Volume 31, No. 9 - March 2, 2017
The European Union Still Resisting the “New Paradigm” The Establishment on both sides of the Atlantic continues to deny the reality of the profound strategic changes ongoing in the world, reflected most spectacularly in the dynamic of the New Silk Road and, more recently, in the Trump presidency. Rather than recognizing the failure of the so-called unipolar world under Western domination, they are desperately clinging to the illusion of their power. In Europe, the refusal to face reality has reached clinical levels, demonstrated in the rantings against President D**onald Trump, while not reporting on the substance of the policies which led to his election in the first place (cf. below). Because that would require recognizing their own mistakes and correcting them. The failed policy is evidenced in the EU’s reticence to accept Chinese offers for cooperation on the Belt and Road Initiative, in particular in Eastern and Central Europe. For example, the European Commission threatens to prevent China from building and financing the Belgrade-Budapest high-speed railway under a bureaucratic pretext (cf. below). Many Asians are perplexed by the EU’s attitude. In a paper published last March by Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, the authors ask whether the EU has already missed the Belt and Road train, noting that “the EU population is still not well aware of the OBOR initiative.” Part of the reason for that, in their view, is that the European media is over-focusing on Chinese mergers and acquisitions, rather than analyzing the benefits of long-term cooperation for all. A realistic assessment of the opportunities available is set out by the consulting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers, in a new study headlined: 2016 Assesment B&R Watch; China and the Belt and Road Infrastructure; Review and Outlook. These experts found that the economic value of announced infrastructure projects in which China is participating surged by 47% in 2016 and concern 66 countries and regions, that are part of the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative. Of the deals valued at $500 billion in 2016, only one-third was in China. The PwC review covered seven core infrastructure sectors: utilities, transport, telecoms, social, construction, energy, and environment. As for NATO and pressure from the Trump Administration for the Europeans to pay more for their defense, Helga ZeppLaRouche proposes in a Feb. 25 article that EU leaders should
simply state that there is no need to do so, since the Warsaw Pact no longer exists, and there is no threat that Russia will invade the Baltic States or Poland or any other country. But rather than taking the high ground, the Eurocrats insist on further military expansion toward the East, while mooting the possibility of a European nuclear bomb, including in Germany! One can hope that the changes sweeping over the world in the next months will likewise sweep the ideologues of the “old paradigm” into the dustbins of history. A crucial test will be the summmit in May in Beijing (cf. below). Color Revolution Ops in the U.S.: Donald Trump Counterattacks With the collapsing trans-Atlantic establishment continuing its dangerous drive to create a Maidan-style coup against Donald Trump, the U.S. President again demonstrated this week that he will not capitulate. Networks close to Barack Obama and George Soros are deploying bands of “protesters” to disrupt Republican Congressional town meetings, demanding that Republicans join them in throwing out Trump. The expose of Soros’ role in “regime change” operations through Color Revolutions, by LaRouchePAC and EIR, is being picked up by some in Congress and alternative media, leading a Soros spokesman to deny that his foundations are funding the disruptions. Those efforts dovetail those of the networks in the intelligence community, that fear their crimes will be exposed by Trump. After all, the new President just decided to turn over to a court of law the unredacted report on CIA torture, completed in Dec. 2014 by the Senate Intelligence Committee – which President Obama had adamantly refused to do. These intelligence networks are leaking reports of highly classified discussions supplied by White House officials, which are then featured