Zepp-LaRouche Weekly Webcast: Trump, Xi, and the Spirit of the New Silk Road

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Schiller Institute New Paradigm Webcast With Helga Zepp-LaRouche

 November 9, 2017

Trump, Xi, and the Spirit of the New Silk Road 

HARLEY SCHLANGER: Hello, I’m Harley Schlanger from the Schiller Institute and I’d like to welcome you to this week’s webcast, featuring Schiller Institute Chairwoman Helga Zepp-LaRouche.

Obviously, the lead topic for today, is the historic visit of President Donald Trump to China, as part of his extended visit to Asia. Now, if you’re looking for reporting on this in the Western media, forget it. Just looking at some of the headlines — the Washington Post had a headline today “How Will China Play Trump?” The New York Times featured an Obama deputy national security advisor Tony Blinken — of Winken, Blinken and Nod — and Blinken had a comment, whose title was “Trump Ceding Global Leadership to China.” And you have the Democratic Senator from Connecticut Blumenthal coming out in a press conference, accusing Trump of “colluding” with China.

So we really need to get a picture of what’s happening and the full strategic significance, and for that we turn to Helga Zepp-LaRouche.

HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Hello. I think from what we can know today, which is the second day of I would say an historic visit of President Trump in China, I think it is exactly what I expected would happen: That both sides know perfectly well that the future of mankind depends on the relationship between the United States and China, as the most important two nuclear powers and economic powers in the world. And I think it went very well. The statements by President Xi Jinping characterizing the meeting as a strategic new beginning, a mutual beneficial relationship of historic importance which can solve not only the problems of the two peoples, but of the whole world, I think this is absolutely to the point. And President Trump was very enthusiastic: He praised China and its great President, who, according to his Tweet, feels very warm feeling — I mean, this is really good. Because if the two Presidents understand each other and can make it work, then I fully agree, there is no problem in the world which cannot be tackled.

So I think this is a gigantic step forward, and I think it’s also interesting that Trump, who was very much talking about the trade gap between the United States and China, however, he said he does not blame China for that, because he respects it, that President Xi would do everything for the maximum benefit of his own country and people; and then he blamed previous U.S. administrations for having allowed to drop exports to China so much that this trade gap now exists. And remember, the Chinese always wanted to import much more from the United States, but the previous administrations which were on a confrontation, containment, encirclement policy towards China, they refused to sell many of the products which China wanted to buy with the pretext that they had “dual use,” that things could be used both for civilian and military purpose — and naturally, there’s almost anything you can use for either peaceful or not so peaceful purposes, depending on what is the intent of your policy.

So, I think this is very good. They concluded, I think, somewhere in the range of $250 billion in deals, various things ranging from infrastructure, transport, energy, agricultural exports from the United States to China, just a very wide variety of economic deals. They also decided to not only improve and strengthen the relationship between the two Presidents, but to increase the cooperation on all levels, to strengthen the four permanent dialogues which had been arranged already in Florida in April, one of them dealing with economic cooperation. And I think an absolute basis has been laid to continue to develop this relationship to the benefit, not only of China and the United States, but really for the whole world.

So naturally, they agreed fully on the need to solve the North Korea problem, on which they want to work together, and also Trump expressed a confidence that with the help of China, and Russia, which he said on an earlier occasion, that problem can be brought to a positive solution.

While I have not seen any direct mentioning of the United States working with the Belt and Road Initiative as such, I know that that is the mindset of President Xi, and I think that also coming out of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, where Xi Jinping has made the goal by 2050 to build a “community of a shared future of mankind,” I think this trip by President Trump has been a gigantic step in the right direction. And I think the Chinese really know how to bring into the consciousness, the 5,000-year history of China, and Trump was treated really very well. They had a one-day or several hour special treatment in the Forbidden City which was closed to the public, and they performed three Beijing operas, and showed the restoration of ancient handicrafts. So Trump was very, very happy, and he sent a message to Xi Jinping saying that he and Melania will never forget this experience. So I think from a human standpoint this is very positive.

And these journalists should just go and be ashamed of themselves, because they are so cynical that never will anything move their hearts and minds, and probably these minds are dried out like old prunes anyway, so I wouldn’t worry about what they’re writing, because I think these two presidents have made a very positive step, moving human history forward.

SCHLANGER: It’s also significant that that there are a group of businessmen who are part of the delegation that will be involved in meetings, and I think that’s where we may hear later, more of the specifics on the Belt and Road connection with the Chinese.

