The following is an edited transcription of an interview with Prof. Li Xing, PhD, conducted on Jan. 26 by Michelle Rasmussen, Vice President of the Schiller Institute in Denmark. Dr. Li is a professor of Development and International Relations at the Department of Politics and Society, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Aalborg University. Li Xing was born in Jiaxing, China, near Shanghai. He earned his BA at the Guangzhou Institute of Foreign Languages. He came to Denmark from Beijing in 1988 for his MA and later completed his PhD studies at Aalborg University. Read the full transcript below. Michelle Rasmussen: Welcome, Professor Li Xing, thank you so much for allowing me to interview you. Prof. Li Xing: Thank you too. Michelle Rasmussen: Li Xing, as we speak, there is an overhanging threat of war between the United States and NATO against Russia and China, countries which the war faction in the West sees as a threat to the disintegrating, unipolar Anglo-American world dominance. On the other hand, the Schiller Institute has led an international campaign to try to get the U.S. and Europe to cooperate with Russia and China to solve the great crises in the world, especially the pandemic, the financial and economic crises, the underdevelopment of the poor countries, and the cultural crisis in the West. Our international president, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, has stated that the U.S.-China relationship will be the most important relationship in the future. You recently gave a lecture at the Danish Institute for International Studies about the U.S.-China rivalry. And you are a contributor to the book The Telegram: A China Agenda for President Biden by Sarwar Kashmiri, which was published in 2021 by the Foreign Policy Association in New York City. The book is composed of statements by the contributors of what each would say if they were granted a personal meeting with President Biden. What would your advice be to President Biden regarding China? Advice to President BidenProf. Li Xing: Thank you for giving me this chance for this interview. If I had the chance to meet the President, I would say to him: Hello, President Biden. I think that it is a pity that you didn’t change Trump’s China policy, especially regarding the trade war and the tariff. We can see from the current situation that in the U.S., the shortages issue, the inflation issue, these are all connected with tariff issue. Many congressmen and senators are calling for the removal of the tariffs. So, I really think that the president should give second thoughts to continuing the trade war. Contrary to this, though, the data from 2020 and 2021 shows that the China-U.S. trade actually surged almost 30%, compared with early years. So, the trade war didn’t work. The second issue is the competition in the area of high technology areas, especially regarding the chip industry. I’d say to him: Mr. President, the U.S. has the upper hand in that technology, and China has the largest market. I think that if the U.S. continues to use a technology sanction on Chinese chips, then the whole country and the whole nation will increase the investment on the chips. Once China has the technology, then the U.S. would both lose the market, and also lose technology. So, this is the second issue, I think the president should give a thought to. The third issue, which I think is a very touchy issue, is the Taiwan issue. I would really advise the President: Mr. President, to play the Taiwan card needs caution, because Taiwan is the center of Chinese politics, in its historical memory, and the most important national project in the unification process. So, to play the Taiwan card really needs caution. But still, I would also say to the President: Mr. President, China and the U.S. have a lot of areas for cooperation. For example, climate change; for example, North Korea, Iran, Afghanistan; and last but not least, because China has great technology and skill in terms of infrastructure, so you, Mr. President, should invite China to come to the U.S. and play a role in the U.S. infrastructure construction projects. That would be an ideal situation to promote bilateral relations. Attitude of the U.S. Toward ChinaMichelle Rasmussen: In your statement in the book, The Telegram, you address whether the United States should consider China as an enemy or as rival. What would you say to the American people about the attitude that the United States should have towards China? Prof. Li Xing: I don’t think that the U.S. should regard China as an enemy, but as a rival. I think there is a truth in that because China is obviously a rival to the United States on many, many grounds, both in materials and also in ideation. Nevertheless, it is not an enemy. China and the U.S. have so many areas of cooperation as you point out, that this bilateral relationship is the most important bilateral relationship in the world. Were this relationship turned into an enemy relationship, it would be a disaster for the world. Michelle Rasmussen: On January 17, Chinese President Xi Jinping addressed the World Economic Forum in Davos. What do you think is most important for people in the West to understand about his speech? Prof. Li Xing: Xi Jinping was invited to the World Economic Forum, and he sent some messages. In his address he admitted that economic globalization has created problems, but that this should not constitute a justification to write off everything regarding globalization, regarding international cooperation. So, he suggested that the world should adapt and guide globalization. He also rejected the protectionist forces on the rise in the West, saying that history has proved time and time again that confrontation does not solve problems; it only invites catastrophic consequences. President Xi also particularly mentioned protectionism, unilateralism, indirectly referring to the U.S., emphasizing that this phenomenon will only hurt the interest of others as well as itself, meaning that the U.S. trade war, or sanctions against China, will hurt both. It’s not a win-win, it’s a lose-lose. President Xi delivered a message that rejects a “zero sum” approach. I think it was a very constructive message from President Xi Jinping. He totally rejects, if I interpret his address correctly, the Cold War mentality. He doesn’t want to see a Cold War mentality emerge in either the U.S., or in China. The Belt and Road ConceptMichelle Rasmussen: Let’s move on now to the question of the Belt and Road Initiative. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Schiller Institute has worked to establish a new Silk Road, the World Land-Bridge, and many of these economic principles have been coming to life through China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Li Xing, in 2019 you wrote a book, Mapping China’s One Belt One Road Initiative, and have lectured on this. How has the Belt and Road Initiative created economic development in the underdeveloped countries? Prof. Li Xing: First of all, I think that we need to understand the Belt and Road concept—the historicity behind the Belt and Road; that the Belt and Road is not an international aid program. We have to keep that in mind. It is an infrastructure project attempting to link Eurasia. It has two routes. One is a land route, consisting of six corridors. Then, it has another route called the Maritime Silk Road. Globally, about 138 countries, ranging from Italy to Saudi Arabia to Cambodia, have signed a Memorandum of Understanding with China. Just recently another country in in Latin America signed up with the Belt and Road. The idea of the Belt and Road is founded on two basic Chinese economic strengths. One is surplus capital. China has a huge amount of surplus capital in its banks, which it can use for investments. The second is that after 40 years of infrastructure development in China, China has huge technology and skill, particularly in the infrastructure development area. So, the Belt and Road is basically an infrastructure development project. The driving force of China’s Belt and Road is that after 40 years of economic development, China is experiencing a similar situation experienced by the advanced countries in world economic history—for example, rising wages, overproduction, overcapacity, and a lot of surplus capital. So, China is looking for what the Marxist analytical lens calls a ”spatial fix,” as in its domestic market, the mass production manufacturing is getting extremely large. In looking beyond Chinese territory at Chinese neighbors, China has discovered that all the countries around China are actually very, very far behind in infrastructure development. So, it’s kind of a win-win situation. The idea behind the Belt and Road is a kind of a win-win situation. Historically, the Post World War II Marshall Plan in Europe, and the military aid to East Asia, were, you could say, like Belt and Road projects, helping those countries to enhance economic development. I recently came across a World Bank study pointing out that if the Belt and Road projects were successfully implemented, the real income level throughout the entire region would rise between two or four times. At the global level, the real income can rise between 0.7 -2.9%. So, you can say, the international financial institutions, and economic institutions like World Bank, are also very positive toward the Belt and Road. However, the Belt and Road also has four areas which we need to be concerned about. Number one: the debt trap, which has been discussed quite a lot at the global level. Number two: transparency, whether the Belt and Road projects in different countries are transparent. This, too, is an issue for debate. Number three: corruption, whether Chinese investments in countries creates corruption by local officials. The number four area for concern is the environmental and social cost. So, these definitely need to be taken care of, both by China and those countries. As a whole, I think the Belt and Road project is huge. It’s very constructive. But we also need to consider its potential to create bad effects. We need to tackle all these effects collectively. ‘Debt Trap’ DiplomacyMichelle Rasmussen: When you spoke just now about a debt trap, our correspondent Hussein Askary, who covers the Muslim world, and also developments in Africa, has argued against the idea that China is creating a debt trap, pointing out that many of the countries owe much more money to Western powers, than they do to China, and that China has done things like forgiving debt, or transferring physical assets to those governments, because the debt trap accusation has been used as the primary argument against the Belt and Road. Do you do you think that this is legitimate argument or that this is overplayed to try to just create suspicion about the Belt and Road? Prof. Li Xing: No, I fully agree, actually, with the comment you just quoted from another study. It is true that the “debt trap” has been used by Western media, or those politicians who are against the Belt and Road, as an excuse, as a kind of a dark picture. But, according to my research, China actually understands this problem, and very often, the Chinese government uses different measures, or different policies, to tackle this problem. One is to write off the debt entirely, when the borrowing country would really suffer, if it had to repay. For example, the Chinese government announced that during the pandemic, debt service payments from some poor countries is suspended until their economic situation improves. China is a central-government-based country. State policy plays a bigger role than in the political system of the West, where different interest groups drive their countries’ policies into different directions. Therefore, the Chinese central government is able to play a bigger role than Western governments in tackling debt problems. Michelle Rasmussen: What has this meant for the underdeveloped countries, for example, in Africa, and other poor countries in Asia, in Ibero-America? What has the Belt and Road Initiative meant for their economic development? Prof. Li Xing: The increasing number of countries that have signed up with the Belt and Road, shows that the Belt Road project is comparatively quite welcomed. I have also followed many debates in Africa, where many African leaders were asked the question and they completely agree. They say that the situation regarding the debt of the old time, their experiences with the colonial countries, is quite different from the debt incurred with China’s investment projects or development projects. So, they still have confidence in China’s foreign development policies, especially in the Belt and Road project. From the many studies and reports I have read so far; they have strong confidence in that. Infrastructure Means DevelopmentMichelle Rasmussen: What would you say about the role of infrastructure development in China in creating this unprecedented economic growth and lifting people out of poverty? What role has infrastructure played in the incredible poverty elimination policy that China actually succeeded in achieving this year? Prof. Li Xing: The entire 40-year history of China’s economic growth and economic development, and China’s prosperity, is based on the lesson that infrastructure is one of the most important factors leading to China’s economic success. China has a slogan: “If you want to get rich, build a road.” Infrastructure is connected with every aspect of national economy. The raw materials industry, the metal industry, you name it. Cement industry, etc. Infrastructure is really the center of a nation’s economy, which can really get different areas of the country running. So, I think this experience of China is really a good lesson, not only for China itself, but also for the rest of the world, especially for developing countries. That’s why China’s Belt and Road project, identified as infrastructure projects, is really welcomed by many people, and especially President Biden. Even though his budget was not passed, because of the resistance, or even if it’s shrunken, the idea about improving U.S. infrastructure, became a kind of hot spot. I think that the U.S. needs to increase its infrastructure investment as well. Definitely. Europe-China RelationsMichelle Rasmussen: Let’s move on to Europe and China relations. You have edited the book China-U.S. Relations at a Crossroads: “Systemic Rivalry” or “Strategic Partnership.” What is your evaluation and recommendation about European-Chinese relations? When we spoke earlier, you had a comment about how the impact of African development, if there would be development or not in Africa, would impact Europe. Could you also include your idea about that? Prof. Li Xing: EU-China relations are increasingly complex, and affected by a number of interrelated factors, such as China’s rise, the growing China-U.S. rivalry, U.S. global withdrawal, especially under the Trump administration, the trans-Atlantic split, the Brexit, and at the same time, the China-Russia comprehensive alliance. Under these broad transformations of the global order, EU-China relations are also getting very complex. Right now, I feel that the EU and China are struggling to find a dynamic and durable mode of engagement, to achieve a balance between opportunities on the one side, and challenges on the other, and also between partnership and rivalry. For instance, China and the EU successfully reached what is called the EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment treaty in December 2020. It was a joyful moment. However, in 2021, due to the Hong Kong events, the Xinjiang issue, and mutual sanctions in 2021, this investment treaty was suspended. Not abandoned but suspended. You can see that the relationship can be hurt by events. It’s really difficult to find a balance between strategic partnership and systemic rivalry. “Systemic rivalry” was the official term used in a European Commission document, “EU-China—A Strategic Outlook,” issued March 12, 2019. That document states that China is “simultaneously … an economic competitor in the pursuit of technological leadership. and a systemic rival promoting alternative models of governance.” So, you can see that a systemic rival means alternative normative values. That’s why it’s a new term, when used in that way. It shows that China’s development has both a material impact, and, also, an ideational impact—that many countries are becoming attracted by the Chinese success. For that reason, the Chinese, and the rise of China is increasingly regarded as a systemic rival. On the other hand, the message from my book is also that the EU must, one way or another, become autonomous, and design an independent China policy. Sometimes I feel that the EU-China policy is somehow pushed around or carried by U.S. global interests, or affected by the U.S.-China competition. I really think Europe needs an independent China policy. You know, the EU is thinking of developing “defence independence.” That is, it is pursuing autonomy in defense. But that’s something else. According to data from Kishore Mahbubani, a very well-known Singaporean public intellectual and professor, the Belt and Road has special meaning for Europe in relation to Africa. This is of importance to your question about Africa. According to his data on the demographic explosion in Africa, Africa’s population in the 1950s was half of that of Europe. Today, Africa’s population is 2.5 times that of Europe. By 2100, Africa’s population will be 10 times of that of Europe. So, if Africa still suffers from underdevelopment, if any crisis appears, where will African refugees migrate? Europe! From Kishore’s point of view, the Belt and Road is doing Europe a “favor,” so Europe should be very supportive of China’s Belt and Road project. I totally agree with that. What he says is also a part of the message of my book. A ‘Differentiated’ EuropeMichelle Rasmussen: You were speaking about Europe becoming more autonomous in its relations with China. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel has stated openly that Germany should not be forced to choose between the United States and China, that Germany needs to have relations with both. Can you say more about that? Is China Europe’s biggest trading partner? Prof. Li Xing: Yes, since November last year. Michelle Rasmussen: There’s differentiation inside Europe. For example, the Eastern European countries have a forum called “16+1,” where 16 Eastern European countries, plus China, have a more developed Belt and Road cooperation with China, than the Western countries. And there’s differentiation in the western European countries. You mentioned that some are making Hong Kong and Xinjiang into obstacles to improving European relations to China. What would you say to these concerns? Prof. Li Xing: China-EU relations are being affected by many, many factors. One is, as you mentioned, about 16+1, but now it’s 17+1, because, I think two years ago, Greece became a part of 16+1, so now it’s 17+1. And the western part of the EU, was quite worried about the 17+1 because some think that the Belt and Road plays a role in dividing Europe. Because Europe has this common policy, common strategy, and common action toward the Belt and Road, they also see the 17+1 grouping as somehow playing a divisive role. So, the EU is not very happy about that. Because you’re right, the Belt and Road is more developed in the eastern part of the EU. This is one issue. The second issue is that the EU has to make a balance between China on the one side, and the U.S. on the other. Right now, my assessment is that the EU is somehow being pushed to choose the U.S. side. It’s fine with me, from my analytical point of view, that the EU, most of the countries in the West, the traditional U.S. allies—like including Denmark—if they choose the U.S., that’s fine. But my position is that their choosing sides should be based on their own analysis, their own national interests, not purely on the so-called values and norms, that the U.S. and EU share norms, and therefore should have a natural alliance. I think that is not correct. I always advise Western politicians, thinktanks, and policy makers that they should study China-U.S. relations or EU-China-U.S. relations and try to find their own foreign policies. What is the correct direction? And based on their own judgment, based on their own research results, not based on what the U.S. wants them to do. Michelle Rasmussen: One of Denmark’s top former diplomats, Friis Arne Petersen, has been Denmark’s ambassador to the United States, to China, and to Germany. At the Danish Institute for International Studies, he recently called for Europe to join the Belt and Road Initiative. Why do you think it would be in the interest of Europe and the United States to join or cooperate with the Belt and Road Initiative, instead of treating it as a geopolitical threat? Prof. Li Xing: Well, on the Belt and Road, as we have already discussed, we must first understand what it is. I fully agree with Friis Arne Petersen. When he was Ambassador to Beijing, I met him at one of the international conferences. He was always very positive towards Denmark-China cooperation. I fully agree with his point on the Belt and Road. But we have to understand, first of all, why the West is nervous about the Belt and Road. This is very important, because the European’s or the American’s worry is based on two perspectives. One is geopolitics. The second is norm diffusion. Geopolitics means that through the Belt and Road, China’s economic political influence will gradually expand to cover all of Eurasia, which is not in the interest of the West. This is a geopolitical rationale. Then the second perspective is norm diffusion, which means that through the Belt and Road, the Chinese development model spreads. As I mentioned before, because of the global attraction to China, the Chinese development model will be consolidated and extended through the Belt and Road, and that is also not in the interest of the West. That’s why China is a “systemic rival,” because it has a norm diffusion effect. We have to understand these two aspects. But why should Europe support the Belt and Road? I have already discussed this issue in my answer to your previous question regarding the importance of infrastructure development, and regarding why Europe should support the Belt and Road, especially in the context of Africa. Michelle Rasmussen: And you also spoke about the need for infrastructure development in the United States. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the United States a grade point average of C- for the state of its infrastructure. Looking at high speed rail in China and in the United States, there’s nothing to compare. Prof. Li Xing: No, no. Michelle Rasmussen: In its 14th Five-Year Plan, China has committed itself to increase its high-speed rail lines by one third, from the present 38,000 kilometers to 50,000 kilometers by 2025. The U.S. has maybe a hundred and fifty kilometers. Prof. Li Xing: I was told by American friends that the U.S. has not invested heavily in infrastructure for many, many decades, about half century, something like that. I was shocked to hear that. So, I think Biden’s idea of infrastructure investment is great, but somehow the bill could not be agreed on by the Congress, and also the Senate, due to partisan conflict. Michelle Rasmussen: And it was not very ambitious in any case. Prof. Li Xing: Yes, totally. Reordering the World OrderMichelle Rasmussen: It was a step in the right direction, but was not very ambitious. Let’s move on to Latin America, which we in the Schiller Institute call Ibero-America. That’s because our members say that the Spanish language did not proceed from Latin. The Iberian Peninsula is Portugal and Spain, so Ibero-America is a better term. In any case, Li Xing, you are working on a study, China-U.S. Rivalry and Regional Reordering in Latin America. Can you please share the main idea with us? Prof. Li Xing: Yes. I’m working on this book, together with a group of Latin American scholars from different countries in the region. The objective of the book is to provide a good conceptualization, first, of the changing world order, and the reordering process. When we talk about that the world order is changing because of the US-China rivalry, at the same time, we also suggest that the world is experiencing a reordering process, that we do not know the future order, or the new order, but the world is in the process of reordering, driven by the China-U.S. rivalry. The book will also try to convey that the U.S.-China rivalry, according to our conceptualization, is “intra-core. According to the world system theory, you have a core which is the advanced economy countries, then you have a semi-periphery, and then you have a periphery. The semi-periphery is between periphery and the core, and the periphery is the vast number of developing countries. So the China-U.S. rivalry, competition, especially in high technologies in the security areas, is between these two core countries, or is intra-core. The China-U.S. rivalry also represents a struggle between two types of capitalism. On the one side is Chinese state capitalism, very centralized, state led, with central planning. On the other side is the U.S. free market, individual capitalist economy. Somehow the China model is gradually appearing to be more competitive. Of course, the U.S. doesn’t agree with that assessment, at least from the current perspectives. So, this rivalry must have a great impact on the whole world, especially on the developing world we call the Global South. Here we’ve tried to focus on the U.S.-China rivalry, and its impact on the Latin American and Caribbean region. The message of the book is, first, that global redistribution of power is inevitable. It’s still in process, and the emerging world order is likely to be dominated by more than one superpower, so the world order will likely look like a polycentric world, with a number of centripetals competing for high positions or strong positions. This is the first message. The second message is that the situation shows that the world is in a reordering process driven by the competition between the two superpowers, and it poses opportunities, and also constraints, to different regions, especially for the Global South, such as Latin America, because Latin America is the U.S. backyard; it is the subject of American doctrines—that North America and South America, are a sphere of U.S. influence. The Monroe DoctrineMichelle Rasmussen: You’re talking about the Monroe Doctrine? Prof. Li Xing: The Monroe Doctrine. Thank you very much. North America and South America have to be within the U.S. hegemonic influence. No external power is allowed to have a hand in, or interference in these two regions. You can say that China’s relations with Latin America has really been increasing tremendously during the past two decades. At the same time, the U.S. was busy with its anti-terrorism wars, and its creation of color revolutions in other parts of the world. If you look at the investment in infrastructure, and also imports of agriculture, China-Latin American trade and Chinese investment in Latin America are increasing tremendously, dramatically, which becomes a worry, a really deep worry, to the U.S. The different scholars, the book’s chapter authors, will use different countries and country cases as examples to provide empirical evidence to our “theoretical conceptualization.” This book will be published around summertime by Brill, a very good publisher in Holland. Michelle Rasmussen: Well, actually, the Monroe Doctrine was adopted in 1823, in the very early history of United States. This is after the United States had become a republic and had freed itself from the British Empire. It was actually John Quincy Adams— Prof. Li Xing: Exactly. Michelle Rasmussen:—who was actually involved in the idea, which was that the United States would not allow imperialism, imperial powers to bring their great power games into Latin and South America, but that the United States would help those countries become independent republics. So the question becomes, will Chinese policy strengthen the ability of the Ibero-American countries to be republics and enjoy economic development, or is China’s intention also a kind of imperialism? Prof. Li Xing: Based on your definitions, on your conceptualization of the Monroe Doctrine, you can say that there are two implications. One is that the U.S. should defend these two regions from imperialist intervention. The U.S. itself was not an imperial power at that time. The U.S. didn’t have intentions to become a global interventionist then, but today it is a different situation. Second, that the U.S. definitely interprets Chinese investment and infrastructure cooperation, and economic investment in Latin America as “helping,” to consolidate the country’s independence? No, I don’t think that is the case. That would be a kind of positive-sum game. Today, unluckily, these two countries are trapped into a zero-sum game. Whatever China is doing in the South American region, is interpreted as not being good for United States. That’s a very unfortunate situation. Michelle Rasmussen: Actually, we in the Schiller Institute have said that if the United States were to join with China to have even better economic development in Ibero-America; that would be a win-win policy. You spoke about the immigration challenge from Africa to Europe. It’s the same thing from Ibero-America to the United States. People would much rather stay in their own countries if there were jobs, if there were economic development, Prof. Li Xing: Yes. Michelle Rasmussen: And if the United States would join with China, then instead of— Prof. Li Xing: —building the wall! Instead of building the wall! Michelle Rasmussen: Exactly, exactly. Prof. Li Xing: Yeah, I agree with you. Operation Ibn SinaMichelle Rasmussen: Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the President of the Schiller Institute, has stated that one very important way to lessen the war danger between the United States, Russia and China would be for these countries to join forces to save the people of Afghanistan, where there is the worst humanitarian crisis in the world now, after the war, the drought, and the freezing of Afghanistan’s central bank assets by the western countries. She has proposed what she calls Operation Ibn Sina, named after the great physician and philosopher from that region, to build a modern health system in Afghanistan to save the people from disease, and as a lever to stimulate economic development. I know that when we spoke about Afghanistan before, you also referred to very important discussions now going on in Oslo, for the first time, between the Taliban and Western governments, including in the United States. But what do you think about this idea of China and the United States, and also Russia and other countries, joining hands to act to alleviate the terrible crisis for the people of Afghanistan? Prof. Li Xing: It’s a superb idea. This is one of the initiatives by the Schiller Institute. When I read your website, you have many development projects, and this one is a great idea. This is one of the areas I mentioned where the U.S. and China have a common interest. Unfortunately, what is happening today is the Ukraine crisis and the China-U.S. rivalry—so many battle fronts—puts Afghanistan more into the background. Right now, the Taliban delegation is talking with the West in Oslo, and I really hope there will be a constructive result, because after the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan, Afghanistan’s Taliban government immediately went to China. And it was a Chinese interest. It was in China’s fundamental interest to help Afghanistan, because if Afghanistan is safe and prosperous, then there will be no terror and terrorism coming from Afghanistan across the border. Many of the terrorists in Xinjiang actually based themselves in Afghanistan. So it is in China’s national interest to help Afghanistan. Right now, I don’t know whether it is still in the U.S. interest to help Afghanistan. The U.S. might be tired of that region, because the U.S. lost two trillion dollars in the Afghanistan war, without any positive results. So, I do not know. I cannot tell the what the U.S. politicians’ feelings are, but the U.S. holds $9.5 billion of Afghanistan assets. And I think that money has to be released to help in the country’s rebuilding. And particularly, the Shiller Institute’s suggestion of a health care system is the priority. When people are in a good health, then people can work, and earn money. When people have a job or have a family, normally, people do not move. According to refugee studies, people normally do not move just because of a shortage. People move because of a situation devastated by war, by climate change, by various crises. Otherwise, people are relatively stable and want to stay in their homeland. XinjiangMichelle Rasmussen: You mentioned Xinjiang again now. Do you have something to say about Xinjiang for people in the West? Prof. Li Xing: I think that there are a lot of misunderstandings between the West and China, especially the misunderstanding from the Western side concerning Xinjiang. The other day, I saw a debate at Oxford University between an American former politician and a British former politician, about whether China is a friend or a foe. The American representative put forward the claim that in Xinjiang, we are experiencing what is called genocide. But later, at the end of his discussion, he admitted that there is no genocide, but he deliberately used genocide as a kind of provocation in order to receive attention from the world. The British representative asked if this view caused such a bad misunderstanding, misperception, then why not just give it up? Do not use genocide. You can criticize China for human rights abuses. You can criticize China for its minority policies, etc. But to deliberately defame China is not a good way. I don’t think it’s a good way. We also have to be fair. On the one side, you can criticize China’s policy treating problems in the minorities and others. But you have to also condemn terrorist actions because there were a lot of terrorist bomb killings in that region, especially from 2012-2015, around that time. In the beginning of the 2010s. I was in Xinjiang as a tourist in 2011, and I was advised to not pass by some streets, because there could be some risks. You can see that it was a very tense situation because of a lot of bombings. People pointed out to me, here were some bombings, there was some bombings. You don’t understand. So, the West should be fair and condemn these things, while at same time, also advising the Chinese government to develop a more constructive policy to resolve the problem, rather than using harsh policies. It has to be fair. This is the first point. Second, is that genocide not only defames China, it’s also contrary, it’s opposite to the facts. Twenty years ago, 30 years ago, Xinjiang’s Uighur population was about five million or eight million. But after 30 years, I think it’s about 11-13 million. I do not know exactly, but there has been a growth of population. How can you claim genocide, when the local population is increasing? Do you understand my point? So, this is not a good attitude. It is not a very good way to discuss with China and it makes China much more resistant in talking with you, when China is fears that it is being defamed. When some Western sources, in particular one German scholar, use a lot of data from a Turkish scholar, who is connected to the “minority resistance” from Xinjiang, then the credibility, reliability of the source is in question. You understand my point. So, the Xinjiang issue is a rather complicated, but the West and China should have a dialogue, rather than use in this specific discourse rhetoric to frame China in a way that China is the bad guy. It should be condemned. I think this is not constructive. The SWIFT SystemMichelle Rasmussen: Going back to the war danger, what do you think the impact on China and on the world economy would be, were the U.S. to force Russia out of the SWIFT international payment system, or similar draconian measures? Prof. Li Xing: Let me tell you that Olaf Scholz, the current German Chancellor, already expressed it very well, saying that if Russia were sanctioned and pushed out of the SWIFT payment system, then Europe could not pay Russia for its gas and oil. “If we can’t pay Russia, then Russia will not supply us. Then what should we do?” I read in the news today that the U.S. said, “We could supply most of Russia’s oil and gas.” Then Europe began to ponder: “Well then, this war has become your war, you know—a very egoistical interest, because you actually want to replace Russia’s gas and oil supply. That’s why you want to instigate the war.” So, I think it’s the U.S. that has to be very cautious in its sanctions, because the only sanctions possibilities for the United States today against major powers is financial, is payment—it’s the U.S. dollar. That’s the intermediate currency, the SWIFT system. And when China sees this, that only strengthened China’s conclusion to develop what we call electronic currency. China is using a lot of energy today investing in electronic currency. This electronic currency is a real currency. It’s just electronic. It’s being implemented in some big cities in test trials. Then, back to the SWIFT system, [if a country were thrown out] it would be rather impossible or would rather create a lot of problems in the international payment system, then the whole system will more or less collapse, because most countries watch this, and they will try to think about how they should react in the future if the U.S. uses the same system of sanctions against them. I just mentioned China, but also many other countries as well. They have to find an alternate. One other alternative is to use currencies other than the U.S. dollar as much as possible. I just read in the news today that the Chinese yuan has surpassed the Japanese yen as the fourth international [reserve] currency. And the situation will accelerate in that direction. So, I think that the U.S. should think twice. On China-Russia relations, I definitely think that China will help Russia in case the U.S. really implements a sanction of pushing Russia out of the SWIFT payment system. China definitely will help Russia, because both face the same pressure, the same struggle, the same robbery from the U.S. So, it is very bad. It is extremely bad strategy from the U.S. side to fight, simultaneously, on two fronts with two superpowers. This is what Henry Kissinger had said many times during the entire Cold War period. The U.S. was able to keep relatively stable relations between U.S. and China and between U.S. and the Soviet Union, keeping the Russia and China fighting against each other. But now it’s the opposite situation. The U.S. is fighting with two big powers simultaneously. I don’t know what is in the mind of the U.S. politicians. I really think that the U.S. needs to redesign its strategic foreign policy. The Schiller InstituteMichelle Rasmussen: Yeah. We’ve been speaking mostly about the U.S., but the British really are an instigator in this: the British Old Empire policy of trying to drive a wedge between the United States, Russia and China. That also has a lot to do with the current situation. We spoke before about that the Schiller Institute is trying to get the United States’ population to understand that the whole basis for the existence of the United States was the fight against the British Empire, and against this divide and conquer strategy, and, rather, to cooperate with Russia and China. In conclusion, this conversation has been very wonderful. Do you have any parting words for our audience? We have many people in Europe and in the United States. Do you have any parting words of advice as to how we should look at China and what needs to be different about our policy? Prof. Li Xing: No, I think that I want my last words, actually, to be invested in talking about the Schiller Institute. I think that some of your programs, some of your projects, and some of your applications are really interesting. The Schiller Institute has a lot of ideas. For example, you just mentioned your campaign for an Afghanistan health care system, but not only in Afghanistan. You promote these ideas for Africa, in developing countries. I really think that the Schiller Institute should continue to promote some of the ideas—a health care system in a country, especially now, considering the pandemic. The rich countries, including China, are able to produce vaccines, but not the developing countries. The U.S. has more vaccine doses stored up than necessary [for itself]. But Africa still has only very low percentage of people [who have been vaccinated]. Michelle Rasmussen: I think 8%. Prof. Li Xing: And we claim the Omicron variant of the coronavirus came from Africa. That’s an irony. That’s an irony, because it’s definite that one day, another variation will come from Latin America, or from some other part of the world. So, it’s rather important for the West, and for China, to think about some of the positive suggestions by your Institute. I’m glad that you invited me for this interview, and I expect to have more cooperation with you. Thank you very much. Michelle Rasmussen: Thank you so much, Li Xing.