in major media, with a nasty spin. These false stories then feed opinion pieces, such as two which appeared in the Feb. 18 New York Times , “What a Failed Trump Administration Looks Like,” and “How Can We Get Rid of Trump?” Trump is directly counter-attacking, first by refusing to back away from his commitment to establish a collaborative dialogue with Russia and China, and by rejecting the permanent warfare policy of the last two presidencies. In his appearance at the Conservative Political Action Committee on Feb. 24, Trump pointed out the United States has “spent trillions of dollars overseas while allowing our own infrastructure to fall into total disrepair and decay. In the Middle East, we’ve spent as of four
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weeks ago $6 trillion. Think of it...and the Middle East is in... much worse shape than it was fifteen years ago.” He added that if his predecessors had “gone to the beach for 15 years, we would be in much better shape than we are right now....We could have rebuilt our country three times with that money.” Trump directly attacked the FBI in a tweet, saying the agency is totally unable to find and stop the national security “leakers” inside the government, or even within the FBI itself. “Classified information is being given to the media that could have a devastating effect on the U.S.” With Trump continuing to blast the “fake news” emanating from “dishonest media”, his press spokesman did not invite some media to the off-camera “press gaggle”, which allows for informal exchanges between White House spokesmen and the press, among which CNN , the NY Times , the LA Times and the Daily Mail , which have notoriously misreported his comments. Where there was as good as no coverage of Trump’s comments on stopping war, the access denied to NY Times and CNN was all over the headlines in the United States and in Europe. White House Expects a New War Plan against ISIS This Week Defense Secretary James Mattis is scheduled to present a revised war plan against the Islamic State to President Donald Trump this week. While few details about the policy review have come out publicly, General Stephen Townsend, who heads the military operations in Iraq and Syria, made clear to reporters in Baghdad that the U.S. operations will still rely on local armed forces to defeat ISIS, although others have hinted additional US troops may be requested. General Herbert Carlisle, who is charge of the US air war operations for Iraq and Syria, has called for approval for greater coordination with Russia in the ongoing preparations to drive ISIS out of Raqqa, the Syrian city that the Islamic State proclaims is the “capital” of its “caliphate.” Part of that greater coordination would involve higher ranking officers -- one to three star generals from the US and Russia -- coordinating air operations and establishing a secured “red phone” communication. Meanwhile, Staffan de Mistura, the UN Special Envoy for Syria, convened two days of talks in Geneva involving the Syrian government, the main rebel organizations, and members of the International Syrian Support Group. At the same time, a series of suicide bombing attacks took place in Homs, threatening again progress in the talks. The situation in Ukraine is also heating up. In the past days, in stark violation of the Minsk II agreements, Ukrainian forces took over the Donetsk water filtration plant in the past days, and began using the site to launch artillery fire at nearby villages. With all of these crisis spots pending, it is essential to put the US-Russia relationship on solid footing. And that will mean a face-to-face meeting between Presidents Trump and Putin at some point soon. In a recent Reuters interview, Trump said he would prefer to have a world with no nuclear weapons, but the United States would never “fall behind any country”: “It would be wonderful, a dream would be that no country would have nukes, but if countries are going to have nukes, we’re going to be at the top of the pack.” The Defense Department recommendations on how to upgrade the fight against ISIS will be the first substantive national security review of the new Trump Administration, and it will provide a broader insight into how the new President will make critical decisions and follow them through.