Now, before he came to China, he was in South Korea and Japan. I wonder if you have some thoughts about those meetings and their significance?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: I think they were significant, but I think the upcoming meeting in Vietnam is going to be more important. Because it is now definitely confirmed that Trump will meet with President Putin tomorrow, and I think that meeting will be very important also. Because President Putin just wrote an article and basically commenting ahead of that APEC summit about it, where he said that what will be discussed at the APEC meeting, in the context of the already-ongoing integration of the Belt and Road Initiative with the Eurasian Economic Union, that Russia will present a major plan for the development of the Far East of Russia, that this will be a national priority for the 21st century, where many infrastructure projects are supposed to be built, but also industrial parks, investments in various ways; and he already emphasized the positive cooperation between Russia, China, Japan, and the Koreas.
So I think what is clearly emerging, is more and more an integrated economic new system, where basically it is very clear, as long as the Europeans remain in their stand-offish, or at least the EU and the German government for that matter, remain in their stand-offish attitude, it is what one businessman said recently, “if they don’t jump in the train then they will see the lights from the last wagon leaving the station, and they’ll be left behind.”

The center of strategic importance is clearly moving towards Asia right now. And hopefully this U.S.-Chinese relationship will continue to expand, and then I’m very optimistic that then the Trump-Putin meeting will be very successful. I actually have reason to believe that this will also be a major breakthrough, and then these journalists of these yellow papers will just tear themselves apart like Rumpelstiltskin. And that’s what they should do.

SCHLANGER: And one other thing I’d like you to comment on, I’m sure it’s very interesting to you, given the importance that you put on the cultural exchange and the understanding of other cultures, one is President Trump’s [six-year-old] granddaughter singing to them on video of Chinese songs. Did you get a chance to see that, Helga?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Yes, yes. I think this was very sweet, and obviously while the little girl was not there, her video was presented, and I think it expressed the spirit of absolute appreciation for the Mandarin culture, and I think it was very well taken.

SCHLANGER: Now, when you talk about the journalists with their nonsense in their coverage of this, and attempting to keep the real story out, you are seeing some breaks with the whole Russia-gate story. And of course, we’ve been covering this very extensively, but in the last couple of days there was the report that Bill Binney, the former NSA technical expert, met with Mike Pompeo of the CIA at Donald Trump’s urging; Pompeo greeted him, at Trump’s urging, to talk about the fact that there was no Russian hacking. What do you make of that?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: I think this is very important. It clearly shows that President Trump is fully aware of the revelations of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), of which William Binney is a member, and that means that President Trump is also not afraid of Russia-gate. Because by asking Pompeo, the current head of the CIA to meet with Binney, that is now on the record, so to speak, and now the investigation which the FBI never did obviously has to follow. And the key argument which Binney made, previously at our event in New York and on other occasions, is that there is forensic evidence that there was not hacking, but that it was downloading of this material to a storage device, because the speed with which it occurred is four times higher than you could get from the internet. And the VIPS have presented this documentation at a Schiller Institute event in New York a couple of months ago, and that will now be investigated and they will come to the exact same conclusion, that there was no hacking, and with that I think the whole Russia “spook” story will just vanish. [See EIR, Sept. 22, 2017, p. 14; ]

And that will liberate Trump to carry out policy as a President should do. That was the whole purpose of the Russia-gate, to prevent him from having a change in the attitude towards Russia and China. And I think this is clearly backfiring.

And then, you have all these investigations now, which we mentioned already last time, with the Donna Brazile book, saying very clearly, that Hillary did sort of steal the election. And in a certain sense, this whole story can turn totally the other way: You have the ongoing investigations in the Senate and in the Congress on the British role [in interfering in the 2016 election], which is now becoming much more prominent in the discussion, that U.S. intelligence services from the Obama period, used foreign intelligence against a U.S. Presidential opponent — I mean, that’s more than “opposition research, ” this is potentially something very criminal. And that may all come out now.

SCHLANGER: Two other footnotes on that: One is that Binney referred to Russia-gate as “mindless drivel,” and if you think about it, that’s what the American people and the people in Western Europe have been being fed for a full year now — mindless drivel.

Now, the other thing that I think is interesting, is the interconnection between the Hillary Clinton exposé from Donna Brazile and the whole Fusion GPS, because this story is now coming out of all the interconnection, leading back to London. So, as you’ve been pointing out, it looks as though this whole thing will come to the forefront soon.

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: There is another interesting thing, which I think people should reflect upon. Because all these accusations against Putin being a dictator, against Xi Jinping being a “new Mao,” and all of these insinuations, that these countries are not democratic and are dictatorships — well, the Democratic Party, and I emphasize Democratic Party, it now is established that the DNC picked their candidate, Hillary Clinton, one year before the national convention, and then manipulating the whole electoral process in such a way that Bernie Sanders, who probably would have won against Trump, — or at least there was a good chance that this could have happened — was sidelined, and obviously betrayed.

