New Bretton Woods credit system geared to capital goods exports from the major technological powers to the underdeveloped nations, for the great projects of economic development which are the precondition for peace. Afghanistan’s Ambassador to China Javid Ahmad Qaem told Global Times July 16 “The only place where they could really cooperate, and at least there could be a starting point to cooperate between these rivals, if I can call them that, is Afghanistan,”—referring to China, the United States and India, but could have included Russia. If this opportunity for development and peace is taken, that New Bretton Woods credit system is in sight.

Contrary to President Joe Biden’s self-justification today—“Our mission has never been nation-building” in Afghanistan—there is no conceivable reason for the military and military engineering forces of a major nation to stay in an underdeveloped country for such a long period of time unless they are on a mission to help build that nation, help it industrialize with the infrastructure for sustained economic development. What did the United States military forces under General MacArthur do for a decade and a half in Japan after World War II, if not to at least assist in relaunching the modern industrialization of that country after the disaster of war? What about assistance in South Korea’s building itself as an industrial power after war?Those times are long past when the United States was almost unique in being capable of providing such assistance. Now it must be done in cooperation with the other major economic and technological powers; and an Eurasian effort is already underway, China’s Belt and Road Initiative with projects in scores of countries. And the United States, until now, clearly has not been in Afghanistan to help build up a nation. The U.S. withdrawal is not the defeat of a campaign “for democracy,” which the NATO occupation never was. No, it is an opportunity which must be taken, with whatever government has popular backing, to foster the building of power, modern healthcare, water systems, transportation corridors—“TVA”-type development—in a country whose collapsed economy holds back the connectivity and development of an entire region. The Schiller Institute, led by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, organized a day-long conference just two weeks ago on exactly this subject, “Afghanistan: A Turning Point in History after the Failed Regime-Change Era,” with panels of real experts and representatives of other Asian nations who knew the country. The best of it was previewed in a special offprint report from Executive Intelligence Review, “Will Afghanistan Trigger a Paradigm Change?” The Schiller Institute will now be bringing many of the same experts and representatives back together to update their discussion of economic development in light of the new circumstances. One of them, Hussein Askary, today said on his Twitter feed, “It is fully possible to reach peace and stability in Afghanistan by integrating it into the Belt and Road Initiative. The regional and global context today is different from 1994” when the Taliban had previously taken power. This is already very much the approach that China and the Central Asian nations around Afghanistan are taking, and the approach Russia will take. The British may wax hysterical, as some of their Tory Parliament leaders did today, about sending Her Majesty’s very colonialist forces back into Afghanistan on their own to put things back in order! The British UN Ambassador may lament, as he did in today’s UN Security Council special session, that “what is happening in Afghanistan is a tragedy.” Shaken European ambassadors from the Irish to the Dane may have echoed him, but they are all clinging, sadly, to the beaten remains of a geopolitical policy of British origin which has been a disaster to the United States and the world. It is a good thing that the policy of regime-change wars is ending. It is that policy only which has failed, and it was never in the interest of the United States. As Helga Zepp-LaRouche stressed today, what is in American interest is to “join hands and go for reconstruction.” The NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan is a situation full of opportunity to do just that. The Schiller Institute’s July 31 conference on peace through development in the Central Asian region is now the vehicle for a drive to organize that development through joint offers by nations capable of exporting high-technology capital goods and substituting Afghanistan’s opium traffic. And the Institute will now update that vehicle for the greater opportunity which now exists.

The Schiller Institute is preparing a conference at the end of this month with experts who are passionate about Afghanistan’s prospects of becoming, not only a rapidly developing nation, but the pivot of economic development in South Asia, and even the catalyst in a change of relations among the major powers. Our conference will be aimed as a spark, with many nations already meeting in the Central Asian region to discuss next steps after the NATO withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan.The Schiller Institute’s meeting will be held at a true turning point of 21st Century history: The major powers and the regional neighbor countries alike need to eliminate terrorist threats and remove the scourge of Afghan heroin fed by decades of war; and this opens the possibility of development of healthcare and education, transport routes and power and water, with international cooperation in contributing capital goods. As Afghanistan’s ambassador to China, Javid Ahmad Qaem, expressed it in an interview with Global Times July 16, “The only place where they [China, India and the United States] could really cooperate, and at least there could be a starting point to cooperate between these rivals, if I can call them that, is Afghanistan.” The people of the United States and the European NATO members need this development more than Afghanistan does. As NATO forces have done to Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya since the 1990s, so have we, in America and Europe, done to ourselves. Our industrial economies and our labor forces have been left to crumble and become impoverished while we trusted the endlessly deployed fighters and their spectacularly expensive equipment to make us “number one” in the world. We admired Wall Street speculating on decaying economic infrastructure until it has fallen apart. Only six months ago the United States electric grid could not keep scores of Americans from dying of cold in long blackouts, while millions of others huddled in misery during a freezing Polar Vortex. This past week Germany’s and Belgium’s flood control infrastructure was washed away in floods which have killed hundreds despite nearly a week of precise warning. America has done nothing for 25 years to counteract a steadily intensifying drought which is threatening to turn the West back into uninhabited desert. “Climate change” hysteria is not a policy to save the planet, but a threat to reduce the human race and push it back centuries in productive capacity. Between now and the meeting on Afghanistan’s development, the Schiller Institute on July 24 holds a combative conference with scientists, engineers and others to defeat the Green New Deal, stop power blackouts and prevent the wholesale shutdown of power supplies and industry. (“There Is No ‘Climate Emergency’—Apply the Science and Economics of Development To Stop Blackouts and Death”) The withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan is no setback if it is taken as an opportunity to make the contributions American technology can make to the progress of developing countries. Instead of tolerating think-tanks’ and Defense Secretaries’ talk about “winning” endless and fruitless wars, we can devote ourselves to the arts of peace against pandemic and famine, and rebuild our own economies into the bargain.