Read the full transcript below. Mike Billington: This is Mike Billington with the Executive Intelligence Review and the Schiller Institute and The LaRouche Organization. I'm here speaking with Jim Jatras. Jim served in the State Department in Mexico and in Russian affairs. He also served for many years as an adviser to the Republicans in the Senate. He worked in the private sector, and he's established himself as a leading analyst on political issues internationally. Would you like to say anything else about your career, Jim? Jim Jatras: No, I don't think so, except to say that the extent to which somebody can be in the belly of the Beast for 30 years and come out relatively sane, I hope so. I guess we'll let the viewers decide that. Mike Billington: You presented a speech to a student seminar at the Ron Paul Institute last September titled "It's Later Than You Think." What did you mean by that? Jim Jatras: Well, we tend to think of political and economic. Developments in a kind of an isolation -- what are good policies, what are bad policies, what are constructive, what is destructive -- rather than looking at the underlying health of society itself and macro historical trends that make such policy choices viable or not. My concern was, and is, that we are approaching some kind of a crunch, some kind of a major crisis, not only in America but globally, that not only could totally remake what it means to be an American, but maybe means the end of the American nation and the republic itself. I would even go as far as to say, I don't think the American Republic, as we've known it, really exists anymore. I'd like to ask the question of people: how many republics have there been in France? Well, this is the Fifth Republic. Yet the French nation still exists. So many Americans are so wedded to the notion of our constitution, our political structures, that they lose sight of the fact that that's all they are -- they're just structures. Those structures are going through the biggest crisis, certainly since the Great Depression and possibly since the Civil War. And we don't really know what's going to come out on the other side of it. I think the problems America faces today are not going to get solved by an election or a political party or a political movement -- we're going to have to go through a great destructive ordeal of some sort. And we cannot really envision what comes out on the other side. Mike Billington: The talks this week between Russia and the United States, while not an absolute failure, were described by Russia as having failed to budge an inch for the West, having failed to budge an inch on the fundamental issues of guarantees for Russian security. Nonetheless, several leading Russian experts, including Gilbert Doctorow and Dmitri Trenin, have described the talks as a victory for Russia by forcing the U.S. to admit that they could not conduct a war with a nuclear armed Russia over Ukraine. You have headed an organization called the American Institute in Ukraine and have insight into this. What's your view of this week's diplomatic efforts? Jim Jatras: I'm basically in agreement with the analysts you cited, I think sometimes there's too much of a focus on, you might say, the CNN headline -- which is: “Will Russia invade Ukraine?” -- when that is not really what this is about. In fact, it's not even primarily about Ukraine, in the sense that it's really about NATO expansion and the United States and our satellites. Let's not even call them allies, they are satellites, basically on Russia's doorstep, its front porch, its back porch and everywhere else, threatening its vital security interests. And the Russians have basically signaled that they've had enough. As President Putin said, "We have no place left to retreat to." So I think they're coming back to say, "All right, we're giving you one last chance to address our security concerns seriously, to provide us with guarantees." I don't know what those guarantees would look like, by the way, since the West can never be trusted to keep its word. But, but nonetheless, I think they're making one last chance to say, "Will you take our serious concerns seriously? Here are two draft treaties. Do we have a deal or not?" And I think the West is coming back and saying, "No, we don't have a deal." Jim Jatras: We can delay Ukraine's accession to NATO for about 10 years. Maybe we can have some more confidence building measures in Europe, things of that sort. I don't think that's going to wash with the Russians. As you mentioned, Gil Doctorow, as he's pointed out, he thinks that the Russians are ready to act in some decisive and dramatic way, stationing advanced hypersonic weapons close to the United States that would give them the same flight time to our major cities as we are posing a threat to Russian cities. Jim Jatras: Maybe some kind of surgical strikes within Ukraine against hostile forces that would force NATO to wake up and smell the coffee and say, "We have to accommodate these concerns or else the pain level is going to keep getting ratcheted up." NATO is no longer the master of all it sees in Europe, as we were, say, in the 1990s, and the Russians are in a position to act. They're acting unilaterally, and there's really not much we can do about it unless we want to start a major war. Unfortunately, what I'm seeing from most of the establishment -- there was an absurd discussion at the Atlantic Council, (which, just saying Atlantic Council almost tells you how absurd it was going to be), where the most reasonable person on the call, if you can believe it, was Evelyn Farkas --who had this horrible piece in Defense One basically talking about how we need to fight a war with the Russians in Ukraine. But she was the only one that took that seriously. The rest of them were all saying, "No, no, the Russians are just bluffing. We just need to crank up the weaponry going into Ukraine and crank up the sanctions threats and the Russians will back down." That's what I think is the dominant view within the establishment. Mike Billington: This brings up the issue of some of the mad men who openly propose a nuclear war. The head of the U.S. Strategic Command, Admiral Richard, said earlier last year that because of the rise of Russia and China, nuclear war, which we used to consider unlikely, is now likely, which is literally madness. And of course, you had Senator Roger Wicker directly calling for a first strike nuclear attack on Russia. Do you think these people have the power to influence decision making on the questions of war? Jim Jatras: I think they can influence it. Even I don't believe that there are people who are crazy enough to actually deliberately push the button and say, let's have a nuclear war. Maybe there are. They've got to be out there somewhere. But the bigger concern I have is that we are in a very dangerous period, especially since I think the Russians will do something fairly dramatic before the end of the month, my guess is. Then you always have the risk of unintended escalation, that if you have -- as we've been having increasingly for the last few years -- if you have American and Russian planes playing chicken over the Black Sea or the Baltic Sea or with boats, something unintended could happen, leads to an escalation, and then we don't really know what happens after that. So the risk is there. The question is, can we find some way to come to an understanding of security in Eastern Europe, which basically means getting out of Russia's face, or can we not? I find it very hard to believe this establishment can accommodate them. So that risk will be there. Mike Billington: The Obama administration and the Trump administration and the Biden administration have all referred to the violent overthrow of the elected government in Ukraine in 2014 as a "democratic revolution." You know the situation well. What can you say about that coup and its aftermath today? Jim Jatras: Let's remember what triggered it. You hear, again, misreported in the Western media that it's because Yanukovych was Moscow's stooge and he refused to to proceed with a deal with the European Union. All Yanukovych did --first off, he wanted his country to be non-aligned, not either part of a Western bloc or part of a Russian led bloc. He very much wanted to be a neutral country, which many people, by the way, are even proposing now as a solution to the problem. Well, that solution has never been acceptable to the West. We want Ukraine in our camp, by hook or by crook, despite the fact that Ukraine is a very, very divided country. If you look at the electoral map, you look at the linguistic maps, the only way to hold Ukraine together is by having it straddle both sides of the East-West divide. Anybody with any sense knows that, but that's not good enough with Victoria Nuland and people like that. You have this almost Bolshevik mentality which says, "The people of Ukraine have chosen their historical path." No, they haven't. The people of Ukraine are certainly as divided as the people in the United States are. They haven't made a choice of any historical direction at all. It was, as you say, a coup, and it was clearly planned for many years in advance. Jim Jatras: A lot of money being poured in there by the National Endowment for Democracy and other Soros organizations and other outside groups, to prepare for a color revolution, the overthrow the Yanukovych government, similar to what we saw recently in Belarus and very recently in Kazakhstan, an attempt to do that as well. These things don't just come out of thin air, whatever the local roots of those might happen to be. Yanukovych (unlike President Tokayev in Kazakhstan recently) President Yanukovych dithered. He couldn't make up his mind whether to accommodate the demands or to try to defend himself and to crush what was an insurrection -- a real one, not a fake one like we talk about a year ago here in this country. He ended up paying for it by being driven out of office. At that point, we had this triumphalism coming from the West. “Ukraine is ours! Ukraine is coming to the West! Ukraine is coming to Europe! NATO,” blah blah blah. Well, the Russians felt they had some cards they could play in the Donbass and supporting the local people there who, remember, were the people who voted Yanukovych in in the first place. They saw their vote taken away by a violent mob in the streets of Kiev, and they were not willing to accept it. And they were certainly the people in Crimea were not willing to accept it, and the Russians took steps to secure their interests and the interests of those people in Ukraine. Jim Jatras: We saw, as you know, the Minsk agreement by which Kiev was given an opportunity to repair some of this damage by saying, "OK, fine, let's have a federalization of Ukraine. Let's give self-rule to these areas and eastern Ukraine. Let's not repress the Russian language. Let's try to put Humpty Dumpty back together by accommodating the diversity of Ukraine." And of course, they and their Western sponsors had no intention of ever doing that, despite Kiev's legal commitment to the Minsk agreement. So that's where we are now. In the meantime, the West has proceeded with NATO expansion. Right after Trump was elected they swept Montenegro into NATO, even though the polls showed that, at best, there was an even split within the population about whether they should join NATO. I actually think the majority was opposed to that. They just swept in North Macedonia -- a ridiculous name for a ridiculous excuse for a country. Why are we doing all of this stuff? It has nothing to do with American security, certainly, but it does have to do with tightening a stranglehold around Russia, which has been the purpose of NATO ever since, supposedly, the Cold War ended in 1991. Mike Billington: What do you think of the relations between forces within the U.S. and Europe with the overtly neo-Nazi groupings within Ukraine. Even Israel has complained bitterly that Ukraine is allowing these neo-Nazi organizations to parade with swastikas and with pictures of Stepan Bandera and so forth. What's behind these institutions and how much influence do they have over actual policy? Jim Jatras: It's hard to say, Mike, because we know that especially in the Republican Party -- not exclusively -- some of this kind of World War Two Losers Association stuff, went all the way back to the 1950s, really, even in the late 1940s, where the CIA and MI6 and other -- you may be familiar with something called the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations. This is something that was around largely led by West Ukrainian pro-Nazi elements that went all the way back to the late 1940s and was originally created by British intelligence and then was adopted by the Americans as well. But there were many groups like that. Now, some of them may have been simply people who were nationalists of various sorts and thought that their countries had gotten a raw deal on the territorial arrangements in Europe in both World Wars, and others, I think, were very ideologically committed to something along the lines of fascism or Nazism. And we do see some elements like that in Ukraine. Jim Jatras: I would draw a parallel to the way the United States, especially the intelligence agencies, have used jihadists of various sorts as proxies in various wars, going all the way back to Afghanistan in the nineteen eighties. We used them in Bosnia, we used them in Kosovo, we use them in Libya. We are still using them today in Syria. There is, I think, a very cynical attitude of the intelligence agencies toward extremist groups, whether they're neo-Nazis or whether they're jihadists. They say, "Yeah, these people are operational, we can use them with a degree of plausible deniability. If they get into trouble, too bad for them. ‘The secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions.’ But they can get the job done because they're ruthless." So I think the degree of cynicism about groups like this is really hard for most Americans to believe, that their government would engage in. Mike Billington: The coup in Ukraine also included an effort to separate the Ukraine Orthodox Church from the Russian Orthodox Church as part of this anti-Russian hysteria. You are a member of the Greek Orthodox Church and you're active in issues regarding Orthodox Christianity. What can you tell us about what was going on in Ukraine and where that stands today? Jim Jatras: Well, a lot of this is "inside baseball" in the Orthodox Church. I'm of Greek origin personally. The parish I attend most of the time is a Russian parish although it's mostly full of just regular Americans. They are some Greeks, some Russians, some Serbs, Romanians and so forth, but it's mostly just Americans. We're still one Church at this point. We like to say the devil can never subvert our Church because he can't figure out the organization chart. We have this feud going on between Constantinople and Moscow over Ukraine and what really was the status of Ukraine in the 17th century and all this sort of thing. But I think we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that, again, just as I was mentioning with regard to jihadist and neo-Nazi groups, for outside meddlers, religion is simply another lever that they can use to try to manipulate society and to try to even break down society. For example, we're talking about specifically the Orthodox Church: back in 1948, there was essentially a coup in Constantinople (Istanbul) that removed the patriarch then, Maximos, who was considered to be too friendly toward the Russian Church -- which, let's be honest, at the time was under the control of the Soviet authorities -- and replace him with the archbishop here in America Athenagoras, who was actually flown over there on Truman's plane and installed by the U.S. government, the Greek government and the Turkish government acting in concert and has been an asset of the United States, the State Department and the CIA, ever since 1948. Of course, this is also consistent with Constantinople's kind of "neo-papal" aspirations within the Orthodox Church, which is itself a-historical. At the same time, you've got Russia, which -- again in a very peculiar structure among the local Orthodox churches -- is itself a majority of the entire Orthodox Church, a good chunk of that being in Ukraine. Now in Ukraine, the Orthodox Church is called the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. It is an autonomous part of the Russian Orthodox Church, it is self ruling in virtually all aspects. That church is the canonical Church in Ukraine. Its status has not changed. What has happened is, with U.S. support, Constantinople has tried to create a rival Orthodox church in Ukraine from a group of, actually several groups of, schismatics that they tried to cobble together into a new church. That's where we stand right now. We have two competing Orthodox churches in Ukraine. The canonical one aligned with Moscow, which is very much the majority, and a much smaller one supported by the United States and Constantinople, which is not acceptable to most of the rest of the world, in Romania and Jerusalem and Serbia and Bulgaria and the other places of the Orthodox Church. Again, I know this is very complex inside baseball, but what it shows is frankly a degree of sophistication, and again, cynicism of the Western powers that they're willing to manipulate this in order to make some kind of a political game. Because I think the way they see it is, just as the Maidan in 2014 was a political coup to try to separate Russia from Ukraine, this is, if you will, a spiritual coup to try to accomplish the same thing, to take two very closely kindred people in language, culture and especially religion, and set them at odds against each other. It's not working, it's not successful, but it is creating a lot of discord, a lot of unhappiness and hurt, and even to some extent, violence. Mike Billington: Georgia is yet another country where the NED, Soros apparatus ran a color revolution in 2003, the so-called Rose Revolution, which saw the mobs connected to Mikhail Saakashvili, overthrow the government of Eduard Shevardnadze, who himself had been the Soviet Union's foreign minister before becoming president of Georgia, a position that he kept after the falling apart of the Soviet Union and Georgia became independent. Then in 2019, you've pointed out that there was a second color revolution -- you could call it a "rainbow revolution" -- which was unleashed by the Soros organization, and some people in the U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi, demanding support for an LGBTQ parade, a Pride parade, against the strong opposition of the 80% of Georgia's population who are Orthodox Christians. Where did this lead and what is the status of that at this point? Jim Jatras: I think to a large part is simply the application on the local level of what is a huge, huge part of Western policy, which is the promoting of -- I'm trying to think of a … -- socially and morally destructive forces the equal of LGBT. As I like to say, there's no trans-Atlanticism without transgenderism. This is a huge part of American and Western democracy promotion and human rights promotion. There's a great meme out there of an American soldier with an automatic weapon and a flag and a skull mask saying, "Until I'm out of ammo or out of blood, I will fight for homosexuality in Botswana." This is one of the great causes for which Americans are willing to shed blood and treasure? Evidently so. And I think part of it has to do with the fact that if you look at maps of social attitudes like, for example, towards same sex marriage or toward the role of religion and public life and things like that, you will notice a rather odd thing -- that is, that Eastern Europe, the areas that were under communism, are much more conservative than the countries of Western Europe. Maybe it was because as a progressive Promethean force, communism was such a failure that the underlying social attitudes are actually much more pre-modern conservative when it comes to social and family values and religious values than Western Europe, and presumably the United States, that have been corrupted by decades of consumerism and all these other materialist forces. Jim Jatras: So I think that the Western policymakers instinctively understand that if we want to conquer these societies, we need to break down their social attitudes. And one way to do that is to tell them, "Hey, if you want to be part of the West, you want to be part of the EU and NATO, you want to be part of the democratic club? It's a full package. You have to take this as well.” I think that's what they were doing there in Georgia, but they also do that in Ukraine. I even remember there was one of the priests from the church in Odessa, after they had a big Pride parade there, he went out afterwards with holy water to re-sanctify the streets after the parade had passed through. People there don't like this sort of thing, but nonetheless, the Americans and the U.S. embassies with their rainbow flags and all that, they're all over it. They're being forced to do this because, well, "this is democracy. This is the West. You have to get used to it." Mike Billington: I'm reminded that Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov once said regarding the so-called "Western values" that you hear spoken of so often, that the West insists on defending, are not the values of their grandfathers. Jim Jatras: No, they're not. And by the way, I can remember back in the 1990s, when I was at the Senate, there was a big issue about giving observer status to some big coalition of LGBT organizations, which included groups like NAMBLA, the North American Man Boy Love Association, which is a pro pedophile group. This was a very controversial thing at the U.N. This was under the Clinton administration. North America, the U.S., Canada and all of Western Europe were really promoting this, and the countries in Eastern Europe -- this was the 1990s -- newly liberated from communism were saying, "What is going on here? We have to accept {this?}." I mean, the communists there, they never would have accepted anything like that. So you really had this kind of weird thing, where these Western countries, the paragons of democracy, are promoting this kind of depravity. Latin America was opposed to it. The Islamic world was opposed to it. The Far East, I think, was mostly puzzled by it, by "what kind of people are these?" And then you had Eastern Europe who was sort of on the fence, because they knew they should be integrating in with the democratic West, but at the same time they couldn't figure out why in the world we would be pushing something like this. Mike Billington: You've noted often that the leaders in both parties -- you've named in particular, John McCain, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton -- have never seen a war they didn't like. Biden's push for the war started by George W. Bush and Tony Blair in Iraq, is well known, that he promoted that strongly. But less well known is that Biden led the effort to launch a war on Serbia in 1999, which led to 78 days of bombing without U.N. authorization, laying waste to much of that country. Biden also backed the al-Qaida-linked Kosovo Liberation Army in that conflict and the independence of Kosovo. So you were involved in some of this, if you could explain that? Jim Jatras: At the time I was the analyst at the Republican Policy Committee in the Senate, and the Clinton administration had decided on -- "intervention" is a nice word -- I would say in "aggression" in the Balkans, not only in Bosnia, but also in Kosovo. I tried, to whatever extent I could, to inform Republican Senators and their staff, which it was my job to do, as to what was the reality behind some of the claims of the Clinton administration, That was a little difficult to do when the leader of the Republican Party in the Senate at that time was Bob Dole, who was on the same program as Biden and the Clinton administration were. But I did my best to try to say, "Look, here are the open sources. Here's what they're saying. Here's the various Al Qaida and other groups that are involved here in terms of the human rights and other claims. Here's what's really going on. Yeah, we've unleashed a brutal inter-communal war between Serbs and Muslims and Croats and Albanians. Rather than trying to find some way for a peaceful resolution, we're trying to aggravate it, in a conflict that was kind of a rock-paper-scissors thing. Well, "the Serbs are always the bad guys. Let's just start with that and work from there." And by the way, some of this goes back to what we were talking about earlier, as I mentioned, the World War Two Losers Association. If you look at a map of occupied Europe in the Balkans in 1943, and compare it to the way we carved up Yugoslavia, the two maps look awfully similar. We essentially adopted all of the Axis clients from during the war and said, "Oh, these are now democratic NATO clients." So, you know, again, the roots of these things tend to go back a long way. In any case, obviously I was unsuccessful in trying to enlighten people about what was going on, although I will say that when the vote on the Kosovo war occurred in Congress, the Republicans voted primarily against it. Maybe a lot of it was just partisan because it was the Clinton administration, a Democratic administration. But even with Bob Dole in the Senate and Henry Hyde, at the time the Republican leader in the House, whipping votes in favor of the war, the Republicans in the Senate voted, I think very heavily in the majority against the war, and in the House, not only a very heavy majority of Republicans vote no, they even voted down the war resolution. It failed on a tie vote in the House of Representatives. Jim Jatras: Nonetheless, Clinton proceeded with the war, which tells you something about the integrity of our constitutional process, when a war can take place not only against international law, in violation of the U.N. Charter, aggression against another country, but even against American domestic law. When the Congress says "no, you do not have the authority to go to war," and they said, "Yeah, well, I'm going to do it anyway." And so there are many things that are all wrapped up in these things. The long and the short of it is that it is amazing to me how many people, even who are essentially anti-war and against these wars -- You remember there was a great series by Oliver Stone about the history of American wars and aggression around the world. I notice he skipped over the Balkans. He sort of forgot that war. These are the wars everybody wants to not really pay attention to because they sort of went down in the history as the place where NATO, the West, you know, came as the cavalry with the rescue. We were there for mom and apple pie and human rights and democracy. Well, it really wasn't that way. But nonetheless, that then set the stage and the precedent for places like Iraq and Libya. Mike Billington: On Kosovo. Secretary Tony Blinken and other U.S. officials have insisted that under the so-called rule of law -- which means their own made up rules, nations cannot change the borders of other nations by force. Maria Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, responded to that statement by saying, "Do we get it right? That Washington no longer supports Kosovo's sovereignty?" You were directly involved in much of this. What is Zakharova referring to? Jim Jatras: Let's remember, under U.N. resolution 1244, which ended the war in Kosovo, Kosovo was supposed to remain part of Serbia, and there were supposed to be negotiations about its status with the fullest possible autonomy, which is what Belgrade was offering. They were willing to jump through any hoop requested of them in terms of whatever autonomy could ever exist anywhere on Earth, for any part of any country, they were willing to offer that to Kosovo. But the Western powers, especially Washington, had decided {ab initio}: "No, no. The only possible solution is independence." Well, the U.N. resolution doesn't say that. At that time -- I was in the private sector -- I was involved in lobbying on behalf of the Bishop of Kosovo, Bishop Artemije, against the American policy of pushing for independence for Kosovo. I would say we met with some success. That was supposed to be resolved by the end of 2006. It wasn't. It was dragged out until the beginning of 2008, when I think the Western powers thought they were losing support, so they needed to push the button they needed to move quickly on unilaterally recognizing Kosovo as an independent state, even though there was no legal mandate for that at all. And certainly there was no negotiated solution to that effect. I think that's one reason why we have a stalemate now where you have about one hundred and ten countries at last count that recognized Kosovo, but a lot of those are micro states, that if you look at the vast majority of the world's population, India, China and so forth, not to mention Russia, even still today, five members of the European Union -- Greece, Cyprus, Romania, Spain and Slovakia -- have not recognized Kosovo's independence. So it's not an acceptable solution for anybody, but that's where we are right now. Jim Jatras: I think the point that Zakharova is referring to is, you say you can't change borders by force. Well, what do you think the West did in 1999 in the war and then 2008 in recognizing Kosovo's independence? We did precisely that without any legal authority at all. We detached part of a state, or at least claimed to, and say this is now a new country. Well, OK, you know, some things, once you break them, stay broken. Once you have a principle like the inviolability of borders, and say, "Oh, well, we can break them when we want, but you can't." Well, the other side says, "Oh no? Watch." And then, if you want, might makes right. If you want the law of the jungle, if you want to say that the U.N. guarantees of the inviolability of borders and state sovereignty no longer matter, OK, they don't matter anymore, I guess. Well, who asked for that? Mike Billington: On China's role in all of this, the Belt and Road Initiative, which is taking the the economic miracle within China over these past decades through massive infrastructure, lifting the productive platform of the nation as a whole, they are taking that to the rest of the world. they are also very active in Eastern Europe in huge amounts of trade through the thousands of trains that now traverse the new Silk Road routes from China to Europe, and also through investments in infrastructure across the region, especially in Eastern Europe. How do you see the difference between China's approach to international relations to that of the United States? Jim Jatras: This is something we've discussed before, especially with regard to some of the ideas that Mr. LaRouche was championing for many decades. It really comes down to construction versus destruction. Are you going to build? Are you're going to integrate -- a rising tide raises all boats? Or are you going to try to look at the other people trying to do that and say, "Let's beggar thy neighbor, let's try to throw roadblocks into that. Let's try to break it down." We've talked about in the past. For example, why don't we have a land bridge across the Bering Strait, with trade between Eurasia and North America? Why are we not building our own Belt and Road Initiative here in the Western Hemisphere? Why are we not trying to come up with a way that countries can act in a cooperative way to build up their economies and to maximize their mutual advantages in the way that I think the Chinese and the Russians and the other countries behind Eurasian integration are doing that. Our response is what? To try to give the Chinese the hotfoot in Xinjiang, to try to give the Russians a hot foot in Kazakhstan with a coup there, rather than trying to find a way to build up the world economy, build up standards of living. We're trying to find a way to play "dog in the manger" by trying to retard those efforts if it's being done by somebody else, while we neglect to do it ourselves. We're not doing any of these things. I think we have -- unfortunately, put it in a nutshell -- that is the distinction between construction and destruction, and it's a really sad thing. But that gets back to what we're saying about the nature of our ruling class and the duopoly in this country. They seem to see eye to eye on these things, about preserving American hegemony, primarily based on military power {ad infinitum} and using whatever dirty tricks in the book they can, to try to preserve that and to keep the other guys down. Mike Billington: President Trump insisted -- one of the reasons he got elected -- that he was going to rebuild the American industrial economy, and Wall Street basically said, "Forget it. We have to bail out the bankrupt financial institutions," and as a result, really nothing, nothing has changed. We continue to see no infrastructure and no development within the U.S. Do you have thoughts on that whole financial situation? Jim Jatras: I'm not an economist. I'm not an expert on financial matters. As I say, I do understand the difference between construction and destruction. I think Trump did want to do that. I think he did have a concept of a national economy. When it comes to China, yeah, I do think our China trade relationship with China is terribly lopsided. It seems to me that is because, frankly, it's beneficial to a lot of corporate America to hollow out our industries, our production, and ship those operations to foreign countries. China, certainly, but many other countries as well. And then, of course, bring their goods back in the United States, duty free, basically undermining our national economy. At the same time --I was saying this back at the time of the Trump administration --there's a natural deal here between the United States and China, to where we rebalance our trade relationship to favor American production and the American industrial base, but at the same time, we get out of China's face in the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait and so forth, the same way that we should be getting out of Russia's place in Eastern Europe, that it seems to me there's the making of a deal there. I don't know that Trump really saw that. It seemed to me a lot of people in his administration had a strong animus against China across the board, that not only did they want to address the trade issues, which I think is legitimate, but also wanted to threaten them on some of the security issues, which I thought made no sense whatsoever. Jim Jatras: But that's where we are. But I do think Trump, on some level, at least in his gut, had a sense that we need to build up our own national economy, get control of our borders, get control of our trade. Unfortunately, like many other things, I don't think he really had any idea how to do that. He certainly populated his administration with all the wrong people when it came to getting any of his agenda from 2016 done. When you turn to the Heritage Foundation and the Republican National Committee to hire a bunch of Bush retreads for your administration, hey, you're going to get your tax cut, which any Republican president would want to push through the Congress, but you're not going to get an infrastructure bill, you're not going to get any of the other things you want. I think looking back on it, Trump was a great missed opportunity and perhaps in some sense, the last missed opportunity for an America that, maybe, could have been revived. Mike Billington: As to the two party system, you were an adviser to the Republican Party in the Senate, as you mentioned, for many years. You have insight into the two party system that we have today -- what Lyndon LaRouche referred to as the two potty system. What is your view on democracy in America today, which the war party claims to be defending in their wars around the world? Jim Jatras: To be precise, I was an adviser to the Senate Republican leadership, which is a Senate office, not a party office. The structure of the Senate, as in the House, is partisan, but it's the Senate, part of the U.S. government. It's not the Republican Party {per se.} I don't know, Mike, we might not be fully in agreement on these things. I'm a pretty retrograde guy when it comes to political theory. I do notice that the founding fathers did not intend to create a democracy. They knew their history, they knew their Aristotle, they knew how democracies tend to end. For the first 80 or 90 years of our republic until the Civil War, we had a confederal republic. And then after the Civil War, until at least in the post-World War Two period, we had a federal democracy. But then increasingly in recent decades, we've had a consolidated administrative state, managerial state. I don't think you would even call it democracy anymore. This is the way democracies tend to end. Once you have, everybody has the vote, everybody can say, "Well, I want, I want, I want." You tend to vote yourself benefits out of the other guy's pocket. And that goes for the plutocracy, too. They say, "Well, we can manipulate the levers of this thing too, and we have our propaganda machine in the media" and so forth. So none of this should be particularly surprising where you get to a moribund state where a constitution on paper is simply honored in the breach. Jim Jatras: It's honored with fingers crossed behind your back, and it really doesn't exist anymore. The fact that we have this entrenched duopoly, which is as entrenched in America today as the CPSU was entrenched as a one party system in the Soviet Union, is something that is -- I don't know that there's any coming back from that, except in the same sense that, well, when the Soviet Union collapsed, so did the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and something new arose from the ashes. Unfortunately I think that's sort of where we are now in America today, what that looks like, how bad it's going to be, with things like supply chain breakdown, collapse of the dollar. Who knows what else is going to come, whether it results in the breakup of the country or what level of violence. I don't think we really know. I explored some of this in the piece you mentioned earlier, the "It's Later Than You Think." I think unfortunately -- and again, we might disagree on this, Mike -- a lot of this is baked into the cake. I don't know that there's much any of us can do by shouting from the rooftops that "bad things is a'comin." The bad things will come, and then we'll see how we get through it, who survives, who doesn't, and what comes from the ashes. Mike Billington: At the end of of that talk you gave to the students at the Ron Paul Institute, you said that, I have a quote: "I think your ability to impact the big picture regarding any of this is slim to none." That's somewhat like you are saying right now. That's clearly rather pessimistic. As you know, LaRouche always told the youth, and others, that in a systemic crisis like we're in today -- and you acknowledge it's a systemic crisis -- the ability to make big changes is even greater than normal, rather than less, precisely because the old system is falling apart and people are forced to give up their delusions and look for new solutions, including outside of the United States, internationally. So how do you respond to that? Jim Jatras: Well, I would say that it largely depends on the human factor and the mechanisms. I remember during the 2020 election, so many people were saying, people who believe that the vote was stolen -- and I'm I'm one of those people -- "Well look, the Supreme Court's going to do this, or the state legislators are going to do that, or Congress is going to do this." And I kept saying, "No, no, no. None of those things are going to happen, because those people who are in charge of the system, in charge of being the guardians of the system, will not do their duty even when the facts are plain." I think a lot of us have a kind of a naive -- and I'm not calling Mr. LaRouche naive -- but a lot of us have a naive faith, in facts. If you throw the facts on the table -- whether it's about COVID or whether it's about CRT and Black Lives Matter and Antifa, or whether it's about foreign policy -- that people will wake up and say, "Oh my God, you're right, let's do the right thing." The trouble is, you have people holding all the levers of power who will not do the right thing. That means what you have is stasis. You have stasis until the collapse comes. Now what that happens after that? Jim Jatras: Yeah, I think there are things that people can do. I'm not advising complacency by any means. I just don't see the levers. I don't see the pathways to changing national policy even in the middle of a crisis until the collapse comes. That doesn't mean that the local, and to some extent at the state level, things can't be done like, you know, I live in a rural county in Virginia. We did pretty good in this last election here. We're very optimistic here at the county level, maybe even a little optimistic at the state level. That may be a little naive. But you look at states like Florida and Texas to some extent, maybe we have a kind of a soft secession going on in some of the states and localities in America where, yeah, a healthy America could still be sustained and provide the groundwork for a kind of a revival of the American spirit and something like an American republic in the future. But I think those pathways are not yet clear to us. I think being active at the local level, being active with your community, acting with likeminded people and why conversations like this, I think are valuable, are something we should focus on. But not to expect that, "oh great. The Republicans are going to take the House this year," and that goodness and niceness will break out, because it won't. Mike Billington: Lyndon LaRouche always, always represented himself as an American, supporting the American system of Hamilton and Lincoln and Roosevelt, but he always insisted he represented the human race as a whole, and fought for the human race as a whole, rather than for one nation. You have followed LaRouche for many, many years, and you've been involved in many of our discussions and forums and conferences. How do you see LaRouche, his role in history and his impact on the international situation today? Jim Jatras: I think he will be remembered as a visionary and maybe a reminder of what could have been, that if there had been people who are willing to listen to common sense at the right time, when opportunities had not been frittered away one after another, the outcome could have been different, that we would not have to go through this crisis or crunch or whatever you want to call it, which I think we will have to go through now. I think one of the things that occurred to me, looking back on my comments at the time when we were asking about his exoneration to try to get a pardon and a exoneration for him from the unjust prosecution -- persecution that he suffered, and that you and many others suffered, by the way, at the hands of Robert Mueller and the establishment. You think about that. What if, if those policies had been heeded at the time when they could have made a big difference, rather than saying, "let's squash this guy," which was what the response of the power was at the time. I think it could have made a big difference in the life of this country, but unfortunately that didn't happen. Remember, he was out talking about these things, how many decades ago? There were how many missed opportunities through all of those decades? And now here we are. So I'm not saying those ideas are not applicable now. As you point out, we do have to look at the rest of the world, that to a great extent some of the things he proposed about a new Silk Road and so forth are being followed by the Eurasian powers. I don't want to sound naive in that regard. I'm sure the Chinese and the Russians and other countries are looking out for number one, the way, frankly, a national government should do. I think we discussed a little earlier, we have so many people on the Right in this country today who are calling for the "China, China, China" alarm, the same way the Left fell for "Russia, Russia, Russia" during the Trump years. "Oh, the Chinese Communists, you know, they're behind everything.' Well, first off, despite the formality of the CCP being the ruling party in China, I think it's pretty clear that it's not -- I like to call it Han National Bolshevism. The bottle may be red and has a picture of Mao on it, but the wine inside the bottle is Han Nationalist and Confucian, and there's simply nothing really communist about it other than the name of the party. Now, it's authoritarian. In some ways, it behaves in ways that we would consider quite inhumane. But I think it reflects the long history of China as a civilization, and it is focused on China's national interest, but not in a kind of a "let's destroy everybody else" kind of mentality, but rather that China will have its greatest flowering and opportunity when other people do as well. Why can we not see that in our leadership? I think it gets back to the level of corruption that has become almost ubiquitous at the upper ends of our system, or as, hopefully, at the lower end, the local level, maybe to a lesser extent on the state level, they're still healthy things there that can be preserved. Mike Billington: Thank you. Any further thoughts or last words for our readers and supporters? Jim Jatras: No, not really, I would just ask people if they want to see what I have written --I have lost my muse for writing, I do try to do interviews from time to time. But I am an incessant tweeter, until they kick me off. So go to @JimJatras if you want to see what my latest thoughts or dumb ideas I have. And I do want to say that, black pilled as I do tend to sound -- I am a Boomer after all -- I am fundamentally an optimist in many respects. As I pointed out with respect to France, the fact that one republic is ending doesn't mean the nation goes away. And I do believe there is an American nation. I realize that concept is not well understood or accepted in America today because we tend to think in "civic terms" rather than national terms. But I do think that there is a future for the American people as we come through this crisis, which still, I think has another five to seven years to go. And we'll see how bad it gets. But something, some phoenix, will arise from the ashes. At the same time, even in a greater sense, on a moral, spiritual level, the hairs on our head are all numbered. God is in His heaven. Nothing happens without His allowance or his will. If we pray without ceasing and have confidence in the final triumph of good, it will sustain us through even very difficult times. Mike Billington: Ok, thank you very much, Jim. I think this will have a very good and long term impact on those who have a chance to watch or listen or read this. Thank you. Thank you, Mike, for the opportunity.
Dennis Speed and Mike Billington (Executive Intelligence Review) in dialogue with Ray McGovern (Analyst, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA-ret.), Co-Founder, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity). The full transcript is available below. SPEED: Now, what we’re going to do is hear from a couple of people who are going to discuss this. That’s Ray McGovern and also Mike Billington. I just want to say about Ray, I wrote about you about 11 days ago at the top of something I was writing. “Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern has insisted that only a metanoia, a 180-degree spiritual bootlegger’s turn away from a self-defeating, self-destructive indifference to promoting the General Welfare of people all over the world can preserve any nation, including a declining United States.” Now, I’m not asking you to take responsibility for my remarks, but I would like to point out that our art of analysis, of actual strategic evaluation seems to be severely endangered right now, particularly in the United States. You’re one of the few people who is still practicing it. So, I’d like you to start us off, both in terms of responding to what Helga said, but you’ve been looking at what’s been said over the last week, week and a half, and Mike’s going to have plenty to say, because he’s been speaking to a few interesting people on his own about these matters. So, make it a little informal, you go ahead and tell us what your own thinking is about these matters, and then we’ll hear from Mike, and then continue to discussion. RAY MCGOVERN: Well, Dennis, thank you for the introduction. I hope you didn’t get too many bricks thrown at you from describing me that way. I wish I could tell you that we were further toward metanoia at present than we were back when I used that term. We are inches further, or inches more toward metanoia now. Let me tell you what I think, and why I think it. I should sort of as a clearness or honesty in advertising, say that I’m an outlier on this, just as I was an outlier for four years on Russiagate and so forth. But I’m used to that, just so you know what you’re getting. Watching the pronouncements by official Kremlin spokespeople and the play from these Biden-Putin conversations, and most important, what happened this last week starting on Monday in Geneva, persuades me that we’re on the road to a relaxation of tension. That Putin got a major concession from Mr. Biden, who very cleverly has told his people to play that down, and that talks will continue. I’ll say that again, the Russians didn’t stomp out of the talks, they didn’t invade Ukraine. They didn’t do anything other than to insist on their maximum position, and then sotto voce saying, well we got a big commitment here. We’re going to reinvent the intermediate forces treaty, the INF Treaty. Most Americans don’t understand this because it happened in 1987, but what was happening in those days was that the Russians had these intermediate and shorter-range ballistic missiles called SS-20s. We had Pershing 2s, the equivalent. This made the strategic situation incredibly tentative, because instead of 30-35 minutes warning from an ICBM shoot-out, you had maybe 14-15 minutes. These were bases in Europe, the European part of Russia, and Germany and elsewhere. Wise statesmen got together and said, this is crazy. We got to limit this. We don’t need this; we’ve already got a balance of strategic power here, thanks to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972. So, we don’t need these things. Let’s get rid of them. People like me kind of said, “Right. We’re going to get rid of a whole class of very sophisticated ballistic missiles.” But, they did. One key element there was that it was verifiable. My friend Scott Ritter, for example, was one of hundreds of U.S. inspectors who were there when they blew up these sites in Russia. So, that’s possible, and what happened more recently is not only lamentable, but stupid and reversible. Now, be the first to know that U.S.-Russian talks are in the process of getting underway to reverse that, and to reinstate something like the INF Treaty. Will it be exact? No, it won’t, but it will place limits on offensive strike missiles in that part of Europe. How come you’re the first to know this? You’re the first to be crazy enough to listen to McGovern; that’s the first answer. But the second one is, McGovern has this arcane methodology, it’s called media analysis. I mean it’s sort of a sub-discipline of political analysis, I suppose. And what he does is, he reads stuff one day, and the next day he reads stuff, and then he figures out what’s different. When Vladimir Putin called Joe Biden and says, “Look, our negotiators are going to get together in just 12 days, but I need to talk to you now.” Biden said, “OK.” And they talked on the telephone on Dec. 30th this past year. How do we know what eventuated? Well, the Kremlin put out an immediate report, and they said—and I’ll quote it here, because I don’t want to misstate it. “Joseph Biden emphasized that Washington had no intention of deploying offensive strike weapons in Ukraine.” I’ll say it again. Biden emphasized that the U.S. has no intention of deploying offensive strike missiles in Ukraine. What about the American side? Well, they didn’t really include that in their read-out. How about Jake Sullivan? I guess he was the senior administration official that briefed all those reporters on background. Well, he said, nothing much happened. One of the reporters said, “Was there anything at all that we could report?” And Sullivan says, “Nothing I can think of.” Well, that’s a bit disingenuous, but it’s also clever. Because he didn’t want to give these reporters, who have their own axes to grind, time to criticize what Biden had done. It’s a mixed blessing that Americans don’t know what Biden had done, but eventually the mainstream media is going to have to deal with it, because those negotiations are in train. We know from Wendy Sherman and Ryabkov that they said these arms control issues are going to be pursued now. And you know, you can’t conclude these talks in a week or a month; it’s going to take some time. Both sides agree that it’s going to take some time to do this. Another straw in the wind, but not really for somebody who follows the media closely. Jens Stoltenberg, the head of NATO, who’s way out there as a hardliner, who says, “Our arms are ready for Russia.” What did he say? Again, you won’t see this reported, but here it is in TASS in English. Reporters can read this. He says, “‘Concrete possibilities for limits on the missiles Russia and NATO should be discussed, but not discussed publicly.’ He stressed that the Alliance was ready to discuss not only limitations, but a ban on intermediate-range missiles. ‘We have clearly expressed our willingness to sit down and discuss these kinds of limitations on different levels, banning all intermediate-range weapons which are a concern in Europe,’ the Secretary-General said.” That’s Stoltenberg! It was missed by the western press. What am I saying here? I’m saying that if you get through all the propaganda, all the stuff that’s sort of boiler-plate—“The Russians are demanding that Ukraine and Georgia will never become members of NATO.” Is that a realistic prospect? No. How long does it take a country like that to qualify for membership in NATO? Several years, maybe decades, maybe never. If you’re Vladimir Putin, what’s more important to you? To get NATO and the U.S. to sign onto an agreement that says we’ll never let Ukraine and Georgia into NATO? When, as Putin points out, Ukraine is already being populated by all kinds of arms emplacements. In other words, Putin said, membership in NATO for Ukraine may sort of be a distinction without a difference, because what they’re doing right now is moving all kinds of troops and offensive capabilities into Ukraine. What I’m saying here is this: You have to distinguish between the rhetoric, which is “No, no Ukraine, no Georgia in NATO.” And we, NATO, and Wendy Sherman, and Blinken and Nod and Sullivan, we all stood up to those Russians. We adamantly said, “Under no circumstances! Win!” Putin was hardly surprised by that. I think he was a little surprised—let’s be realistic—that he frightened Joe Biden with a deployment of—how many? 100,000 troops near the Ukrainian border. And persuaded him that, hey, you had a Cuban Missile Crisis which not only bears a resemblance to how we feel now, but is an exact replica. And guess what, Joe? We’re going to react the same way the U.S. when Khrushchev tried to put those medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. As an aside, and as an indication of how dangerous this really is, Khrushchev did put those medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. We found them finally. CIA U-2s found them. But guess what? We never thought they were armed with nuclear warheads. And guess what? They were. We found that out decades later. So, just think, if John Kennedy had been more susceptible to the blandishments of our military, they wanted to give Russia a bloody nose? Long story short, we might not be here; there’s a good chance we wouldn’t be here today to discuss these things. Another sort of aside on this, is simply that here’s Putin before all his generals and admirals above a certain grade, it’s the 21st of December. He’s giving them the word. He says, this time we’re going to have mutually agreed upon signed, legally binding documents to limit arms. And he looks out, and he sees—I’m guessing here, I wasn’t there, right? He sees a couple of generals say, “Yeah, right. That was really helpful on the ABM Treaty, wasn’t it? Or, the INF Treaty? We had mutually binding international agreements, and the Americans just walked out, without explanation, for God’s sake. Tell us more about those mutually binding agreements there, Vlad.” In the next paragraph, Putin says, “OK, the U.S. has not given much respect to mutually binding international agreements.” And he mentions the INF Treaty and the ABM Treaty. So, you know, it will be nice to get these kinds of agreements, but what Putin is most interested in is what happens on the ground. And they’re negotiating on that. If you don’t believe me, or you don’t believe Wendy Sherman, believe Jens Stoltenberg, who is on the far right of the hawks in NATO. The last thing I’ll say has to do with analysis of what the New York Times puts out. I’m just becoming aware how war-mongering the New York Times has always been. I go back a ways. More recently, I go back to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And of course, the New York Times was a main culprit in selling that story. Not only Judy Miller, who did finally get relieved of duty, but a fellow named David Sanger. He was equally responsible. I have the book on David Sanger, and I’ve written about him, but suffice it so say here that in July 2002, so 7-8 months before the war, before the U.S.