Now, what does that say about “democracy”? I think people should reflect on the fact that this present party system, as it has developed with the very large influence of Wall Street in it, given the fact that people need $5 million, $10 million in order to run for a Congressional seat, that system clearly is not working. And in a certain sense, I think it is time to change a lot of things, to change not only the set of relations among nations internationally, but also go back to a discussion like it was in the Federal Papers in the United States, for example: Can a people govern itself? I think this is a very important question, and I think democracy is just a joke. The Democratic Party did their very best to prove exactly that.

SCHLANGER: We’re also learning more and more about how this was an operation to take money from the state parties, and that’s one of the reasons the Democrats have been losing every single, until recently. Interestingly, also, I think just to make a note of this, is that Donna Brazile referred to “three titanic egos,” that of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, stripping the core out of the Democratic Party, and I think that’s what most people see.

Now, Helga, the other thing I think is really crucial that we need to hear your thoughts on, is what’s happening in the Middle East right now. As is typically the case, when there are developments like the Trump-Xi Jinping meeting, the enemy is operating elsewhere to cause serious disruptions: And we see the events unfolding in Lebanon, with a possible Saudi-Israeli involvement in a war in Lebanon; the ongoing events in Yemen. And you just participated in a conference a couple days ago via video, in Yemen, about the Chinese Silk Road extension to that part of the Arabian Peninsula. Why don’t you give us a little bit of a report on that, and what your thoughts are about this very dangerous situation emerging in the Middle East?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: It is very dangerous because just at the point where the ISIS forces were as good as defeated in Syria and Iraq, you had this operation, obviously run by the young Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, where when Prime Minister Saad Hariri from Lebanon was on a visit in Saudi Arabia, conveniently U.S. intelligence — at least that’s what some Israeli reports are saying — provided Saudi Arabia with the information that there was an assassination plot against Hariri, so he resigned and stayed in Saudi Arabia. And that naturally aggravates the situation in Lebanon, which is very tense anyway, because this country has as many refugees as it has citizens, which means a totally tense situation as it is.

Obviously, then there was this strange incident about a missile, shot from Yemen into Saudi Arabia — now that is very strange, because what would be the purpose of one, single missile? Naturally, the Saudis claim that it was from Iran via Hezbollah, and it is now heating up the whole situation. The worst thing about it, is that the Saudis blockaded all ports and entry points into Yemen. And this has dramatically worsened the situation in Yemen, which is already one of absolute danger of starvation of millions of people, so that even the UN Human Rights Commission and similar people came out and said there is an {immediate} danger of 7 million people dying of hunger and epidemics, cholera, and similar things in Yemen, and that they demand immediately that all ports and other such routes are opened and the blockade be ended.

And I think this is really something which must public, international attention, because this is a genocide taking place before the world public, and this absolutely must end. And we should not forget that the dossier which we have published about Robert Mueller, which details the apparatus which went after my husband and his organization in the ’80s and ’90s, is the same apparatus which is covering up for 9/11, and which is the apparatus which is still deploying against President Trump. And these are absolutely the similar forces who are behind this operation against Yemen.

So this is all hanging together, and requires absolute, important investigation. And people have to really get mobilized that this genocide is being stopped.

SCHLANGER: And in spite of the desperate situation in Yemen, it seems from the report I saw, the conference you addressed a couple of days ago, there’s tremendous spirit. Again, it’s the optimism of the New Silk Road is coming into that country, isn’t it?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Yes, yes. There is a very delightful reading group, you know, people have been studying for quite some time, the report which we published The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge. And that obviously includes the extension of the New Silk Road into Yemen. And people are really taking this as the hope for their future.

And I think it would be very good if people in other countries around the world would do likewise, because there is this alternative plan! And the chances that it will come to a cooperation of Russia, China, and the United States, in rebuilding the region, getting Iran and Saudi Arabia at one table and overcoming this terrible conflict between the Sunnis and the Shi’ites, which have been played by the British for a very long time; and that we move to a different era of mankind. I think this is the absolute demand of the hour.

SCHLANGER: And just to come back to the overriding theme of the U.S.-Russia-China relationship, I guess we’ll see that again in action, with the meetings still to come in Vietnam and the Philippines, that President Trump is going to have on his trip.

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Yes. I think that that will be tomorrow, so people should pay attention to this summit, because I think later things will occur there.