That review will also provide an opportunity to test the role of the President’s new National Security Advisor, General H.R. McMaster, who replaces Gen. Michael Flynn, McMaster has been endorsed almost unanimously by national security specialists from both parties. He is known for his 1997 book Derelic tion of Duty , which tore apart the Lyndon Johnson Administration, particularly Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for drawing the US into a no-win war in Vietnam based on false intelligence. Andrew Bacevich, a retired US Army Colonel, wrote last week that the big challenge for McMaster is to get beyond the “kinetic” world of military strategy and enter the domain of grand strategy, something that has been sorely lacking in US national security deliberations, since the end of the Cold War. Cheminade Announces Over 500 Pledges for His Presidential Bid! The news went out in a major way on Feb. 21 after Jacques Cheminade announced, in an interview with RTL TV/Radio , that over 500 elected officials had pledged in written form to sponsor his candidacy once they received the official form to do so. Those forms were sent out on Feb. 23 and have to filled out and received by the Constitutional Council by March 17 at the latest. Virtually all major media covered Cheminade’s announcement ( AFP, Les Echos, France Soir, Le Figaro, Libération, Europe 1, France Info, France TV Info , etc.), and a number of them took statements from his campaign staff as well, including AFP . The candidate also gave an excellent 20-minute interview to the news channel LCI on Feb. 24. (It seems, however, that Le Monde may stick to its absurd decision during the 2012 presidential campaign never to mention that Cheminade was one of the 10 presidential candidates, in a blatant example of fake news.) This year, as Cheminade and his staff have pointed out, there is more uncertainty as to whether the mayors who pledged will actually sign the official form. And deliberately so, since the Parliament passed a law explicitly to make it more difficult for “small” candidates to run. For example, each elected official must send his form personally by post to the Constitutional Council, whereas in previous years, the candidate could have them collected by his staff and then deliver them altogether himself by the deadline. In that way, he knew how many he still needed. In addition, the CC will publish the names of all the mayors who sponsor and whom they sponsors, rather than publishing only a random sample of 500 names, and that list will be updated twice a week, rather than at the end of the process. The intention is to put pressure on the mayors not to sponsor anyone for fear of reprisals. Whereas Cheminade is still confident he will have the 500 signatures required, he is not taking any chances and continues to contact other mayors. As he pointed out to LCI , the political landscape has changed significantly since the beginning of 2016, when his first pledges came in. Indeed, the orchestrated surge of arch-establishment candidate Emmanuel Macron, and the scandal surrounding François Fillon have led some to want nothing at all to do with the presidential elections. Cheminade’s campaign slogan, widely taken up in the coverage, is “Freeing Ourselves from Financial Occupation”. The RTL article explains that his target is “the City of London, Wall Street, and also the IMF. He denounces a ‘financial occupation’ which can be broken by creating ‘a new international monetary
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system’.” The article notes his attack on “financial globalization” and his call for a new law on banking separation, different from the “fake law” adopted in the beginning of François Hollande’s term. “The EU as its exists now, taken over by lobbies and the ECB’s financial power, and deaf to peoples’ hopes, is no solution for Jacques Cheminade... We have to exit and build a Europe of the Nations, at the heart of which such common projects could be carried out with the six founding members plus Spain and Portugal.” The article underlines his rejection of the euro, and support for an ECU kind of currency arrangement, and for the re-establishment of national banks. Austria and Switzerland Look to Cooperation with China on One Belt, One Road A spokesman for the Chinese President announced on Feb. 24 that some 20 governments have committed to attending the major One Belt One Road summit to be held in Beijing on May 14-15, although he did not specify which ones. From Europe, only the participation of the Swiss President has been confirmed, but others have been invited and are likely to attend. As for Germany, the government still seems to have reserves about expanding cooperation with China along the New Silk Road, in spite of the statistics released Feb. 24 showing that China was Germany’s top trade partner in 2016. The situation is quite different in Austria, where the mainstream media have for the most part had positive coverage of the Chinese New Silk Road policy, and prominent officials have shown genuine interest in deepening bilateral ties. In a report published a little over one week ago, the Vienna Institute of International Economic Comparisons (WIIW) assesses