By Jacques Cheminade, president of the French political party Solidarité et Progrès
We have reached the most dangerous moment for mankind ever. The conditions of mutual destruction, provocative actions and hateful rhetoric, that prevailed in some regions of the world before, are spreading now everywhere.
Inevitability? The present rules-based order
Fyudor Lukyanov, Director of the Valdai Discussion Club and chairman of the Russian Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, emphasized that this is already a new World War, following the breakdown of the international order.
In our countries of the Western hemisphere, the behavior of the leading circles is like that of children sitting on a powder-keg. The President of the United States, Joe Biden, has gone from being a Delaware tax-heaven sponsor to a warmonger calling his Russian counter-part “a killer”. The Anglo-American forces are leading two proxy wars in Europe and in the Mideast and sending more and more weapons and ammunition to their under-servants, turning Ukraine and Israel into unpinned hand grenades thrown at the world scene.
We have reached a point where the Israeli Heritage Minister, Amichal Eliyahu, threatened to throw an atomic bomb on Gaza, and even if Benjamin Netanyahu set him aside, he did not force him to resign. Accurately, Russian Foreign ministry spokesman Maria Sakharova commented: “Did we hear an official declaration that Israel has nuclear weapons? “Hezbollah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah assigned primary responsibility in the Mideast conflict to the United States, which “has rejected any proposals for a ceasefire.”
Russia has now temporarily withdrawn from the International Treaty banning nuclear tests, while the United States, who never ratified it, hypocritically deplores such a decision. The final result is that all the international treaties concluded between Russia and the United States during the Cold War have been canceled or dropped. On the Ukrainian front, the US has delivered to Kiev Himars and Atacms that can reach into the Russian territory, while the United Kingdom and France have sent Scalps and Storm Shadows. Two American aircraft carriers are now deployed in the Mideast, the Gerald Ford and the Dwight Eisenhower, together with an Ohio-class submarine of the type which bombarded Libya as part of the NATO operations to back rebel forces which toppled Muammar Qaddafi. Patriot systems have been set up in various Mideast countries to “deter attack on US bases in Syria and Iraq”.
Since the NATO provoked Russian “special operation” into Ukraine, and now the provoked Hamas war crimes into Israel and the “right for Israel to defend itself”, with the ensuing genocidal bombing of Gaza, the “war economy” declared by the Western countries has turned into a war deployment, weaponizing not only the dollar but the whole world scene. “The nightmare in Gaza is more than a humanitarian crisis. It is a crisis of humanity… Ladies and gentlemen of the press, Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children”, stated UN Secretary General Antonio Gutterres, addressing reporters on November 6.
What is the real cause of such abominations, beyond all the narratives deployed in the Western political circles and media? Their oligarchical rules-based order is based on a Ponzi scheme which forces the other into submission in order to maintain its swindle. To say it in plain words, it leads to war, risking exceeding the nuclear threshold, because to keep its power is an existential issue for the Western oligarchy.
Hope against fatalism: The global shift
The old order is breaking apart. A new world order is emerging but is not yet settled. And, if not successfully fought, the Western ruling “elites” are committed to winning the challenge of the so-called Thucydides trap by all means, going from containment to bombing and to finally destroying the other. Between 2007 and 2023, the total world debt has doubled, and the total American debt has quadrupled. With no real increase in the real, physical production, and even recently a decrease of production. Worse, the total world derivatives bets has gone beyond 2 quadrillion dollars! This is the reflection of the Ponzi scheme in monetary terms: destructive destruction of the real, productive economy! The only two economic sectors that have developed within the Western economies in the last 20 years are, indeed, the interrelated weapons and digital industries, those which President Eisenhower had already called the “military-industrial complex” in his farewell address on January 1961, and against whom my friend, American economist and world citizen Lyndon LaRouche, fought during all his life. Their policy leads to war against their enemy, convinced that human beings are not capable of goodness to organize a common, peaceful development.
The West is trying therefore to contain at any costs the emergence of a new world order, the new system of economics relations, with the Brics, the Brics-Plus, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Eurasian Economic Union and the Global South countries, the Global Majority of the world. Our commitment to create the conditions for peace and avoid World War Three should thus be to accelerate such a positive shift of the world.
China, contrary to the narrative spread by the Western media, made the largest contribution of any country we know in the recent period. They have managed to lift 900 million of their citizens out of poverty and the life expectancy of its population is now higher than in the United States. In this context, the Belt and Road Initiative is the only existing platform for a shared world future. Its win/win strategy, based on inclusiveness and connectivity, is providing a model for the Global South and also for all of us to overcome poverty, lack of development, rivalries and war. It is in absolute opposition to the Ponzi scheme of the present policies under Anglo-American political rule. It is the best positive contribution to positive human rights.
The Belt and Road Initiative thus corresponds, historically, to what all national and international war avoidance treaties have set forth. A key example, that President Xi Jinping himself often mentions, is the Treaty of Westphalia, which brought peace among nations in 1648. A Treaty that a geopolitical warmonger like former British Prime Minister Tony Blair strongly rejected as early as 1999, before creating the hoax of the weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein allegedly possessed, in order to justify the imperialist Iraq war of George W. Bush.
The Treaty of Westphalia requires our attention today as a living inspiration. It was based, beyond diplomatic arrangements, on three main principles:
First the search of the benefit of the other, a peace treaty having to be to the advantage of all, and the idea that peace is something that you have to reach with enemies transformed in the process into partners through a higher form of cooperation.