-British attack on Iraq, Sanger had this article in the New York Times which said, no fewer than seven times, that there were, as flat fact, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Now, this was what he was instructed to say by his intelligence sources. It was a very interesting juncture, because that’s when W Bush and the administration were trying to sell the idea to Congress so that Congress would, in its own stupid way, authorize war. Today, we have a lead article, right on the front page above the fold, David Sanger. What’s he saying? He’s saying that my intelligence say that the Russians, those dastardly clever Russians, do you know what they’re planning now? They’re planning to infiltrate agents to shoot up other Russians so they can have a pretext, a casus belli, a reason to attack Ukraine. They are so lusting after some kind of justification to attack Ukraine, that they’ll kill their own Russians there. How about that? What’s his source? The same guys he talked to back in 2002; the WMD guys. How do I know that? They’re the same unknown sources who are reluctant to give their names because of the sensitivity of the subject. Just in contrast, the Russians have also warned about a false flag justification. And how did they do that? It was this fellow named Sergei Shoigu, who happens to be their Minister of Defense. At the same gathering at which Putin talked to all the top admirals and generals, what he said was that we know there are 150 or so Americans, contractors of course, who are preparing this kind of false flag attack in the area of Ukraine, and that they have sarin gas, which is one of their preferred methods of false-flag attacks. So, you have Shoigu identifying himself, he’s not an unnamed source in intelligence who’s reluctant to give his name because of the sensitivity of the subject. No, he’s gone right ahead of time. Is this significant? It is in a sort of intelligence playing around thing. I’m sure that both sides are equally prepared to do just this kind of thing. The operative bottom line for me is simply that Putin is much too clever, much too restrained, and much too much a statesman—and I’ll say that again, statesman—to get himself involved in attacking Ukraine, much less occupying this basket case. It used to be the bread basket of Europe; now, it’s a basket case, thanks to the coup that we, the United States and other Western intelligence services, arranged on the 22nd of February, 2014, aptly called the most blatant coup in history. Why? Because it was advertised; it was advertised on the 4th of February on YouTube. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland talking to U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt in Kiev, saying, “We’ve got it all arranged now. Yats is the guy. Incoming Prime Minister. Tell these other guys to wait in the wings here. Did you talk to Jake Sullivan?” “Yeah.” “OK, what did he say? Oh, good. Biden is free to come in and solidify this thing, and we can glue it together.” Pyatt says, “What about the EU?” And Victoria Nuland says—and I don’t want to destroy the nice tone of this conversation, but she uses the F-word. She says, “F— the EU!” Was this a real conversation? Yeah! You had the voices. Did they know it was going to monitored? No. Did Nuland apologize? She apologized, but only for saying the F-word, not for arranging the coup. She said, I’m really sorry I said that; I didn’t really mean it. Of course, that’s exactly what she meant. And that’s what they’re doing even now. The question is, how long the EU will put up with this kind of thing. I could go on for a while, and I’ve probably outlasted my welcome, but perhaps more can be said in what ensues. The operative thing I’d like to leave you with is that right now, many of the leading newspapers—that is, the Wall Street Journal and so forth—are very reluctant to mention that discussions will now take place on intermediate-range ballistic missiles between the U.S. and Russia. Did you know? I ask you, did you know that Biden promised that we have no plans to deploy offensive strike missiles in Ukraine? Did you know that? No, you didn’t know that. OK. Did you know that the so-called anti-ballistic missile emplacements already completed in Romania and going into Poland now, have the same kind of holes that accommodate what Putin calls “Toe-ma-hawk”? Tomahawk missiles. Now, what’s the point there? Tomahawk missiles can easily strike the ICBM force of Russia and destroy the strategic balance. Is this a real concern of Putin? Of course it is! It’s been a primary concern for years, and he said so. Right now, he’s being heard, that’s different. Right now, he’s being heard, and there’s a concession on the table from Biden about not doing this in Ukraine. The discussions will go forward. I’ve been accused of being Pollyanna, and I don’t like that, but I don’t mind seeing some progress here. And of course, the main kibosh can be done by what I call the MICIMATT. There are very strong forces there in the military-industrial, Congressional, intelligence, media, academia, think tank complex. You notice there are parts of the government in there, right? Military, Congressional, intelligence? But in this case, oddly, it’s not the White House. So, the question for the next couple of weeks is, how soon will it become the White House, or conversely, how soon will the White House’s hopeful position descend under pressure of the MICIMATT? I’ll stop there, and thanks very much for letting me go on this long. SPEED: Well, thank you very much, Ray. And I think you had a lot to say there that I’m sure Mike is going to have both responses to and maybe some questions about, too. Mike, of course, for anybody who doesn’t know, is the Asia Desk editor for EIR, but he’s also been spending some time interviewing some interesting people recently, and he’s pursuing that, as we’re doing our best to try to resurrect the lost art of evaluations. So, Mike, why don’t you go ahead. MICHAEL BILLINGTON: Well, thank you, Ray. That was a most comprehensive and very powerful presentation. I think you captured the overall idea in a way which is going to maybe shock a lot of people, but I think also wake them up to the fact that you have to look at the world as a whole. There’s a lot of people, very depressed, or somewhat pessimistic within the United States right now, about the idea that everything’s lost, our country’s going to hell, our cities are destroyed, the pandemic’s out of control, we’re threatened with thermonuclear war, and so on. But if you’re willing to look at the world from the perspective of the world as a whole, as Ray just did, then you have the ability to revive optimism in a population which has been purposely degraded by the media part of the MICIMATT, and by our government in many respects, to give them some optimism, that there is a way out; that in fact, there’s a way to stop this descent into a dark age, which clearly we are in—the threat of war, the pandemic, the cultural breakdown, the social disintegration within the United States and most of Western Europe. But, again, if you look at the world as a whole, if you look at who should be our closest allies, Russia and China, then you begin to get the sense, you can begin to get the sense that what we as individuals do at a moment of crisis like this, can have a huge, huge impact on the world. I want to say a few things about what Helga and Lyn said in the beginning, but let me fill in a few pieces of what Ray McGovern just went through, from a few other, very prominent and knowledgeable intelligence people. There aren’t that many, so the few of them that there are, have stepped forward over the last few days, in a way which really does confirm the perspective that Ray just laid out. One of them is a guy named Gilbert Doctorow: He’s a long, long-time analyst, somebody who’s worked in Russia and around Russia for many years, as well as on other sides of this. He attended the Russian press conference, after the Russia-NATO meeting on Wednesday [Jan. 12], and when he came out, there was an RT journalist who talked with him, and he said that the reason that the Russians deployed these forces on the border with Ukraine was provoked, first, by the fact that the U.S. and the British and others were sending modern missiles, modern weapons—not ballistic missiles, not intermediate-range nuclear missiles, but war-fighting missiles, Javelin missiles against tanks and drones to deliver bombs over the Donbas, that this was happening. And the way Doctorow put it, he said, they were concerned that some of the “hotheads” in Kiev would use this equipment with the mistaken belief that the Western powers would come and defend them militarily if they got into a war with Russia. In order to disprove that to these hotheads in Kiev, they deployed their forces to the border, with no intent to invade—they’ve made that very clear—but they want to do, as Doctorow put it, “flush out the reality” of what nations would come to Ukraine’s defense if they were stupid enough to get into a war with Russia. And it worked! One after another, the U.S., the French, the Germans, others, said, “No! If there’s a war between Ukraine and Russia, we’re not going to send troops, not one troop, not one soldier, not one boot will be on the ground” (although there are people there, training already, and there’s certain activities). But what they mean is that they’re not going to put their full weight into a war with Russia. They’re not stupid enough to fight a potentially nuclear war with Russia, over Ukraine. And in fact, they said so! They said, “If Russia invades Ukraine, we’re going to give them the toughest, most never seen before sanctions against them, it’s going to destroy their economy. It’s the economic nuclear option,” and so on and so forth, but not said was, “we’re going to send any troops, we’re not going to go to war.” And that, in fact, is what happened. Now, another extremely competent analyst on this is a guy called Dmitri Trenin: He is Russian, who spent 20 some years in the Soviet army, at that time. And he’s now heading the Carnegie Institute in Moscow. So he went to work in something called the Moscow Institute in Europe, and then the NATO Defense College in Rome; but then he began working with the think tanks here in Washington, Carnegie in particular, and he’s now heading the Carnegie Moscow center, so it’s the fellow Carnegie Institute in Moscow. He’s in Moscow, he’s in the center of these ideas; he has a long history in the military. And he gave an interview to Christiane Amanpour—I won’t characterize her; she’s with CNN. I think that’s probably enough to indicate her character. And she was trying to bait him and he generally made mincemeat out of her. She began by quoting the hardline positions that were being stated by Russia and by the U.S.; Russia saying, we absolutely insist on written guarantees, you must move NATO back to where it was before you expanded. The U.S. was saying, we didn’t give an inch, we’re telling Russia we’re going to really destroy them if they dare to invade Ukraine; and we will never say that we cannot expand NATO, and so forth. But Trenin said: Look, they’re talking. This is the beginning, this is not the end. And when you talk about Russia going to war, he said—and I’ll read this—he said: “Putin is very careful in using military force. In Crimea, not a shot was fired. In Syria, professionals did the fighting, with few casualties. Kazakhstan is a victory. And they’re beginning to withdraw, today,” he said, which is true. They stopped a Ukraine, a Maidan from happening in Kazakhstan, because they quickly called in the collaborators to make sure that this thing was stopped in its tracks, this color revolution and outside terrorist operation, which burned down several government buildings, but tried to literally create a Maidan, and a coup was crushed. He goes on: “This talk of war is on the Western side, not on the Russian side. There’s no feeling of impending war within Russia over Ukraine. Putin is using the troops as leverage, to get the U.S. to listen and to negotiate.” And as Ray said, Putin is being heard. This is a change in the dynamic of European security development. Now, as Ray also mentioned, Blinken, just yesterday, Blinken and Stoltenberg talked, and they both incurred, indeed, as reported by Ned Price, the State Department spokesman, he said that both the U.S. and NATO are ready to meet again, to pursue diplomacy and reciprocal dialogue. So this is moving forward. And Wendy Sherman, who’s the official negotiator in these talks, talked with the head of the OSCE, Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which includes Russia—it’s all the nations of Europe; she agreed with the current Secretary General Helga Schmid of the OSCE that this is a format to continue revitalizing European security dialogue, which includes Russia and all the other nations. So this is moving forward, no question. Amanpour then quoted the U.S. bluster and Trenin replied, just straight out, “Get beyond the rhetoric. We know Ukraine will not be a NATO member soon, maybe never,” as Ray also said. “The simple reason, the U.S. will not fight a nuclear-armed Russia over Ukraine. It is not in the U.S. interest to deploy intermediate-range missiles in Europe, since Russia could retaliate by deploying nuclear-armed submarines to patrol the Eastern seaboard of the United States.” In other words, they could put nuclear weapons, including their hypersonic weapons, which they have and the U.S. doesn’t, they could put them at the same distance from the U.S. cities, as the U.S. would be, if they moved their missiles up to the Russian border, and therefore, it is absolutely not in the U.S. interest to do that kind of thing. Now, one other aspect of this I want to quote; this is back to Mr. Doctorow. The RT reporter asked him, “Why, now?” And Doctorow said, “That’s a question. Why has the media asked the ‘why now’?” Why didn’t Russia do this when they started moving their NATO forces east toward the Russian borders, starting, I think it was in 1999 was the first time. And Doctorow said, it’s very clear, you know, Putin gave a now very famous speech in 2007 at the Munich Security Conference, where he laid out precisely these issues of what is not acceptable to the Russians. But, at that time, the Russian economy was still in very precarious condition, and their military was not up to snuff, to put it nicely. Since that time, Gilbert Doctorow said, they have poured huge amounts of money, of brain power, of scientific and technological capacity into building their military, and they now quite rightly believe they have a military that’s equal, perhaps even in some areas like hypersonic weapons, the superior to the Western military powers. Therefore, they can do it. You can’t even pretend any longer that the U.S. is the only superpower, as we did after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It’s simply not true. You have China, as the by far the biggest and best economy in the world; and you have the Russia-China cooperation on both developing the third world. Russia is building nuclear power plants, and of course the Belt and Road is building nations, getting them out of poverty, getting out of the grip of the IMF/World Bank, by giving them infrastructure. So they were able to do it, because they now have the power to do it. And the U.S. knows that. People, no matter how much they bluster, they know that they cannot fight a war against Russia, just like they cannot fight a war against China. The only danger, and it’s an extreme danger, is that you have some real madmen in the United States. You have Admiral Richard, the head of the Strategic Command, the guy who would actually push the button. Who said in February last year, that we used to think nuclear war was unlikely, but now with the rise of Russia and China, it’s likely. And this is madness, real madness. And you all saw, I’m sure, Senator Wicker, who literally, he’s one of the top guys on the Senate Armed Services Committee, openly saying we should prepare for a first nuclear strike against Russia: Madness. So, could madness happen? Could we sleepwalk into a thermonuclear World War III? We have to be on guard. But, as Ray said, we have to look for the optimism where it’s there, because it’s our responsibility to push to make that happen that way, by making sure the American people do know what the American media is trying so hard to make sure you don’t know. I want to say a few more words, in a sense go back to what you heard Lyn say, that when you have a crisis like we have today, you have to look at it in the context of an overall global crisis, an incident, which is not defined by what happened this week, or last week, but as a long-term process. And there’s no question but that this round of crisis started with the collapse of the Soviet Union, when we had a tremendous opportunity, when Lyn and Helga said: OK, we’ve broken the British Empire’s division of the world into East versus West, the free world versus the communists, and so forth. We’ve basically ended that. this is an opportunity to bring about a new paradigm for mankind, and they proposed that it be done by building high-speed rail connections between Europe and China, through Russia; that we create an environment in which we begin to work together as human beings and as sovereign nations committed to the idea that our sovereignty depends upon the sovereignty of the others, as we had in the Peace of Westphalia. So, at that time, with the fall of the Soviet Union, some people, the neocons and others in the West thought, “we just won. We won the war. We won the Cold War.” It’s like Francis Fukuyama said, the neocon who wrote The End of History: Liberal democracy has now proven to be the superior means of running a nation, and it’ll be so from now and henceforth for the rest of time. History is over. We won. And then, just last week, Fukuyama looked around, and he said, I guess I look like a bit of an idiot when people see that I wrote that End of History back in the 1990s. So he wrote an op-ed, I think in the New York Times, which said, “well, you know, I guess I missed up some things. It didn’t occur to me that advanced democracies like the U.S. could collapse—didn’t occur to me. I thought, well, this is permanent, this is the rest of time.” And of course, what he sees as the collapse is January 6, last year, that this “insurrection” showed that our democracy has collapsed. So he’s really no different from the most wacko of the Democrats, who look at it that way. But look at what Helga was discussing with the Peace of Westphalia. I won’t repeat what she said, but it was, in a sense, seen as the birth of the idea of sovereign nation-states, because it’s based on the idea that your sovereignty depends upon recognition and honoring the sovereignty of others, the “interest of the other,” that that was the basis on which this would take place. And the concept was somewhat built into the UN Charter. It was emphatically adopted under something that the Chinese and the Indians first established: In 1954, Zhou Enlai from China and Jawaharlal Nehru from India, established what they called Panchsheel, or Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. And then, in the next year, in 1995, the famous Bandung Conference in Indonesia, which was the meeting of Asian and African formerly colonialized nations, meeting for the first time without their colonialist lords, and it was sort of the beginning of the Non-Aligned Movement. Part of the purpose of that conference was to prevent what was then an emerging threat of a war between the U.S. and China. And Zhou Enlai and Nehru and Sukarno, the head of Indonesia, were the key leaders—some from Africa and others from Asia—and in that they adopted officially these Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. And it’s worth thinking about what they are, because it’s really the nature of the Westphalia sovereignty idea and it’s the nature of the United Nations. The first, and you hear these terms, now, often, is: territorial integrity, that you have a sovereign nation. Nobody can move and take over your territory. Nonaggression, that you will not launch aggression against another nation. Non-interference in internal affairs, which of course is the daily fare of the U.S. intelligence community is interfering in other nations’ internal affairs. The equality of nations, the idea that you respect the sovereignty of the other, and cooperate with them. And then, fifth, the idea of peaceful coexistence. So these ideas are the basis upon which we can, and we must establish a new security architecture, to replace NATO. As Helga said, at one point, they were talking about Russia being part of NATO, and perhaps NATO could have sustained itself by being a truly inclusive agreement amongst all of the nations of Europe; but that was undermined, and it’s now threatened. We need a new architecture based on this idea of peaceful coexistence. And it has to be driven, as LaRouche has always insisted, by that idea of economic development: That peace will only come through economic development. We are now faced with both the complete breakdown of the Western financial system: Hyperinflation kicking in. To a great extent, the energy hyperinflation is driven directly by the adoption by the Western banking system of the Green New Deal, which is not something being run by AOC, or any of the silly children, running around screaming about the environment, or Al Gore and his fanaticism. It’s run by the banks. It’s run by Mark Carney, by the people who set up a banker’s cartel at the Glasgow climate summit, who explicitly said, we don’t believe governments are going to implement the policy of shutting down their fossil fuels in their economy, and therefore, we bankers will take upon ourselves, the moral responsibility to save the planet from carbon, by shutting down the world economy, and diverting every available penny into bailing out the bankrupt banking system, and funding the military buildup we need to enforce that. So this is a moment of truth, where we can, and must, inspire optimism in people of the world, and especially the people in Europe and the United States who are drowning in pessimism and degeneracy right now. I think what Ray had to say, what some of these others, and what Lyn and Helga have to say is the antidote to the pessimism and the destruction of the minds of our citizens, that’s been so drilled into them over this systematic descent into a moral and cultural dark age. And, again, I say, we have every reason to be optimistic, and let’s pledge ourselves to bringing that optimism, while holding up the grave danger we’re in, a moment of crisis of whether civilization itself will even survive if there were to be a nuclear war, and yet, it’s precisely because it’s so dangerous that people are looking around; they know something’s gone horribly, horribly wrong. They’re looking for answers. They’re looking for who’s been telling the truth when everybody else was lying. Like what Ray said about the brilliant New York Times journalist. I’m going to end by one short thing. This is the New York Times believe it or not [showing lead editorial, “Let Innocent Afghans Have Their Money,” https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/14/opinion/afghanistan-bank-money.html]. But as you know, we’re having a conference on Monday, an emergency seminar on the extreme danger in Afghanistan, the fact that we have the threat of a genocide, as bad or maybe even worse, than Hitler carried out in his death camps and his wars—believe or not, the New York Times lead editorial this morning was “Let Innocent Afghans Have Their Money.” And the way it’s worded—I won’t go through the whole thing right here—but the way it’s worded, it’s clear that somebody at the New York Times realized that this genocide is so obvious, that if they don’t turn around from what they’ve been doing, which is peddling as they did with the war policy, the idea that we can and should punish the Taliban, they realize that this would be hanging over their heads. And somebody got through to them and said “You better turn that around.” So they did—not fully, not completely. It’s still somewhat self-serving. But they did note that if we don’t release the money that we’ve sequestered, if we don’t allow the central bank of Afghanistan to have their money, then we’re going to be faced with personal responsibility for mass murder, the mass murder of somewhere in the range of 20-24 million people, over this winter, where people have no money. And their editorial says “malnourished children with withered arms have been arriving at clinics in Afghanistan for months. Doctors, nurses, teachers and other essential government workers haven’t been paid in months and it’s not clear when they will. Targetted financial sanctions,” they say—of course, they defend their sanctions policies—“targetted financial sanctions are an appropriate and powerful tool to punish bad actors, and odious regimes. The mere threat of them can achieve results. But too often their cumulative effect over time is indistinguishable from collective punishment.” And of course, they’re guilty of collective punishment in case, after case, after case of these 20 years of mass warfare. But nonetheless, they’re saying this has got to stop. They have excuses about why the Fed can’t release the money, but they say, we can get the money released from Europe and they interview our friend Shah Mehrabi, the former board member of the central bank in Afghanistan. So things are moving: Our emergency conferences, our mobilization, our pulling people together on this Afghan crisis, our Committee on the Coincidence of Opposites, and the statement by Dr. Elders that humanity comes first in the case of Afghanistan, we have to release these funds and immediately launch a development program—this is having an effect. And again, there’s reason to be optimistic, if we’re willing to give our full heart and soul to this fight for the fate of mankind. SPEED: Thanks a lot, Mike. And I’ll just say, to both you and Ray, I’ve gotten three questions which I’m going to pose. They’ll give us an arc of time, and Ray’s got something. Go ahead, Ray. MCGOVERN: I just wanted to comment on one of the points that Mike made and that could be well elaborated on, because it’s the most important new factor in the equation: And that is, China. Now, Biden has had a bad experience. His advisers told him, before the June 16 summit that the Russians and the Chinese have this big, long border, and they have clashes on the border, and China’s so big that it must be threatening Russia. And so, what Biden said to Putin, and we know this, because Biden said this before he got on the plane coming home, “Russia is being squeezed by China. They have this long, long border, and Russia knows that China’s not only one of the biggest economic powers, but the biggest military power. So the Russians have a lot of cause to worry about China.” Now, that’s 180 degrees away from the current situation. It might have been true in the textbooks that Jake Sullivan and Blinken read 40 years ago, but it’s not true now. Never! Never, ever have China and Russia been so close! So, consider Putin coming away from this summit, saying to his associates, “My God! These guys don’t know what end is up! They don’t know how strong we Russians really are—why? Because China will back us up! In the vernacular, China’s got our back! How do we show them that?” Next summit, on Dec. 7, Putin reads Biden the Riot Act. He says: “You got our relationship with China completely screwed up. We’re very, very close. As a matter of fact, in one week I’m going to be talking with President Xi—tune in! Because you’ll see how close we are!” So, a week later, on Dec. 15, I think, there’s a virtual meeting between Putin and Xi, and they released the first minute of it, which was choreographed exactly the way the way they wanted it, and this is what happened. Putin: Thank you so much for the invitation to get together, and I just wish it were in person my good friend, because I look forward to meeting you in Beijing to begin the Olympics on Feb. 4. Then we will be in person and we can discuss things as we usually do. (Witness the fact, in parens here, that the U.S. had just declared that it would not go to the Olympics and it’s not going to have any official presence there and others followed suit.) What does Xi say? Xi says, “My friend, Vladimir Putin. This is the 36th time we’ve met, one-on-one, physically or bilaterally in the last couple of years. I look forward to these discussions. What I really appreciate is what you, Russia, have done to support our core interests. And also, you’ve been really good about preventing others from driving a wedge between Russia and China. Just be assured that we, China, will support your core interests, in the West, just the way you have supported our core interests here.” And then, Yury Ushakov, who’s the prime adviser to Putin, tells the press, “the way these two describe their relationship as something that exceeds, something that’s bigger than or higher than a treaty or a defense alliance, in terms of its closeness and in terms of its effectiveness.” It exceeds an alliance. I checked out the Russian and Chinese words, and that’s the word they used. So, if Biden and his advisers, you know, he brought in the clowns, but at least they’re getting educated! If they didn’t get the message from that, they never—well, they did get the message from that. That was on Dec. 15th. When Putin insisted that Putin and Biden talk on Dec. 30th, Biden had been educated. And what Putin is really saying is, look, even your military I think should be aware of, or shy away from the prospect of a two-front war on opposite sides of the world. China’s got our back, and that’s real. Bottom line, here: What helped Putin to be so assertive, and his people like Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu? Well, because it really is two against one, now, unlike the situation that existed under Nixon, where we successfully played one off against the other. Then their relationship was very thorny. Now it could not be closer. And that’s not pretense, that’s real! Now, one other thing I’ll just tuck in here, is that empowers what reaction our allies get when they make silly statements like German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who said: Look, you Russians are willing to use military force? That’s where we’re moving our troops up into Ukraine and elsewhere. And so, what did Shoigu say? He says, “You know, you’re probably too young to remember, but the last time German troops moved up to our border, it really didn’t end well, so, please go study your history.” There is a new assertiveness. It’s well founded, and I just hope that those sophomores—or, they’re rising juniors now—that Biden has advising him will read more current textbooks, or maybe even some articles from you guys and from me. Thanks. SPEED: I’m very glad you raised that, Ray. Actually, one of the first questions pretty much prompts that. I think before we go to this question, if we could show the map, and maybe either Mike or Ray will have a comment. This is a map of Kazakhstan, and the general area. I’m putting this up here, because of what you referenced concerning the issue of borders. It doesn’t show the whole Chinese border, but it does show something about an area people have just heard about in the world, and one of the things that should be noted is, Kazakhstan, and then you see Afghanistan on the map. The question we have is about Afghanistan, and I’ll ask that, but I suspect either of you may have a more expansive answer. Let’s leave the map up, while I’m asking the question. The question comes from one of our people, Anastasia, who reports: “Helga Zepp-LaRouche just had an awesome class and discussion”—this was during our meeting, as we began here—“with some 80-plus youth from around the world, who are ready to fight for Operation Ibn Sina. How can we combine the NATO/Russia crisis with the Ibn Sina initiative?” Operation Ibn Sina refers to Afghanistan, and it’s an initiative that Helga has discussed concerning the possibility of addressing the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan from the standpoint of a new participation among the United States, China, Russia, and of course, the actors surrounding Afghanistan. You see there on the map: Iran on the west, Pakistan on the east; and then Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan. But we’ve just heard on the news about Kazakhstan and what’s happened there. I’ll say that the concept of what was being discussed about Operation Ibn Sina—Ibn Sina was a physician and philosopher, generally from Southwest Asia; the Afghanis claim him, the Iranians claim him, a lot of people claim him. But importantly, as a physician and as a great philosophical thinker, the idea was to invoke someone from the culture of the area, so that when talking about humanitarian relief, you’re invoking a person from the area itself. You’re not just talking about outside intervention, and more importantly, a new form of collaboration: This as a process of a new strategic alliance. So, I just wanted that map up and whatever comment either of you could have, on what can be done on the Afghanistan situation. Mike why don’t you start, since we just heard from Ray? BILLINGTON: Actually, I wanted to respond to Ray by addressing the Kazakhstan issue, because as Ray was making fun of the geopoliticians, including Biden’s gaffe about Russia and China, the Kazakhstan thing is being portrayed by many Western geopolitical writers as “Oh, China’s very worried about this, because Russia used this crisis to step in there, and now Russia’s going to be taking over an area where China’s got its interests….” and nothing could be further from the truth. This was another example of the extremely close cooperative operation between Russia and China—based on principle! This is what’s important, it’s not just alliance of nations ganging up against people they see as their enemies. The old British imperial idea, that when there’s three powers, in order to defeat one, you ally with your enemy, who happens to be opposed to another enemy; and then you crush them, and then create another alliance to crush the other. This is geopolitics: Constant conflict, zero sum game—which deny that there’s a common aim for mankind! The relationship between Russia and China right now is based on the principle of peace through development. What happened in Kazakhstan? Remember that the Russians’ concern with the collapse of the occupation forces in Afghanistan, they’re working with the Taliban, but they’re not agreeing to recognize them because they have a very real concern about the existing al-Qaeda, ISIS type formations that still exist in Afghanistan, that they will come across the borders into the Central Asian countries. What happened in Kazakhstan? They tried to run another Maidan, another 2014 Maidan coup, with different predicates, somewhat, but it was done based on an economic crisis. The National Endowment for Democracy spent $1 million last year; the George Soros Open Society Fund spent $3.5 million last year, organizing the NGO/color revolution forces, to go out in the street and create chaos over some economic or other slight. And that was done. But within about 48 hours, when they doubled the price of gas, and therefore, some of these Soros types came out in the street, you then had very highly trained, armed terrorists, some of whom came from Afghanistan, some from Syria, who intervened into the mobs, with high-powered rifles, with their private communication capacities; attacked buildings, attacked the media—they took over the TV stations; they took over the airport: This is what a coup does. They burned down government buildings. And President Tokayev responded, by immediately calling in the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) forces, which includes strong forces from Russia. And the Russians immediately deployed significant numbers of forces, shut the thing down over just a few days. Now, what’s going on in Kazakhstan: Kazakhstan is the key transport route for the New Silk Road. The Chinese already built a major pipeline from the Caspian Sea, right straight through Kazakhstan into China, which is delivering huge amounts of oil to China, so they have that to protect. Then when they decided to build their New Silk Road Economic Belt, the main route goes right through Kazakhstan on its way to Europe and Turkey. And they have a dry port on the border of China and Kazakhstan, which is an incredible place that takes 4,000 trains per year, now going back and forth between China and Europe, they go through the dry port, where they have to switch gauges; they have incredible mechanisms to move the containers from one gauge train to another in record time. So this is a strategically crucial part of the New Silk Road transformation of the economies. And yes, there were difficulties in Kazakhstan, with a lot of corruption in the ruling circles around Nazarbayev, and other problems. But the point is, the potential for its development as a very lightly populated, but huge country, which also has Russia’s spaceport and it also has Russia’s missile training sites are in Kazakhstan. They have uranium that is processed in Russia, and then sent back to be turned into nuclear power fuel. These are totally Russia-China cooperative operations to transform the world, and especially in their neighboring areas. Now, on Afghanistan: Of course, you also have the fact that the Uighur in Xinjiang in China—what people hear all the time is that the Chinese are committing genocide against the Uighurs. It’s such an abomination it’s almost not worth refuting: The Uighur population in Xinjiang has doubled; their standard of living has nearly doubled since China began focussing on developing the poorest parts of the country. And in lifting 700-800 million people out of poverty, a good number of those were the very, very poor Uighur people in Xinjiang, who have been lifted up, educated, given jobs, and this is called “genocide” by Mike Pompeo! They deal with their terrorist problem by educating and giving employment to the young people who otherwise are dragged off into terrorist operations, because the U.S. is dropping bombs on their mothers’ homes. I think that’s the proper way to see it. But these networks came out of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and there are still areas of terrorist training within Afghanistan. it’s not going to be cleaned up overnight, even though the Taliban is fighting them in most cases. So for both Russia and China, the issue of the Islamic movements within the Islamic culture are crucial. Now, what has Helga done, by launching the Operation Ibn Sina? This is not something that came out of the blue. Helga’s studied this for many, many years, and has written extensively about the golden age of Islam. She’s written about Ibn Sina in particular, and she knows that he is a beloved figure in the Islamic world. My interview with Graham Fuller, the former CIA station chief in Kabul, and stationed all over the Islamic world, very much an Islamic scholar himself, made the point that there’s absolutely no reason that you could not have another golden age of Islam! It’s most likely going to come as part of what Lyn and Helga always argued, which is that you’re not going to have a localist renaissance any more. We have to have a global renaissance, in which each culture pulls out the best moments of its history. The Christian Renaissance, the European Renaissance, the Islamic Renaissance during the Baghdad Caliphate, the Confucian Renaissance during the Sung Dynasty; and similar things in Africa and elsewhere, this is what can and must happen. So this Ibn Sina project, of course, it’s aimed at stopping genocide in Afghanistan, it’s aimed and bringing modern health facilities to Afghanistan and in fact every nation on Earth. But it also is crucial to getting people to think in terms of why we, non-Muslims, have to understand who Ibn Sina was and is, today, to the Islamic community internationally, but also that we have to internalize that in our hearts, with the sense of the Peace of Westphalia, that we have to understand the Confucian Renaissance and Chu Hsi in the Sung Dynasty in China. We have to understand what went on during the golden age of Islam, and embrace it as part of what we do, by embracing the Platonic period and Augustinian era, and especially the work of Nicholas of Cusa and Schiller and Leibniz and so forth. This is the basis on which we have to look at every one of these crisis moments as a moment that can change history as a whole. SPEED: Ray, if you have a response to that, and if you don’t, I have two questions for you. MCGOVERN: Let me just make a quick remark and about the strategic significance of Kazakhstan. I think you’re showing that map was a really good idea. Not many people known where Kazakhstan is. Now they do. It sits atop the other “stans,” and needless to say there still is a terrorist threat as Mike has elucidated. And so, what’s the problem? Well, the problem is, that the border between Kazakhstan and Russia is—most people say—the longest contiguous border in the world. Look at it! It’s pretty ragged, and it goes for a long way. Now, also look, in the middle on the left there, the Caspian Sea: What’s there? There are deposits of natural gas, that exceed by far all the oil deposits in Iraq in value. All of them. That’s where the TAPI pipeline was going to come from—Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India, and then out into the ocean. And who was going to take care of all of that? Enron! [laughs] That was a totally corrupt enterprise from the beginning, but that accounted in many ways for Bush Jr. and other interests in that TAPI pipeline—which never happened, of course. But the riches there are incredible. Uranium? Mike mentioned that, which is incredibly important, for anybody who’s working with nuclear materials. So the strategic significance of Kazakhstan is in many ways more important than Ukraine in terms of natural resources; not in terms of strategic importance. But when people try to overthrow governments like that, the prompt response of the President Tokayev in Nur-Sultan, in getting the Russians in there, and then the naïve response from my friend Blinken—“Oh, once the Russians come in, you’ll never get them out of there!” Well, as Mike also mentioned, they’re out of there, or they’re getting out of there. So again, Mike is quite right in saying that is a success, that Russia can crow about. And they’re going to watch it very closely, because this in its own way is a very critical, strategic area. SPEED: These will also be pertinent to you, Mike, and we also have a couple other maps to reference here. But the first question is from Cade, and it is: “Thank you for these wonderful analyses of the current situation. My question is to Mr. McGovern: It does seem we have moved a few inches away from a new Cuban Missile Crisis. The Schiller Institute’s interview with Director General of the Russian International Affairs Council Andrey Kortunov also pointed toward a trust from Russia put into Biden individually as a negotiator. But what about the potential, let’s say, of a ‘new Bay of Pigs’? The prospect of rogue elements outside of Biden’s control, such as those training Ukrainian paramilitaries to ‘kill Russians,’ as Yahoo News reported yesterday, inciting either of the false-flag scenarios mentioned or any other operation?” So that’s one question. I’m putting it together with the other question, for reasons of time, but also because they relate. The second question to both of you is from Kynan. He says: “It is quite a relief to hear that there were some positive developments from the talks that took place between Russia and the United States, and the fact that Biden has taken seriously Putin’s concerns about the deployment of nuclear weapons on Russia’s border, is important. “This also coincides with another very significant development in which the leaders of the UN Security Council affirm that a ‘nuclear war could never be won, and therefore must never be fought.’ Why is it that the media aren’t actually reporting on these developments? What do they gain from portraying Russia in this malicious way, and by saying that nothing significant happened in these talks?” MCGOVERN: The first question I discussed a little bit about these false-flag things, and these operations. You know, our intelligence services have lots of money, and if they don’t spend it, they won’t get as much next year. And sometimes there are cockamamie ideas, but they say, well maybe they’ll succeed and you get really fast promoted, so who’s going to be held accountable? It’s all secret, right? So, none of that can be dismissed. Is Biden fully in control? The answer is: No. If he told Bill Burns, head of the CIA, “you make sure that those CIA-nics don’t cause any trouble for us in the border area between Ukraine and Russia,” and Bill Burns said, “Yessir!” would they do it anyway? My guess is—of course, they would! Bill Burns is not in control either. The guys with the money are in control. And they have all these assets and they want to use ’em. That’s the problem. And Putin knows that better than McGovern knows it, because he’s been kind of mouse-trapped in this way before, namely, the ceasefire in Syria, which blew up in the face of Putin and Obama, each, when the U.S. Air Force decided to violate it, a brief week after it had been concluded—after negotiations of 11 months. The other thing here, is, OK, the UN Security Council: that was really nice. “No one can win a nuclear war.” Right. Well, that’s what Putin and Biden said at the end of their June 16 summit. They issued a statement, that’s the same as the one we remember with Reagan and Gorbachev: “No one can win a nuclear war…” That doesn’t really matter! What matters is what Mike mentioned before. Adm. Thomas Richard, who puts his finger on the button. He’s the Strategic Air Command, which used to be called “SAC.” Those guys are real patriots, and they’re not going to let the Russians do anything bad to us, and you know, Richard has never rescinded his notion that nuclear is probable. Has Biden told him to shut up? No, he hasn’t told him to shut up. And so, what is Putin looking at? He’s looking at a very, variegated command structure. In Russia, they have what they call “yedin nachaya” [ph]—leadership in one person. Everyone knows Putin is in control, and I think that’s a good thing. In our country, well, you have the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff telling the Chinese late the year before last, “look, if Trump tells me to take you out, I probably won’t do it” you know? What the hell is that?! I mean, it may have been a good thing in the vast scheme of things, but what conclusions do Putin and his Defense Minister Shoigu draw from this kind of, let’s call it, insubordination? All I’m saying is, the situation is much more itsy-pitsy than anyone realizes. When you look from the Kremlin and you see, that despite all these statements, and they come fast and furious, the guys in charge—you know, if you read Daniel Ellsberg’s book on The Doomsday Machine, you’ll see that the executive authority to authorize nuclear weapons devolved into some of the smallest units you could ever imagine. I don’t know if it’s better now. But neither does Putin, and that’s the point: He’s got to be really careful. SPEED: We may be dealing with one of that kind of Sterling Hayden/ Brig. Gen. Jack Ripper and Slim Pickens/Major “King” Kong! Let’s hope not! [referring to characters in Dr. Strangelove] All right, lets again go the maps, but I want to have respond coming to the conclusion here. But let’s show three maps of NATO in 1990; this is 32 years ago, those were the NATO boundaries when the U.S. promised it would not expand one inch eastward from the German border. That was Secretary of State James Baker speaking to Gorbachev. All right, let’s go to the next one, NATO’s eastern boundary in 2019. Flip back to 1990 for a moment, and then 2019, so people can get the idea here. And then the third map is NATO in 2021, these are the proposed expanded NATO boundaries. Let’s go to the final image, the larger map: This shows what is sometimes referred to as the “Eurasian Heartland,” but more importantly can assist everybody, having seen the map of Kazakhstan, having seen the map of NATO expansion, to get a sense of the entirety of what we’re talking about. There, you’re seeing the border between Russia and China, there in the east. This is what Biden was referring to. Of course, you see the border of Kazakhstan and Russia, which Ray just discussed a moment ago. So, having shown these maps, here’s my question: How can people conquer the fragmented picture that is supplied by media and also supplied by bad education, to think about how these world leaders are required to think about strategic matters; what we are also talking about here as a higher security architecture, how would you approach that kind of thing? And how could we, as citizens think about this, or play a role in thinking about this in such a fashion as to call these people to account? It’s a large question, but I wanted to put it out there, and let each of you give me a sense of it. Mike why don’t we start with you. BILLINGTON: I agree, this is key. What Ray said a minute ago about the fact that the President doesn’t run things, is absolutely true. This was just as true with Trump as with Biden. Trump ordered the military to get out of Syria, and they told him to go to Hell. He said, we’re going to be friends with Russia, and they ran the Russiagate operation against him, and he basically capitulated. Same thing with China: He was friends with China, but then Pompeo and company made up the line about China gave us the coronavirus, and Trump needed somebody to blame or whatever reason. He clearly didn’t run things: he wanted to rebuild U.S. industry, but what did Wall Street do? They kept bailing out the banks. So he failed in everything he said he was going to do, which is why he was voted in by a population that was delighted to hear that we’re going to be friends with Russia, we’re going to rebuild the economy, we’re going to end these damned wars, we’re going to get out of the climate change hoax. This is absolutely true with Biden. Is that reason to be demoralized? I must say, a lot of people I talk to feel demoralized for the reasons I was saying before: they think there’s no leader who can do anything. Well, in a sense that’s true. But I’ve talked about this before: LaRouche always emphasized the institution of the Presidency as more important than the President per se; that sometimes a President plays a crucial role in the institution of the Presidency, but, really, it’s the institution of those who are part of governing, including people in Congress, in the intelligence community, in the private sector, and individuals like Lyndon LaRouche, or Ray McGovern, who’s no longer official in a government agency. But, in other words, citizens who take responsibility for their nation and for the world: That really is the institution of the Presidency. So what does that say to the American people? It says, it’s up to us! Like I said before, there’s a tremendous reason for optimism, in the midst of this descent into a dark age, that because it’s so damned serious, people are looking around for answers and for leadership. I’ve said, many times, when I first met Lyn in late 1971, he said people aren’t going to want to hear my warnings that Nixon’s pulling the dollar off gold and ending the Bretton Woods system is going to lead to depressions, and hyperinflation, and pandemics and wars. But when it happens, we’d better be there to lead, because people are going to look around for who was telling the truth, when everybody else was lying. So this is a wonderful moment for the individual: I think it answers the question about the individual rights and the common good. You know, you have a horrible problem in America, where people think individual rights are the rights to be anarchistic, and say, “I refuse to do what I’m being told to do, because I’m American,” you know. Well, the importance of the individual is in their capacity to effect the Good. This is Platonism. This is the American Founding Fathers. And a moment like this, people have an opportunity to do the Good, which is to change the descent into Hell that the world is going through right now—the Western world in particular, and to act in a way that we make sure that this very interesting potential that’s emerged, that Ray and I discussed, coming out of this last week, that this does go in the right direction, that it does not collapse into Admiral Richard pushing the button. But that it’s going to depend, really, on us. You don’t get demoralized about the fact that Biden doesn’t run things: You take a good that he has put forward with Putin—largely because of Putin’s direction in this—but you take that as the basis on which, this is what we fight for; that’s what we fought for with Trump, that if he had succeeded in doing what he said he was going to do, he would have won the election with or without vote fraud. But he did. And the same thing is true, here. We don’t just sit back and say, “Gee, I hope Biden can do it. We fight like hell to get the American people to understand that there is an opening here which is going to depend upon how the American people act, in conjunction especially with our friends in Russia and in China.” SPEED: OK, fine. Ray? MCGOVERN: Thanks, Mike. It’s been a pleasure to be one with you. I would my gloss on this, this way: things change. Maybe it’s an advantage being so old as I am, you see a lot of change. When I was working, as my first job at CIA as an analyst, it was to analyze the Sino-Soviet dispute, to convince people that the Chinese and the Soviets hated each other with a passion! And that we could take advantage of it. Now, I thought, and most of my colleagues thought that this would be forever the case, that they would hate each other from previous movies! They had irredenta, they had everything! And all of a sudden—not all of a sudden, actually; we watched it gradually dissipate, to the point where no two allies have been ever closer. And this is the reality. So what am I saying? I’m saying that things change. Now, I think we have to leave open the possibility, that people will change, too, and that there is a common enemy here. When the Chinese and the Soviets hated each other, the common enemy was the United States, but the United States took advantage of this. And now, the common enemy is twofold: climate change—I have ten grandchildren. I care about this!—climate change, and the pandemic. We have to do something about all that. Now one has to allow for the fact that more progressive people, less bound to the MICIMATT, will eventually come to the fore and recognize that, you know, it’s over for all of us, if we don’t do something about climate change, and reining in pandemics. And then, then comes individual initiative, where people will come together, individually at first, but without fear and do what is necessary. I would finish with my favorite theologian, Annie Dillard, who said, “Who shall ascend to the mountain? Who shall do the work for us? There’s only us, there never has been any other.” So let’s put our nose to the grindstone. Thanks. SPEED: And thank you, very much, Ray. I just want to say, also, at this point, this has been a particularly both stimulating and informative discussion. And it’s also important to say, and this explains why I’m saying this, that the opinions expressed here are not necessarily ones on which everybody agrees, and that’s exactly what we’re trying to do. Let me repeat that: It’s going to be important, in particularly a United States that has become so sclerotic, that you rarely get a forum in which people can discuss ideas, that people get used to the notion of changing their view and of thinking about matters from a different standpoint. It’s fine—well, it’s not so fine, but it can be tolerable, when people find themselves in what they call “factional positions,” but really, actually, a lot of these are a product of advertising, the product of media. They’re not even opinions that people have formed. I’m saying that for anybody who is watching right now, and also in the future, this is exactly what we all are trying to pursue at this point in our nation. It’s important to get a platform, whereby we can not only talk about these things, but recognize that in the dispute comes wisdom.