opportunities offered by the development of the New Silk Road, and in particular Austria’s participation in it. While the direct benefits for Austria’s industry will be rather limited to begin with, it notes, Austrian exports will benefit significantly from the improvements in the transport infrastructure in the neighboring countries which Chinese investment will ensure. That in turn will strengthen the national economies of the Balkans and to a rise in private and corporate incomes which, according to the WIIW study, will increase the demand for Austrian products. In Switzerland, where the mainstream media coverage has begun to be more supportive of China recently, there is a marked interest for working with the Chinese. The Swiss Ambassador to China, Jean-Jacques de Dardel, announced on Feb. 23 that Swiss President Doris Leuthard would attend the OBOR Summit in Beijing in May. As current Minister of Transport and former Minister of Economics, Leuthard has the qualifications needed to take part in a constructive discussion on projects of infrastructure at that summit, Dardel said. In January, Chinese President Xi Jinping conducted a state visit to Switzerland before attending the World Economic Forum in Davos (cf. SAS 3/17). Xi Jinping Makes Italy a Great Offer Chinese President Xi Jinping invited Italy to attend the May 14-15 summit, directly extending the invitation to President Sergio Mattarella, who led a political and business delegation to China Feb. 21-26. The latter responded by expressing “utmost interest in the One Belt, One Road Initiative”. But Italy, subject to EU constraints, is kept on a shoestring budget. Speaking at the end of the Italy-China Business Forum and the Italy-China Cultural Forum, Xi said that Italy “offers incom
parable advantages as a door between East and West,” given its geographical position and its political role in Europe. “There is a pioneering spirit in our two countries,” Xi said. The Chinese President cited Italian missionary Prospero Intorcetta, who was the first European to translate Confucius, in the 17th Century, and who, like Mattarella, hailed from Sicily. Intorcetta is buried in Hangzhou. In his speech, Mattarella said that “Italy can offer experiences and knowledge in sectors of great interest for China, such as food security, health, environmental technologies, sustainable urbanization, logistics and transports, aerospace.” The two countries signed deals for $5 billion, including Italian participation in a joint mapping of the Moon and joint experiments in long-term human flight on the Chinese space station in 2022, as well as Italian technology and interiors for two large cruise ships to be assembled in Shanghai, customs agreements between the ports of Genoa and Ningbo, and supply of Italian gas turbines. The deals, however, show that Italy is unprepared to fully join the Belt and Road paradigm. In fact, Mattarella highlighted the strategic opportunity of “the Italian system of ports and logistics” to complete “the last precious track of the ‘New Silk Road’ down to the heart of Europe”, but he meant northern ports such as Genoa and Venice. This neglects the advantage of Southern Italy, whose ports are closer to Suez and represent a real advantage compared to the Gibraltar route to northern Europe. Using a Southern Italian platform, however, requires investing a huge amount of capital in the modernization of the ports, in addition to building the Messina bridge between Italy and Sicily, and modernizing the rail and road south-north transport infrastructure. Under EU budget constraints, it is forbidden to finance such infrastructures. While China could be an external source for such capital, the case of Hungary shows that the EU is opposing that too. As the dynamic of the OBOR increases, it is only a matter of time before a conflict explodes into the open. The EU Attempts to Derail the Belgrade-Budapest Railway Project The Chinese are eager to build and finance a high-speed railway in a strategic section of the Eastern European route of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The 350-km line will reduce the travel time between the capitals of Serbia (Belgrade) and Hungary (Budapest) from eight to only three hours and serve as a link between the Chinese-owned port of Piraeus, in Greece, and Central and Eastern Europe. The Hungarian section of the line, as pointed out by Tamas Matura, assistant professor at the Corvinus University in Budapest, should serve as “a masterpiece to show that the Chinese can build according to EU standards.” But now, the European Commission has opened an investigation to probe whether the contract violates EU laws imposing a mandatory public tender for large deals. Brussels is focused on Hungary, a full member of the European Union, while Serbia is not subject to the same strict EU rules. The Hungarian government countered that the contract with China was signed after consulting with Brussels. Bejing reacted by exposing the hostile action by the EU. Cui Hongjian, director of the Department of European Studies at the China Institute of International Studies, penned an article in the Global Times of Feb. 23 under the title “EU’s bureaucracy gets in way of China ties”.