Second, to forgive grievances and even crimes committed against the other part, through a cooperation for the common good. It is in that sense that Pope Paul VI said, in his Encyclica Popularum progressio, that “development is the new name for peace”. This is indeed the principle of all religions and humanist beliefs based on the goodness of human beings when they work for the common good.
Third, to cancel all illegitimate war debts and to settle the others in such a way to afford the best possible conditions for a common development and shared prosperity.
The present accomplishments of the Belt and Road initiative are the concrete proof that such a commitment is no illusion or utopia but the human alternative to hate, nihilism and mutual common destruction though wars. Over this month of November, China is holding the rotating presidency of the United Nations Security Council and it intends to use it to bring peace both in the Mideast and Ukrainian conflicts. There are good reasons to hope that it will succeed against all odds, because among the Brics-plus countries committed to the Belt and Road initiative are Saudi Arabia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates, representing together with Russia the leverage of the main oil producing countries, excepting the United States. Already, the UN representatives of China and the United Arab Emirates came together in a press conference to make a passionate plea for an urgent ceasefire and a resolution of the Mideast conflict. China, Brazil and six main African countries had before called for a diplomatic, negotiated solution to the conflict in Ukraine. The Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement on November 6 calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and the convening of an international Peace Conference aimed at reaching a political settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
The cause of peace fostered by a Global Majority stands therefore on a solid platform, on the Road towards a new architecture of development and security for all nations. These countries demand to recover their monetary sovereignty and the power to engage freely in decision making in a new dedollarized world financial system. This is the key point of weakness of the warmongers: let’s pull under their feet their currency carpet. Sergueï Glazyev, the Russian Minister in Charge of Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasian Economic Union, is leading a broad international coalition of resistance against the hybrid war for global dominance and prepares for the disintegration of the dollar-based economic system. He considers that China and India, the two main countries that were economically successful during the beginning of this XXIst century, have followed the principles of a physical economy based on productive credit and investment, as opposed to the Western, money-based economies, which failed and try to survive at the expense of the others. He proposes the creation of a new digital payment currency issued by a pool of currency reserves of Brics countries. To provide backing and to make such currency more resilient, he suggests a basket of the main exchange-traded commodities, gold and other precious metals, key industrial metals, hydrocarbons, grains, sugar as well as water and other natural resources. Glazyev stated that he was inspired by Lyndon LaRouche after various in depth discussions and debates. In 1986, on the issue of peace in general and notably in the Mideast, LaRouche wrote: “Durable agreements on peace and mutual security, among group of nations, are critical for economic development. Without cooperation in economic devlopment, political agreements lack the durability to survive.” This is exactly our challenge to save world peace today: the approach of Sergueï Glazyev and Lyndon LaRouche.
The International Schiller Institute, headed by Helga-Zepp LaRouche, the wife of now diseased Lyndon LaRouche, has published a Special Report in many languages – English, French, Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, German… – which presents the New Silk Road as a key step to a World Landbridge, a metaphor for a new architecture based on security and development for the benefit of all nations. She conceived and organized for this idea since the beginning of the 1990’s. I made of it a key part of my first presidential campaign in 1995, stressing that it corresponds to De Gaulle’s concept of a “Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals”, becoming now a “Eurasia from the Atlantic to the China Sea”. Since then I have urged France and all Western nations to join this unique world peace platform.
It means corridors of development bringing progress along the steps of all segments of the Road, opening up new areas and, beyond, promoting common space and oceanic explorations policies. Peace means to accomplish such a great design: between Europe and Asia; in South and Central Asia transforming the old British “Arc of Crisis into an area of self-developing cooperation; promoting Russia’s mission and common aims with other countries into North Central Asia and the Arctic; making of Africa a test case for a Chinese way of development with “African characteristics”; connecting the Atlantic and Pacific sides of Latin-America with railways and canals; but more than anything else, creating hope in the minds of us all. The key cross-connection between the East-West direction of the Belt and Road and the North-South connection from Russia to the Iran-Indo-Pakistan region exemplifies this potential future of peace based on the shared aims of humanity.
Again, it may seem utopian. My answer is that there is no alternative other than entering like sleepwalkers into World War III, as the present world situation makes it too clear.
My hope that the cause of peace will be victorious are the various discussions towards that direction which have taken place: the Saint-Petersburg Russia-Africa summit on July 27-28, the XV Brics summit of August 22-24, the 3rd One Belt, One Road Forum for International Cooperation on October 17-18of this year, and many others before or soon to come. The Road is going to be abrupt and risky, and the recent behavior, of the Western leaders is obviously very dangerous. But two things have to be stressed:
– more and more crowds of pro-peace demonstrations or against the present mass murders taking place in Gaza, signal an awakening of the Western populations, from Washington to Berlin to London and Paris, against the policy of their governments. It is not yet enough but it is gaining strength as they understand that our fight is not merely against war but to build the basis for a peace, ending the age of colonial and imperial oppression;
– within the administrations of the Western states themselves, a growing opposition to their war policies develops. Both within the US States Department and the French Quai d’Orsay, diplomats rebel, realizing that their countries are losing all their moral and political credit.
In that sense, the present mass murders and crimes against humanity occurring in Gaza shall create, provided we lead the fight for it, a shock effect against the war. Breaking with the indifference of the still majority of the Western populations to the abominations they are witnessing. Our duty is to concretize the principles for peace, a long march that we have to soon transform into a world surge.
Our Schiller Institute is presently leading an international team of experts in Kabul to demand the end of sanctions and promote an Ibn Sina development plan for the revival of that martyred country, making of it a hub and a collar of oasis and urban centers in Central Asia. It is an example of how a joyful mobilization, confronted to the most extreme conditions, can radiate inspiration.