HARLEY SCHLANGER: Hello, I’m Harley Schlanger with the Schiller Institute and Executive Intelligence Review. It’s January 6, 2022, and I’m joined today, very happily, by Dr. Andrey Kortunov, the director general of the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC). He’s been a participant at several Schiller Institute conferences. The RIAC itself is a very prestigious and important institute in shaping Russian foreign policy. We’re speaking at a moment of heightened tension between the U.S. and NATO with Russia, but also on the eve of a number of dialogues which have a potential for a breakthrough, and we want to explore this with Dr. Kortunov. Andrey, thank you for joining us today. ANDREY KORTUNOV: You’re welcome. SCHLANGER: The tension that’s been growing in the most recent period can be traced back to the Dec. 3rd leak in the Washington Post, claiming that the Russians and President Putin are about to invade Ukraine. This has led to several discussions, two talks, in fact, videoconference talks between Presidents Putin and Biden. And there is a demand from President Putin that there be a discussion about legally binding agreements for Russian national security. I’d like to start by just asking you, why do you think at this time, there’s been increased tensions? I don’t mean to say it just started Dec. 3rd, but we’ve seen a constant drumbeat since then. KORTUNOV: Well, it’s hard to tell what exactly triggered the current escalation, but I think it was simmering for some time. If you look at the Russian side of the equation, of course, there has been a growing disappointment with the performance of the Normandy group, and I think that right now, there are very clear frustrations about the ability of this group to lead to the full implementation of the Minsk agreements. There were hopes when Mr. Zelenskyy came to power in Kiev, that he would be very different from his predecessor, Mr. Poroshenko, but at the end of the day, it turned out that it was more of the same. He introduced new legislation on languages, which implies naturalization of the use of the Russian language in Ukraine; he banned a couple of important and influential opposition media; and he prosecution some of Russia-friendly politicians in his country, so the perception was that probably we cannot expect too much from him. Likewise, there was growing frustration with Paris and Berlin, in terms of their ability to use their leverage in Kiev to make the Ukrainian side implement the Minsk agreements. And an indicator of this was the publication of an exchange of letters between Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov and his peers in Paris and in Berlin, a very unorthodox, unusual step for Russian diplomacy, which suggests that Russia cannot really count on Berlin and Paris as honest brokers in this context. So, I think ultimately, the decision was made that we should bring it to the attention to President Biden, because President Biden might be a tough negotiator, but he at least delivers on his commitments. And Biden has demonstrated that he is ready to continue a dialogue with Moscow. They had a meeting with President Putin in June of last year in Geneva, and I think that the decision was made that we should count on the United States more than on our European partners. This is how I see the situation on the Russian side. And of course, there are also concerns about what Putin called a “military cultivation” of the Ukrainian territory by the North Atlantic Alliance. Looking at the situation from Moscow, one can see that although Ukraine is not a member to the NATO alliance, but there is more and more military cooperation between Ukraine and countries like the United States, and Germany, and the United Kingdom, and Turkey, and that changes the equation in the east of Ukraine; and I think that the concerns in Moscow are that at some point, President Zelenskyy, or whoever is in charge in Kiev, might decide to go for a military solution of the Donbas problem, and this is definitely not something that Moscow would like to see. So in certain ways, the Russian policy in Ukraine is that of deterrence, to deny Kiev a military solution for the problem of the east. SCHLANGER: Now, you wrote that you don’t believe that President Putin intends to invade Ukraine: That it would be an enormous cost to Russia, and that, in fact, sending troops to the border which was within Russia, may be in all this increased tension, may be designed to send a signal to the West—you just mentioned France and Germany. But do you think the West is getting the signal? Annalena Baerbock, the German Foreign Minister, was just in Washington and she and Blinken were rattling their sabers, a little bit, again. Stoltenberg of NATO continues to make very strong statements. Do you think the signal is being recognized, or it’s reaching the people that need to understand what President Putin is insisting on? KORTUNOV: Well, I think that it really depends on how you define “recognition” of the signal: Because on the one hand, indeed, you’re absolutely right, we observe a lot of rather militant rhetoric coming from the West, and it is not limited to Washington and to Berlin only. We see some other Western countries, where they make very strong statements, denying Russian veto power over decisions that are made, or can be made within the NATO alliance. But on the other hand, you can also observe that there is a readiness, at least, to start talking to Moscow, and this is exactly what Mr. Putin apparently wants. His point is that if we do not generate a certain tension, you will not listen to us, you will not even hear us. So we are forced to make all these noises in order to get heard, if not listened to. So they are ready to meet. I am not too optimistic about potential breakthroughs that can be reached within these meetings, but the idea to meet and to discuss a band of issues is already something that President Putin can claim as his foreign policy accomplishment. SCHLANGER: Now, in the United States, the media are continuing to paint President Putin as an autocrat, Russia as authoritarian nation, and they’re sort of missing one of the broader points here, which is that we’re looking at something which could be described as a reverse Cuban Missile Crisis. And I just went through President Kennedy’s Oct. 22, 1962, where he made a point very parallel to what President Putin is saying, which is that no nation can tolerate offensive weapons that close to its border, as the Soviet weapons were to the U.S. in Cuba. Do you think this is something that is part of the consideration from the standpoint of President Putin and the Russian government? KORTUNOV: Well, I think that, again, you’re right, here. I think that definitely President Putin implies that there are certain rules of the game, maybe not codified rules of the game, that should be observed. And I think that when we’re talking about the U.S. position, there is a standard U.S. feeling of exclusiveness—we can do it because we are good guys, so we cannot harbor any evil intentions, so our missiles are fine. These are peacekeeping missiles, they cannot constitute any threat to Russia or to anyone else. But if you guys put your missiles in the vicinity of our borders, since you are bad guys, it means your missiles are also bad, and that they should be removed. Of course, the United States pursues this policy of double standards for a very long time, and I understand why the United States is doing that, but I think that such double standards can no longer work in our world. So, if we agree that there should be some constraints, and that security interests of major powers should be taken into consideration, then it should be applied universally. It should not be applied to the United States only, but it should be applied to Russia, to China, to some other countries as well. SCHLANGER: Now, you’ve spoken of your view that there needs to be a new security architecture, to replace the existing bloc structure which seems to be left over from the Cold War. Just a few days ago, the permanent five nations of the UN Security Council issued a statement, which I think was quite extraordinary, that “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” which is an echo of the discussion between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev back in October 1986 in Reykjavik. Is this the kind of thing that can move toward a new security architecture, or recognition of something like this? And what kind of changes would you like to see, in order to create stability and ease the tensions? KORTUNOV: Well, I would say that this is an important first step, and the question is whether this step will have any continuation. Because it is relatively easy, though it is difficult in itself, but it is, in relative terms, it is easier to make a general statement, without making any specific commitments, than to go for something more practical. I guess that one of the problems we see in Europe, in particular, is that NATO has monopolized the security agenda in Europe, and that implies that if you are not within NATO, you have no stakes in the European security: You are not a stakeholder. And if you’re not a stakeholder, you are tempted to become a spoiler. And that is something that I see as a major problem. So, in my view, the key goal should be not to reverse the NATO enlargement, which is not possible, I think. But rather to deprive NATO of its monopoly position on European security matters. That might imply giving more power and more authority more inclusive European institutions, like the Organization on Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), for example, which really needs some addition flesh on its bones. It has to be empowered, it has to become a real European multilateral organization that can take a part of the security agenda. There might be some other agreements, and some other arrangements that would diversify our security portfolio in Europe. But I think that definitely, any European system which excludes Russia by definition, is likely to be very—not very stable, let me put it in this way, and fragile, and it will have high maintenance costs. So, I think it’s better to have Russia in, rather than to have Russia out. SCHLANGER: Now, in an article you wrote recently, “A Non-Alarmist Forecast for 2022,” one of the things you talked about is finding areas of cooperation. And you say one of the most urgent of these is Afghanistan for obvious reasons: the refugee crisis, the potential for radicalization of people if the humanitarian crisis deepens—as it is; David Beasley of the World Food Program just said yesterday, almost 9 million Afghans are at the verge of starvation. [https://russiancouncil.ru/en/analytics-and-comments/analytics/a-non-alarmist-forecast-for-2022/] Do you see a potential, then, through the Extended Troika—China, Pakistan, Russia, United States—to do something? And as you know, Mrs. Helga Zepp-LaRouche of the Schiller Institute has called for an “Operation Ibn Sina” to use the healthcare situation as the basis for beginning, not just emergency aid, but building up a modern healthcare system in Afghanistan. Is this some area, where you could see some cooperation? KORTUNOV: Well, Afghanistan strikes me as one of a very few places in the world, where I see no major contradictions between the East and the West, between Russia and China on the one hand, and the United States and the European Union on the other. I think that everybody around Afghanistan, and also if we consider overseas powers, everybody is interested in seeing Afghanistan as a stable place, as a place which will not harbor international terrorism, as a place which will stop being a major drug producer and drug exporter to neighboring countries: So these interests are essentially the same. I would definitely call for an as broad international coalition to deal with Afghanistan as possible; and this coalition should involve not only neighboring countries—which are clearly very important—but also countries which have the stakes in Afghanistan. We can talk about the European Union which remains the largest assistance provider to Afghanistan, even today; we can talk about the United States with its residential influence in Afghanistan; we can talk about Pakistan, Turkey, Iran, and the Central Asian states. So I think the broader the coalition we have in dealing with Afghanistan the better it is, because it would mean that we have more leverage in dealing with the regime in Kabul and that also implies that we can agree on the red lines that this regime should not cross if it wants to maintain its international legitimacy. So I think Afghanistan can be regarded not only as a challenge, but also as an opportunity for a multilateral, international cooperation. We can talk about the Extended Troika. We can talk about the SCO [Shanghai Cooperation Organization] as a platform to discuss Afghanistan. We can talk about other formats, but formats are just tools in our hands. The key issue is to agree on what we expect from the Taliban, and what we can give the Taliban in exchange. SCHLANGER: Now, another area I want to take up with you is the Russia-China alliance. This is causing sleepless nights for a lot of the geopoliticians who see this as primarily a military alliance and it seems as though they’re ignoring the economic benefits of Eurasian integration, including potential benefits for the West. I wonder what your thoughts are on this? Is this going to continue the alliance, and is it more than just a reaction to the targetting of Moscow and Beijing by the Western war-hawks? KORTUNOV: I think that these days, everybody is pivoted to Asia, Asia is becoming an important driver of the global economic development, and you cannot ignore China, no matter where you sit—whether you sit in Moscow, or Brussels, or in Washington, you have to keep in mind what’s going on in Beijing. So the Russian-Chinese cooperation has its own logic: We have arguably the longest land border in the world, and definitely, there is a natural complementarity of the Russian and the Chinese economies. Trade is growing pretty fast: I think if you take last year, it was about $140 billion and there is a lot of potential there. There are also common interests: there are interests that the two countries share in terms of Eurasia, and we discussed Afghanistan; definitely this is where Russian and Chinese interests mostly coincide. We can talk about the situation in Northeast Asia, and again, here, there is a noble effort for Russian and Chinese interests. As far as the United States is concerned, I think definitely both countries are exposed to political and military and economic pressures from Washington. The Biden administration continues the policy of dual containment targetted as both Beijing and Moscow, and that is an additional factor that brings Russia and China closer to each other. But let me emphasize once again that the Russian-Chinese cooperation has its own dynamics, its own logic and this logic does not depend fully on the position of the United States though this position is important for politicians both in Russia and in China. SCHLANGER: I want to come back to the P5 statement on not fighting nuclear wars, because we’ve raised this before in discussion with you: President Putin in January of 2020 proposed a P5 summit, so that it’s broader than just the United States and Russia. Do you still see this as a venue that would be an appropriate one for taking up some of these broader issues? KORTUNOV: I think it would be important, at least, in order to reactivate the United Nations Security Council. Because unfortunately, we see on many important issues, the council cannot really deliver, because there are very clear disagreements between its permanent members and that prevents the council from taking a consolidated action. So I think if they discuss some of the regional issues at such a meeting; if they discuss issues like nonproliferation, or the fight against international terrorism, or let’s say, energy or food security, that would be helpful. Of course, the P5 cannot decide on every single international issue. They cannot resolve all the global problems without participation of other states, but you have to start somewhere, and maybe a P5 meeting, face to face hopefully, will be this important starting point. If it is successful, then we can complement it with other formats, for example, when we talk about the economic dimension we can do a lot within the G20 framework, and that should complement the efforts of the Security Council. Some issues can be discussed in the framework of bilateral U.S.-Russian negotiations, some of them will require multilateral discussions, in multilateral formats. So formats might be different. The question is whether they have the political will to pursue this agenda, whether they are ready to go beyond their conventional wisdom and think strategically. SCHLANGER: And on this question then of bilateral discussion, do you think there’s a prospect for progress on nuclear arms discussions in the year ahead? KORTUNOV: I think that if there is a will, there is a way, of course. But it will be an uphill battle for both sides, because it’s not clear what we could have after the New START agreement expires in about four years from now. The arms race is changing. It’s no longer about numbers, it’s no longer about warheads and delivery means. It’s about quantity, it’s about precision, it’s about prompt strike, it’s about autonomous lethal weapons, it’s about cyborgs, it’s about space, and we still have to find ways to counter these very dangerous, destabilizing trends in the nuclear arms race. On top of that, we have a very serious problem of how to multilateralize strategic arms control, because the lower we go—I mean “we,” the United States and Russian Federation—the lower we go, the more important nuclear capacities of a third country become, and we have to engage them in this way or another into the arms control of the future. So there are many issues here. I will say I’m probably pessimistic about the future of arms control, but it will require a lot of commitment, a lot of patience and a lot of stamina. SCHLANGER: Somewhat pressing right now, which is the situation in Kazakhstan: We were talking last night, given the upcoming meetings and the potential for a breakthrough, that maybe we should be watching for something coming out of the blue that could be a destabilizing influence. And there are elements of what’s happening in Kazakhstan which are coherent with what we’ve seen with color revolutions in the past, including Western intervention into the affairs of other countries. Do you have any reading on this? Any thoughts on that? KORTUNOV: Well, it’s hard to tell. It’s probably too early to jump to conclusions, because of course, there will be people in the West who would applaud the kind of developments in Kazakhstan. At the same time, for instance, if you look at large American oil and mining companies, they had a pretty good business in Kazakhstan, and they cannot be interested in a political destabilization there. So I’m not sure that the United States has been directly involved in staging a color revolution in Kazakhstan. But definitely, there are some external players, that might be interested in turmoil and mutiny in Kazakhstan. Having said that, I should underscore that there are some fundamental domestic roots of the problem: Definitely the leadership of the country was too slow to react to the social and economics demands of the population. They promised political reforms, but again, they dragged their feet on this issue, which triggered the events that we now observe. I can only hope that everybody will learn appropriate lessons. The state authorities should learn how important it is to keep an eye on the changing moods of society, and protesters should also learn that the borderline between peaceful protests and violent extremism might be murky. We now see that already hundreds of people, unfortunately, were killed in Kazakhstan. There were many cases of looting and vandalism, and definitely this is something that has to be stopped. SCHLANGER: Well, Andrey, thank you very much for your time and joining us today. KORTUNOV: Thank you. SCHLANGER: As these meetings take place and we see new developments, I’d like to be able to have an opportunity to speak with you again and see how these things are moving. KORTUNOV: My pleasure, thank you.
The following is an edited transcription of an interview conducted with Dr. George Koo, by Michael Billington on December 29, 2021. Dr. Koo is one of the leading Chinese-American writers and organizers in regard to U.S.-China policy and on the conditions of Chinese-Americans in the United States, especially the persecution over these last years of Chinese-Americans and Chinese in the U.S.EIR: This is Mike Billington with the Executive Intelligence Review, the Schiller Institute, and the LaRouche Organization. I’m here with Dr. George Koo. Would you like to say a few words about your own history, Dr. Koo, when you came to the U.S., your education and your career? Dr. Koo: Thank you. And Mike, thank you for inviting me. It’s a pleasure to be with you. I started a draft of my autobiography, and my working title is Best of Both Worlds. By that, I mean, of my first 11 years in China, which was in, probably, one of the worst periods of Chinese history—war torn China—I was fortunate. I never saw a single Japanese soldier, and I never lived under the Japanese occupation with all its brutality and inhumanity. What happened was, my parents graduated from, and were affiliated with, Xiamen University. The leaders of that university, in their wisdom, knew that the Xiamen Harbor was too strategic to be {not} occupied by the Japanese troops. So in 1937, they picked up and moved roughly 200 miles into the interior part of Fujian province. China is very mountainous, so 200 miles is actually quite an appreciable distance away from Xiamen, and as a consequence, the Japanese never saw the strategic need to occupy the area, a very small hamlet called Changting. I was born there, and because of that, I actually had a very nurturing, peaceful upbringing by my parents. I was actually a couple of years ahead of my class in the grammar school. When the war was over and we moved back to Xiamen, I went back a year, because all my fellow students were five years older than I was, because they were interrupted by the war. When I came to the U.S., I had graduated from sixth grade, which gave me a nice foundation—not only the Chinese language, but also an appreciation of the Chinese culture and Chinese history. I was fortunate. My father had already gotten a fellowship from the nationalist government. They used some of the war reparations from Japan to send some of their students to continue their graduate education after World War Two, and my father was among them. He was in Seattle already, continuing his graduate studies. He was trained as a marine biologist, and was in the University of Washington to study fisheries. In 1949, a lot of these divided families—where the scholar was in the U.S. for further education but the family stayed behind on the mainland—they all had to make a crucial decision, whether they were going to leave the U.S. and go back to China, or they were going to try to get their families to come to the U.S., or they would face an uncertain period of separation. We were fortunate—we were able to emigrate to the U.S. in 1949. I was eleven at the time, didn’t know a word of English, but the Seattle public school system was really, really outstanding. We didn’t feel that we had to go to a private school, so I was brought up through the Seattle public schools. I caught up with my English by the time I graduated from high school. I was fortunate enough to get a partial scholarship and work program to attend MIT. I went to MIT for my bachelor’s and master’s degrees. I got married—my wife was similarly a Chinese-American who came to the U.S. when she was, I think, six years old. We met at MIT in graduate school. I joined Boeing, worked at Boeing on their Saturn project, and subsequently joined Allied Chemical, continuing my graduate studies, and got my doctorate degree at Stevens Institute of Technology. That’s pretty much the early part of my career. I joined SRI [formerly the Stanford Research Institute] in conducting what is called industrial economic research. From there, I joined Chase Bank and subsequently Bear Stearns to work on China Trade Advisory Business. For an appreciable period of time, I was helping American businesses doing business in China, establishing business relationships and also negotiating joint venture contracts, cooperation, and so on. From that basis, I developed a very basic understanding of China, how China works, where they’re coming from. As we got later into the relationship, I could see that there was a tremendous gap in understanding between China and the U.S., and I sort of took upon myself the role to help bridge the understanding between the two countries. That’s when I began to write about U.S.-China relations. This is, I guess, what we’ll talk about today. Confrontation Is Lose-LoseEIR: A lot of that I didn’t know. I’m glad to learn that about you. You spoke at the Schiller Institute conference on November 13. Your presentation was called “The Survival of Our World Depends on Whether the U.S. and China Can Get Along.” You noted there that the Chinese economy, by certain kinds of accounting, is now larger than that of the U.S., and that the U.S. response has been, as you said, to “push China’s head underwater rather than trying to compete on its own.” I concur with you on that. What would you say is the economic and technological impact of that policy, both on China, and also on the U.S.? Dr.Koo: It’s unfortunately a zero-sum approach that the U.S. is taking First, it assumes that by taking this approach the U.S. will win at the expense of China, and that China will lose. But what will actually happen, of course, in a zero-sum approach, is that each side will try to endeavor to win at the expense of the other. The eventual outcome is lose-lose—both sides lose. It’s arguable whether China will lose more than the U.S., and the reason I say that is because, China has a much more vibrant, healthy trading relationship with virtually all parts of the world compared to the U.S. So, economically, they have a lot more reach and flexibility. Second, it goes without saying that China has a very complete, robust manufacturing base, which we do not. We have already emptied out our manufacturing base, and for Trump to impose a tariff barrier and presume that that will bring the manufacturing base back is very wrongheaded. It shows his, I guess, ignorance on the basic principles of economics. I don’t find, and I don’t expect, that very many manufacturing firms will come back unless the economics is basically favorable. And as you know, the justification for the tariff barriers was that it was going to be “free money” coming to the U.S. Treasury, and the Chinese exporters were going to pay for it. And of course, that was far from reality. The reality is the increased prices the American consumers end up paying, so it’s not free money; it’s coming out of one pocket and going to the other. That just raises the cost of living. There’s no question that by separating or attempting to separate the two economic spheres of influence, if you will, that both will lose. I’m not at all sure that the U.S. will come out ahead in a lose-lose outcome. Ambassador BurlingameEIR: You are also the head of something called the Burlingame Foundation, which is named after Anson Burlingame, the American diplomat in China who actually ended up representing China. Could you discuss a bit about his career, when there was an attempt by the U.S. to establish good relations with China, which was at that time under the boot of the British? Dr. Koo: About 13 years ago I happened to catch, in a very small local newspaper that covers the city of Burlingame, that the Burlingame Historical Society wrote about the life of Anson Burlingame—that’s the first time I heard about him, and that the city of Burlingame was named after him. So I read up on it. I was fascinated because, here is somebody who was a dedicated abolitionist, anti-slavery, who placed the highest importance on human rights and human dignity, and was one of the founders of the Republican Party and an energetic, vigorous supporter of Abraham Lincoln, and helped get Lincoln elected. He worked so hard that he lost his own re-election as a congressman from Massachusetts. So, Lincoln offered to appoint him as an ambassador, first to the Austria-Hungary Empire. But the Austrian government didn’t want Burlingame—Burlingame was very vocal about the suppression of the Hungarians by the Austrian emperor, so he was persona non grata from the get-go. So then Lincoln appointed him to be ambassador to China. He left the U.S. in 1861, but he took his time, landed in Hong Kong, and travelled up through China gradually so that he could learn more about the Chinese culture, the Chinese people, the Chinese history. By the time he got to Beijing, it was already 1862. He made his stand very clear: that China’s sovereignty was to be respected, that he was not there to carve up China for the U.S., unlike the British and other Western powers that were based there. He was very outspoken on what was fair in how to deal with China from a U.S. point of view. In fact, when some American was accused of murdering some Chinese nationals while he was Ambassador, he had him arrested, presided over his trial, and accepted witnesses from China—Chinese witnesses, which was unheard of if you were a British court or a French court or some of the others. He then pronounced him guilty and sentenced him to be executed. (I think he never got executed, because he escaped, but that’s a different story.) All of that very much impressed the regent behind the throne. His name was Prince Gong, Gong Qing Wang in Chinese. Prince Gong was so impressed with Anson Burlingame and his integrity that when Burlingame was all set to return to the U.S.—that would have been 1867—Prince Gong went to see him and said, “Mr. Burlingame, we need to go to the Western countries and try to renegotiate the various unequal treaties that have been imposed upon us. We have a team all set to go, but we need someone of international stature to lead this group. Would you be willing to lead it?” Burlingame immediately accepted the appointment, wrote a letter to his boss, the Secretary of State, William Seward, and said, “Hey, I’m coming back, but I’m coming back as an Ambassador from China,” and that’s what happened. He came to the U.S. in early 1868, took the train that the Chinese had helped to build, the Transcontinental Railroad, celebrated all along the way, got to Washington, and negotiated a treaty called—in shorthand—the Burlingame Treaty of 1868. That treaty recognizes the mutual sovereignty, the equal rights of citizens from one country living in the other, the mutual rights to emigrate from one to the other. It was the first treaty that China enjoyed with the Western countries of that kind, and that set a different relationship between the U.S. and China that had lasting effects, even though the Chinese exclusion laws of 1882 canceled the Burlingame Treaty. One of the lasting effects was the Chinese Educational Mission that was organized, I think, starting in 1871. This mission was organized by a guy by the name of Rong Hong, or in Cantonese, Yung Wing. He had been brought over [to the U.S.] earlier by American missionaries, and was a graduate of Yale. When he went back to China, he was entrusted by the Manchu government to be the intermediary between the U.S. and China. He brought a munitions plant—a turnkey plant—from the U.S. to China, and convinced one of the senior officials there that China should send young boys somewhat like himself to the U.S. to get a U.S. education. Through a lot of effort on his part, he convinced families, mostly families in the Guangzhou area, to send 120 boys to the U.S. to be educated. Thirty boys a year were sent over a four-year period. The first batch landed in 1871. They were all 12, 13 years old, if you can imagine. They ended up in Connecticut, in New England; they were being hosted mostly by Christian families in their area and educated in American schools. Some of them became old enough to attend college, such as MIT, Yale—a lot of them went to Yale because of Rong Hong—and Columbia—and some others of the best schools on the East Coast. It only lasted four years. The third- and fourth-year batches of young kids never got to finish or attend college, because the internal politics of China became very negative, watching these young Chinese kids becoming “too Americanized,” and losing their Chinese roots and Chinese culture. So, they brought them back and interrupted their education. Nevertheless, this group of Western-educated young Chinese later on went on to have a tremendous influence, especially after the fall of the Manchu dynasty and in the Republican government. One of them, who was actually an outstanding baseball pitcher and hitter when he was in the U.S., was appointed Ambassador to Washington. He got to be good friends with Teddy Roosevelt — he was the one who convinced Roosevelt, by the time he got to be President, that the indemnity funds which the Chinese were paying to the U.S.1 could be better used by sending them back to train and educate Chinese in the American system of education. Some of that money funded the building of Tsinghua University that we now know in Beijing, and also funded some of the outstanding students from China to be educated in the U.S.2, starting in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, including my father-in-law, by the way. He was sent to get a bachelor’s degree from MIT, a master’s from Pennsylvania, and a doctorate in electrical engineering from Harvard. Boeing’ chief engineer, Wong Tsu, was one of that batch. He went to Boeing, designed the first sea plane, which the U.S. Navy bought, and that got Boeing started. Then Wong Tsu went back to China. There’s a whole list of people which that particular mission created. Now back to Burlingame. After he successfully negotiated the Burlingame Treaty of 1868, he then took the Chinese delegation and went to Europe. He visited the British, the French, and others, trying to convince them that they should do the same. Of course, none of those countries were interested in recognizing China on an equal sovereignty basis. But they also didn’t want to antagonize somebody of Burlingame’s stature. So, they just sort of fobbed him off and stalled. Eventually he ended up in St. Petersburg in February of 1870. There he contracted pneumonia and died within four days. He was a few days short of his 50th birthday when he died in the service of China. This story, by the way, is pretty much forgotten in the U.S. especially, but also in China. But one of the young reporters that he befriended on his way to China was a beginning reporter by the name Sam Clemens, who later on, as you know, became Mark Twain. And Mark Twain wrote probably the best eulogy on Anson Burlingame when Burlingame died. So the reason for me and some of the others to start the Burlingame Foundation was really to remind the people of the world, especially in the U.S. and China, that there was a point in time in history when the relationship between the two countries was really exemplary, and we would like to see it go back to that basis again. Sun Yat-sen and the American SystemEIR: Yes, indeed. As you know, Dr. Sun Yat-sen was not educated in the United States, exactly, but he and his brother went from the Guangzhou area to Hawaii to work, where he was taken under the care of a missionary family who were part of the Henry Carey School, who had studied the American System of economics developed by Alexander Hamilton. When Sun Yat-sen then came back to China and ended up organizing the Republican movement that led to the overthrow of the dynasty in 1911 and the establishment of the Chinese Republic, his organizing was based on what he called the Three Principles of the People, which was based on the ideas of Abraham Lincoln, who said “government of the people, by the people and for the people.” In particular, Dr. Sun understood and taught the American System as it was invented by Alexander Hamilton. He even understood the factional differences within the United States, that Thomas Jefferson, although he wanted independence, was a follower of the British laissez faire system, including slavery, and so forth. This was Sun Yat-sen’s legacy. But that, too, is generally unknown in the United States. So, I’m wondering what you think about the impact of Sun Yat-sen in China and in the United States, how that is impacting things today, because it’s clear that the Chinese economists who are leading the miracle in China today are very, very familiar with this tradition. Dr. Koo: Yes, I think it’s fair to say that the influence of Sun Yat-sen, or in Chinese, Sun Zhongshan, continues to be a legacy that is still admired and studied, even in today’s China, even though he was not a leader of the Communist Party movement. However, while he was alive—and unfortunately, he didn’t live very long after the revolution—he wanted to accommodate both the Kuomintang (the Nationalist Party), and the Communist Party, and wanted them to work together, which was not to be, as we know. No question that his Three Principles is taken directly from Abraham Lincoln; he was an unabashed admirer of the American System and democracy as defined by the U.S. To a large extent, I think, as you said, the Communist Party, since the founding of the PRC [People’s Republic of China] very much did follow Sun Yat-sen’s doctrine along the way. One of Hamilton’s principles was the protection of homegrown industries through tariff barriers, and we saw China do that. They did protect their homegrown industries—they called them the pillar industries. They would protect them from competition, up to a certain point. But they also understand that there is an endpoint to when protective barriers, tariff barriers, cease to be working in their own interests. A lot of other emerging countries don’t understand that. Once they set up the tariff barriers, they don’t seem to have the ability or the wherewithal to remove these barriers, and the long-term consequences of having tariff barriers forever is to keep your own homegrown industries protected, but never competitive, because they’re not able to compete in the open trade situation. Now, we know that China has surpassed that handicap, because once they joined the WTO, and Premier Zhu Rongji started to remove the protection, it’s a sink or swim situation for the Chinese companies. Those that didn’t make it, that sank, were absorbed in the Chinese economy. Fortunately, I think the Chinese economy grew fast enough to take up the slack of the under- or unemployed as a result of having to face world competition. War Over Taiwan?EIR: Let me address the strategic crisis that we’re living through now between the U.S. and China. Ambassador Chas Freeman, who was the interpreter for Richard Nixon on his famous 1972 visit to China and who went on to have an esteemed diplomatic career, is a China scholar and expert. In an interview with EIR last month, said he thought that the U.S. had gone beyond the “red line” of China vis-à-vis the Taiwan situation, beyond the “One China, Two Systems” policy, by backing up the Democratic Progressive Party’s [DPP] policies in Taiwan, calling for independence. The U.S. appears to be sleepwalking into war both in the Russian and the Chinese situations, which could be, of course, disastrous for mankind. Dr. Koo: Right. EIR: You’re very familiar and knowledgeable about the developments in Taiwan. What do you think about how Taiwan got to the point that they’re now being used as a lever for a very evil policy? Dr. Koo: Unfortunately, the party in power in Taiwan, the DPP, probably doesn’t see the situation the way you just enunciated. I think they’d like to see themselves as a tail trying to wag the dog. Unfortunately, the Biden administration, like the Trump administration preceding it, is encouraging them on that line of thinking. By that, I mean, they are encouraged to push the line in the sand, if you will. I think we’ll have to go back to when the DPP came to power, with Chen Shui-bian their first elected President.3 It’s a very strange politics in Taiwan. Chen Shui-bian was elected because there was a bullet that made a right turn and grazed his belly on the night before the election, and also hit his vice president candidate in the knee. It created such an uproar that he successfully got enough sympathy votes to put him over and got him elected. Once he was elected, he changed the core [school] curriculum for grades K-12 and disconnected the Taiwan history from that of the mainland, so that the Taiwan kids growing up no longer know that they’re a part of the Chinese culture, Chinese history, and that their characters and poems and literature came originally from China. So the disenchantment, or this disaffection, of the Taiwan people started with Chen Shui-bian, or perhaps even from Lee Teng-hui, when Lee Teng-hui was President.4 Gradually, the people in Taiwan have become more and more detached from any sense of affiliation with the mainland. That’s a very important factor that’s happening here. The other thing is that the DPP has very successfully convinced the people of Taiwan that they are infinitely better off than what’s going on in mainland China, despite the fact that, if they were fortunate enough to go to Shanghai and go to other places, they could see for themselves what a difference it is. In fact, the elites, the better educated, better motivated, which is maybe a couple of million of the young Taiwanese people, are living and working in mainland China, establishing their careers there. A lot of them are working for Taiwan companies that are based in mainland China. They know the difference, but when they go back to Taiwan on home leave, they can’t even talk about it, because the local Taiwan folks would hoot at them and heckle them, and don’t believe what they’re saying. So there’s a dichotomy here between Taiwan and mainland China. Beijing feels that time is on their side. Eventually, the people in Taiwan will recognize that it’s in their benefit to be part of China and not to be trying to be the fifty-first state of the United States of America, which will never happen, even though the DPP seems to be deluded in that sense and that feeling. Is Taiwan a spark? I think Taiwan could be a spark for a war and conflagration if that’s what the United States wants. If the U.S. pushes to the point where Beijing feels that they have to respond, then we will have a disaster in our hands. But as you know, the way the situations are being portrayed by our mainstream media and by our politicians is totally distorted. Whether it’s about Taiwan, about Xinjiang, about Afghanistan, about any part of the world where we have troops and we have bases. Somehow, we’re there to save the world and the Chinese and the Russians are there to destroy the world. Whereas in actual fact, it’s just the opposite. U.S. Destabilization in Hong KongEIR: You mentioned Hong Kong. I know you’ve been very active in business, as well as just knowledgeable about Hong Kong for a long time. As you know, in 2020, just as there were rioters in the streets across the United States burning down shops, shopping centers, attacking police and so on, the same thing had been going on in Hong Kong the year before, where masked, black-clad young people were driven to go out and set fires and attack police and so on. And yet this was called, in the U.S. press, in regard to he Hong Kong riots, “peaceful protests for democracy.” So, what is your view of the role of Hong Kong today in regard to China, as well as in its relations with the West? Dr. Koo: I’m glad you brought it up, Mike, because this is a classic example, a fabrication and distortion, of what’s going on in Hong Kong. The riots in Hong Kong started in 2019. It all started because a young Hong Kong couple went to Taiwan and the boyfriend murdered the girlfriend, who was pregnant at the time, and cut up her body and put it in a suitcase, and then went back to Hong Kong by himself. And because there were no extradition treaties between Taiwan and Hong Kong, he basically went home scot-free and was free to roam around the streets. The law enforcement couldn’t do anything about it. So, that brought home the point and the need to have an extradition treaty between Hong Kong and rest of the world. In fact, at the time, Hong Kong was one of the few territories or countries that did not have extradition treaties, neither with Taiwan nor with Beijing. So when the Chief Executive of Hong Kong started to enact an extradition treaty, the opposition, the “democracy movers” of Hong Kong, objected, created a riot, and insisted that they must not have this extradition treaty, because, they claimed, that with it they could be extradited, they could be arrested and be sent to Beijing at any time, and they would be threatened. That really created the unrest and the riot. What we found out afterwards, is that those protesters were being funded by the NED, the National Endowment for Democracy, which is a CIA-funded arm whose mission is to create unrest, instability, and disturbance anywhere in the world, in countries where the power that reigns is not to our liking. That’s what happened in Hong Kong. The media not only considered it a democracy movement—one of our leaders, the Speaker of the House, as a matter of fact, publicly said, “What a beautiful sight that was!” Well, when the riots happened in the United States, I didn’t find anybody saying that they were a beautiful sight. It was clearly destruction and lawlessness and so on. So today what we have in Hong Kong, we now have an extradition treaty in place, we have a pledge of allegiance to the Beijing government in place, and we have a voter turnout to elect a batch of legislators for the Hong Kong government. All three things are cause for the Western media to criticize and say this is lack of democracy in Hong Kong. Well, let’s look at it, OK? The voter turnout was very low, was 30%, to elect the legislators. This just happened. Well, guess what? The normal turnout in New York City is 26%. So, do we say New York City is lacking democracy? Well, maybe it does lack democracy, but certainly you won’t find mainstream media reporting it on that basis. The Pledge of Allegiance? Well, it seems to me, we, in school, pledge allegiance to the flag all the time, and nobody complains about it as being an illegal maneuver. So, we’re looking at double standards, and it’s always to the benefit of us looking good and China looking bad. Pompeo and BBC Lies About the UyghursEIR: Perhaps the most extreme example of that was when Mike Pompeo began saying that China was guilty of genocide in Xinjiang against the Muslim Uyghur people, while anybody who would travel to Xinjiang would know how absurd that is. But nonetheless, it’s repeated in every newspaper, in the Congress, and in the White House. What can you tell us about the actual economic and social conditions of the Uyghur population in Xinjiang? Dr. Koo: There is a purpose to Mike Pompeo and his successor, [Antony] Blinken, and the media coverage to emphasize, “human rights violations in Xinjiang,” to the point that now Biden is actually forbidding Americans from buying cotton from Xinjiang. What is the purpose? Well, the purpose is to keep the Uyghurs in Xinjiang poor and underemployed. And why do we do that? Because wherever there’s instability, that’s what we want. That’s how we, the United States, maintain control. We thrive on instability anywhere else in the world. I’ll give you an example of a distortion. CGTN, which is the China Global Television Network, had a documentary that covered why China had recruited young Uyghur women to go to work in factories and in cities in other provinces. The idea of employment is income for her, skills for her to make a decent living, raise her living standard to the point that she could even afford to get her parents to move from Xinjiang for a better living. Uyghur women in Xinjiang do not get the proper education, they tend to stay home, marry young, have kids, and never have a chance to improve their living standard. The documentary also showed that the first time that she had to leave home to go to a faraway city in China, she was crying, because this was the first time that she was going to leave home. Well, BBC took that documentary and skillfully cut and pasted so that it comes out with the message: “See? Beijing is exploiting slave labor again, forcing these young women to leave home to work for peon wages somewhere else.” The same goes with picking cotton in Xinjiang: “Look at all these poor women picking cotton in Xinjiang.” Well, actually most of the cotton nowadays in Xinjiang is done by machines, and the machines are sold by John Deere, a very well-known American company. There’s so much fabrication and distortion going on. Mike Pompeo was actually very open compared to Blinken. Mike Pompeo said: “We lie, we cheat, we steal”—came right out in the open. Blinken does the same thing, but he’s a little smoother, so he doesn’t say, “We lie, we cheat, we steal.” But that’s what he does. He talks about, “China needs to follow the rules-based international order.” What is the rules-based international order? Well, if you listen to Blinken, it turns out the “rules-based international order” is whatever he says it is, not by the United Nations or by a multipolar type of definition. And of course, he has continued to parrot the Xinjiang human rights violations. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this guy by the name of Adrian Zenz, a German right-wing nut who’s been to Xinjiang maybe once, many years ago, and continues to spout all this fabrication about what’s going on in Xinjiang. You also have this Australian research institute [Australian Strategic Policy Institute, ASPI—ed.] that continues to fabricate reports one after another about what’s going on in Xinjiang and elsewhere in China. We have a deliberate effort on the part of Washington and on the part of Western media to blacken China for no other purpose than to justify attacking and making everything negative, so that the American people are thoroughly, thoroughly brainwashed. It’s not possible for the American public to make a separate judgment. We don’t have any politicians of stature willing to come out and say, “Hey, we are going down the tubes if we continue on this path, because we’re going to come out lose-lose. Our economy is going to go in the tank. We’re not going to be benefiting from any collaboration, and we’re not going to solve any of the global problems like the pandemic, like climate change,” and so on and so forth. So, I am very, very sad about where we are at this point. I applaud the Schiller Institute and Helga LaRouche and all the effort that you guys are doing, trying to get the message out. You probably have a better listenership in China and Russia and elsewhere. And somehow, we need to get your voice louder here in the United States. Democracy for the PeopleEIR: Well, of course, their argument is that America is good, and China and Russia are bad because we are a “democracy” and they’re an “autocracy.” In fact, as you know, Biden just held the so-called Democracy Summit, trying to create an alliance of countries who are deemed by the U.S. to be “democratic” against those that are “authoritarian.” In fact, the question of what democracy is, is a very interesting and important discussion, and the Chinese have been talking about that. How would you describe democracy in the U.S. compared to democracy in China? Dr. Koo: I think in the U.S., we are very flexible as to what democracy really is. If you’re a country on our side, you have democracy. If you’re against us, you have no democracy. Now, what is the example of our democracy? Let me count the ways: Our democracy is where the two Parties bicker, nitpick, and get nothing done. We don’t look at the global issues, the bigger issues of what’s good for our country. We don’t move on infrastructure. We don’t invest in health care. We don’t really care much about education that we talk about. We care about who gets elected. We care about, how to maneuver the election mechanism so that the other side has a disadvantage and we have the advantage. We have people who violate the Constitution and the rule of law, and they’re still walking free, and we don’t seem to be able to do anything about it. These are some examples of democracy as we practice in America. We also have democracy exercised in that if you live in the ghetto and if you’re Black, you don’t have a chance; you’re presumed guilty of everything we accuse you of, and it’s up to you to prove innocence. And that goes, by the way, for the Chinese-American scientists in this country. We can talk about that a little bit later. But democracy has become a very handy-dandy label, to blacken anybody that we don’t like and to pat ourselves on the back because we are supposed to be a democracy. Now, I can’t explain fully what China means by democracy, but I do know that they respect the human life of every person in their country. They have spent a great amount of effort alleviating poverty for their remote poor, for the villagers who live in some of the worst situations and worst conditions. Admittedly, it may be a propaganda film, but I saw some films of Xi Jinping walking up these muddy trails to visit remote villages to find out how they’re living and how they’re doing. Do they have enough to eat? Do they have warm clothes to wear? Do they have enough blankets, and so on and so forth. He would hold little village conversations with the people and ask them what problems do they have and what issues do they have that they would like to bring up? This is almost unheard of here. Here, when a politician comes to visit and have a town hall meeting, they usually have their hand out because they’re looking for political donations. This whole country’s election is run on money, and if you’re not in a position to write a big check, your voice really doesn’t count. So, there’s a very different way of practicing and exercising democracy, and we’re just kidding ourselves in this country that we all have “one man, one vote” type of equality. Russia and Sun TsuEIR: Before I ask you more about the persecution of the Chinese and Chinese-Americans, let me ask about President Biden. As I’m sure you know, at this moment, the crisis over Ukraine is extremely intense, and yet meetings have been set up between the U.S. and Putin and the representatives of Russia to attempt to deal with this crisis, to guarantee some security for Russia. In fact, it was announced today that Biden is going to talk to Putin tomorrow [Dec. 30]. He also has had several long discussions with Xi Jinping. Do you see this President as having the intent or the ability to try to override this extreme anti-Russia, anti-China hysteria within the press and the Congress, and even within his own administration? Dr. Koo: I’m doubtful that he could, because the situation that Russia and the U.S. is in, didn’t happen overnight. The NATO organization, for example, has been pushing and pushing, collecting members eastward, if you will, from Western Europe to the neighboring countries of Russia. And of course, this threatens Russia and Putin. And finally, Putin had to do something that will catch the attention of the West. The way he did that—I learned this from one of the analysts from China—is really in accordance with Sun Tzu’s Art of War. You negotiate from power and from strength. By amassing Russian troops on the border of Ukraine, it’s sending a very unequivocal message, which is that if we don’t get the reasonable settlement of cease-and-desist of the encroachment by the West, we have the upper hand. We can go in and take the eastern Ukraine at will, and there’s nothing you can do about it. And that’s the fact. I think that’s what the Pentagon realizes and understands. Whether Biden can effectively settle anything remains to be seen, because what Putin really wants, he’s made it very clear—he basically says, “Hey NATO, you need to sign a document that says you will cease and desist and not continue to expand your sphere of influence.” I think maybe some of the EU countries would be willing to go along, but NATO obviously is controlled by the U.S., and whether that’s going to happen remains to be seen. FBI Witch-Hunt Against Chinese in AmericaEIR: It’s very dangerous. So, on the persecution, you know that we’ve been very involved in documenting and opposing the effort by the Department of Justice and the FBI—starting actually a long time ago, but especially under Christopher Wray and the Trump administration and continuing today, with Wray still Director of the FBI—basically accusing anybody who is Chinese working in America, or Chinese-Americans who have any contact with China, are thereby automatically suspected of being spies. There have been some atrocious operations attacking leading scientists, who were helping to solve cancer and other diseases, who have been accused of spying, lost their jobs, lost their laboratories, and so forth. I know you’ve been an outspoken opponent of this, so I’d like you to say what you think needs to be said about that whole crisis in America today. Dr. Koo: Again, for Chinese-Americans or ethnic Chinese and to some extent, Asians—because our FBI and our government officials don’t always tell the difference between one Chinese and another Asian—so we’re all being tarred. The system of justice, as applied to us, is justice on its head. You are guilty until you prove you are innocent. It’s very, very difficult to prove a negative, as we all know. When a federal prosecutor comes after you, they have infinite resources in supporting them. You can be driven to poverty from the mounting legal defense bills. Frequently, the hapless Chinese scientists basically have to cop a plea just to get out from under the pressure and get out from the financial ruin that they face. This actually goes all the way back to J. Edgar Hoover. The bias against Chinese started from him. We had a “Chinese expert,” Paul Moore, not long retired now from the FBI, who basically said, if you see three Chinese at a cocktail party, they’re probably talking about the espionage and the intelligence that they’ve gathered. Just any three Chinese, or maybe Asians, could be guilty of spying. This guy used to be the carpool buddy of Robert Hanssen. They used to go to work together. Robert Hanssen, if you don’t remember, or don’t know, was indeed the biggest double agent for the Soviet Union before he was finally caught and sent to jail. He [Moore] never smelled a rat sitting next to Robert Hanssen, but he could see three Chinese standing on the corner as spying for China. Moore also promulgated the “grains of sand” theory of espionage. What is “grains of sand”? Well, we have hundreds of thousands of Chinese in this country, and they are loyal to China. They gather any little tidbits of information and they send it to Beijing. The implication is that there’s a supercomputer in the basement of some building in Beijing, cranking through all this little intelligence, through this computer, and out the other end comes the design of the multi-headed missile. That’s the kind of logic that we are facing from the FBI and the Department of Justice. There are even FBI agents that came right out and admitted in their testimony that they lied because they had to fill their quota of cases against Chinese-Americans. I think the long-term implication of this kind of bias is that we are going to lose. And the reason is, because the greatest source of STEM—science, technology, engineering, and math—graduates are coming from China. It’s proven through history that they have made tremendous contributions to American technology, American science, and also as American professors and teachers raising the next generation of students. So we are cutting our own nose to spite our face, because we are discouraging them from coming. And they are indeed not as enthusiastic about coming to the U.S. More and more of them—I saw as many as 80% of the Chinese students who come in and graduate are now going back to China, because it’s just too damn risky for them to stay here and work here. The Belt and Road in AmericaEIR: And all the time, the U.S. also is criticizing China for going out to the rest of the world with their development policy, what they learned in transforming their own country from poverty to one of the greatest economies in history. They are taking that to the rest of the world through the Belt and Road Initiative, which you’ve praised often, for trying to convey to other poor countries that the trick to getting out of poverty is building infrastructure and actually creating the conditions for a modern industrial country. You can only think that the attacks on the Belt and Road are coming from those who want to keep the world poor and divided and to keep China down. Dr. Koo: Right. EIR: Here in the U.S., our infrastructure is a disaster. We just passed a small infrastructure bill, which will barely dent the deficit we have. What can we do to get the U.S. to accept Chinese investment in U.S. infrastructure, which they wanted to do before this hysteria began? And even more important, how can we get the U.S. to recognize that it’s in its own interest to work with China on developing the real physical economies of nations in Africa and Asia and South America? Dr. Koo: I think, Mike, you made an important summary statement, which is, what can we do to convince the American people it’s in our interest to work with China? There are plenty of examples of the benefit that can accrue. For example, the Hamilton Bridge, which is the extension of the George Washington Bridge that goes over the Harlem River. That bridge was refurbished and rebuilt by a Chinese construction company that was based in New Jersey. That came within budget and on time. It employed American workers. Some of the management came from the China side, but the workers, the employment was good employment for the American workers. And that happened a few years ago. I wrote about it maybe two years ago. Another example? The subway cars in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles are being replaced by Chinese subway cars. These are coming from China, partially in kits, and are assembled in the U.S. The U.S. plant, I think, is outside Springfield, Massachusetts, and there may be another one being built outside of Chicago. The idea was, the state-of-the-art design and the siding and some of the important keys are being provided by China. But the inside air-conditioning, some of the other units, and so on are being provided locally, sourced in the U.S. The content of these cars is about 60% local content, meaning U.S. content, or more than 60%. So, it does qualify, according to the rules of satisfying being made locally. It’s a win-win situation, because these subway cars are state-of-the art. They’re quieter, they’re safer, and they’re more economical. Their prices are lower than third-party sources. In point of fact, in the United States, we no longer have the capability of making these subway cars, so we have to outsource. The other outsources are more expensive than the Chinese source. When the first car was delivered in Boston, there was a big hullabaloo, a source of celebration. The next targets the Chinese were looking at were New York and Washington. Then the politicians got into the act, and they said, “No, no, no, we can’t do that, because the Chinese could put in all these listening bugs in the subway car and spy on us while the cars are rolling into work.” Can you imagine you and I having a conversation? “Hey, Mike, how are the Yankees doing? You know, do you think they’re going to win the pennant this year?” And that goes to Beijing as espionage? How about that? The Common GoodEIR: I think one of the primary issues which exemplifie why the world has to work together, is the out-of-control pandemic, this COVID pandemic. As I think you probably know, Helga Zepp-LaRouche and former U.S. Surgeon General in the United States, Dr. Joycelyn Elders, have formed something they call the Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites, an idea taken from the 15th-Century genius Nicholas of Cusa, who was largely responsible for the Renaissance in Europe. Cusa said that to overcome conflicts between religions or ethnicities or nations, you have to think of the higher principle of the common needs and desires of mankind as a whole. This pandemic cannot be cured unless it’s cured everywhere, as we’ve seen by these variants coming back to bite us, because we refuse to build modern health care delivery systems in most countries and we’ve even hoarded vaccines from Africa and elsewhere. Zepp-LaRouche and Dr. Elders are calling for is that we must build a modern health system in every country in the world, which would include not just the hospitals and doctors, but clean water and electricity, of which many countries have none. This is certainly the kind of aim that the Belt and Road Initiative is targeting. Do you think this health issue is a means whereby we can overcome this division and geopolitics and get the world to come together for the common aims of mankind? Dr. Koo: Whether we get to the point you just summarized, will require a significant change in attitude in the United States. In China, people seem to naturally understand what’s for the greater good is more important than my individual druthers, my individual “exercise of freedom.” But that’s not the case here in the U.S. We even have people who object to vaccination because it’s an infringement on their personal freedom. If we have the inability to recognize what is the greater good in our own country, we will have even greater difficulty recognizing what is the greater good in solving the problem on a worldwide, global basis. We’re lucky in the sense that we are richly endowed in water compared to many other places in the world. Therefore, it’s hard for us to appreciate the importance of water elsewhere, whether it’s in Africa or Asia or elsewhere. We are so concerned and care about where we come down on these issues, we don’t even think about the fact that these issues affect all of us and not just in our little circle, our little world of the United States. So, I think the task ahead is a monumental one for the organization, unfortunately. Confucius in AmericaEIR: Maybe we should look back to Ben Franklin, who, as you probably know, was a great admirer of Confucius and the meritocracy system in China, and wanted to bring this idea of the common good—or the general welfare, as our Constitution calls it—into the U.S., in building the United States. But as you said, this has been lost in the process of so-called libertarian individual freedom. Dr. Koo: Right. It’s way overdone. EIR: Do you think we can teach Confucius to the American people? Dr. Koo: Well, we’re throwing them out. You know, these Confucius Institutes are being thrown out rather than being welcomed at this point. And again, they’re being victimized by the biases that we have here. I mean, we have this Senator from Arkansas [Sen. Tom Cotton—ed.] who says, “Hey, we can’t let the Chinese in unless they want to come to study Shakespeare.” And I added, well, they could go to Oxford and Cambridge to study Shakespeare, not come to the University of Arkansas. Maybe they can study how to be a top football team in the AP poll in Arkansas. EIR: Are there other issues you’d like to address to our audience and to the readers of EIR? Dr. Koo: Well, Mike, it’s really nice having this conversation. I just feel so disappointed on the path the United States is taking at this point. We seem to be insatiable in wanting to pick fights. We seem to need a common adversary to justify our military budgets. There is only one issue that has overwhelming bipartisan support in this country, and that is increasing the military budget. You have to ask, the American people need to ask: Why do we need an increased military budget? We can blow the world apart many times over with what we’ve got. What’s the point of intimidating everybody else? By intimidation, we think that we have other countries on our side. Actually, most countries fear us but do not like us, and do not admire what we’re doing. That’s why I’m so glad we’re having this conversation. I just wish that we can help turn some people around, and encourage not just thought leaders, but politicians, to understand what’s at stake and start to speak out on what would be sensible and in the interests of our country. EIR: Thank you very much; I appreciate this discussion. I think it should have ramifications throughout our country and hopefully around the world, that we can change America. I thank you again for doing our interview. Dr. Koo: It’s been a pleasure. Mike, thank you for inviting me.