SCHLANGER: I just wanted to bring another thing to the attention of our listeners: This has been a week of anniversaries, and I think it’s important to get a good, competent historical perspective of what’s happened. You had just a couple days ago, the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, which has a lot to do with the British Empire’s destruction of the Middle East and the ongoing activity there. There was the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution yesterday. And then today, is a very important day in Germany: It’s the 28th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and you were very active in that period, and in fact, I think it’s fair to say, that the idea of the Silk Road grew out of the effects of the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the potential for the reunification of Germany.

So I’d like you say something about that, because you are uniquely situated to put this history together in a way that makes sense for people.

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Well, yes, that is absolutely true. Because my husband, Lyndon LaRouche had forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union, already in ’84. And he basically said that if they would stick to their then-existing policy of the Ogarkov Plan and similar things, and primitive accumulation against their own economy, they would collapse in five years. And that’s exactly what started to happen with the fall of the Wall. And since he had already proposed in 1988, that the Comecon would collapse soon — he made that prognosis in ’88, one year before it happened — and that there would be soon a German unification with Berlin as the capital, and that a unified Germany should start to develop the countries of the Comecon, with modern technology and infrastructure. And he proposed the first such country should be Poland. [See EIR, Oct. 5, 1990]

So therefore, when the Wall came down, it was not really a surprise for us. As a matter of fact, we were the only ones prepared for that occasion, and we developed then this idea of a Productive Triangle from Paris-Berlin-Vienna, which was a highly industrialized area of the size in territory of, let’s say, Japan. And we proposed it should be upgraded through infrastructure, maglev trains, HTR nuclear reactors, the Sänger project for sub-orbital Mach 1-2 planes; we proposed that, and when the Soviet Union then collapsed — as a matter of fact, we had that report ready in January of 1990, about six weeks after the fall of the Wall.

And this would have been already a peace plan at that point, but as we know, the powers that be, the neo-cons in the United States, Margaret Thatcher, Mitterrand in France, they all had their own geopolitical reasons to prevent that. But when the Soviet Union collapsed in ’91, we just extended that Productive Triangle to become the Eurasian Land-Bridge, proposing economic transportation development corridors, along the Trans-Siberian Railway, and along the old Silk Road. And this was really — what is happening now with China and the Belt and Road Initiative could have happened already in ’91.

Now, it didn’t happen, and I published documentation about the developments from that time, which is called “The Lost Chance of 1989,” because that opportunity was not used. People remember that the “shock therapy” was imposed on Russia, in order to turn Russia from a superpower into a Third World, raw materials-exporting country, which was what happened under the Yeltsin period. And so this entire decades of the ’90s was one of genocide for Russia, and people have written books about that, from Prof. Sergey Glazyev and others.
Now, when Putin came in, he started to undo that, and that is why he attracted so much hatred from people who had wanted to put Russia into a corner. Now, he is now doing a lot to undo that, and what I said earlier about the development of the Far East is a very important component of that.

So in a certain sense, this is the second chance, and this time I think the possibility that it’s being used to establish truly a peace order for the 21st century, and ending the period of geopolitics, this is very close. If the relationship which was clearly brought forward in a gigantic between Xi Jinping and Trump, if that consolidates and the relationship between China, Russia, and hopefully the United States is becoming part of that triangular, and then maybe India will change its mind, and maybe even the Europeans will get onboard, we can enter a completely new set of relationships among countries.

And I would invite all of you, our viewers, to become an active part. The Schiller Institute is a membership think tank. You can become an active member in the Schiller Institute, by contributing research, by doing all kinds of things, you can actually help to bring such a new era of civilization about, by joining us: So I want to invite you do exactly that, to celebrate the moment.

SCHLANGER: And I think the fact that you made very clear to people, how devastating losing that opportunity of 1989 has been, with the 28 years of degeneration in the United States, the wars, the terrorism and so on, we {have} to take this chance. And this is where the optimism comes from, that there are countries that are already doing that.

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Yes. It will sink in, that that situation is there, and if the Russia-gate in the United States stops, I think the world can become better. And in even in the United States, people can join this hopeful perspective. And I think they need it so badly, because the infrastructure is in terrible shape, the drug epidemic is there; in Europe you have a situation where some youth, especially in the south of Europe have neither a job nor an education. But with the New Silk Road, people have a future and a perspective to really end poverty, to end the miserable life for so many people and focus on the common aims of mankind. There are so many riches to be discovered, so many discoveries to be made. And it’s about time that we give mankind an order which is worthy of the character of the human species.

SCHLANGER: Well, the next few days will be very important, and I think it’s very important that people join us again next week to get the update on the completion of President Trump’s trip, and the implications for us in the West.

So Helga, thank you very much for joining us, and for all of you listening, we’ll see you next week.

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Yes, until next week.