Jens Jørgen Nielsen has degrees in the history of ideas and communication. He is a former Moscow correspondent for the major Danish daily Politiken in the late 1990s. He is the author of several books about Russia and the Ukraine, and a leader of the Russian-Danish Dialogue organization. In addition, he is an associate professor of communication and cultural differences at the Niels Brock Business College in Denmark.The Schiller Institute released a memorandum entitled “Are We Sleepwalking into Thermonuclear World War III,” on December 24th. In the beginning, it states, “Ukraine is being used by geopolitical forces in the West that answer to the bankrupt speculative financial system, as the flashpoint to trigger a strategic showdown with Russia, a showdown which is already more dangerous than the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and which could easily end up in a thermonuclear war which no one would win, and none would survive.” Jens Jørgen, in the past days, Russian President Putin and other high level spokesmen have stated that Russia’s red lines are about to be crossed, and they have called for treaty negotiations to come back from the brink. What are these red lines and how dangerous is the current situation? Jens Jørgen Nielsen: Thank you for inviting me. First, I would like to say that I think that the question you have raised here about red lines, and the question also about are we sleepwalking into a new war, is very relevant. Because, as an historian, I know what happened in 1914, at the beginning of the First World War — a kind of sleepwalking. No one really wanted the war, actually, but it ended up with war, and tens of million people were killed, and then the whole world disappeared at this time, and the world has never been the same. So, I think it’s a very, very relevant question that you are asking here. You asked me specifically about Putin, and the red lines, because you can have the point of view — I heard that the Clintons, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry, and many other American politicians, claim that we don’t have things like red lines anymore. We don’t have zones of influence anymore, because we have a new world. We have a new liberal world, and we do not have these kinds of things. It belongs to another century and another age. But you could ask the question, what actually are the Americans doing in Ukraine, if not defending their own red lines? Because I think it’s like, if you have a power, a superpower, a big power like Russia, I think it’s very, very natural that any superpower would have some kind of red lines, because you can imagine what will happen if China, Iran and Russia had a military alliance, going into Mexico, Canada, Cuba, maybe also putting missiles up there. I don’t think anyone would doubt what would happen. The United States would never accept it, of course. So the Russians would normally ask, why should we accept that Americans are dealing with Ukraine and preparing, maybe to put up some military hardware in Ukraine? Why should we? And I think it’s a very relevant question. And basically, the Russians see it today as a question of power, because the Russians, actually, have tried for, I would say, 30 years. They have tried. I was in Russia 30 years ago. I speak Russian. I’m quite sure that the Russians, at that time, dreamt of being a part of the Western community, and they had very, very high thoughts about the Western countries, and Americans were extremely popular at this time. Eighty percent of the Russian population in 1990 had a very positive view of the United States. Later on, today, and even for several years already, 80 percent, the same percentage, have a negative view of Americans. So something happened, not very positively, because 30 years ago, there were some prospects of a new world. There really were some ideas, but something actually was screwed up in the 90s. I have some idea about that. Maybe we can go in detail about it. But things were screwed up, and normally, today, many people in the West, in universities, politicians, etc. think that it’s all the fault of Putin. It’s Putin’s fault. Whatever happened is Putin’s fault. Now, we are in a situation which is very close to the Cuban Missile Crisis, which you also mentioned. But I don’t think it is that way. I think it takes two to tango. We know that, of course, but I think many Western politicians have failed to see the compliance of the western part in this, because I think there are many things which play a role that we envisage in a situation like that now. I think the basic thing, if you look at it from a Russian point of view, it’s the extension to the east of NATO. I think that’s a real bad thing, because Russia was against it from the very beginning. Even Yeltsin, Boris Yeltsin, who was considered to be the man of the West, the democratic Russia, he was very, very opposed to this NATO alliance going to the east, up to the borders of Russia. And we can see it now, because recently, some new material has been released in America, an exchange of letters between Yeltsin and Clinton at this time. So we know exactly that Yeltsin, and Andrei Kozyrev, the Russian minister of foreign affairs at this time, were very much opposed to it. And then Putin came along. Putin came along not to impose his will on the Russian people. He came along because there was, in Russia, a will to oppose this NATO extension to the East. So I think things began at this point. And later on, we had the Georgian crisis in 2008, and we had, of course, the Ukraine crisis in 2014, and, also, with Crimea and Donbass, etc. And now we are very, very close to — I don’t think it’s very likely we will have a war, but we are very close to it, because I think that wars often begin by some kind of mistake, some accident, someone accidentally pulls the trigger, or presses a button somewhere, and suddenly, something happened. Exactly what happened in 1914, at the beginning of World War I. Actually, there was one who was shot in Sarajevo. Everyone knows about that, and things like that could happen. And for us, living in Europe, it’s awful to think about having a war. We can hate Putin. We can think whatever we like. But the thought of a nuclear war is horrible for all of us, and that’s why I think that politicians could come to their senses. And I think also this demonization of Russia, and demonization of Putin, is very bad, of course, for the Russians. But it’s very bad for us here in the West, for us, in Europe, and also in America. I don’t think it’s very good for our democracy. I don’t think it’s very good. I don’t see very many healthy perspectives in this. I don’t see any at all. I see some other prospects, because we could cooperate in another way. There are possibilities, of course, which are not being used, or put into practice, which certainly could be. So yes, your question is very, very relevant and we can talk at length about it. I’m very happy that you ask this question, because if you ask these questions today in the Danish and Western media at all — because everyone thinks it’s enough just to say that Putin is a scoundrel, Putin is a crook, and everything is good. No, we have to get along. We have to find some ways to cooperate, because otherwise it will be the demise of all of us. Michelle Rasmussen: Can you just go through a little bit more of the history of the NATO expansion towards the East? And what we’re speaking about in terms of the proposed treaties that Russia has proposed is, firstly, to prevent Ukraine from becoming a formal member of NATO, and secondly, to prevent the general expansion of NATO, both in terms of soldiers and military equipment towards the East. So can you speak about this, also in terms of the broken promises from the western side? Jens Jørgen Nielsen: Yes. Actually, the story goes back to the beginning of the nineties. Actually, I had a long talk with Mikhail Gorbachev, the former leader of the Soviet Union, in 1989, just when NATO started to bomb Serbia, and when they adopted Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary into NATO. At this time, I had a long talk with Gorbachev. You should bear in mind that Gorbachev is a very nice person. He’s a very lively person, with good humor, and an experienced person. But when we started to talk, I asked him about the NATO expansion, which was going on exactly the day when we were talking. He became very gloomy, very sad, because he said, ‘Well, I talked to James Baker, Helmut Kohl from Germany, and several other persons, and they all promised me not to move an inch to the east, if Soviet Union would let Germany unite the GDR (East Germany) and West Germany, to become one country, and come to be a member of NATO, but not move an inch to the East. I think, also, some of the new material which has been released — I have read some of it, some on WikiLeaks, and some can be found. It’s declassified. It’s very interesting. There’s no doubt at all. There were some oral, spoken promises to Mikhail Gorbachev. It was not written, because, as he said, ‘I believed them. I can see I was naive.’ I think this is a key to Putin today, to understand why Putin wants not only sweet words. He wants something based on a treaty, because, basically, he doesn’t really believe the West. The level of trust between Russia and NATO countries is very, very low today. And it’s a problem, of course, and I don’t think we can overcome it in a few years. It takes time to build trust, but the trust is not there for the time being. But then, the nature of the NATO expansion has gone step, by step, by step. First, it was the three countries Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, and then, in 2004, six years later, came, among other things, the Baltic republics, and Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria. And the others came later on — Albania, Croatia, etc. And then in 2008, there was a NATO summit in Bucharest, where George Bush, president of the United States, promised Georgia and Ukraine membership of NATO. Putin was present. He was not president at this time. He was prime minister in Russia, because the president was Medvedev, but he was very angry at this time. But what could he do? But he said, at this point, he said, very, very clearly, we will not accept it, because our red lines would be crossed here. We have accepted the Baltic states. We have retreated. We’ve gone back. We’ve been going back for several years, but still, it was not off the table. It was all because Germany and France did not accept it, because Merkel and Hollande, at this time, did not accept Ukraine and Georgia becoming a member of NATO. But the United States pressed for it, and it is still on the agenda of the United States, that Georgia and Ukraine should be a member of NATO. So there was a small war in August, the same year, a few months after this NATO summit, where, actually, it was Georgia which attacked South Ossetia, which used to be a self-governing part of Georgia. The incumbent Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili did not want to accept the autonomous status of South Ossetia, so Georgia attacked South Ossetia. Russian soldiers were deployed in South Ossetia, and 14 of them were killed by the Georgian army. And you could say that George W. Bush promised Georgian president Saakashvili that the Americans would support the Georgians, in case Russia should retaliate, which they did. The Russian army was, of course, much bigger than the Georgian army, and it smashed the Georgian army in five days, and retreated. There was no help from the United States to the Georgians. And, I think, that from a moral point of view, I don’t think it’s a very wise policy, because you can’t say ‘You just go on. We will help you. – and not help at all when it gets serious. I think, from a moral point of view, it’s not very fair. But, actually, it’s the same which seems to be happening now in Ukraine. And in Ukraine, even though there was, what I would call a coup, an orchestrated state coup, in 2014. I know there are very, very different opinions about this, but my opinion is that there was a kind of coup to oust the sitting incumbent president, Viktor Yanukovich, and replace him with one who was very, very keen on getting into NATO. Yanukovich was not very keen on going into NATO, but he still had the majority of the population. And it’s interesting. In Ukraine, there’s been a lot of opinion polls conducted by Germans, Americans, French, Europeans, Russia and Ukrainians. And all these opinion polls show that a majority of Ukrainian people did not want to join NATO. After that, of course, things moved very quickly, because Crimea was a very, very sensitive question for Russia, for many reasons. First, it was a contested area because it was, from the very beginning from 1991, when Ukraine was independent — There was no unanimity about Crimea and it´s status, because the major part of Crimea was Russian-speaking, and is very culturally close to Russia, in terms of history. It’s very close to Russia. It’s one of the most patriotic parts of Russia, actually. So it’s a very odd part of Ukraine. It always was, a very odd part of Ukraine. And so I have no doubt at all that the majority of the people in a conflict, where the first thing the new government did in February 2014, was to forbid the Russian language, as a language which had been used in local administration, and things like that. It was one of the stupidest things you could do in such a very tense situation. Ukraine, basically, is a very cleft society. The eastern southern part is very close to Russia. They speak Russian, and are very close to Russian culture. The western part, the westernmost part around Lviv, is very close to Poland and Austria, and places like that. So it’s a cleft society, and in such a society you have some options. One option is to embrace all the parts of society, different parts of society. Or you can, also, which afterwards is what happened, one part could impose its will on the other part, against its will. And that was actually what happened. So there are several crises. There is the crisis in Ukraine, with two approximately equally sized parts of Ukraine. But you also have, on the other hand, the Russian-NATO question. So you had two crises, and they stumbled together, and they were pressed together in 2014. So you had a very explosive situation which has not been solved to this day. And for Ukraine, I say that as long as you have this conflict between Russia and NATO, it’s impossible to solve, because it’s one of the most corrupt societies, one of the most poor societies in Europe right now. A lot of people come to Denmark, where we are now, Germany and also to Russia. Millions of Ukrainians have gone abroad to work, because there are really many, many social problems, economic problems, things like that. And that’s why Putin –, if we remember what Gorbachev told me about having things on paper, on treaties, which are signed — and that’s why Putin said, what he actually said to the West, ‘I don’t really believe you, because when you can, you cheat.’ He didn’t put it that way, but that was actually what he meant. ‘So now I tell you very, very, very, very clearly what our points of view are. We have red lines, like you have red lines. Don’t try to cross them.’ And I think many people in the West do not like it. I think it’s very clear, because I think the red lines, if you compare historically, are very reasonable. If you compare the United States and the Monroe Doctrine, which is still in effect in the USA, they are very, very reasonable red lines. So much more than — I would say that Ukraine, many of the Ukrainians, are very close to Russia. I have many Ukrainian friends. I sometimes forget that they are Ukrainians, because their language, their first language, is actually Russian, which is also close to Russian. So those countries being part of an anti-Russian military pact, it’s simply madness. It cannot work. It will not work. Such a country would never be a normal country for many, many years, forever. I think much of the blame could be put on the NATO expansion and those politicians who have been pressing for that for several years. First and foremost, Bill Clinton was the first one, Madame Albright, from 1993. At this time, they adopted the policy of major extension to the East. And George W. Bush also pressed for Ukraine and Georgia to become members of NATO. And for every step, there was, in Russia, people rallying around the flag. You could put it that way, because you have pressure. And the more we pressure with NATO, the more the Russians will rally around the flag, and the more authoritarian Russia will be. So we are in this situation. So things are now happening in Russia, which I can admit I do not like, closing some offices, closing some media. I do not like it at all. But in a time of confrontation, I think it’s quite reasonable, understandable, Even though I would not defend it. But it’s understandable. Because the United States, after 9/11, also adopted a lot of defensive measures, and a kind of censorship, and things like that. So it’s what happens when you have such tense situations. We should just also bear in mind that Russia and the United States are the two countries, which possess 90 percent of the world’s nuclear armament. Alone the mere thought of them using some of this is a doomsday perspective, because it will not be a small, tiny war, like World War II, but it will dwarf World War II, because billions will die in this. And it’s a question, if humanity will survive. So it’s a very, very grave question. And I think we should ask if the right of the Ukraine to have NATO membership, which its own population does not really want, is it really worth the risk of a nuclear war? That’s how I would put it. I will not take all blame away from Russia. That’s not my point here. My point is that this question is too important. It’s very, very relevant. It’s very important that we establish a kind of modus vivendi [an arrangement allowing people or groups of people who have different opinions or beliefs to work or live together-ed.]. It’s a problem for the West. I also think it’s very important that we learn, in the West, how to cope with people who are not like us, because we tend to think that people should become democrats like we are democrats. And only then will we deal with them. If they are not democrats, like we are democrats, we will do everything we can, to make them democrats. We will support people who want to make a revolution in this country, so they become like us. It’s a very, very dangerous, dangerous way of thinking, and destructive way of thinking. I think that we in the West should study, maybe, a little more what is happening in other organizations where the West is not dominating. I’m thinking about the BRICS, as one organization. I’m also thinking about the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, where Asian countries are cooperating, and they are not changing each other. The Chinese are not demanding that we should all be Confucians. And the Russians are not demanding that all people in the world should be Orthodox Christians, etc. I think it’s very, very important that we bear in mind that we should cope with each other like we are, and not demand changes. I think it’s a really dangerous and stupid game to play. I think the European Union is also very active in this game, which I think is very, very — Well, this way of thinking, in my point of view, has no perspective, no positive perspective at all. Michelle Rasmussen: Actually, today, Presidents Biden and Putin will speak on the phone, and important diplomatic meetings are scheduled for the middle of January. What is going to determine if diplomacy can avoid a disaster, as during the Cuban missile crisis? Helga Zepp-LaRouche has just called this a “reverse missile crisis.” Or, if Russia will feel that they have no alternative to having a military response, as they have openly stated. What changes on the western side are necessary? If you had President Biden alone in a room, or other heads of state of NATO countries, what would you say to them? Jens Jørgen Nielsen: I would say, “Look, Joe, I understand your concerns. I understand that you see yourself as a champion of freedom in the world, and things like that. I understand the positive things about it, but you see, the game you now are playing with Russia is a very, very dangerous game. And the Russians, as a very proud people, you cannot force them. It’s not an option. I mean, you cannot, because it has been American, and to some degree, also European Union policy, to change Russia, to very much like to change, so that they’ll have another president, and exchange Putin for another president. But I can assure you,’ if I speak to Joe Biden, ‘Joe Biden, be sure that if you succeed, or if Putin dies tomorrow, or somehow they’ll have a new president, I can assure you that the new president will be just as tough as Putin, maybe even tougher. Because in Russia, you have much tougher people. Many blame, actually — I would say even most people in Russia who blame Putin, really blame him because he’s not tough enough on the West, because he was soft on the West, too liberal toward the West, and many people have blamed him for not taking the eastern southern part of Ukraine yet. He should have done it.’ So I would say to Biden, ‘I think it would be wise for you, right now, to support Putin, or to deal with Putin, engage with Putin, and do some diplomacy, because the alternative is a possibility of war, and you should not go down into history as the American president who secured the extinction of humanity. It would be a bad, very bad record for you.’ ‘And there are possibilities because I don’t think Putin is unreasonable. Russia has not been unreasonable. I think they have turned back. Because in 1991, it was the Russians themselves, who disbanded the Soviet Union. It was the Russians, Moscow, which disbanded the Warsaw Pact. The Russians who gave liberty to the Baltic countries, and all other Soviet republics, and with hardly any shot, and returned half a million Soviet soldiers back to Russia. No shot was fired at all. I think it’s extraordinary.’ ‘If you compare what happened to this dismembering of the French and the British colonial empires after World War II. It was very, very civilized, in many ways. So stop thinking about Russia and as uncivilized, stupid people, who don’t understand anything but mere power. Russians are an educated people. They understand a lot of arguments, and they are interested in cooperating. ‘There will be a lot of advantages for the United States, and also for the West, and also the European Union, to establish a kind of more productive, more pragmatic relationship, cooperation. There are a lot of things in terms of energy, climate, of course, and terrorism, and many other things, where it’s a win-win situation to cooperate with them. ‘The only thing Russia is asking for is not to put your military hardware in our backyard. I don’t think it should be hard for us to accept, certainly not to understand why the Russians think this way. And they should think back to the history, where armies from the West have attacked Russia. So they have it in their genes. I don’t think that there is any person in Russia who has forgot, or is not aware of, the huge losses the Soviet Union suffered from Nazi Germany in the 1940s during World War II. And you had Napoleon also trying to — You have a lot of that experience with armies from the West going into Russia. So it’s very, very large, very, very deep.’ Michelle Rasmussen: Was it around 20 million people who died during World War II? Jens Jørgen Nielsen: In the Soviet Union. There were also Ukrainians, and other nationalities, but it was around 18 million Russians, if you can count it, because it was the Soviet Union, but twenty seven million people in all. It’s a huge part, because Russia has experience with war. So the Russians would certainly not like war. I think the Russians have experience with war, that also the Europeans, to some extent, have, that the United States does not have. Because the attack I remember, in recent time, is the 9/11 attack, the twin towers in New York. Otherwise, the United States does not have these experiences. It tends to think more in ideological terms, where the Russians, certainly, but, also, to some extent, some people in Europe, think more pragmatically, more that we should, at any cost, avoid war, because war creates more problems than it solves. So, have some pragmatic cooperation. It will not be very much a love affair. Of course not. But it will be on a very pragmatic — Michelle Rasmussen: Also in terms of dealing with this horrible humanitarian situation in Afghanistan, and cooperating on the pandemic. Jens Jørgen Nielsen: Yeah. Of course, there are possibilities. Right now, it’s like we can’t even cooperate in terms of vaccines, and there are so many things going on, from both sides, actually, because we have very, very little contact between –. I had some plans to have some cooperation between Danish and Russian universities in terms of business development, things like that, but it turned out there was not one crown, as our currency is called. You could have projects in southern America, Africa, all other countries. But not Russia, which is stupid. Michelle Rasmussen: I wanted to ask you a little bit more about that, because you wrote two recent books about Russia. One is called “On his own terms: Putin and the new Russia,” and the latest one, just from September, “Russia against the grain.” Many people in the West portray Russia as the enemy, which is solely responsible for the current situation. And Putin as a dictator who is threatening his neighbors militarily, and threatening the democracy of the free world. Over and above what you have already said, is this true, or do you have a different viewpoint? Jens Jørgen Nielsen: Of course, I have a different point of view, because I think, well, Russia for me, is not a perfect country, because such a country does not exist, not even Denmark. Some suppose it is. But there’s no such thing as a perfect society. Because societies are always developing from somewhere, to somewhere, and Russia, likewise. Russia is a very, very big country. So you can definitely find things which are not very likable in Russia. Definitely. That’s not my point here. But I think that in the West, I think, actually for centuries, we have — if you look back, I have tried in my latest book, to find out how Western philosophers, how church people, how they look at Russia, from centuries back. And there has been kind of a red thread. There’s been a kind of continuation. Because Russia has very, very, very often been characterized as our adversary, as a country against basic European values. Five hundred years back, it was against the Roman Catholic Church, and in the seventeen eighteen hundred it was against the Enlightenment philosophers, and in the 20th century, it was about communism. And it’s also split people in the West, and it was also considered to be a threat. But it is also considered to be a threat today, even though Putin is not a communist. He is not a communist. He is a conservative, a moderate conservative, I would say. Even during the time of Yeltsin, he was also considered liberal and progressive, and he loved the West and followed the West in all, almost all things they proposed. But still, there’s something with Russia, which I think from a philosophical point of view is very important to find out, that we have some very deep rooted prejudices about Russia. And I think it plays a role, because I hear, when I speak to people who say ‘Russia is an awful country, and Putin is simply a very, very evil person, is a dictator.’ ‘Have you been in Russia? Do you know any Russians?’ ‘No, not really.’ ‘Ok. But what do you base your points of view on?’ ‘Well, what I read in the newspapers, of course, what they tell me on the television.’ Well, well, I think it’s not good enough, because — And I understand why the Russians — I very often talk to Russian politicians, and other people, and what they are sick and tired of, is this notion that that the West is better. We are on a higher level. And if Russians should be accepted by the West, they should become like us. Or at least they should admit that they are on a lower level, in relation to our very high level. And that is why, when they deal with China, or deal with India, and when they deal with African countries, and even Latin American countries, they don’t meet such attitudes, because they are on more equal terms. They’re different, yes, but one does not consider each other to be on a higher level. And that’s why I think that cooperation in BRICS, which we talked about, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, I think it’s quite successful. And I don’t know about the future, but I have a feeling that if you were talking about Afghanistan, I think if Afghanistan could be integrated into this kind of organization, one way or another, I have a feeling it probably would be more successful than the 20 years that the NATO countries have been there. I think that cultural attitude plays a role when we’re talking about politics, because a lot of the policy from the American, European side, is actually very emotional. It’s very much like, ‘We have some feelings — We fear Russia. We don’t like it,’ or ‘We think that it’s awful.’ And ‘Our ideas, we know how to run a society much better than the Russians, and the Chinese, and the Indians, and the Muslims, and things like that.’ And I think it’s a part of the problem. That it’s a part of our problem in the West. It’s a part of our way of thinking, our philosophy, which I think we should have a closer look at, and criticize. But it’s difficult, because it’s very deep rooted. When I discuss with people at universities and in the media, and other other places, I encounter this. That is why I wrote the latest book, because it’s very much about our way of thinking about Russia. And that’s why the book is — it’s about Russia, of course, but it’s also about us, our glasses, how we perceive Russia, how we perceive not only Russia, but it also goes for China, because it’s more or less the same. But there are many similarities between how we look upon Russia, and how we look upon and perceive China, and other countries. I think this is a very, very important thing we have to deal with. We have to do it, because otherwise, if we decide, if America and Russia decide to use all the fireworks they have of nuclear [armament] power, then it’s the end. You can put it very sharp, to put it like that, and people will not like it. But basically, we are facing this, these two alternatives: Either we find ways to cooperate with people who are not like us, and will not be, certainly not in my lifetime, like us, and accept them, that they are not like us, and get on like as best we can, and keep our differences, but respect each other. I think that’s what we need from the Western countries. I think it’s the basic problem today dealing with other countries. And the same goes, from what I have said, for China. I do not know the Chinese language. I have been in China. I know a little about China. Russia, I know very well. I speak Russian, so I know how Russians are thinking about this. What the feelings are about this. And I think it’s important to deal with these questions. Michelle Rasmussen: You also pointed out, I think, that in 2001, after the attack against the World Trade Center, I think Putin was the first one to call George Bush, and he offered cooperation about dealing with terrorism. But I think you’ve written that he had a pro-Western war worldview, but that this was not reciprocated. Jens Jørgen Nielsen: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Afterwards, he was criticized by the military, and also by politicians in the beginning of his first term in 2000, 2001, 2002, he was criticized because he was too happy for America. He even said, in an interview in the BBC, that he would like Russia to become a member of NATO. It did not happen, because there are many reasons for that, but he was very, very keen –. That’s also why he felt very betrayed afterward, and in 2007, at the Munich Conference on Security in February in Germany, he said he was very frustrated, and it was very clear that he felt betrayed by the West. He thought that they had a common agenda. He thought that Russia should become a member. But Russia probably is too big. And if you consider Russia becoming a member of the European Union, the European Union would change thoroughly, but they failed. Russia did not become a member. It’s understandable. But then I think the European Union should have found, again, a modus vivendi. Michelle Rasmussen: Way of living together. Jens Jørgen Nielsen: Yeah, how to live together, because they joined — It was actually a parallel development of the European Union and NATO, against Russia. And in 2009 the European Union invited Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus, Armenia, Azerbaijan, to become members of the European Union, but not Russia. Even though they knew that there was really a lot of trade between Ukraine, also Georgia, and Russia. And it would have interfered. But they did not pay attention to Russia. So Russia was left out at this time. And so eventually, you could say, understandably, very understandably, Russia turned to China. And in China, with cooperation with China, they became stronger. They became much more self-confident, and they also cooperated with people who respected them much more. I think that’s interesting, that the Chinese understood how to deal with other people with respect, but the Europeans and Americans did not. Michelle Rasmussen: Just before we go to our last questions. I want to go back to Ukraine, because it’s so important. [Jens Jørgen Nielsen wrote the book, “Ukraine in the Field of Tension-ed.] You said that the problem did not start with the so-called annexation of Crimea, but with what you called a coup against the sitting president. Can you just explain more about that? Because in the West, it’s like everybody says, ‘Oh, the problem started when Russia annexed Crimea.’ Jens Jørgen Nielsen: Well, if you take Ukraine, in 2010 there was a presidential election, and the OSCE monitored the election, and said that it was very good, and the majority voted for Viktor Yanukovich. Viktor Yanukovich did not want Ukraine to become a member of NATO. He wanted to cooperate with the European Union. But he also wanted to keep cooperating with Russia. Basically, that’s what he was like. But it’s very often claimed that he was corrupt. Yes, I don’t doubt it, but name me one president who has not been corrupt. That’s not the big difference, it’s not the big thing, I would say. But then in 2012, there was also a parliamentary election in Ukraine, and Yanukovych’s party also gained a majority with some other parties. There was a coalition which supported Yanukovych’s policy not to become a member of NATO. And then there was a development where the European Union and Ukraine were supposed to sign a treaty of cooperation. But he found out that the treaty would be very costly for Ukraine, because they would open the borders for European Union firms, and the Ukrainian firms would not be able to compete with the Western firms. Secondly, and this is the most important thing, basic industrial export from Ukraine was to Russia, and it was industrial products from the eastern part, from Dniepropetrovsk or Dniepro as it is called today, from Donetsk, from Luhansk and from Kryvyj Rih (Krivoj Rog), from some other parts, basically in the eastern part, which is the industrial part of Ukraine. And they made some calculations that showed that, well, if you join this agreement, Russia said, ‘We will have to put some taxes on the export, because you will have some free import from the European Union. So, of course, we don’t have an agreement with the European Union. So, of course, anything which comes from you, there would be some taxes imposed on it.’ And then Yanukovich said, ‘Well, well, well, it doesn’t sound good,’ and he wanted Russia, the European Union and Ukraine to go together, and the three form what we call a triangle agreement. But the European Union was very much opposed to it because it didn’t want –. Even though you could say the eastern part of Ukraine was economically a part of Russia. Part of the Russian weapon industry was actually in the eastern part of Ukraine, and there were Russian speakers there. And the European Union said, ‘No, we should not cooperate with Russia about this,’ because Yanukovich wanted to have cooperation between the European Union, Ukraine and Russia, which sounds very sensible to me. Of course, it should be like that. It would be to the advantage of all three parts. But the European Union had a very ideological approach to this. So they were very much against Russia. It also increased the Russian’s suspicion that the European Union was only a stepping stone to NATO membership. And then what happened was that there was a conflict in, there were demonstrations every day on the Maidan Square in Kiev. There were many thousands of people there, and there were also shootings, because many of the demonstrators were armed people. They had stolen weapons from some barracks in the West. And at this point, when 100 people had been killed, the European Union foreign ministers from France, Germany and Poland met, and there was also a representative from Russia, and there was Yanukovich, a representative from his government, and from the opposition. And they made an agreement. Ok. You should have elections this year, in half a year, and you should have some sharing of power. People from the opposition should become members of the government, and things like that. But all of a sudden, things broke down, and Yanukovich left, because you should remember, and very often in the West, they tend to forget that the demonstrators were armed. And they killed police also. They killed people from Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, and things like that. So it’s always been portrayed as innocent, peace-loving demonstrators. They were not at all. And some of them had very dubious points of view, with Nazi swastikas, and things like that. And Yanukovych fled. Then they came to power. They had no legitimate government, because many of the members of parliament from these parts of the regions which had supported Yanukovich, had fled to the East. So the parliament was not able to make any decisions. Still, there was a new president, also a new government, which was basically from the western part of Ukraine. And the first thing they did, I told you, was to get rid of the Russian language, and then they would talk about NATO membership. And Victoria Nuland was there all the time, the vice foreign minister of the United States, was there all the time. There were many people from the West also, so things broke down. Michelle Rasmussen: And there have actually been accusations since then, that there were provocateurs who were killing people on both sides. Jens Jørgen Nielsen: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And what’s interesting is that there’s been no investigation whatsoever about it, because a new government did not want to conduct an investigation as to who killed them. So, it was orchestrated. There’s no doubt in my mind it was an orchestrated coup. No doubt about it. And that’s Russian –. That’s the basic context for the decision of Putin to accept Crimea as a part of Russia. you should say, but normally you would say, in the west, that Russia simply annexed Crimea. It’s not precisely what happened, because there was a local parliament, because it was an autonomous part of Ukraine, and they had their own parliament, and they made the decision that they should have a referendum, which they had in March. And then they applied to become a member of the Russian Federation. It’s not a surprise, even though the Ukrainian army did not go there, because there was an Ukrainian army. There were 21,000 Ukrainian soldiers. 14,000 of these soldiers joined the Russian army. And so, that tells a little about how things were not like a normal annexation, where one country simply occupies part of the other country. Because you have this cleft country, you have this part, especially the southern part, which was very, very pro-Russian, and it’s always been so. And so, of course, you could say that you — there’s a lot of things in terms of international law, you can say about it. But I have no doubt that you can look upon it differently, because if you look it at from the point of people who lived in Crimea, they did not want — because almost 80-90 percent had voted for the Party of the Regions, which was Yanukovych’s party, a pro-Russian party, you could say, almost 87 percent, or something like that. They have voted for this party. This party had a center in a central building in Kiev, which was attacked, burned, and three people were killed. So you could imagine that they would not be very happy, well, to put it this way. They would not be very happy with the new government, and the new development. Of course not. They hated it. And what I think is very critical about the West is that they simply accepted, they accepted these horrible things in Ukraine, just to have the prize, just to have this prey, of getting Ukraine into NATO. And Putin was aware that he could not live, not even physically, but certainly not politically, if Sevastopol, with the harbor for the Russian fleet, became a NATO harbor. It was impossible. I know people from the military say ‘No, no way.’ It’s impossible. Would the Chinese take San Diego in the United States? Of course not. It goes without saying that such things don’t happen. So what is lacking in the West is just a little bit of realism. How powers, how superpowers think, and about red lines of superpowers. Because we have an idea in the West about the new liberal world order. It sounds very nice when you’re sitting in an office in Washington. It sounds very beautiful and easy, but go out and make this liberal world order, it’s not that simple. And you cannot do it like, certainly not do it like the way they did it in Ukraine. Michelle Rasmussen: Regime change? Jens Jørgen Nielsen: Yeah, regime change. Michelle Rasmussen: I have two other questions. The last questions. The Russian-Danish Dialogue organization that you are a leader of, and the Schiller Institute in Denmark, together with the China Cultural Center in Copenhagen, were co-sponsors of three very successful Musical Dialogue of Cultures Concerts, with musicians from Russia, China, and many other countries. And you are actually an associate professor in cultural differences. How do you see that? How would an increase in cultural exchange improve the situation? Jens Jørgen Nielsen: Well, it can not but improve, because we have very little, as I also told you. So, I’m actually also very, very happy with this cooperation, because I think it’s very enjoyable, these musical events, they are very, very enjoyable and very interesting, also for many Danish people, because when you have the language of music, it is better than the language of weapons, if I can put it that way, of course. But I also think that when we meet each other, when we listen to each other’s music, and share culture in terms of films, literature, paintings, whatever, I think it’s also, well, it’s a natural thing, first of all, and it’s unnatural not to have it. We do not have it, because maybe some people want it that way, if people want us to be in a kind of tense situation. They would not like to have it, because I think without this kind of, it’s just a small thing, of course, but without these cultural exchanges, well, you will be very, very bad off. We will have a world which is much, much worse, I think, and we should learn to enjoy the cultural expressions of other people. We should learn to accept them, also, we should learn to also cooperate and also find ways –. We are different. But, also, we have a lot of things in common, and the things we have in common is very important not to forget that even with Russians, and even the Chinese, also all other peoples, we have a lot in common that is very important to bear in mind that we should never forget that we have a lot of things in common. Basically, we have the basic values we have in common, even though if you are Hindu, a Confucian, a Russian Orthodox, we have a lot of things in common. And when you have such kind of encounters like in cultural affairs, in music, I think that you become aware of it, because suddenly it’s much easier to understand people, if you listen to their music. Maybe you need to listen a few times, but it becomes very, very interesting. You become curious about instruments, ways of singing, and whatever it is. So I hope the corona situation will allow us, also, to make some more concerts. I think it should be, because they’re also very popular in Denmark. Michelle Rasmussen: Yeah. As Schiller wrote, It’s through beauty, we arrive at political freedom. We can also say it’s through beauty that we can arrive at peace. Jens Jørgen Nielsen: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Michelle Rasmussen: The Schiller Institute and Helga Zepp-LaRouche, its founder and international president, are leading an international campaign to prevent World War III, for peace through economic development, and a dialogue amongst cultures. How do you see the role of the Schiller Institute? Jens Jørgen Nielsen: Well, I know it. We have been cooperating. I think your basic calls, appeals for global development, I think it’s very, very interesting, and I share the basic point of view. I think maybe it’s a little difficult. The devil is in the details, but basically, I think what you are thinking about, when I talk about the Silk Road, when I talk about these Chinese programs, Belt and Road programs, I see much more successful development that we have seen, say, in Africa and European countries developing, because I have seen how many western-dominated development programs have been distorting developments in Africa and other parts of the world. They distort development. I can see — I’m not uncritical to China, but, of course, I can see very positive perspectives in the Belt and Road program. I can see really, really good perspectives, because just look at the railroads in China, for instance, at their fast trains. It’s much bigger than anywhere else in the world. I think there are some perspectives, really, which I think attract, first and foremost, people in Asia. But I think, eventually, also, people in Europe, because I also think that this model is becoming more and more — it’s also beginning in the eastern part. Some countries of Eastern Europe are becoming interested. So I think it’s very interesting. Your points of your points of view. I think they’re very relevant, also because I think we are in a dead end alley in the West, what we are in right now, so people anyway are looking for new perspectives. And what you come up with, I think, is very, very interesting, certainly. What it may be in the future is difficult to say because things are difficult. But the basic things that you think about, and what I have heard about the Schiller Institute, also because I also think that you stress the importance of tolerance. You stress the importance of a multicultural society, that we should not change each other. We should cooperate on the basis of mutual interests, not changing each other. And as I have told you, this is what I see as one of the real, real big problems in the western mind, the western way of thinking, that we should decide what should happen in the world as if we still think we are colonial powers, like we have been for some one hundred years. But these times are over. There are new times ahead, and we should find new ways of thinking. We should find new perspectives. And I think it goes for the West, that we can’t go on living like this. We can’t go on thinking like this, because it will either be war, or it’ll be dead end alleys, and there’ll be conflicts everywhere. You can look at things as a person from the West. I think it’s sad to look at Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and those countries, Syria to some extent also, where the West has tried to make some kind of regime change or decide what happens. They’re not successful. I think it’s obvious for all. And we need some new way of thinking. And what the Schiller Institute has come up with is very, very interesting in this perspective, I think. Michelle Rasmussen: Actually when you speak about not changing other people, one of our biggest points is that we actually have to challenge ourselves to change ourselves. To really strive for developing our creative potential and to make a contribution that will have, potentially, international implications. Jens Jørgen Nielsen: Yes. Definitely Michelle Rasmussen: The Schiller Institute is on full mobilization during the next couple of weeks to try to get the United States and NATO to negotiate seriously. And Helga Zepp-LaRouche has called on the U.S. and NATO to sign these treaties that Russia has proposed, and to pursue other avenues of preventing nuclear war. So we hope that you, our viewers, will also do everything that you can, including circulating this video. Is there anything else you would like to say to our viewers before we end, Jens Jørgen? Jens Jørgen Nielsen: No, no. I think we have talked a lot now. No, only I think what you said about bringing the U.S. and Russia to the negotiation table, it’s obvious, I think that it should be for any prudent, clear thinking person in the West, it should be obvious that this is the only right thing to do. So of course, we support it 100 percent. Michelle Rasmussen: Okay. Thank you so much, Jens Jørgen Nielsen. Jens Jørgen Nielsen: I thank you.
The following is an edited transcription of an interview with Justin Yifu Lin conducted December 20, 2021 by EIR Editor Michael Billington. Dr. Lin was the Chief Economist and Senior Vice President at the World Bank from 2008 to 2012, and is now the dean at several institutes at Peking University: the Dean of the Institute for New Structural Economics; the Dean at the Institute for South-South Cooperation and Development; as well as a Professor and Honorary Dean at the National School of Development. Subheads, footnotes, and embedded links have been added.EIR: This is Mike Billington, I’m with the Executive Intelligence Review, the Schiller Institute, and The LaRouche Organization. I’m speaking here with Dr. Justin Yifu Lin. Dr. Lin: Thank you very much for the opportunity to have this conversation with you. What Prevents China-U.S. Cooperation for Development?EIR: As you probably know—I sent you some of this—there are several senior diplomats and intelligence professionals in the United States—including Ambassador Chas Freeman, who has great experience in China, and former CIA official Graham Fuller—both of whom have warned that the U.S. foreign policy has been “weaponized,” that diplomacy has been lost, and that this is driving the danger of war between the U.S. and China, as well as with Russia. You have argued in the past for what could be called “economic deterrence,” that as China’s economy becomes significantly larger than that of the U.S., that “the United States’ own development could then not ignore the opportunities brought by the Chinese market,” and that this would bring about a “peaceful and common development between China and the United States.” What in your mind is preventing that peaceful and common development now? Dr. Lin: Thank you very much for this very important question for our world today. First, we need to understand that cooperation between the U.S. and China is crucial for many global challenges, because the U.S. is the largest and the strongest country in the world, and China is the second largest economy in terms of economic size. Their cooperation will be the foundation for combating climate change, containing the pandemic, and to help the other countries to get rid of their poverty in order to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. So, the cooperation is important, and our cooperation certainly is good for the U.S., for China, and for the whole world. But we did not see the cooperation come along. We see a lot of tensions in the recent years. I think it is because the U.S. has lost confidence in itself. The U.S. was the largest economy in the world throughout the 20th century. In terms of purchasing power parity (PPP), China overtook the U.S. in 2014, but the U.S., for her own interests, tried to maintain its dominance, economically, politically and so on. And so now there are some involved in the strategy of the U.S. who try to contain China. And certainly, that kind of strategy reflects in the U.S. diplomatic and foreign relations policy with China. Certainly, that will threaten the stability of the world, because, first, we need to have cooperation to address global issues, but also because that kind of tension is a threat to the foundation for cooperation; that will add to the uncertainty of the world. That’s very bad. How To Resolve the Difficulty How can we improve that? Well, one way is that China could reduce its economic size. If China cut its GDP by half, then the U.S. would not feel threatened. But it’s not possible, because development is a human right. That is in the UN constitution, and that is a constitution has been advocated by the U.S. and many other countries for decades. So, there’s no reason why China would need to cut our income by half or more to please the U.S. The other way is to continue to have development, to have growth. I wrote an article arguing that if China can reach half the per capita GDP of the U.S.—I think that’s very moderate, only half of the U.S.—I think the U.S. will accept China by that time, for three reasons: First, [even] if China’s per capita GDP is half that of the U.S.—and certainly we would still have some internal differences—our more developed regions, like the major cities, Beijing and Shanghai, and the more developed areas, our coastal provinces, like Shandong, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian and Guangdong, have a combined population of a little bit more than four hundred million. Currently, the U.S. population is around three hundred and forty million, but certainly the U.S. population will continue to grow. In those more developed regions in China, per capita GDP will be about the same as in the U.S. Both per capita GDP and the economic size will be about the same as the U.S. We know that per capita GDP reflects the average labor productivity of that part of the economy, and the average labor productivity reflects the industrial achievement, the technological achievement. So, by that time the U.S. will not have the technological superiority that they could use to choke off Chinese development. Currently, you see, the U.S. has put a lot of high-tech companies in China on its so-called Entity List,1 without actually having any concrete evidence for their accusations. That is only because the U.S. wants to use their technological superiority to choke off China’s development. But if at that later time, if the more advanced regions in China had the same income level, the same technological level, then the U.S. would not be able to do that. Second, our population size is about four times that of the U.S. If our GDP is half the U.S., then in fact China’s economic size will be twice as large as the U.S. No matter how unhappy the U.S. is, the U.S. cannot change that fact. It’s a fact. And third, China will be the largest economy by that time, and China will continue to grow. For the U.S., for example, if those companies on the Fortune 500 list, want to stay on that 500 companies list, they cannot lose the Chinese market. And also in trade, certainly it’s a win-win. But we know that in trade, the smaller economy gets more than the larger economy. By that time, China’s economy will be twice as large as the U.S., so in trade with China, the U.S. will gain more. So, for that reason, certainly, if U.S. politicians really care about their own people, then, to have friendly relations with China will be necessary. It would be necessary for the U.S. to improve the well-being of their own people and to maintain their companies’ leadership in the world. Countering Economic Suppression by the U.S.EIR: You argued once before that the U.S. intentionally suppressed the Japanese economy in the 1980s and 1990s to, as you said, “prevent them from threatening the U.S. economic status.” And, as you’ve just said, they’re doing pretty much the same thing now towards China, having suppressed these Chinese companies with accusations and so forth. How has China countered this today? You’ve already said what you propose will come in the future, but how can China counter this attack on Huawei and other companies today? Dr. Lin: I think the first thing we need is to remain calm and open. We need to move our economy to further improve its market efficiency. The U.S. today has some superiority, an upper hand in certain technologies, but the U.S. is not the only country which has those kinds of technologies. The advanced countries in Europe—Germany, France, and Italy—and Japan and Korea—also have many advanced technologies. China should remain open, to have access to the technology from other advanced countries, as long as it’s not technologies in which the U.S. has the monopoly. Advanced technologies require their own heavy R&D—it’s a bit expensive, and once they get those kinds of technological breakthroughs, the profitability of these companies depends on how large the market is. Measured by purchasing power parity, China is already the largest market in the world. Every year since 2008, China has contributed about 30% to global market expansion. So as long as China can open the Chinese market, I figure that other high-tech companies will be ready to fill in the gap that is due to the U.S. restricting its companies from exporting those kinds of technologies to China. China only needs to focus on a few technologies, for which the U.S. is the only supplier in the world. By that we will not be choked off. Second, we need to continue to develop our economies. Currently, if you measure by purchasing power parity, our GDP is about 25% that of the U.S., and by market exchange rate our GDP is about one sixth of the U.S. As I said, if we can maintain the growth momentum, I think the dilemma will be addressed. ‘Industrial Policy’ vs. ‘Free Trade’EIR: You’ve written for years about the fact that the advanced industrial nations reached the point they are at today by using government directed credit, and what you call “industrial policy,” to protect and support emerging industries and the research that’s necessary for that kind of development. But now these advanced sector countries are denying the same measures to today’s emerging economies, under the demand of “free trade.” The Korean economist Chang Ha-joon called this “Kicking Away the Ladder.” Lyndon LaRouche has pointed to this as the primary difference between the British System of “free trade” and the original American System of protection and directed credit. I have also written that the Chinese economic model today that you promote is closer to the American System—people like Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich List and Henry Carey—than is now practiced in the U.S. itself. How do you see this? Dr. Lin: I fully agree with it, no question. Actually, not only did the U.S. protect her own industries during the “catching up” stage, but Britain practiced the same. Before the 17th Century, Britain was in a process of trying to catch up with the Netherlands, because at that time the Netherlands’ wool textile sector was more advanced than Britain. The GDP in the Netherlands was about 30% higher than the GDP in Britain. So, Britain adopted similar strategies to protect its own wool textile industries, and created all kinds of incentives to smuggle the equipment from Netherlands to Britain and provide incentives to attract the craftsmen in the textile sector in the Netherlands to come to Britain. Exactly the same process, like what Hamilton argues, and List argues. Britain only turned to free trade after the industrial revolution. Britain was then the most advanced country in the whole world, and their industry was the most advanced in the world. They wanted to export their products to other countries, so they started to advocate free trade. At that time, the U.S. wanted to catch up, so the U.S. used exactly the same policy as Britain had used in the 17th century, when Britain wanted to catch up with the Netherlands. If you look at history, only a few countries were able to industrialize and catch up. You can see in the catching-up process, they all used the government’s active facilitation to support their industrial upgrading. Britain and the U.S., after they became the most advanced countries, on the one hand, they argued free trade for their electorates, but at the same time, they also actively supported research and development to further improve their technology. And that’s how they can continue to upgrade their technology, and also develop new higher-value industries. Because at that time, their technologies were on the global frontiers, so if they wanted to have new technologies, they would have to invent the technologies by themselves. The invention of technologies has two parts. One is basic research, the other is the development of new products based on the breakthroughs in basic research. Private firms, certainly, have the incentive to develop new technologies and new products, because if they’re successful, they can get patents, and then they can have a monopoly for up to 17 or 20 years in the global market. But at the same time, if they do not have breakthroughs in basic research, then it would be very difficult or even impossible for them to have the development of new products and new technologies. But you know, basic research, you’ll find, is a public good, and so the private sectors do not have the incentive to do basic research. If you look into the high-income countries, their governments all support basic research. That is a necessity for them, to continue to have a new stream of technology, a new stream of products and so on. They are still using the industrial policy. But the difference is that they are on a global frontier [of new technologies], and that’s how an industrial policy in the advanced countries, to address market failures, will be different from the type of industrial policy to address market failures in a developing country. In nature it is the same, but actually the areas that the government is required to contribute its efforts will be different. Recently, there’s a famous book called The Entrepreneurial State, by Mariana Mazzucato. Her theme is: In all of the major and competitive industries in the U.S. today, they are the result of the government’s active support in basic research in the previous period. So, the area in which a country requires the government to put its efforts will be different, depending on the stage of development. Hamilton vs. Jefferson In the U.S., there are two traditions: One tradition is the Hamilton tradition, to argue that the government should provide support to overcome the barriers for further development. The other tradition is the Jefferson tradition, to say the government should do nothing, should leave the market to function—the government should be minimal. In fact, in practice, the U.S., since the founding of the nation, has been following Hamilton. But in rhetoric, it is totally dominated by the Jefferson tradition. I think you have a split between the reality and your rhetoric, but unfortunately your rhetoric has been so powerful, and it’s all over the developing countries—they are advised not to do anything by their government, and as a result—except for a few countries whose governments followed the Hamilton tradition and were able to industrialize and catch up—but other countries were misguided by the Jefferson tradition to not do anything, and so they were unable to narrow the gap with the advanced countries. Money Accounting’ vs. ‘Wealth Accounting’EIR: You and other Chinese officials, including Premier Li Keqiang, have called for a new means of accounting the strength of nations, arguing that looking only at the GDP and the debt—which are the money side—is what you call “severely flawed,” for considering only monetary data and leaving out the underlying national assets, including human capital, natural capital and produced capital. You call this alternative method “wealth accounting.” How far has this idea been developed and put in use in China or anywhere else? Dr. Lin: First, I’m delighted to see an increasing recognition for change in some nations. GDP is a flow concept—how much you produce every year. But the production every year depends on the stock of the wealth, including human capital, natural resources, biodiversity, as well as the produced capital: the equipment, the machinery, and also the infrastructure. All those are the wealth of that nation and the foundation for producing goods and services to generate the GDP. In the past, we only looked at the flow concept, the GDP, without paying attention to the condition of the foundation to generate the flow. The foundation should be based on the wealth—the assets we just described. I’m delighted to see now, increasingly, there is a recognition of the necessity to change the concept, including in the IMF recently, which has produced a paper saying that if the government can use debt to finance an investment in infrastructure, it generates assets; and it is different from the government using that debt to finance consumption—those are pure debts. So, if we calculate debt according to whether the government used the debt to support infrastructure or other improvements in human capital, then it will contribute to the ability for the nation to generate new streams of income and thereby enhance the ability to pay back its debt. In the past, when we talked about the debt-sustainability framework, that framework only calculated the gross debt, without paying attention to the asset side. The IMF today called for a revision in its debt sustainability framework. So, we are delighted to see now this more inclusive concept has been increasingly recognized and put into the policy consideration. EIR: Were you and other Chinese economists involved in that change at the IMF? Dr. Lin: When I was at the World Bank, I started to advocate that. I wrote policy notes to advocate that. To change peoples’ beliefs, people’s ways of behaving, certainly takes time. I was the Chief Economist of the World Bank from 2008 to 2012. The proposal to change to the new framework came only after about four years after I left! So, I think that if we want to change the world, conversations like this one with you and me, and people with a better concept, a better idea, should not stop advocating for that. And the more people understand, then I think that gradually, in the end, I’m sure the world will change for the better. EIR: You are attacking neoliberal orthodoxy. But while you were at the World Bank between 2008 and 2012, you were face-to-face with that as the dominant ideology at the World Bank and the IMF. I guess you are explaining now how you dealt with it then, and how it’s having a longer-term effect from your arguments. Does that sound right? Dr. Lin: Yes, that’s very true. For example, when I first arrived at the World Bank, I started to say, okay, structural transformation is the foundation for inclusive and sustainable development in any country. But if you look into the structural transformations, you not only need to rely on the entrepreneur in order to have innovations, but entrepreneurs, if they are to be successful, need to be provided with adequate infrastructure. You need to provide adequate financial support. You need to have an improvement in infrastructure, improvement in the financial structure, institutions, and so on. Also legal institutions. All those things that individual enterprises will not be able to deal with. You need to require the state to do it. But the state’s capacity and resources are limited. You need to use your limited capacity and resources strategically. That means you need to pick certain areas that you want to do. And those certainly require so-called industrial policy. At the beginning, industrial policy was a taboo in international development organizations, including World Bank. But I started to advocate for it. I’m delighted to see, increasingly now, people accept that it is necessary to have industrial policy, including the U.S. government, which now openly says we embrace industrial policy for our future development. Right? For example, infrastructure. In 2008, I started to advocate investing in infrastructure, on the one hand, to cope with the necessity for counter-cyclical intervention, but at the same time to lay the foundation for long-term development in the developing world. So, it’s one stone killing two birds. At the beginning, people were also very reluctant. At that time, the counter-cyclical intervention was mostly providing rescue packages to laid-off workers and so on. I see, certainly, that to stabilize the economy would be essential. But if you only provided, let’s say, unemployment benefits—it’s about the consumption, yes, but you do not contribute to enhancing the growth potential in the future. If you invested in infrastructure, you [not only] create jobs, but you reduce the need for unemployment benefits, and at the same time you lay the foundation for long-term growth. At the beginning, people were very reluctant. But I’m delighted to see now, the World Bank, the IMF and the European Union, and to some extent also the U.S., accept the idea, and have started to advocate the need for infrastructure. Recently, the Biden administration proposed to the Congress for funds to support infrastructure investment. Those kinds of ideas. When I was at the World Bank, when I started to argue for that, it was so foreign to many people. They thought, well, infrastructure is an investment, so the market will take care of that. But as we see, the market could not do it, and so we need to have an active government participation. Gradually, people started to embrace many ideas I had started to advocate at the World Bank, and put them into their programs. EIR: On the other hand, the U.S. and Europe are continuing to deal with their huge debt crisis by simply printing money—Quantitative Easing [QE] and other programs. So, while they’re acknowledging the huge deficit in infrastructure, and they’re making some small efforts in that direction, they’re continuing with the QE, which is threatening hyperinflation today, which I think even the inside gurus of Wall Street and the City of London are acknowledging, that there’s a grave, grave danger of a hyperinflation. What is your view on that? The Power of Great IdeasDr. Lin: Yes, I think that in order to change their policies it will be essential to change their ideas, their policy orientations. For this, I agree with Keynes. In the last sentence of his General Theory, he said: “But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.” In the past, the world was influenced by those kinds of inappropriate neoliberal ideas, so the government policy was shaped by those kinds of misguided ideas. And so, it’s very important for your Institute and for scholars like me to advocate and present alternative ideas which can address the issues, and also improve our way of doing things in individual countries, and also in the world. In the end, people will see the benefit and they will start to make some changes. At the beginning, maybe a very small step. But once they see the power of the right interventions, the power of the right policy, I’m hopeful. I think that the world will move for the better. I do wish the right idea will win the debate in the end. EIR: When I looked at your idea of “wealth accounting,” going beyond the monetary figures of GDP and debt, I thought about Lyndon LaRouche’s idea of a non-monetary measure of economic progress, which he called “relative potential population-density.” His view was that these measures were ratios determined by the transformation of the physical economies through the rates of development of new physical principles, discovered in nature, and then applied to the productive process through new machine tools using those new principles. Do you see that as similar to your idea of “wealth accounting”? Dr. Lin: Yes, I think that that idea is very close to the idea that we just discussed, what I have been advocating for a long time. And we do see, you know, we share the same wisdom and our ideas, our proposals, converge on the same directions. And so, we need to join hands to propose the right ideas, through your Institute and my Institute, and to convey it to more people. EIR: You recently wrote an article, “Development Begins at Home,” with your associate, Dr. Wang Yan, who has also spoken at one of our Schiller Institute conferences, comparing the approach of the IMF and the World Bank to the development of Africa, to that of the Chinese approach, using your “wealth accounting” idea. In that article, you said that despite many decades of aid from the West, the infrastructure bottlenecks were not addressed, and that this was the primary reason that the African countries very much appreciate Chinese investment, which emphasizes infrastructure as the means to lift the productivity of the entire nation and escape from poverty The Belt and Road Initiative As you know, the Schiller Institute and EIR have strongly promoted the idea of the New Silk Road, since the 1990s—actually, following the fall of the Soviet Union—as a means of achieving peace through development. Of course, the Belt and Road Initiative, launched by President Xi Jinping [in 2013], is very much in that light. How would you evaluate, so far, the progress of the Belt and Road Initiative in Africa and elsewhere? Dr. Lin: I’m delighted to see that these new ideas have been welcomed and also joined hands in practice. For example, the Belt and Road Initiative—there are already 145 countries and more than 30 international organizations which have signed the Strategic Cooperation Agreement with China. I am delighted to see this idea has been widely accepted in the world. China also has continued to support infrastructure and infrastructural improvements in the world in spite of the pandemic situation, and those kinds of investments certainly provide the foundations for the future, but at the same time, improve jobs and economic developments, even during these pandemic times. I am also delighted to see the European countries now proposing a similar strategy, like the European Gateway, as a way to improve the infrastructure, to link to other countries. I think the world is moving towards the same direction. The infrastructural gap is so huge, that no one country can accomplish all of this. So it is desirable to join hands, with all the initiatives, by China, by European countries, by Japan, by the U.S., because fundamentally we care about humanity, we care about the future of the Earth, the future of human beings. As long as we contribute to that, we should join hands. We should not, in each individual country and for our political purposes, put up barriers to our cooperation. A Modern Global Health Care SystemEIR: In that same article about African development, you directly blame the IMF and the World Bank for what you called “neoliberal orthodoxy,” and that the result of that was that many low- and middle-income countries continue to suffer from fundamental deficiencies, such as the lack of health care personnel and resources. You noted that even after 70 years of development aid, still “there is the inability to deliver clean water, electricity and sanitation.” As you know, Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche has formed what she calls the Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites—based on an idea of the 15th-century genius Nicholas of Cusa—calling for a global mobilization to address the health crisis that you’ve identified, to provide a modern health system in every country, if the pandemic and future pandemics are going to be defeated. I know that part of what China has launched is a Health Silk Road. So, what are your thoughts on global cooperation to achieve this kind of health system in every country? Dr. Lin: I think that there is a need, and a huge need, as this pandemic shows up, and China certainly contributes to what you mentioned about health care overall. China already provided two billion doses of vaccine to Africa and other parts of the world—one third of the doses of vaccine in the world excluding China. But that’s not sufficient. So, we need to work harder, to work together. Otherwise, the COVID-19 pandemic may linger, and the longer the pandemic is there, the harder it is to deal with, because there are going to be other new mutations coming out all the time, making the vaccines become less effective. So, we need to join hands to contain it, and the sooner, the better. We also need to set the foundation to cope with similar challenges in the future. When this kind of threatening virus appears, at the beginning, we should cope with it. We should repress it immediately. And with that, we need to have global cooperation. So, I think the call [for a modern health system in every country] is very important, and we should join hands to promote that. Operation Ibn SinaEIR: Let me bring up the horrible situation in Afghanistan, where, as you know, 40 years of war, and now the freezing of that nation’s very scarce reserves by the U.S. Federal Reserve and several European banks, and the imposition of sanctions and even cutting off the aid from the IMF and the World Bank, which has created a threat of what has to be recognized as genocide through starvation and disease in that country. In particular, the World Bank was supporting the nation’s health care system for the last 20 years of the U.S./NATO warfare and occupation there, but that’s been completely cut off, leaving the country with virtually no public health system at all. In this case, Helga Zepp-LaRouche has launched another project—she calls it Project Ibn Sina, named after the 11th century Persian medical genius, who came from that region, of Afghanistan. Our proposal is demanding not just emergency aid, and the release of these funds—but also to build the nation’s infrastructure, as you have been emphasizing. By integrating Afghanistan into the Belt and Road, and in particular, extending the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, the CPEC, into Afghanistan. Do you think this is possible? Dr. Lin: I think it’s possible, if we really care about humanity. I think that the support in the health care, in the medical situation, should be unconditional. Conditions in Africa and in Afghanistan and other developing countries will be improved once they have improvement in their health, and improvement in their economic development. Then the socio-political stability there can be maintained. I’m sure that it’s not only good for the individual country, but also good for the global communities, because then we will be in a better situation to work together and to have more collaboration, and it will also reduce the refugees, legally and illegally, to the high-income countries. And you know, that will also be a big challenge for the high-income countries. So, in some areas, the support should be unconditional, because only that will get you humanity. If we really care about human beings, then no matter under what consideration, we should support those basic needs. Prospects of a ‘Greater Harmony’ and PeaceEIR: Right. As you know, the U.S. and China signed a “Phase One” trade agreement in January of 2020 between the U.S. and China. [Vice Premier] Liu He was in attendance at the White House and President Xi Jinping was on the telephone with President Donald Trump. At that time Trump announced that he would soon make a second visit to China, and said he looked forward to what he called, in his words, “continuing to forge a future of greater harmony, prosperity and commerce,” which would lead to an “even stronger world peace.” Now, clearly, that never happened. As the U.S. failed to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump eventually fell into adopting the antagonistic approach to China expressed by his Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, blaming China for virtually every failure in the United States. And although the current Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, has the same hostile attitude toward China, President Biden has had several long calls with President Xi. Do you see some chance of restoring that “greater harmony” coming out of this cooperation between Presidents Biden and Xi? Dr. Lin: I think that China’s door is always open, and, as we said at the beginning, cooperation between China and the U.S. will lay the foundation to address many of the global challenges that we encounter today. So, it will be essential. As to why it did not occur: I think it is because there are some problems in the U.S. If you look into the past, the U.S. always liked to use other countries as the scapegoat for its own domestic problems. That may gain some kind of political interest for the politician in the short run, but it will make the issue become worse for the long term. So, I hope the politicians and the intellectual communities in the U.S. will have the wisdom to understand the roots of its own problems, and it should not use other countries as the excuse or scapegoat for its own problems. Short-term political gain is for a few politicians, but at the cost of the well-being of the whole nation. I hope that this kind of situation will be improved. If those kinds of using other countries as a scapegoat for its own domestic problems, is removed, then certainly U.S. and China cooperation will be good for the U.S., for China, and for the world. Creating a Culture of Science and ArtEIR: In his own work, Lyndon LaRouche very much focused on the quality of creativity, which distinguishes Man from the Beast, as the same in scientific investigations as it is in artistic discoveries, especially that of classical music. In that light, he insisted that scientific education and aesthetic education must go hand in hand in order to allow for the full development of the creative powers of our youth and our population. I personally have very much taken note of the fact that there is a new appreciation in China, following the dark days of the Cultural Revolution, to honor the classical traditions in China, of Confucius and Mencius and the great minds of the Song Dynasty Renaissance, people like Zhu Xi and Shen Guo, and that this is going on simultaneously with the incredible economic and scientific developments taking place in China, as well as China’s increased acknowledgment of the great cultural developments in Western culture and Western classical music, and so forth. How do you see the relationship between economics and science, and the aesthetic side of cultural development? Dr. Lin: I see that science and art—they are complementary to each other, they are both [areas] in which all human beings unleash all of our potentials. So, we should not just focus on one thing and neglect others, if we want to have a better society. We also want to allow the people to develop themselves with greater potentials. And, as you described and you noticed, China now has tried to bring in our traditional culture—appreciation of art, music, classics, not only from China, but from other civilizations—into our programs, educational programs. That’s a good sign. I’m sure that will further the rejuvenation of China to a higher stage, not only materially, but culturally, spiritually. EIR: Thank you. Are there any other thoughts you would like to convey to the readers and supporters of The LaRouche Organization? Dr. Lin: I am delighted to have this opportunity, and I hope our voice will be heard in more corners of the world, because fundamentally, we all care about human beings, and we all want to have a better society for every country in the world. And so I hope that our message will get momentum, traction in the world. EIR: Thank you very much. I hope that we can in fact build on this cooperation. Helga Zepp-LaRouche has always insisted that if we are going to bring about a new paradigm for mankind, it’s going to mean that each culture reaches back to its greatest moments, and that we work together to bring about a truly human renaissance, rather than just a European Renaissance or a Chinese Renaissance or an Islamic Renaissance, but that we bring mankind together to address our common humanity. That is the one basis on which we can end this descent into conflict and war and depression. Dr. Lin: Very good. Thank you very much.
The following is an edited transcript of the interview with Dr. Shah Mohammad Mehrabi conducted December 15, 2021 by EIR’s Gerald Belsky and Michael Billington. Since 2002, Dr. Mehrabi has been a member of the Board of Governors of the Da Afghanistan Bank, the Afghan central bank. Since 1992 he has been a professor in the Business and Economics Department at Montgomery College in Maryland and chairman of the department since 2003. [UPDATE, 12/22/2021 ― The Letter to President Biden referenced by Dr. Mehrabi below, calling for the release of the Afghanistan funds being held by the Federal Reserve, has subsequently been released with the signatures of 46 members of the House of Representatives. It can be read here.] Gerald Belsky: Dr. Mehrabi, could you tell us something about your background and your relationship to the current Taliban government? Dr. Mehrabi: Thank you, Gerry, and I want to thank also the Schiller Institute for all their efforts to be able to make a difference in releasing the Afghan reserves, and to be able to get a positive result in eradicating the poverty that has ensued and will continue unless concrete measures are taken by the United States and European countries who at this stage, hold the Afghanistan Foreign Reserves overall. Now, I’m an economist, and as an economist I have spent close to 20 years on what is called the Supreme Council, the governing board of the Central Bank of Afghanistan. I also served on the fiscal side as a senior economic advisor for two Ministers of Finance, and worked on generating revenue, and also dealt with government spending when I was at the Ministry of Finance. While in the Ministry of Finance, I continued my role as a member of the Supreme Council of the Central Bank, which is again a board very similar to that of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States. It consists of seven board members, and I am also chairman of the Audit Committee of the Central Bank of Afghanistan. I have been extremely active in trying to bring reform, as we did when I went back, when I was first invited to Afghanistan, and tried to reform the financial institution, and more specifically, to at least make certain that we have a functioning and effective Central Bank. Prior to 2003 and 2004, the Central Bank had a dual function. It was both a commercial bank and also a government bank. The commercial bank function was given to the newly created commercial banks, and the Central Bank of Afghanistan, as an independent entity, was re-structured and started its function in early 2000, 2003, 2004 and 2005. Effects of Freezing Foreign Exchange ReservesBillington: The main subject that you have been dealing with, as have we, is that the U.S. Federal Reserve and several European banks have $9.5 billion in reserves which belong to the Afghan Central Bank. This money does not belong to the banks that are holding it, but it’s being frozen for political reasons and disagreements with the new government in Kabul, which makes it essentially a form of illegal economic warfare. Could you describe the impact of this on the people of Afghanistan and what actions you have taken to attempt to free these funds? Dr. Mehrabi: Here is an important point about freezing Afghan foreign exchange reserves. It has contributed to economic instability which I predicted back in September. I predicted a number of things would occur, and they have all come into being, because now there is data to substantiate what I had already predicted in September. At that time, I predicted the currency would depreciate—it has depreciated by more than 14% since August. I also predicted that food prices would increase to double digits—and double digit has occurred. The Price of wheat has gone up by more than 20%, flour has gone up by over 30%, cooking oil has gone up by 60%, and gasoline has gone up by 74%. In the banking sector, I also said at that time that it needs liquidity, and to bring liquidity, it is very important that the reserves must be released, I said, to stabilize prices and to prevent a further collapse of the afghani, which is the national currency. The 14% currency depreciation hits mostly consumer purchasing power. It puts people in a position where they cannot buy the basic necessities of life. Also, the asset prices of all these goods have gone up. Also, I said that imports would decline, and that has occurred. There was a reduction in demand for these imported goods, and consumption has declined significantly because people have no access to their own money in the bank. On the top of that, they don’t have jobs. Many lost their jobs; they did not earn any income and then higher prices further suppressed the demand for buying goods and services. So that’s what you see: hunger and starvation has come into being. I also said that trade clearly is not taking place. As a matter of fact, imports from Pakistan were 46% lower than during the same period last year. Exports are very meager—dried fruit, carpets, and so on. That has remained somewhat stable but has not been generating adequate foreign exchange reserves. Wages have declined. Getting back to the impact of this freezing of Afghanistan’s reserves, we already see that has created immense poverty. What I propose is that we should allow the Central Bank of Afghanistan a limited, monitored, and conditional access to their own reserve. This is Afghanistan’s reserve, it does not belong to anybody else, but to Afghan people. They should be allowed to have access to their reserve, and this foreign exchange reserve should be used for the purpose of auctioning. Why? Because auctioning is designed to prevent the depreciation of the afghani against the dollar and other foreign currencies, and also to increase the purchasing power of afghanis and prevent it further from declining day in and day out. The Central Bank of Afghanistan will not be able to maintain domestic price stability without auctioning. Price stability will not come into being unless these reserves are released. One of the main functions of the Central Bank of Afghanistan is to maintain price stability, and that they cannot do. What I suggested at that time and still suggest, is that access [be given] to $150 million—now I’m saying $200 million, because Afghanistan’s reserves have dwindled significantly—per month out of the $7.1 billion [held in the U.S. Federal Reserve], which is roughly half of the reserve that is required monthly to stabilize the economy. I also said that the United States will be able to verify that these funds are used exclusively for the purpose of stabilizing the currency. The auctions are conducted electronically and the transactions between the Central Bank and commercial banks are automatically recorded. But in addition to this, I suggested that the use of funds could be audited by an international auditing firm that is currently operating in Afghanistan. If there’s any misappropriation, then they could cut off the funds. An important point here is that we want to be able to try to use the funds to prop up the value of the afghani, to allow people to buy essential goods and services. People are calling me constantly who say they cannot afford to buy bread, which is the mean staple for everyone. My own brother is dean at the university. He’s being paid, but even he cannot afford to function without our help through remittances—he is not able to purchase the basic necessities. There are many other Afghans who are constantly talking about the fact that they cannot buy ordinary goods. So, we need to be able to help meet the needs of ordinary Afghans, because, again, higher prices of food. And that can be handled without any difficulty by allowing this reserve to be released. The important point is that we know, based on empirical evidence, what we have done in the past with regard to the release of the funds. Every time that we wanted to engage in an auction, we were able to stabilize the currency and move to price stability. As a matter of fact, the record of the Central Bank is very clear. The Central Bank was able to maintain a single-digit increase in prices for most of the two [past] decades. Further, look at empirical evidence: the Taliban just about three weeks ago auctioned off $2.5 million out of the $10 million they had proposed to auction, and that auctioning off during the same day resulted in the appreciation of the currency. The value of the afghani went up and then it stayed there for two days. But $2.5 million is not adequate. The Central Bank has to intervene continuously to be able to maintain this price stability. If they don’t do it, you’ve got the crisis that you see right now. Higher prices, people are going to be starved to death, and then, famine is going to come as a result of drought as well. People are going to move out of Afghanistan, and there will be banging on the European doors trying to be admitted. Proposed Modification of the Sanctions PolicyBelsky: You have called for the release of $150 million a month from the frozen reserves, to engage in dollar auctions to stabilize the value of the currency. We think that would allow these western countries to justify their continued holding of Afghan funds, which they have no legal nor moral right to do. Wouldn’t you agree that they must release all the funds as a matter of principle and moral obligation? Dr. Mehrabi: I have said that the United States Treasury needs to clarify and modify their sanctions law. Whether the U.S. Treasury can legally withhold another country’s reserve is not clear in my mind. So that needs to be clarified. They have shown some degree of flexibility in the area of humanitarian aid, but it has to be broader than humanitarian exemptions. There are concerns from the Treasury Department about terrorism financing, and others have raised the issue regarding the competency of government and its leaders. I think all of those issues can be discussed. We have a lot of models that the United States has used in the past. Iran was allowed a release of funds to be used for the purpose of trade. The U.S. Office of Foreign Asset Control will have to allow some degree of flexibility, to be able to make certain that exceptions are made, not only for humanitarian related issues, but also for allowing the Central Bank to get access to their reserves. I think you cannot punish Afghans. We talk about the issue of women and so on—women and children are the first people suffering from this. They are not able to buy goods and services. On the one hand, if we argue, that we want to provide humanitarian aid, but we are going to choke off the economy as well—those are two opposite arguments. The arguments do not really make sense. On the one hand, you say, I want to help with humanitarian aid, but I’m going to choke off the economy so that the ordinary Afghans will not be able to have access to food and basic necessities. Humanitarian Aid Is Good, but Not a SolutionBelsky: You’ve answered my next question implicitly, but I’m going to ask it anyway. The World Bank, as you know, is now planning to restore about $230 million in aid. But even this small amount, they’re saying, has to go through UNICEF and the World Health Organization instead of going through the Afghan banking system. What is your view of this? Dr. Mehrabi: I don’t know where UNICEF is going to use it, for what purposes. I said that before. Or WHO, and even the World Food Program. If they are for the purpose of purchasing grains and other basic necessities, that is good. But humanitarian aid is not a solution to rekindling the activities of the economy. Humanitarian aid, as I have said all along, while it is necessary, it’s a stop gap measure, it’s not a complete measure to get the economy overall to move to a point where they could get an increase in aggregate demand, which is very essential if the economy is going to function and generate enough revenue for daily economic activity. Billington: One of the sanctions, or some of the sanctions, have, as I understand it, denied Afghanistan access to the SWIFT money transaction system. What is the impact of this on the country? Dr. Mehrabi: This is what commercial banks have been complaining about. The commercial banks had a window where they could engage with corresponding banks. And that has been stopped. That has been blocked by Treasury. The Treasury Department would not allow it. And the correspondent banks are hesitant and reluctant to engage in any activity, unless they get a clearance from Treasury. Unless the Treasury relaxes, to ensure some degree of flexibility, allow some exemptions from sanctions, and allow this SWIFT entity to allow the transactions to take place, we’re again going back to the same situation. Liquidity is not going to be there. We’re going to be choking off the economy overall. Do Not Bypass the Central Bank!Belsky: Dr. Mehrabi, there’s been a recognition by many individuals and organizations of the point you’re making, that humanitarian aid will not work if there’s no banking system. However, one individual has floated a proposal. In 2019 Alex Yerden, the former financial attaché for the Treasury Department in Kabul, put forward a proposal that may be being discussed behind the scenes. His proposal is to bypass the Central Bank in order to avoid giving money to the current government, and to set up a private central bank, or to use a commercial bank like the Afghanistan International Bank or some other bank, to which some of these funds can be channeled which are being illegally held. The proposal is to set up a private bank that would carry out some of the functions you’ve described, such as the auctioning of money to prop up the currency. What is your view of this idea of setting up a private central bank to bypass the current Central Bank? Dr. Mehrabi: We have invested about 20 years in modernizing, in establishing a Central Bank that is able to administratively, based on the law, perform all the functions that a central bank is to perform. That includes supervision of the Central Bank, issuing of banknotes, being able to be the lender of last resort, and to provide liquidity to the commercial banks. Those functions cannot be taken over by a commercial bank. A commercial bank is there to be able to earn profit, while a central bank’s main function is not profitability. Also, a commercial bank cannot be relegated with the responsibility of a central bank. A central bank has personnel that are well trained, who have the education and experience that they could perform all their particular duties based on the law. That is still not revised, it still is in practice. To allow another entity, or a parallel institution, to a great extent is going to result in a situation where it will create a lot of confusion, and in one way or another, it will result in the credibility in the Central Bank being eroded in the mind of the public at large. The issuing of currency is the domain of the Central Bank. A commercial bank does not have the authority, legally or otherwise, to be able to engage in issuing currency or injecting liquidity, or afghani, into the system. It cannot issue currency as a medium of exchange. The currency issued by the Central Bank, however, is accepted because the people trust that particular currency to use as a medium of exchange or store of value and use it as a unit of account Remember here, it’s not only U.S. dollars, it is also Afghanistan’s currency that is an important element in bringing about liquidity into the economy. So, establishing a parallel institution, if it’s designed for dismantling the Central Bank, as some of these people have advocated, is not a move that will rescue the poor people, ordinary Afghans, from the misery that, out of no fault of their own, they are experiencing. The Prospect of a Banking CollapseBillington: The UN has addressed the crisis in the banking system. The U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan, Deborah Lyons, gave a report to the UN Security Council Nov. 17, saying: “The dire humanitarian situation in the country is preventable as it is largely due to financial sanctions that have paralyzed the economy.” Also, in November, the UN Development Program said that “the commercial banking system is critical to continue even the humanitarian and other basic programs that are supported by the UN and some of the NGOs and other partners. So, the economic cost of a banking system collapse, with the concomitant negative social consequences, would be colossal.” That’s what the UN Development Program said. Has the UN taken any significant steps to stop this disaster, which they are describing? Dr. Mehrabi: That’s a good question. Let’s look at what we know. I want to mention also that UNAMA, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, was able to bring in $16 million in cash, as a part of the humanitarian aid for Afghanistan. So, they have taken that measure. Even UNAMA, however, does not have a very good record in the mind of many Afghans—their record of performance in the past, as far as efficiency, credibility and accountability is concerned. But anyway, $16 million has been brought in twice. So, there’s been about $32 million in cash, almost all of it directed toward humanitarian aid to Afghanistan. It was not brought in through the Central Bank. While the UN clearly talks about the collapse of the system—and I think in talking about a financial sector and the constraints that the financial sector is faced with—they realize that the liquidity of both commercial banks and the Central Bank have been eroded. But still they have not taken enough measures to be able to address the channeling of these funds to the Central Bank for the purpose of auctioning. So, you know, we say, talk the talk, but walk the walk. I think it is an issue that needs to be brought up on this UN position. But the statement by the UN Special Representative, they clearly realize that, and understand that a banking system collapse could come into being. But you have to take concrete measures to prevent the banking system from collapsing. And what do you do in this case? It is not going to happen by only addressing humanitarian aid. Firms and households will be unable to access bank deposits. To begin with, right now they are not able to get access to their bank deposits. The Central Bank has put strict limits on withdrawals because they don’t have enough liquidity in the system. So, when you look at these international transactions that were mentioned before, SWIFT and all that—that has been blocked to a great extent. Firms are unable to transfer funds overseas to pay for imports. Bottlenecks are created in every direction that you can think of. The outlook, obviously, is very bleak unless measures are taken by the United States—in this case to release these particular funds and to allow them to be channeled to the Central Bank. At this stage, the depletion of international reserves has created a quagmire here. I would hope that the UN Special Representative would look clearly at what we have suggested in this case. Look at a very simple thing—economists usually look at the costs and benefits. What is the cost of a collapse of the banking system, and what are the benefits of making certain that it is rescued? How much would we—that is, Europe and the United States—gain by making certain that the economy functions in a normal way by allowing them to have access to their reserve, and then also inject other liquidity in terms of cash to the people who were funded by ERDF [European Regional Development Fund]. ERDF has a lot of funds, and that could be used for the salaries of these people who are not being paid, so that when they have their salary, they could spend it in order to buy goods and services. That will help. The aggregate demand, or the total demand, would be activated and the economy will be able to use the multiplier effect to generate economic growth. A Direct Appeal to President BidenBelsky: Dr. Mehrabi, you have been meeting with members of the Congress to urge them to call on President Biden to release the Afghan assets. I know that a letter is being circulated. In fact, I received an email from the Maryland Peace Action Group, and I know peace action groups all over the United States are circulating an appeal to people to call on their congressmen to sign on to this letter. The letter is being circulated by representatives Pramila Jayapal, Sarah Jacobs and Jesús García, to urge President Biden to release the $9.5 billion in frozen Afghan reserves. What can you say about your efforts in the Congress and with the news media to promote this policy? Dr. Mehrabi: This letter is an effort we jointly wrote back, I think, in October, but then the Congress was very busy. Our meetings have continued with congressmen and senators. Through those meetings and efforts, we have been able to get a number of sponsors for this particular letter. So far, we have 23 people who have signed it. Initially, Jayapal, Jacobs, and García signed. But now we have other Congress members who have joined the bandwagon and have signed. I had a meeting today with the staff of the Congress and the Senate, where I made a presentation and pitched the notion of this letter, and got signatures by more people. We were hoping to get more signatures, and then present this two-page letter to President Biden. We are highlighting what needs to be done and why it should be done, and how important it is to make certain that people in Afghanistan are not going to suffer from starvation, and to make certain that we do not have famine and universal poverty. This is in the national interest of the United States. The argument has been made that the United States has lost a lot of sweat and financial resources in making certain that these institutions were established. And now we should not be dismantling this particular institution. The Afghans deserve to have access to their foreign reserves. They deserve to have a life that is lived in peace and prosperity, in a country that has suffered from 40 years of war. So, all those arguments are clearly spelled out in the letter to President Biden. It will be submitted to President Biden soon, most likely on Monday or Tuesday of next week. Operation Ibn SinaBillington: Helga Zepp-LaRouche, as you know, the founder of the international Schiller Institutes, stands very strongly against this policy of genocide that is being waged against Afghanistan by the U.S. and the allied NATO nations. What is needed beyond the immediate aid, she insists, is the launching of a modern health care system with all that that entails, meaning clean water, electricity, transportation as well as the medical facilities. Zepp-LaRouche has called this project for international cooperation Operation Ibn Sina, after the famous 11th century medical genius, poet, astronomer, and philosopher, who was in fact born in the region of today’s Afghanistan and is much beloved across the entire Islamic world. What do you think about this effort, and what can you say about Ibn Sina? Dr. Mehrabi: I thank you for the question again. Here it is that we are looking at the current Afghanistan, a collapse of a government that is coming into being, and Afghanistan is faced with economic and development challenges, and daunting economic and political challenges. Any effort to bring about development and to be able to bring economic growth is welcome. I think the effort by Mrs. LaRouche in terms of making certain that the health issues [are met]—Afghanistan, has a very high mortality rate—is a move that will at least expand the life of many of those people who are suffering shortened lives because of the ailments that they suffer from, and because of not having access to health care. And also, obviously, access to clean water and electricity. Right now, Afghanistan cannot import a lot of electricity and cannot pay for it because of, again, the shortage of currency. I think these are all moves that we should all support, and we should all be able to at least in one form or another, be very appreciative of. In the health area, Afghanistan is experiencing a third COVID-19 wave that started back in April. Infection rates have reached a very high level. Coupled with a drop in foreign aid, the government is not able to generate enough money to address the health issues. At the top of it is the World Bank, which was paying the employees of the health sector—they stopped the payments. All of this combined has really brought about a catastrophic situation for the economy of Afghanistan. So, a move like this, brought about by Mrs. LaRouche, is a welcome move. And I think Ibn Sina obviously, as you mentioned clearly, is well known in that part of the region as well as in Afghanistan. [There is an] Ibn Sina Hospital right in the heart of Kabul that many patients visit. Modernizing that particular institution, with the help of Mrs. LaRouche and others would be highly valued and appreciated. Large-Scale Infrastructure for Economic DevelopmentBillington: The other major issue, which we at the Schiller Institute and EIR have promoted is large-scale infrastructure development, especially with the help of the Belt and Road Initiative. We’ve just learned that Pakistan has now begun constructing a rail connection from Quetta to Kandahar, and we know that starting last February, there was a plan approved between Pakistan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan to develop a rail link from CPEC, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, from Islamabad through the Khyber Pass into Kabul and then on to Tashkent, as part of the Belt and Road, which would give all of the Central Asian countries access to the Arabian Sea for the first time, and also transform Afghanistan. What is your vision for Afghanistan’s development, and do you think it’s possible that these projects can continue without fixing the banking crisis first, getting cooperation from China and other neighboring countries? Dr. Mehrabi: I think we should. Besides humanitarian aid, this Belt and Road Initiative from China could provide Afghanistan with long-term economic viability. I think that is an important point to keep in mind. One possibility is obviously Afghanistan joining the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which is a central part of that Belt and Road Initiative. I think Beijing has pledged over $60 billion for infrastructure in Pakistan. Initially, Afghanistan was not allowed to be a part of it, but now I think it has been invited. This initiative, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, is a good option for the development of Afghanistan. It is also important to keep in mind that we talk about the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India natural gas pipeline. TAPI could generate quite a bit of money for Afghanistan—transit fees I think have been projected at over $400 million. This pipeline clearly is also an important work. But we also have other areas for development purposes that have been addressed or talked about, but have not been fully explored and materialized, such as minerals. When I was in Afghanistan in 2008 at the Ministry of Finance, a contract was signed with the Metallurgical Corporation of China to develop the Mes Aynak Copper Mine, but because of the security situation, it has not really been able to produce much. Then we had the Hajigak iron ore mine as an important one to explore. We have oil basins that China is trying to explore as well. So, there are many other opportunities. Also, Afghanistan has a large reserve of lithium besides other minerals that could be generating quite a bit of foreign exchange reserve, if these were active. Belsky: Are there any other thoughts you would like to convey? Sanctions Only Hurt the Ordinary PeopleMr. Mehrabi: Well, I am a firm believer, as I have said all along, that the reserve has to be released and we should be able to make certain that ordinary Afghans are not put in a position where they could be forced to not have adequate food. As an economist, as an Afghan-American, I am deeply concerned about the fate of the 35 million people in Afghanistan who have known little more than war and suffering their whole life. And now for another country to suffocate those particular people—you know, the result will only be a new refugee crisis, a new refugee crisis of the kind that we saw in 2014 in Syria, or even worse. Afghans will flee on foot. They will carry their babies in one hand and whatever belongings they have in the other, and they will go to the west, to Iran, in hopes of making it into Turkey and then into Europe. I think it is a failure—not only shortsighted—for the United States, but also the final abandonment of the Afghan people. I think it’s very important that the United States, which negotiated the evacuation with the Taliban, which was negotiating how they could attack IS [Islamic State terrorists], could engage fully in those activities, but does not want to get fully engaged in releasing these particular funds. You see these policies, the kind that are now in force. They never hurt the people who they are intended to. It will not hurt the current government. We know that, by the evidence in many other areas. It hurts the ordinary Afghans who deserve to have access to their particular money. They deserve to not have their life savings become worthless, worthless because inflation is going to eat them, the value of their money, in a blink of an eye. They deserve to be able to feed their families. So again, that failure to provide access, as I said before, I think it’s shortsighted. Let’s try to act in a way where indeed we help these people. The United States invested a lot of money. Try to avoid the spiral of price increases and food shortages and currency depreciation and bank closures. Let’s try to avoid the complete collapse of the economy. Billington: Well, thank you very, very much, Dr. Mehrabi. We appreciate it. We will do everything we can to get your message out with our effort and others who are joining with you and trying to prevent this atrocity, and to at least make up for the destruction that has been waged against your country over all these years. Dr. Mehrabi: Thank you very much. Thank you, Gerry, and thank you, Mike, for all your help and efforts in this area. I’m very appreciative of your dedication to this area. I’m an optimist. It took a while to get this letter out, but we finally did it, with meetings almost twice, three times a week, or sometimes four times, for different groups. We have got to a level where at least we have 23 co-signers today. Hopefully, the number will increase. I would like to get this letter out before Christmas and before the congressmen disappear, rather than bringing it out in the new year. We’ll try to do that. We will keep you apprised of what is going on, and we’ll keep in touch. And thanks again very much. Belsky: And thank you for your efforts, Dr. Mehrabi.
Graham Fuller was interviewed by LaRouche Movement Associate Mike Billington on Dec. 9, 2021. Graham Fuller is a former U.S. diplomat, CIA official, and Islamic scholar. The lengthy interview spans many subjects, from US-China and US-Russia relations, to the Islamic world and its cultural revival, to the changing landscape of the world's geopolitics as the Western neoliberal order increasingly collapses, and the need for a more healthy relationship between the world's leading nations.EIR: This is Mike Billington with the EIR, Executive Intelligence Review, and the Schiller Institute. I’m here with Graham Fuller, and if you can, perhaps you can give a bit of your various hats in your career. Fuller: Well, in terms of public service, I was 25 years an operations officer in CIA, serving in Germany, Turkey, Lebanon, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Hong Kong. So a good bit of international background. I graduated from Harvard with a B.A. in Russian language, literature, and history; M.A. in Middle East studies; and had a long interest at the same time in China. After retiring from CIA, I was four years as the vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, which is the long-range forecasting institution within CIA, and then went to Rand Corporation to do more geopolitical writings and things. And since then I have been kind of freelancing, written two novels, both somewhat political, and a lot of different books about the Middle East, Islam, political Islam, et cetera. Danger of War With ChinaEIR: Okay, thanks. So, we sort of came about having this interview because you watched the interview I did with Ambassador Chas Freeman a couple of weeks ago. He warned that the U.S. has already crossed the red line in China by essentially promoting Taiwan independence and breaking all of the U.S.-China agreements in the ’70s that led to the one-China policy and the recognition of Beijing. How do you appraise the danger of a potential war between U.S. and China, even a potential nuclear war? Fuller: Of course it is serious. I’m not sure that the U.S.—and I’m a huge admirer of Charles Freeman—but I’m not sure the U.S. has actually crossed the red line. But I think we are in the vicinity of doing that. And meanwhile, I think the United States is learning a lot about what it means to have a true peer competitor like China, as opposed to, say, the Soviet Union, which was militarily formidable, but in terms of societal and soft power, not at all. I think the U.S. has actually avoided specifically saying they will support Taiwanese independence, but certainly American policy wants to make it as difficult as possible for China to entertain any military views of re-conquering, re-joining Taiwan to China. It’s going to be a tight game, and I think the main goal really should be for both sides to tamp down the pressure, the level of rhetoric, that is underway now, which makes it very hard for more rational and thoughtful discourse. Danger of War With RussiaEIR: On the same issue really, on the Russian side, President Putin has also indicated that the accepting of Ukraine into NATO or moving advanced weapons systems into Ukraine or on Russia’s border would be a red line. And Biden, when asked about that, said, “We don’t recognize any red lines.” On the summit Tuesday, Blinken and Sullivan both came out immediately and gave read-outs, which would make it appear that the whole thing was Biden ‘dressing down’ Putin (and Russia) for its aggression and its threats and so forth. But then Biden himself said that he would be announcing tomorrow, Dec. 10, a meeting with four European countries and Russia to address Putin’s request for guarantees that NATO would not move any further east or deploy weapon systems on their border. What, in general, do you think about the summit, and the potential for avoiding the conflict on the Russian side? Fuller: Well, this is, of course, a long-standing issue. I think in, very broad terms—and this applies to China policy as well as to Russia policy—the United States has been so long in the habit of dominating, not always in a negative sense, but dominating the world since 1945, where other countries would defer to the United States. We, the United States, had the money, the weaponry, the technology, and everything else to be the number one player, really, in the world through that time. So, I think this has been a gradual policy of the rest of the world, much of the rest of the world slowly trying to catch up. Certainly, Europe has, but much of the rest of the world as well. But in the meantime, during the whole Cold War period, the United States was in the position of—the rhetoric was—defender of the Free World, quote unquote. So I think the United States has felt itself really the dominant power, the hegemon of the world, the leader of the free world, whatever terms you choose to use. But the reality in the modern world, and especially since 9-11, has been that the American hegemony, predominance, is a fading quality, and that much of the rest of the world is now rising. This, I think, American mentality, strategic mentality, maybe even cultural mentality finds it nearly impossible, intolerable, to accept the idea that any other country could become a peer competitor with the United States. I remember a couple of years ago, attending some military conferences, wherever, and in Washington, that the term used by the Pentagon in those days was America’s search, or maintenance, for all-horizon dominance. That’s not quite the word. It wasn’t horizon, but all- spectrum dominance, full-spectrum dominance. That says a lot right there. And I think this is a slow, very painful, hopefully learning process, by which the U.S. is going to have to back away ever more carefully, from overt assumption that it’s going to be able to call all the shots anymore. I mean, I think we even saw this with the very unfortunate Blinken, and maybe Sullivan as well, in the Anchorage meeting, when Sullivan, or Blinken, prior to the meeting, announced that he was very confident the meeting would go well and the United States would be dealing with China from a position of strength. Well, you may recall he was dressed down for that quite sharply by the Chinese, who basically said, how dare you say that? You have no right to say that you are dealing with us from a position of strength. We are going to deal, we want to be treated, we WILL be treated as equals by you on an equal footing. I think that pushed back, maybe shocked even, the foreign policy blob in Washington, which has never quite been addressed in those terms, by a country that is pretty demonstrably becoming a peer competitor in almost all respects. EIR: It reminds me of the Clean Break doctrine in the Nineties. This was [David] Wurmser and [Douglas] Feith and [Dick] Cheney and [Donald] Rumsfeld. They basically said, we need a clean break to defend our friends in Israel. And then literally said—I think this was called the Wolfowitz Doctrine—that we must prevent any country or any combination of countries to reach a position of challenging our dominance, our superiority. I mean, that was literally the thinking. Fuller: And even challenging Israeli dominance, I think was a good bit part of that. But yes, I mean, times are changing, the world is changing, and it’s going to be a painful lesson. But I think maybe even Biden in his late years, may be beginning to realize that the old rhetoric just doesn’t work quite as well anymore. And Russia is not quite the old Soviet Union, and Russia now working with China certainly represents a very different global force, not just militarily, but I think, you know, strategically, culturally, diplomatically in all senses. EIR: You know, it’s interesting, several of the Russian readouts on the summit included saying what you just said—one of them called Biden “an old-fashioned politician” who understands the danger of war, and one of them called on Biden to calm down the people around him. Fuller: Yeah, well put. U.S.: Revenge On the Afghan and Syrian PeopleEIR: Yeah, right. Okay, so you were the CIA station chief in Kabul in the 1970s, and I know you’ve remained very active in Afghan policy debates right up until today. Clearly, that country is now in an economic and humanitarian catastrophe. Both the World Food Program and the World Health Organization are screaming as loudly as they can, that many millions of Afghan citizens face death by starvation and lack of medical care as the winter sets in. And yet, the U.S. is maintaining sanctions, and freezing billions of dollars that belong to the Afghan people. How do you explain this, what I consider depraved indifference, and how can we resolve that in your view? Fuller: Well, as you know, Mike, the Afghan people have been victim of great power rivalry for many, many decades, going back to the initial Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to protect the new communist regime that came into power there in 1978. So Americans, and many Muslim states and others, have been participating in war within Afghanistan that has killed hundreds of thousands, probably millions of Afghans over the many years, leading to civil war, after the Soviet departure, the civil war among the mujahideen, and then utter anarchy within Afghanistan for a number of years. And then the Taliban came in to restore order, a rough sort of frontier justice, peace order, within the country. And then the whole bin Laden business, and then the American invasion. So this has been a nonstop, brutal thing. What I fear is, how gracefully the United States is capable of accepting the fact, that this is yet one more war, which we did not win, and that it is not going to have blood in its eye for the victors of the country, the Taliban. I’m no great admirer of the Taliban, but they are the de facto winners, and I think nearly everybody in the region acknowledges it, for better or for worse. It is the reality. So I think if this is some kind of vengeful policy towards the Taliban, to make them suffer, and who knows, maybe even there are those who hope that civil war might break out, or whatever, and give the U.S. a chance to win a new foothold. I don’t know, but it is a very ugly policy if it goes beyond mere tactical, temporary pressure points to try to get the Taliban to make a few political domestic changes in outlook. If it goes much beyond that, into a broader vengeance, or a desire to restore the status quo, it will be tragic. And it’s part of such a long tragedy. We see this elsewhere as well, I think, in the case of Syria. The United States has been unhappy with Syria as far back as I can remember. When I first went into government in the Seventies, Sixties even, the Assad regime, father and son, have long been hostile to America, and what they perceive as American hegemony in the Middle East, and Israel’s ability to absolutely dominate militarily the entire region, without giving any particular justice to the Palestinians. So I think the United States has had it in for Syria for 40, 50, 60 years of trying to overthrow, not with major force, but with constant undermining of Syria in one way or another. Again, I’m no great admirer of the Syrian regime. It’s never been a democracy, it’s a minority government, but it’s been the reality of the Middle East for a very long time. But even down to today, we can see U.S. involvement in civil wars in Syria, in which much of the goal, still, is to punish Syria, bring down the regime, change it all, and it again has failed. And again, the victims, sadly, are the Syrian people. We just cannot seem to accept the reality that we have been bested again in that kind of a struggle. Islamist Political Movements Must Be AcknowledgedEIR: You argued at one point that there will be no resolution to the Middle East crisis, unless the Hezbollah and Hamas, and Iran, are recognized, that they have to be a part of this. And yet, the Israelis and many people here in the U.S. consider all three of those institutions terrorists, evil people, and so forth. How is that going to be achieved? I mean, what can be done, especially with the Hezbollah and Hamas issues? And in Syria, how can you resolve that today? Fuller: Well, as you know, the United States in particular has been ready to slap the label of “terrorist” on any Muslim group that it does not like. I find it frankly almost grotesque, that we have now come to persuade our American countrymen that Iran is the number one terrorist threat in the world. I mean, this is alongside Saudi Arabia, which has been pumping out extraordinarily damaging interpretations of Islam, which really leaves little room for generous accommodation, even among Muslims. So I think the term terrorist—you’re familiar with many countries that are slapped with this label, on groups that are seeking better rights, or even seeking separation. And that applies as well today. Hezbollah is the spokesman, basically, for most Shi’ites in Lebanon. The Shi’ites are the biggest single group in a very multicultural, multi-religious country. They have formidable spirit and drive. Many Lebanese who don’t like them, believe that Hezbollah is the one thing that maybe keeps Israel at bay from interfering or invading Lebanon at will. Indeed, Israel is very nervous about Hezbollah’s strength, and it’s not just purely military, it’s this kind of a drive, a will, not to permit Israel to invade the country. Similarly, with Hamas, I mean, Hamas is the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood has not been a terrorist organization, fundamentally, in 50 years. It is a relatively middle-of-the-road Islamist organization. I’m not arguing for Islamist movements, but they are a major force within the Middle East, and there’s a huge spectrum of them, from radical terrorists, genuine terrorists like Bin Laden, or other groups in that region, to rather very moderate Islamic-oriented groups, such as in Turkey. So you can’t smear them all with one label. The Muslim Brotherhood continues to be concerned with Palestinian rights there. It’s an Arab organization, largely. So, I think if we don’t acknowledge full Palestinian rights, and begin to solve that problem, this is going to continue to be a festering issue, that plays right into the hands of more radical organizations, whether we like them or not. They’re there, and there is a call, an issue, to which they can play. Let me just mention one other term which has always been very important to me over the years, from the Egyptian ruler Abdel Nasser, if anybody still remembers him back in the Fifties and Sixties. He was the charismatic leader who sort of put Egypt on the Third World map for the first time, and he became the darling, really, of much of the Arab world. He stood up for Arab rights, and spoke about them. Somebody asked him once, why do you think Egypt has such a major role in the Arab world at that point? And he said, the Arab world is in search of an “actor,” and Egypt is now that actor. I think that applies to many situations around the world, where there’s a strong need for some political voice to speak up on behalf of one or another injustice of the world, and whatever country takes up that challenge, automatically moves into a position of greater respect, and even support, by much of the world. And sadly, all these three organizations—the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah and Iran itself—are formidable, political, ideological forces in the region. Iran is probably the oldest civilization in the entire Middle East. It has managed to survive decades and decades of American sanctions, and Israeli punishment, and assassinations by Israelis, et cetera, and they’re still holding their own. It’s a strong country, whether again, we may not like it all, but I think we have contributed to pushing Iran into a corner in which it is reacting, perhaps in a much more aggressive, reactive manner than might otherwise be the case. And we might talk about this before the interview is over. But just let me say here, we are not thinking enough in this world about why conflicts are coming about. Are they inevitable and can they be avoided? Sadly, I think in American thinking or much of the thinking of the world, these conflicts, wars, are inevitable, but they’re not. They just aren’t. And the trick is deciding how and why to avoid them, because it is doable. The Military-Industrial ComplexEIR: Well, that obviously brings up the issue of the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned about a long, long time ago, that they need wars to be going on. They’re required by the military industrial crowd and their Wall Street backers, thinking that this cannot be allowed to diminish or they’re going to lose their power. I don’t know what you think about that. Fuller: Well, it’s very impressive when you look back at what Eisenhower said way back in the day and look at today’s reality. I think he was spot-on in his observation. I try to avoid an entirely conspiratorial view that it’s all Wall Street and military-industrial complex, because there are many huge capitalist organizations, corporations that do not profit from war and seek to avoid war, because it’s not good for business. Many businessmen and capitalists feel, if you’re not producing arms—it may not be necessarily good [to have] war at all. But that said, yes, there is a war lobby and it is linked with the idea that we must preserve American power and hegemony and dominance at all costs. And that plays, of course, into the hands of those who want to support America’s overwhelming military dominance in the world today. EIR: And yet we lose everywhere we fight. Fuller: Well, somebody once commented to me, a correspondent who worked at the Pentagon. He said, you know, Graham, you don’t get it (or some somebody in the Pentagon said to him), you don’t get it. It’s not about winning wars. It’s about maintaining the organization, maintaining the infrastructure. As long as the funds keep coming in, as long as we can maintain the structure and the training and the weaponry and all of this, you don’t have to win the wars. That’s secondary. It’s nice to win, but that’s secondary. EIR: What kind of an image of man is that? Which thinks that secondary issues which murder millions of people and drive millions out of their homes are secondary issues? Fuller: I agree. I agree. It’s shocking, but I fear it’s the human condition. Project Ibn Sina To Save AfghanistanEIR: Well, let’s hope that’s not the case. Actually I’ll bring up this issue of Ibn Sina that I mentioned to you before the interview. Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s idea of this Project Ibn Sina for Afghanistan, is based on that tradition of a great Islamic leader who represented the kind of leader you talked about with Nasser, but at an even higher level, a great philosopher, a great poet. And of course, also a medical genius. So I wondered if you might want to comment. You know the history of Islam quite well. If you want to comment on the role of Ibn Sina, and Helga’s idea of so-called Project Ibn Sina as a way of bringing the world together around the reconstruction of Afghanistan, but also applying that to these issues of festering wars in the Middle East. Fuller: Yeah, that’s a very interesting question, Mike. Absolutely. I think by now, most Westerners are aware that there was a golden age of Islam. There was a time when intellectual life in the Muslim world, Arab world, Persian world, and beyond in India and even further east, intellectual life was very rich. There were very interesting, open theological discussions about religion, about science, philosophy. There was no shutting down of the mind at that point. Many Muslims have written since then, about, “Has there been a closing down of the Muslim mind?” I think probably you can demonstrate that there has been. The more important question is, why? One simple answer—it’s not the only answer, but it’s an important answer—is, of course, the long centuries of Western imperialism; British, French, German, Italian, Dutch, and American in another sense, that really helped keep these countries infantilized, is the word I would use most readily. They came to rely on outside—they came to fatalistically yield to the power of outside forces that would prevent them from taking charge of their own lives, thinking about these issues more deeply. So, I think many people trace some of the decline of Arab and Persian, and Muslim in general, Muslim intellectual and intellectualism, its sciences, its arts, and this gradual suppression of intellectual tradition within the Muslim world, largely by the ulema, the clerical class that found itself entrenched in positions of power as long as they supported the regime in power. They could have their voice over religious policy absolutely; that contributed to it. Certainly even the shift of the great trade routes from overland across the Silk Route, to new sea routes around the Indian Ocean to East Asia, that also was a factor in the decline of the Muslim world. But it’s undeniable that this has taken place. I think in this sense, Ibn Sina is a reflection, is an aspiration to go back to what made the Muslim world so rich, so strong, so thoughtful, so productive intellectually in its time. I think it can happen again. There’s no reason why it should not. But the Middle East has been caught in this terrible mess now—you can you can go back many, many, many decades, if not one hundred years of colonialism and foreign control and dominance by dictators supported readily by the West, et cetera. It’s a long, sad story, but Ibn Sina is one great symbol. He’s not the only one; there are many great symbols of a broader vision of Islam, a more open thinking, exploratory Islam. Turkey and the Arab SpringEIR: Good. You have something of a specialty on Turkey within the Islamic world, and you wrote a book which was called Turkey and the Arab Spring. I take it this is your reflection on the Muslim Brotherhood, which was sort of the dominant force in the Arab Spring. As I understand it, Erdogan is part of that. Do you want to comment on that now in retrospect, with the downfall of the Arab Spring? Fuller: Yeah, well, this brings up the very important question that I alluded to briefly earlier about Islamism, Islamic movements, Islamist, whatever, there are many different terms. But basically the idea of Islamists is, to put it in very simple terms, it’s a spectrum of views, as I said, from bin Laden to peace activists from an Islamic perspective. But it essentially is Muslims saying, Look, Islam has something to say about the future of governance and society in the Muslim world. What it has to say, what we choose out of it, just as some of the early European movements, Christian Democrats, et cetera, felt that Christianity had something to say intellectually or religiously or theologically, to say about good governance in Europe. So I think the Muslim movements – some are horrible, brutal, violent, as bin Laden is the major case in point. The Taliban have been quite brutal in their own way. Saudi Arabia has been a very brutal state, supporting many brutal movements and ideas outside the country, indeed fomenting these ideas of intolerance—it’s not only Islam, but there’s only one form of Islam, and that’s the Saudi form of Islam, which is Wahhabi, which is utterly uncompromising and very retrogressive. So anyway, the Muslim Brotherhood in all the spectrum is rather centrist. It has accepted the idea of democracy. It has political parties. These are not secret organizations and terrorist organizations. It hasn’t been that for half a century. It has accepted the idea of elections at the student level, the national level, participating in elections, accepting the idea of some kind of democratic practice. These ideas are utterly anathema to countries like Saudi Arabia or other Arab dictators, or Muslim dictators anywhere, who see this as subversive. So, they have moved all out—that’s why Saudi Arabia has been quick to condemn the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorists, even though it’s very, very difficult to make that case over the last 50 years. Fifty years ago, yes, they dallied in it, but not since. So I think, Turkey doesn’t officially call itself Muslim Brotherhood, but certainly the ruling party has good ties with it. And again, Turkey, it’s become an abusive democracy, but it’s still a democracy. I mean, there are real elections. It’s an unfair, or illiberal democracy, is the term I think we use. But nonetheless, it still has elections. And I believe that when the day comes that President Erdogan in Turkey is voted out of power, if there aren’t manipulations, I believe fairly surely he will step down. So the question of the compatibility of Islam and democracy that the Muslim Brotherhood in particular, I think has accepted, is far from over. And the debate is far from over. I mean, we’re even arguing in the United States about religious ideas, in social belief, abortion, among other things. So you cannot totally separate moral views from policy views, and moral views are importantly founded often on religious ideas. It doesn’t have to be, but that tends to be their source. NED: Surrogate of the CIAEIR: To what extent do you see the NED [National Endowment for Democracy], Open Society, regime-change crowd influence in the Arab Spring? And to what extent would you think that caused a backlash against it? Fuller: At one time when I was still working in Washington, I was a big believer in the National Endowment for Democracy, and I believed that democracy had a lot to offer to much of the world. I still believe democracy—it’s like Winston Churchill said, it’s the worst form of governance, except for all those that have been tried before it. But somehow, over the years, the National Endowment for Democracy, or NED, really became almost a surrogate for the CIA. The U.S. largely got out of the business of having the CIA overthrow countries—and this wasn’t, by the way, the CIA choosing to overthrow these places; this was by Presidential Order or Kissinger order or whatever. The National Endowment for Democracy became a much nicer face for regime change. Not by violence, but certainly through using all kinds of financial and ideological and training, and other kinds of things, to bring about change. I believed that democracy was a great goal for the United States, but as I began to watch it over the years, I began to see how much of this was cherry picking. That democracy was, as I often said, democracy was a punishment to deliver upon our enemies, to overthrow them. Democracy is never a gift for our allies. You know, we’re not deciding that we’re going to bestow democracy upon Saudi Arabia or any other number of authoritarian regimes around the world. We have all kinds of things to say about the rights of Uyghurs in China, and I care very deeply about the Uyghurs in China. I’ve been there. I’ve written about it. But, I think the fact that they’re in China seems to be the more important point for the U.S. policy than what the state of the Uyghurs is at this particular time. So it’s highly selective, which undermines the credibility, the ideological credibility of the United States in pushing for democracy. We’ll do it when we want to overthrow somebody, but we don’t have much to say about it otherwise. We don’t have much, even in human rights, I mean, this tends to be a weapon used to overthrow or seriously weaken countries. But if it’s a friendly country, we don’t do it. We never talk about the Kashmiris and Indian policy against Kashmir, or Indian policies against Muslims in general, or other religious groups in India, because India—they’re the good guys, so we don’t talk about it. But if it’s Palestinians rights being crushed in Israel, we don’t talk about it. But if it’s Chechens in Russia, or other groups in China, then we’re all over it. So, I just feel we ideologically corrode the very validity of pushing for democracy. The Uyghurs and China’s Nation BuildingEIR: I certainly agree with you on that. Let me take you up on the Uygher, Xinjiang issue. I read the study you and Frederick Starr did in 2004, called “The Xinjiang Problem,” which involved scholars… Fuller: But it was mainly Jonathan Lipman, who is an outstanding scholar of Muslims in China, who was my partner in writing that essay. Fred Starr very capably brought the book all together, many different disciplines, but it was myself and Jonathan Lipman, who has a wonderful book about Muslims in China. Very readable, delightful book. [see Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China ] EIR: I’ll look that up. Since that time, of course, you had the ISIS-linked Uyghurs who carried out terrorist attacks in Xinjiang, and the Chinese response to that was to launch what they call a mass education or mass re-education campaign for the young people being influenced by the jihadis. But at the same time doing massive economic development in the region; they created new industrial and agricultural projects across Xinjiang. And certainly, that is quite the opposite of the so-called anti-terrorist campaigns in the West, which were largely bombing countries back to the Stone Age. So nonetheless, what China is doing is now, since Pompeo and his ilk, is labeled genocide, and in fact, they’re imposing sanctions on China, and even the so-called diplomatic boycott of the Olympics is because of genocide in Xinjiang. I find this to be not only absurd, but really disgusting, but you certainly know a great deal about the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. How do you look at that now in light of this crisis? Fuller: You know, it’s a complicated issue, Mike. For starters, I would not accept the term genocide, which I think is being extremely loosely applied by Washington again, not so much on the facts of the issue, because if you looked at Palestinian treatment, the numbers are vastly less. But treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and in Israel, there might be very comparable things. But anyway, this is not genocide, but I think it is—some people have used the term cultural oppression. Some have even called it culturacide. China is known to be—and I’m a huge admirer of China, I’ve studied Chinese history and literature and things. I have great admiration for China’s past and indeed even present extraordinary accomplishments. But China is also a tough country in which to be a minority. The Han Chinese massively dominate, just numerically, the country, overwhelmingly, so that it’s difficult to be a minority in China anywhere and not get “Han-ized”, if you will, turned into Han Chinese linguistically, culturally, and otherwise. This is not unique to China; other countries have pushed for cultural integration in the past. I don’t know the years exactly, but I think in the 18th Century, France had an extraordinary policy of imposing, with some force, imposing the language of Paris on the entire country and wiping out regional dialects and languages such as Celtic languages or Basque and other such. So in the process of nation building, whether you like it or not, governments, whether good or bad, or harsh or not, tend to try to push towards homogenization of their population to make it easier to rule, to maybe make it easier for people to get along socially. I don’t know. So the Chinese are part of this long tradition. And it’s easy when you got one-point-four [billion] people — and I don’t know what the statistics are of non-Han minorities, but they’re probably pretty small in comparison. So yes, I do feel that the Chinese have been rather harsh in Xinjiang in the effort to Han-ize, or turn into “good Chinese”, Han Chinese, the Uyghur population. And the Uyghurs, of course, are the furthest away from Beijing of any group in the country, way off to the West. I mean, the capital of Xinjiang province in China is closer to Islamabad than it is to Beijing. So you’re talking about a very distant, culturally long-time Turkic Islamic Muslim society. I deplore the re-education camps. It smacks a bit too much to me of kind of more fascist organizations in the past. But I think, I do not believe that calling this genocide is a legitimate term. And we also have to come to the deeper question of, who is it that deserves an independent state? The Chechens in Russia and the Soviet Union have been a totally distinct ethnic group. They’re Muslims, not Christians, but they have been pushing, including using violence for years, for over a hundred years, to gain independence from the Soviet Union, or from Russia. So this is an ongoing problem. And I certainly don’t support violence on either side of this. But I do acknowledge that in any process of industrializing China, including its distant western regions, factories are going to be built, and even more to the point, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Han Chinese have come into areas that have long been occupied, long inhabited by Muslim Uyghur people, Turkic Muslim Uygur peoples. And they naturally are deeply disturbed at this huge influx of industrial Chinese workers, who are changing the real estate, they’re tearing down their old towns, they’re weakening Islam, closing mosques, you know, imposing Chinese language requirements. Obviously, if you’re going to live in China, you damn well better learn Mandarin. So you can’t say that it’s all brutal, but it’s a complex issue of how do you try to integrate this country without using brutal techniques? And I think China in recent years has moved in the direction of unnecessary harshness in that issue. The Visionary Belt and Road InitiativeEIR: Well, let me say that they’ve built more mosques in Xinjiang than any area in the world. So you have to take that into consideration, too. What you’re saying about Xinjiang is also true of Tibet, and our organization from the beginning—LaRouche’s idea and the ideas of the Schiller Institute—was always predicated on the idea of peace through development, that you can’t try to bring about peace and then development. You have to actually bring development as a way of addressing the common needs of all people, all religious movements, all ethnic differences, and so forth. And certainly, that’s the way the Chinese have approached both Tibet and Xinjiang, and in the process have dramatically increased the populations of Xinjiang, the Uyghur population, increased their standard of living enormously. And their argument, of course, is that when people complain about human rights, that the most fundamental human right is the right to life and to a decent standard of living. And they’re very proud of having brought the entire country, including all the people of Xinjiang, out of abject poverty. There’s still poverty, but [abject poverty] has been eliminated. A lot of this is also what they launched to take internationally, the process of development, through the Belt and Road. And of course, Xinjiang is a crossroad for the Belt and Road. So let me ask you to say what you think about the whole Belt and Road process, which of course, is also roundly denounced by the anti-China people in the West with all kinds of nasty terms. But it is a basis on which, if you believe in the idea that peace comes through development, that you can resolve these issues not only in China, but in Afghanistan and in the Middle East. In particular, I wonder what you think about the efforts by China to bring the Belt and Road into the Middle East. Fuller: I think the Chinese idea of the Belt and Road is an extremely imaginative and exciting idea. It is visionary in the sense of uniting and bringing together diverse societies across Central Asia that have not been united since the days of Genghis Khan, who was a brutal conqueror, but for a hundred years thereafter proceeded to run a pretty enlightened and peaceful administration all across Central Asia, as a Chinese dynasty—later, as a Chinese dynasty. So I think it’s inspired. Central Asia has been the backwater of the world for a long, long time. Even though in medieval periods it was a rich center of commerce and trade and ideas and science, et cetera, along the lines of Ibn Sina, who lived in that area himself. This includes Iran, of course. So, I think it’s an extraordinary idea that the Chinese have been developing here, in context with Russia as well. It’s a complicated area. There are many ethnic sensitivities in the area. Muslims traditionally do not like to feel that they’re under the thumb—however, you choose to interpret it—under the dominance, under the overwhelming power of non-Muslim power, and they would view China in that regard. They would view Russia in that regard, but it doesn’t mean that they will reject it. It just means there are going to be certain sensitivities about Islamic culture, Islamic history and tradition, that will play an important role, I think, in the future of that Belt and Road. And China will need to—and Russia, of course—will need to move very cautiously with full regard for the cultural and religious traditions of that area. But I think, yes, it can do a great deal for the welfare, the livelihood, standard of living, cultural development, and everything else to have this area opened up from an area that will go from, well, you know, you can say Beijing, but in many senses, even from Korea, all the way across land and sea to now Italy, I think, which is the westernmost point at this stage of the Belt and Road concept. It’s very positive, it’s a very highly constructive, imaginative idea. EIR: Have you looked into the efforts between China and, let’s say, Iraq, for instance, to bring in some of these Belt and Road projects? The last government had agreements of oil for development, which got crushed, unfortunately. Fuller: Yeah, I’m not terribly familiar with where Iraq stands on the Belt and Road. I mean, inevitably, it will be part, it would be a natural part. I mean, going way back when it ran from Beijing to Beirut in effect, back in the day. I don’t know where it stands now with Iraq, but certainly Iran. And in Iran, already, China is playing a very significant role in helping relieve some of the more oppressive aspects of American sanctions. Iran has been historically a major country, a major culture that was part of that whole Belt and Road civilization. It was a Muslim, Arab, Persian society, Turkic as well. Very important. All those three cultural groups. China does not always have the best reputation, going way back, as fully honoring societies that resist homogenization, and Muslim societies tend to resist, a bit, homogenization into non-Muslim cultures. You could have a long discussion about why. So I think the idea is brilliant, but as I said before, China and Russia need to step cautiously and sensitively with this huge new cultural region, that will benefit that region, I believe, hugely. Afghan War Targeted China and RussiaEIR: Good. I’d like to ask two other things on Afghanistan before we leave that. One is that I read an article you wrote recently called “Time to Smash the Urge of Imperial Strategic Groupthink”. Fuller: That wasn’t my title. EIR: Oh, it wasn’t, Okay. It’s quite a title. Well, anyway, what I noted in there was that you said that the entire Afghan misadventure was less about fighting terrorism and more about establishing a base near the Russian and Chinese borders, sort of as part of the Great Game. There are indications that the pullout of Afghanistan was less about ending regime-change wars and more about repositioning for confrontations with China and Russia. And you may have heard that Tony Blinken just yesterday basically acknowledged that. He said (I wrote it down): “In ending America’s longest war and making sure that we’re not sending a third generation of Americans back to fight and die in Afghanistan, that frees up a tremendous amount of resources and focus for other challenges.” And the reporter even asked, “Do you think the American people have an appetite for other challenges?” And he said, “Oh, I think the appetite is significant.” I wonder what you think about this in terms of going forward. Fuller: I think it was fairly clear back in 9/11, 2001, that the invasion of Afghanistan was about far more than bin Laden. Bin Laden certainly was the perfect poster-boy enemy for that invasion. And it wasn’t outrageous—9/11 was an outrage, an outrage against the United States and generally, through the use of terrorism and murder. But yes, I think it was not by accident that the U.S. was well aware that Afghanistan sits athwart China, Russia, Central Asia. They understood that all you have to do is read about the British Great Game back in the day, 19th Century, and America supporting the Afghans against the Soviet invasion in 1978. So the idea of the geopolitical significance of Afghanistan is well known. We just didn’t talk about it very much, because it was a much better sell, to talk about terrorism and Afghanistan. I am not sure that the U.S. is quite ready to throw in, give up its spurs in Afghanistan, for the very same reason that it borders on Russia, borders on China, and might in the U.S. eyes be a check, possibly to elements of the Belt and Road. If the U.S. has a better idea than the Belt and Road or could contribute to it or work simultaneously with it, that would be great. But I think now anyway, it seems to be a zero-sum game in American eyes, and it doesn’t want to participate in any way that would facilitate this Chinese venture. I don’t think we’ve really let go quite there, and it won’t be until we start generously helping rebuild that country that we helped to destroy, that we become credible in our willingness to look for better days for the Afghan people and get out of the region. Drugs and the U.S. Cultural DecayEIR: So, I want to ask as, I think, a last question, the issue of the cultural decay in the United States and in the western world generally. I read some reviews of your memoir, I didn’t read the memoir, but the book you wrote about the death of your son to drug addiction. And, as you probably know, it was just recently announced that there have been 100,000 overdose drug deaths this last year. That’s by far the highest ever. And the economic and cultural decay in the country has really left a whole generation of children who have no sense of a positive future. They don’t have a sense of a mission in the world. And this, of course, has resulted in some horrible atrocities like the child killers. We had one just the other day in Michigan, and record-high teen suicides. Since you did have that experience, how do you read this yourself, in terms of what we’re going to have to do to revive the culture in the United States? Fuller: Well, drugs in many ways are the bane of the modern world, everywhere, in some sense. In the United States, as you know, we’ve not had a great deal of luck even with the banning of all kinds of drugs over the years, have not had great success with it. And the so-called war against drugs that’s been going on, what, 20, 30 years, as part of many administrations punishing various Latin American countries for helping produce this stuff, in which we are the main market. This goes back a long way, and with all the problems that you talk about; yes, it’s been, it’s really sad. It’s been exacerbated by COVID. It’s got to be exacerbated by just existential angst from global warming, the future of the world. What I now feel is an excessive sense of individualism within the United States culture. Individualism has been a wonderful feature of American culture, and produced amazing artistic accomplishments and scientific and technical accomplishments, all kinds of things. But it does have a downside. This extreme, extreme individualism of the United States, which means that there’s not so coherent a society, as you might find in, say, slightly more traditional European cultures, but even they are suffering from drugs. So, I’m not sure what the answer to all of this is, but certainly the conditions of American life, the discrepancy between rich and poor, and the negativism that emerges from this, that you can see in the music and the arts and other things, certainly is exacerbating it hugely. But it’s in some senses, it’s a global problem. It’s a human problem. Addiction to Never Ending WarsEIR: Let me close by asking if you have anything else you’d like to like to say to our audience. Fuller: No, just to express my concern about where the U.S. is headed now, the viability of American democratic practice at this point. I think the future of the world is going to be ever more demanding. Obviously, for starters, because of global warming, and pandemics. Also, the negative impacts of technology. Apart from the many wonderful aspects of technology, there are many, many socially negative impacts of technology. My fear is that countries are going to find themselves increasingly unmanageable, in which the power of the state is going to be perceived as more and more necessary. Just in COVID alone, to try to control the spread of COVID and manage the treatment of COVID, has required a great empowerment of the state, not just in the U.S. but globally. So, I think in a country that’s as intensely individualistic as the United States is, where people can say, well, you know, I want to do what I want to do and it’s my freedom, it’s my body. There are all kinds of very good reasons for pushing back against this. But I think in the modern world and the modern world of delicate technology and countries existing on delicate balances of how technologies interact, you can’t really survive in a country that is verging on the anarchistic in many regards, that cannot provide good government and good governance. So I fear very much for where the future of the U.S. is headed right now. It may not just be the United States. It may be the West, and the West may be ahead of much of the rest of the world. But the problem of control of populations getting ever bigger, and the crises, global warming, disease, technology, et cetera, et cetera, I fear are going to hugely empower states. And China is basically arguing that they are the vanguard of the future in this regard. I think the thing that I find most deeply depressing about the United States is its still addiction to never ending war. We talked about that briefly before, but I think I am appalled that even with very progressive thinkers like Bernie Sanders, even Bernie Sanders has not dared to grasp the nettle of the Pentagon budget and the ongoing wars, or only very slightly. Its still, you know, we can’t afford medical care, we can’t afford infrastructure, we can’t afford COVID, or one thing or another. But boy, we can afford those damn wars. I’m appalled that even today, nobody, just about nobody is suggesting that maybe, one-third of the Pentagon budget might go a long way to beginning to solve a few of these domestic problems. It’s beyond the pale, that discussion, right now. EIR: Yeah, either party. Fuller: Either party. EIR: Okay, well, thank you very much. This will be most interesting.
The following interview with Ambassador Chas Freeman was conducted by EIR’s Mike Billington on Nov. 29, 2021. Ambassador Freeman’s extensive career in U.S. foreign policy includes his role as interpreter for President Richard Nixon in his famous 1972 visit to China. He did the legal analysis that inspired the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 and was Country Director for China, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African affairs, and Assistant Secretary of Defense. He served abroad in India and Taiwan, and as Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassies in China and Thailand. He was U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the 1990-1991 war to liberate Kuwait. He edited the Encyclopedia Britannica article on Diplomacy, and is the author of several books on statecraft as well as on Middle East and Asian policy.Chas Freeman: I’m Chas Freeman and it’s a pleasure to be with you, Mike. EIR: Do you want to say a bit about your history, your many hats? Freeman: Well, not particularly. I was a public servant for 30 years, emerged penniless from that experience and have since devoted myself to remedying that condition with modest success. I am currently a visiting scholar at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, and a frequent speaker on a number of subjects which are controversial in U.S. foreign policy, including relations with China, with the Middle East and so forth. So that’s about it. Will the U.S. Start Nuclear War?EIR: Ok, so I prepared some topics. I’ll just go through them and let you expound. I wanted to start with the worst-case scenario, which is, as you noted in your Watson Institute presentation last week, that China launched its nuclear weapon development after the U.S. had threatened to use nuclear weapons against China during the 1958 crisis, over the islands in the Taiwan Strait. Admiral Charles A. Richard, the current commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, said this summer, that while nuclear war used to be considered unlikely, due to the rise of China it was now likely. Do you suspect that the U.S. would rather use nuclear weapons than lose a military conflict over Taiwan? Freeman: Well, that has always been the strategic nuclear doctrine espoused by the United States: The assumption that if conventional warfare fails, there is a nuclear option, and indeed that was the case with the use of nuclear weapons by the United States in World War Two. It was only when it was determined that conventional warfare would be problematic, casualties would be enormous, that it was decided to drop nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is consistent with American reasoning over the years. I find it very unnerving, frankly, in the current context. There are now nine countries known to have nuclear weapons. The United States risks the use of nuclear weapons against our own territory if we threaten or use such weapons against others. We have seen, for example, that a policy of maximum pressure on North Korea has driven the North Koreans to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile and a nuclear warhead, for it, precisely to strike the United States and to deter American attack, or regime change efforts against Pyongyang. We now have a different situation than we did in World War Two, when we had a monopoly on nuclear weapons. And it seems to me a very serious misjudgment to imagine that nuclear weapons remain the ace in the hole that Adm. Richard believes them to be. Now, in the case of China, it is not simply the nuclear modernization program that the United States has undertaken, to which we’ve committed some $1.4 trillion dollars, much of it aimed at China, in order to achieve battlefield supremacy over the Chinese, but it is also the breakdown of all of the understandings that enable peaceful coexistence in the Taiwan Strait. In the finessing of the issue of Taiwan in U.S.-China relation, essentially, the United States agreed to three conditions: one, that we would end official relations with Taipei; two, that, we would withdraw all military personnel and installations from the island; and three, we would void our defense commitment to the island. We have now gone back on each of these commitments. It’s very hard to tell the difference between the way we conduct relations with Taipei now, and an official relationship or diplomatic relationship. We know that there are now American troops on Taiwan training Taiwanese forces, and we hear loud calls in Congress and elsewhere for the U.S. defense of Taiwan, on the grounds that it is a democracy resisting an authoritarian government. Somehow lost in all this is the history. You mentioned the 1958 offshore islands crisis, involving Quemoy and Matsu, as the precipitator of the Chinese nuclear program. But the U.S. threatened the use of nuclear weapons on China during the Korean War, and on three occasions that I know of. The Chinese claim there are six occasions on which they were threatened with nuclear attack, on precisely the grounds that Adm. Richard appears to espouse. And this did indeed lead Mao Zedong to demand help from the Soviet Union, in developing a Chinese nuclear deterrent. Soviet refusal to oblige played a large role in generating the breakdown of Sino-Soviet relations. So, this is a history that is very tangled, very long, very complex, and which we appear to approach rather in the mode of people with Alzheimer’s—you know, where we remember nothing, and everything is new every time. China’s Nuclear DeterrentEIR: You also noted in your presentation with Lyle Goldstein at the Watson Institute last week, that China had given fair warning of their military interventions before Korea in 1950, India in 1962, and Vietnam, when they crossed the border in 1979. But nonetheless, Washington is ignoring similar warnings that are coming today over Taiwan. Why do you think, and what is your expectation if China does in fact use force? Freeman: A great deal of the denial that one sees in Washington on subjects like this, reflects hubris on the part of the so-called blob—the foreign policy establishment and its military component. But it represents a failure to understand the extent to which the global order and geopolitics have rearranged themselves, as others rise to match American power, at least at the regional level. When we did the normalization agreement with China and finessed the Taiwan issue, China did not have the military means to mount an invasion or an attack on Taiwan with any credibility. It now does. It has been developing a wide range of options for taking action to resolve the Chinese Civil War, which is how the Taiwan issue came about, and to bring Taiwan into an agreed relationship with the rest of China. It prefers a negotiated means of doing this. But it’s become apparent that it is developing alternatives, including a wide range of possibilities for the use of force, and it is in that context that one must see the recent Chinese heavying-up of nuclear forces. If China is engaged in a calibrated escalation of pressure on Taiwan to bring it to the negotiating table, which is what it is currently doing, that’s one thing. But if it is put in the position where it sees no peaceful prospect of resolving the Taiwan question, then it is forced to consider the use of force. And the conquest of Taiwan would have to be conducted with speed and with a knockout blow. It would have to present a fait accompli to Americans who wish to intervene in that conflict. And it is in this case that the nuclear deterrent becomes invaluable, because China will be in a position to say to the United States, “if you intervene, all options are on the table,” to use the phrase that we have so often used with regard to others. In other words, are you really prepared to give up Chicago in order to preserve Taiwan’s democracy and autonomy? Since, if there is a war over Taiwan, the first things to perish will be Taiwan’s democracy and its prosperity. Are you really prepared to make this trade off? This is a replay of Cold War-style Cuban Missile Crisis confrontation that we should be doing everything possible to avoid. But it is looking more likely every day. Resolving the Taiwan Issue PeacefullyEIR: Do you think there’s any potential within Taiwan for the Guomindang [Kuomintang, KMT] or any other forces within Taiwan, who would prefer having normal relations leading towards a long-term peaceful reunification, to regain any kind of political influence, or win an election in Taiwan? And on the other hand, what would it take for Washington to convince the DPP [Democratic Progressive Party] and President Tsai Ing-wen to negotiate with Beijing? Freeman: I think the KMT’s electoral prospects are limited, and if it is elected, it will not be on the basis of a vision of cross-Strait relations, but on the basis of local issues. Tip O’Neill was right, all politics is local, and people in Taiwan are much more concerned, for the most part, about issues closer to home, than the prospect of conflict with their Chinese motherland. The DPP contains quite a variety of opinions. There are those who are firmly committed to the idea of independence and advocate risking it now. There are those who, like Tsai Ing-wen, now say that Taiwan is already independent, and has no need to declare independence. This is an answer to the extremists in her own party who advocate immediate declaration of independence. Unfortunately, it is heard very differently across the Strait. Beijing hears it as meeting the conditions it has set for having to use force, namely that Taiwan achieves independence, where there is no prospect of a peaceful reintegration of the two sides of the Strait. So, what could we do to influence the DPP? We would have to back off from our support of our denial of the One-China principle. As you recall, Taiwan and the mainland in 1972, during the negotiation of the Shanghai Communique, both Taipei and Beijing were firmly in agreement that there was only one China, and Taiwan was part of it. Taiwan’s democracy has changed the view of many in Taiwan on that question, and so it is not easy now to have a discussion. In the previous government in Taipei, lip service was paid to the One-China principle, and this permitted very productive dialogue across the Strait; that dialogue has now dried up. If there is no dialogue, if there are no talks, there is no apparent path to a peaceful resolution of the issues. So, I think the United States ought to be advocating dialogue. We should be saying firmly that we do not agree with the DPP that Taiwan is an independent state. But this is politically very difficult, given the anti-China hysteria in the United States at present. Belt and Road—An Opportunity, Not a ThreatEIR: In regard to that general anti-China hysteria, as you know, EIR and the Schiller Institute have long promoted the Belt and Road Initiative. To a certain extent, we initiated this idea back in the 1990s with the Chinese. But the idea of bringing major infrastructure development to nations which have been denied major infrastructure and development by the colonial and neocolonial forces—this is not aimed at taking over the West, as many Western leaders like to argue, but rather to liberate these nations from poverty, as they did their own population in relatively record time, 30 to 40 years, eliminating abject poverty from seven or eight hundred million people. So why, in your view, do the U.S. and the EU oppose this process of the Belt and Road? Freeman: Well, I think unfortunately, the natural American response to any international development at present is to view it through military eyes. Therefore, there is a suspicion that the Belt and Road has a geopolitical military purpose. I don’t think it does. I think it is a geo-economic outreach, which takes advantage of the fact that China now has the best infrastructure construction technology and equipment on the planet. That it has surpluses of materials for construction, like concrete, aluminum, steel and so forth. And it has experience in solving very difficult engineering problems, and it is applying this to create a potential economic community that will span the entire Eurasian landmass from Lisbon to Vladivostok, and North, from Arkhangelsk to Colombo, as well as parts of East Africa. This will be an open economic architecture based on connectivity, whether it’s roads, railroads, fiber optic cable, ports, airports, industrial estates or whatever. And I think the Chinese bet, is that in such an open environment, China’s size and dynamism would give it a natural leadership role. But this is very different from imagining the sort of military positioning that we characteristically try to impose on such developments. I think the proper response by the United States to the Belt and Road Initiative would be to take advantage of it. Somebody builds a road, let’s drive an American car down it. Someone connects Tokyo and London with fiber optic cable, let’s use that to improve the speed of trading on the stock market. If someone builds an airport, there’s no reason that only Chinese aircraft can use that, and so forth and so on. I’m very impressed actually, by the extent to which the Belt and Road Initiative is not just physical connectivity, but a series of agreements on the management of the transit of goods, openness to services, improvement of customs and immigration procedures, bonded transit between China and Europe and a third country or region. I think this is a great opportunity, if it’s approached in that way, for American business, for the American economy. We need to leverage the prosperity of China and the increasing prosperity of Central Asian and European countries, as well as these African countries, and South Asian countries, to the benefit of our economy, not regard it as a threat. There Is no Debt Trap from ChinaEIR: You say that the opposition to this is primarily because it’s viewed militarily, but on the other hand, the western financial institutions have made very clear over the last few years, and emphatically at the Glasgow COP26 conference, that their primary interest, the financial interests, people like Mark Carney and the Bank of England, and Wall Street interests, is to stop investments into fossil fuels, into any industry or agriculture they deem to have too much carbon, because of their argument that carbon is going to burn up the world and so forth. This would appear to be an economic policy not so different from the colonial policy of intentionally wanting to keep these countries in a state of dependence and backwardness. What would you think? Freeman: Well, I don’t agree with the theory that climate change and carbon emissions should not be tackled, but I think that’s really almost irrelevant here. It’s almost laughable that the very institutions which pioneered debt trap diplomacy—a phrase invented by an Indian polemicist to describe a mythical reality involving Chinese lending—the very countries and institutions that pioneered this, for example, in loans to Latin America and so forth, now object to the Chinese competing with them for lending. I don’t see anything very profound in all this. It is just a case of banks trying to screw other banks. If JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs and Citibank, or Wells Fargo or whoever, whichever criminal enterprise you wish to refer to, if they cannot beat the terms that the Chinese offer for various reasons, including political factors, and Western insistence on human rights and other norms that the Chinese leave to the decision of local people, then it’s natural that they would try to prevent China from making loans. As a general proposition, competition with China is mainly economic and technological. It doesn’t fit easily into a military prism, and it doesn’t fit easily into a financial prism. So, the odd thing is, if you want to compete, the best way to do it is to improve your own performance and offer better terms. It’s not to try to hamstring or tear down your competitor. If you are a rival of China, that could potentially be very beneficial to both you and to the Chinese, because that is a competition to improve performance on both sides. If you are engaged in adversarial antagonism, which is clearly what is happening here, then your means of competition is trying to trip up your competitor. And that does nothing for yourself, your own people, your own country, or your ultimate competitiveness. There are many issues involved in this, but at root, it is just a tradition of underhanded, rather amoral competition by Western banks. The U.S. Needs Trust BustingEIR: I agree with you. I’ll just mention as a side note here, when we first published in 2014, the 370 page report called The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge, promoting this, it was our hope—I guess you would say, even an expectation—that we would take this report to American entrepreneurs and investors, and they would say, “Yes, wonderful, a great opportunity for profitable investment and development.” But as we now know, nothing like that happened. Freeman: Well, I think part of the problem is, there is a sense of malaise in the United States at present, for good reason. And part of the reason for poor performance and slipping competitiveness is the emergence of an economy dominated by corporate oligopolies, rather than engaged in open market competition. This is true, people have noticed it, particularly in the area of media and social media, communications, telecommunications. But it’s true more generally. Any mall in the United States that you visit is likely to have the same outlets, the same franchises. The role of small business, whether it’s booksellers or independent restaurants or whatever it is, has been largely superseded by national level monopolies and oligopolies. So I think part of the problem, if we wish to compete with China, which despite its label as communist or socialist, has a fiercely competitive domestic market with a very fractured structure that generates cutthroat competition between enterprises, whether they’re owned by the state or by the province or city, or by individuals, or by the shareholders, doesn’t really matter. If we wish to compete with China, one of the things we’ve got to do is rediscover antitrust policy. Interestingly, the Chinese are currently applying antitrust policy to the very media oligopolies, the analogs of the ones here—the Facebooks and Instagrams and Twitters and whatever—on their own soil. And in many ways, China seems to me to be recapitulating the American response to the Gilded Age. It has had its Gilded Age, like Teddy Roosevelt and company; it is now discovering the merits of antitrust policy. And I suspect that John D. Rockefeller was not very pleased when Standard Oil was broken up, and that there are moans and groans on Wall Street about this being the end of capitalism. Actually, it saved capitalism from itself. We are looking at the Chinese through glasses that are either military, or that ignore our own history, our own past, our own experience with financial capitalism, which the Chinese appear to be determined not to develop. I wish them luck. It may be an inevitability. The Foolishness of the ‘Leaders’ Summit for Democracy’EIR: On the historical side of all this, you were engaged in the opening up to China. You were with Nixon on his first visit, as his interpreter. ou mentioned in your presentation last week that the opening up was largely based on the idea of the “China card” against the Soviet Union. Now China and Russia are increasingly coordinating both their strategic and economic relations. The NATO provocations against Russia over Ukraine are as intense as those over Taiwan. In your view, is this administration, or the previous one, or Congress, or the media, or Wall Street—are any of them taking into consideration that a military operation in Taiwan, or in Ukraine, could easily become a war with both Russia and China? Freeman: I suppose there are people at the Pentagon who understand that. It’s pretty clear the American political elite does not make that connection. Just a minor correction on the opening to China: it was Richard Nixon’s idea to open to China after he contemplated the consequences of a possible Soviet attack on China, removing China as a factor in global geopolitics. And that caused him to see China as the useful counter to Soviet expansionism that it was, and it led to the United States, essentially in the 1970s, treating China as a protected state. We had no real expectations that the Chinese would do anything, but we really wanted them to survive, and to remain a part of the global chessboard. So that was the origin of it. It then turned out that this set up a healthy competition in Moscow for our favor. So, the famous strategic triangle worked to our advantage. Generally speaking, in diplomacy, or military strategy for that matter, it is considered wise to divide your enemies, not unite them. But we have been doing everything possible to push Moscow and Beijing into an entente, meaning a limited partnership for limited purposes. It’s not an alliance. There is no broad mutual commitment to aid. But there are clearly understandings emerging about precisely the sort of issue that you just mentioned. If the Russians feel sufficiently provoked to take the Donbass, which is Russian-speaking, from Ukraine, it will probably time that to coincide with Chinese military operations against Taiwan, and perhaps vice versa. So, we have done ourselves no favor by simultaneously designating China and Russia as adversaries. I make one further point. We’re about to have a Summit on Democracy, which is ironic, because our own democracy is clearly in bad shape, and we are evaluated internationally as having a partially failed democracy. So, this is an odd moment to be attempting to trumpet the virtues of the system we ourselves are abandoning. But by trying to reorganize the world along ideological lines—democracies versus authoritarian regimes or non-democracies—the whole conceit was ridiculous! Because authoritarians—I know lots of autocrats, I’ve dealt with many of them over the years, I’ve never met one who was the least concerned about others—don’t think they have anything in common. They’re concerned to stay in power, not to keep other autocrats in power. So, there’s no international league of autocrats, but we are creating one. Because by excluding countries that don’t meet or aspire to sycophancy in the democratic sphere, by assembling them as a sort of broad coalition aimed at Russia and China, we have stimulated Russia and China to issue a joint declaration against this, and then try to organize their own coalition. We are trying to replicate the Cold War. I don’t think we’ll succeed, because basically the underlying proposition that somehow the United States is currently in a condition to appeal on a democratic basis to the world is problematic. And I don’t think countries want to choose between the United States and its designated adversaries, whether they are China or Russia or Iran. We are in effect, creating the very phenomenon we invented and imagined. And it’s not to our advantage. EIR: And not only did they exclude Russia and China from invitations for this Summit of Democracy, but they left out Hungary, Singapore, all of Central Asia. But they did invite Taiwan as if it were…. Freeman: They also invited the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is not a famous democracy in any one’s eyes, and Angola was invited, I believe. This smacks of geopolitics rather than ideology. And it will be interesting to see how it goes. Here we are in a country where it’s very uncertain that we will make it through our next general election without violence, or that there will be a peaceful transition in 2024 or 2025 when we have our next Presidential election. This is an odd moment to be insisting that others democratize. Perhaps we should focus on practicing democracy at home. I’m all in favor of democracy. I’d like to see more of it here. The U.S. Is Already Over China’s Red LineEIR: We had [Secretary of State] Tony Blinken not only inviting Taiwan to the Summit, but also going to the U.N. and calling on the U.N. to welcome Taiwan in a robust way into all the institutions of the U.N. How close would you call that to the red line? Freeman: I think it’s over the red line. This is a resurrection of something I did as a very young diplomat—namely, manipulate Chinese representation in the UN. Taipei sat in the Security Council representing China, and all of us in the U.S. Foreign Service were engaged in keeping it that way, while keeping Beijing out, and we were pretty good at it. It lasted for, I think, 21 years or so. And then finally, reality caught up with us in 1971, when the rest of the world repudiated our approach. But now we’re going back to it. We just had an election yesterday, in Honduras, in which a candidate committed to switch relations from Taipei to Beijing, has apparently been elected. It’ll be interesting to see how that develops. The last time this happened, in El Salvador, we undertook punitive action—this was under the Trump administration—to punish San Salvador for switching its allegiances. Mrs. Castro, the president-elect apparently, in Honduras, will have to make some hard choices. Among other things, one of the reasons for Taiwan’s strong foothold in the Central American region, is that it supplies the surveillance equipment and technology to keep dictatorships in power. I don’t know whether Mrs. Castro, as president-elect Castro, has aspirations to do away with dictatorship sincerely, or whether she will be tempted, as Mr. Ortega was, in Nicaragua. She will also face a backlash from Americans of a certain political persuasion, so it’s not going to be easy for her to keep her campaign promise. You spoke of crossing red lines. That is an effort on our part to delegitimize the government in China and legitimize that in Taipei. This is not a way to exist, coexist peacefully with Beijing, whatever it may or may not do for Taipei. U.S. on Afghanistan: ReprehensibleEIR: One approach which Helga Zepp-LaRouche has initiated, in order to try to bring these so-called adversaries together, is the situation in Afghanistan, where one would think that it’s in the self-interest of all parties, to not allow that country to descend back into a terrorist conclave and opium producer. Helga has promoted what she calls Operation Ibn Sina, to try to bring all the nations together, both in the region and internationally, including the U.S. and Russia and China, to develop Afghanistan with a modern health system and other urgently needed infrastructure, to make it again a great crossroad, as it was when Bactria was the “land of a thousand cities.” There is a functioning so-called extended troika on Afghanistan, which is the U.S., Russia and China, together with Pakistan, focused on the development of Afghanistan, hopefully. And just recently, Pakistan has agreed to allow India to transport wheat across its territory, which it had forbidden before, to meet the huge humanitarian disaster that’s taking place in Afghanistan. Do you think, as Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche does, that if you can bring these nations together around the Afghan situation, this would have implications for other hotspots, including Taiwan? Freeman: I think there’s a very strong case to be made that the effort that the Russians made, and then we made, to modernize Afghanistan, to promote the rights of women, to improve education and health care, can only be effectively carried out on a multilateral basis. It cannot be carried out, as Moscow and Washington attempted to do, with an occupation force engaged in pacification over resistance. The idea of a multilateral approach to Afghan development is an excellent one, and probably the vehicle for this, given, what I’m sorry to say, is a degree of petulance and vindictiveness in Washington that is, in my view, unconscionable, by which we are withholding the Afghan national reserves from the de facto government in Kabul, and thereby pushing Afghanistan into a state of famine and anarchy, which I think is intended to punish the Taliban, but which will probably provide fertile ground for the growth of Daesh, the ISIS, Islamic State elements, who regard the Taliban as milquetoast. The most likely vehicle, unfortunately, does not involve the United States, but it’s probably the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which includes most of the countries which would be needed for such an approach. We are creating a terrible humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan as we speak. Europeans may be more willing than Americans seem to be, to step forward to cooperate with others in the region to address this. So far, the Biden administration has shown a degree of cold-hearted disdain for the suffering of Afghans, that I find really reprehensible. Now you ask, does this have implications for Taiwan? I don’t think so. I think Afghanistan has to be approached in its own right, and the Taiwan issue is one that involves factors that are quite different from those in Afghanistan. China Does Not Want To Occupy TaiwanEIR: I found something you said in your Watson Institute presentation very interesting—and you said you’d written a book about this—that nations which occupy countries tend to cause total demoralization in general, and deterioration, of the military forces themselves. I think your argument there was aimed at saying that the Chinese really do not want to have to occupy Taiwan. Do you want to say anything about that? I assumed you were looking at the deterioration of the U.S. forces and their occupation of Vietnam, and now Afghanistan, and so forth. Freeman: Well, I thought my model was actually before the U.S. misadventures in either Afghanistan or Iraq. My model was the Israeli occupation of Palestine, which I think has led to a degree of cynicism and callous disregard for human life, that is quite contrary to the universal values of Judaism, which inspired the original creation of Israel. I think this is actually something that is documented in many contexts. It was interesting to me that the PLA [Peoples Liberation Army] General Staff Department, when they read the book in English, seized on this particular small section of it as a justification for producing a translation into Chinese. This is the book [holding it up], Arts of Power. It’s very clear that the Chinese have absolutely no desire to replicate the Japanese occupation of Taiwan. I think I mentioned, the first 25 years of that were characterized by violent resistance and really brutal repression. I don’t think in the modern world, this sort of thing would be without major effects on China’s foreign relations in general. I don’t doubt that they have the capability to occupy Taiwan. I think the last thing on Earth they want to do is to occupy Taiwan. They would much prefer, as I said, a negotiated solution which leaves Taiwan essentially self-governing, but within the context of One China. That’s something Taipei and Beijing have to work out; the United States and other countries can’t speak for either one of them, and can’t resolve the Chinese Civil War, it has to be resolved among Chinese. But, I think it’s reassuring that the PLA understands it would be a mess if it were forced to occupy Taiwan. Biden Administration Failure of Foreign Policy EIR: You said at the Watson address,, “Don’t get me going on this crew in Washington today.” I’m not sure I want to “get you going” on that, but if you look back, Biden has had long talks—a three-and-a half hour talk with Xi Jinping. He’s had a couple of meetings with [President Vladimir] Putin; he plans on another meeting before the end of the year with Putin. But if you look back at [former President Donald] Trump, he was elected, I think to a great extent, because he said we should be friends with Russia, we should be friends with China, although he wanted to solve the trade thing. He said we should end the endless wars. And of course, none of that happened, but quite the opposite. In the current circumstance, Biden appears to want to maintain a personal friendly relationship with Xi Jinping and Putin. But the question is, is that the way policy is made in Washington? And what’s your sense in that? Freeman: Well, the Trump administration essentially destroyed the organized policy process in Washington. Biden has tried to resurrect it, but the National Security Council staff, which is charged with coordinating policy, has now grown to such a bloated size, that it replicates the expertise of different government departments, and therefore it’s incapable of synthesizing a strategy. What I mean by that is best exemplified by the Chinese expression describing a frog in a well. There’s a frog at the bottom of the well, the frog looks up, and he or she sees a circle of sky, and imagines that’s the universe. Well, now there are 100 frogs or more at the NSC, each imagining that the little patch of sky that they see is the universe, and there’s nobody tying those multiple views into a coherent whole. It has not helped that Biden’s staff, meaning his National Security Advisor, who is essentially a campaign operative, and his Secretary of State, who is a congressional staffer, are both people who built careers focused on the manipulation of domestic American opinion rather than on diplomacy, or foreign policy in general. I don’t see any new ideas or vision coming out of this administration. Part of the reason for that—and I’m sure Mr. Biden, in fact, I know, he’s a very decent, warm individual, and I’m sure he does wish to retain good personal relationships with other foreign leaders, including Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi. But the fact is, that he’s in a box. He has no convincing majority in the House, and he has a 50-50 split in the Senate, which is not even that, because on major issues, there are differences with some members of his own party. So, Biden is trying to get through legislation on a variety of issues, and having a hard time doing it. In these circumstances, there’s nothing in it for him, to raise new approaches to either China or Russia. Essentially, to do so would be to open himself up to additional fractious denigration by politicians within the Beltway. So, he’s essentially immobilized. I used to think that perhaps if the political constellations were changed in 2022 in the midterm election, that Mr. Biden would have some flexibility, some ability to abandon the Trump policies and those of the so-called deep state. But it’s now not looking very good for him in that election, which means it just adds to the paralysis. We’ve had a series of meetings with both the Chinese and Russians, with the Iranians indirectly. We approached these meetings—the first two meetings in Anchorage, then in Tianjin—with an opening blast of insults directed at the Chinese. We sent Victoria Nuland, of all people, to Moscow to talk about securing the Ukraine. These are not the actions of a mature diplomatic establishment. These are the actions of an administration that comes out of a demagogic environment in Congress, and has not transcended that. So, I don’t think it’s a case of the individuals involved being stupid or ill-intentioned, but their experience does not suit them for dealing with these issues. And finally, there’s nobody in this administration who really knows China, other than one or two hard-liners. I think a Rush Doshi, [Director for China at the National Security Council], is the epitome of that—a very serious scholar, wrote a good book, but it’s infected with the Washington playbook on military matters. Kurt Campbell, [Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs], is a re-engineered Soviet specialist. Anybody who has dealt with the Chinese directly, as opposed to from an academic perch, or through occasional visits on the diplomatic level, knows that “face” is all important. If you want to drive a Chinese berserk, deprive him or her of the self-esteem that comes from the respect of those he or she respects. That is what “face” is. You get an irrational reaction, you get a sharp reaction—that is exactly what happened at Anchorage, and again, at Tianjin. And it’s not that the Chinese are not pragmatic, or that you can’t talk to them, but you can’t open the discussion with anyone, as I said in the Watson meeting, by saying, “You’re a moral reprobate, I despise you. Your values stink. And I’m going to do everything possible to keep you down, and maybe push you down. But by the way, I have a problem or two, I’d like you to help me on.” What do you think you’re going to get when you try that approach? And that is essentially the approach that the Trump administration pioneered, and which the Biden administration has perpetuated. U.S. Diplomacy Must Restore Diplomacy Over Military EIR: Another thing that I found very interesting when you were speaking at the Watson Institute, was that you said that deterrence is simply bottling up the problem, which will certainly fester and become worse. I think you know that Lyndon LaRouche had actively promoted in the late 70s and early 80s, an end to deterrence, an end to the Mutual Assured Destruction [MAD] idea, promoting the idea of the U.S. and the Russian scientific and military communities actually collaborating on building a space-based anti-missile system, which he introduced to President Reagan. Reagan adopted it, and it became the SDI [Strategic Defense Initiative]. In Reagan’s words, the intent was to “render nuclear weapons obsolete.” This never took off. The Soviets initially rejected the proposal that Lyndon LaRouche had made to them, and eventually in the U.S., the military-industrial people were more interested in building a lot of anti-missile missiles for their industries’ production, than any new technology based on the frontiers of knowledge, new physical principles. So that did not work. What are your thoughts on how to end deterrence? Freeman: Well, I’m not sure that I would advocate ending deterrence, I think I would advocate using it. Deterrence makes sense under one obvious circumstance—and I’m not speaking here of Mutually Assured Destruction, which is simply a form of deterrence—but deterrence in general. If circumstances are likely to evolve in a way that resolves the underlying problem that leads to potential conflict, maybe deter that conflict, then time works on your side and the problem is likely to be ameliorated or mitigated, and maybe even go away. But that is not the case with many, many situations. A case in point, is the standoff in Korea. When the armistice was signed in Korea, the United States, wearing a U.N. uniform, agreed to pursue a peace treaty. Well, we never did. Instead, we focused purely on military deterrence, and threats of regime change. And the result, as I said earlier, is that North Korea now has the ability to strike the United States with a nuclear weapon. In the Taiwan case, we had 70 years to promote a resolution of the differences between Taipei and Beijing, we did nothing. Instead, with a brief exception in the 1980s, we focused purely on military deterrence. The situation festered and it got worse. So, we now have, in the cases of a divided Korea and a divided China, we have situations that appear to be unfolding in the direction of a conflict which could be nuclear. What we should have done, is use deterrence to enable diplomacy, to resolve the underlying issues. We did not do that. Now, in the case of the U.S. and the Soviet Union, Mutually Assured Destruction—in effect, arms control talks, efforts to provide a basis for strategic stability—mitigated the problem. That was a diplomatic effort undertaken within the framework of deterrence. That’s an imperfect solution. There have been no similar efforts with the Chinese. And it may now be that with the Chinese heavying-up their nuclear forces, there will be a basis for some kind of effort to produce a stable situation. But here, I want to register again, a severe doubt about the concept of so-called “guardrails.” When proposed to the Chinese, what these appear to mean is, “We’ll keep doing what we’re doing, but you don’t challenge us. We’ll keep running patrols along your shores. We’ll keep modernizing our nuclear forces. We’ll keep salami-slicing on Taiwan, and the guardrails that you’ve agreed to will prevent you from responding.” I don’t think it’s any surprise that that argument gets us nowhere. We have to deal with countries like China and Russia, on the basis of equality, and in accordance with the Westphalian order. We should do the same with North Korea. To deal with them in a condescending and insulting manner is directly counterproductive. To fail to deal with them because we rely on military deterrence, is to create a ticking bomb that may go off in the future. Stop Condescension Toward AfricaEIR: I’d like you to comment on the Africa situation. The FOCAC, the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, began this morning in Beijing. Xi Jinping gave an introductory speech, in which he agreed to send a billion doses of vaccine, some of which would be produced jointly in Africa. He also has offered expanded Belt and Road and related kinds of development programs. I know you were at one point the Africa coordinator, I think, in the State Department, earlier on in your career. And now, of course, we have this competition, where Blinken actually toured Africa right before this FOCAC meeting was to take place, where he seemed to complain about “democracy” rather than actually proposing any kind of alternative to the Belt and Road. In any case, how do you see this very crucial issue of Africa being faced with both the pandemic, the starvation, the breakdown, the imposition of these restraints on their fossil fuels, and so forth? And how do you see that in regard to China’s role? Freeman: I think the West and the United States in particular need to stop treating Africa and Africans with condescension. The continent is not a humanitarian theme park. It has plenty of disasters and challenges. Africans are serious people, and they have, in many cases, risen to the challenges before them. I think they must be dealt with as equals. The question is, what help do they need, not how do they stand in some mythical contest between Beijing and Washington, which they want nothing to do with. It’s nice if African countries, like Botswana, are democracies. One hopes that democracy in South Africa, which is in difficulty, will reverse course and grow. But this is the business of Botswanans and South Africans, and the role of outside powers should be to be helpful. Africa is the continent which is going to have the largest labor supply in the future. Countries like Nigeria are huge already; they are going to become even larger. Nigerians are very clever people. Africa in many respects is the continent of the future, and it needs to be treated as such. The most constructive thing any country outside Africa can do, is help it build the institutions it needs to cope with its challenges. If the African Union creates a CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] of its own, or an FDA [Food and Drug Administration] analogue, that deserves the strong support, not just of the Chinese who are supporting them, but of the United States. So, I think there’s every reason for the United States and China to cooperate in support of African development, and no reason to see it as a zero-sum game.