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He accuses the EU of asserting its power instead of putting “the interests of the people first” and seeking cooperation with China “that will bring tangible benefits to Hungarians and other Europeans”. The EU “is experiencing a tough time,” Cui Hongjian wrote, “and may seek to assert its authority by ramping up inspections and reviews, but the EU may have hit a dead end. “It is unknown whose interest the EU’s investigation represents. From the perspective of Serbia and Hungary, the project should be given the green light if it is feasible and can benefit both countries. But the EU needs to defend its authority and assert its power. It is unclear whether the need for pragmatism in getting the project done will outweigh the need for the EU to preserve its authority.” A Message of Hope to the Yemeni People from Helga Zepp-LaRouche A conference on the “Forgotten War Crimes in Yemen” was held in Berlin on Feb. 25 at the initiative of Yemeni citizens liv ing in Germany, to raise awareness of the urgent need to put an end to what is clearly the mass murder of the Yemenite people. Two representatives of the Schiller Institute spoke on the topic “stop the genocide, peace through development”, bringing in the role Yemen can play in the New Silk Road perspective. They also read a statement from Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the presi dent of the Schiller Institute, which we publish below. “The war against Yemen, which the Saudi Arabian-led coalition and the United States have supported in many ways, has killed 10,000 people over the past two years, and now threatens the lives of more than 12 million who have been totally cut off from sustenance and medical supplies due to the systematic bombardment of the country’s agricultural infrastructure, and the air and sea blockade. This war, by the official definition of the United Nations, is a genocide. There is no case which better exemplifies the insufferable hypocrisy of the so-called ‘free West’, than the lack of reporting on the war crimes which have been committed on a daily basis against the population of Yemen for the past two years. Where are all the advocates of ‘humanitarian intervention’, who, under the pretext of defense of human rights, have incited one war after another on the basis of lies? Where is the coverage of the bombardments of funerals and hospitals, of the use of cluster bombs banned under international law, of the deaths of over a thousand children per week who are dying of preventable diseases? Where is the outcry about the systematic destruction of mankind’s magnificent cultural heritage? In the age of the Internet and NSA surveillance, no one can claim that the atrocities against the Yemeni population are not known to every government and all mass media. The decision to maintain de facto silence about them, only because the deeds are being carried out by “allies,” makes them complicit in these crimes. It is good that the new American Secretary of State Rex Tillerson addressed the need of “’unfettered delivery of humanitarian assistance throughout Yemen.” But there must be immediate international pressure exerted to end the war against Yemen right away, to rebuild the country, and to restore the destroyed cultural artifacts as much as possible. One source of hope and consolation for the people of Yemen should be the fact that the existence of the BRICS and China’s New Silk Road Initiative have made possible the prospect for confronting these challenges. The hopeful signs that a growing number of countries recognize the advantages of ‘win-win’ cooperation, and are ready to break with geopolitics, also mean that the strategic situation for Yemen can soon improve.
In the meantime, everyone is called upon to support the appeal of the Yemeni people for an end to the war, and to draw the attention of the world to this very important and culturally rich country! Former Ukrainian President Calls for Truth Commission to Investigate the Maidan Coup Echoing the call by Schiller Institute Chairwoman Helga ZeppLaRouche, Viktor Yanukovych has sent a letter to various European leaders to propose that the Council of Europe convene an independent commission to investigate the Feb. 23, 2014 coup which ousted him from power. In an interview in Moscow to a group of journalists, including from Tass, on the third anniversary of the Maidan coup in Ukraine, Yanukovych pointed out that many witnesses of the violent protests on the Maidan do not want to testify to the current authorities, but are willing to testify “to an international monitoring commission that should be set up in order to fulfil the agreement signed on February 21 [2014] and should particularly include representatives of the opposition and international experts.” He also charged that the current Ukrainian Prosecutor General, Yuri Lutsenko, had organized all the illegal activities and killings that took place at the Maidan, and that activists there had weapons and were ready to use them. “We are talking about the killings of innocent people who were shot dead from the buildings occupied by the Maidan activists,” Yanukoyich went on to say. “Not one member of the Pravy Sektor [Right Sector, nationalist organization outlawed in Russia] was killed; they were shooting ordinary people who had just come to the Maidan. Those people were in the area that was easy to target from the buildings where snipers were. There are many proofs and people who are ready to testify.” After the coup, however, the Ukraine Parliament passed a law prohibiting prosecution of any demonstrators who committed crimes on the Maidan. Yanukovych further said that if the Kiev regime refuses to implement the Minsk II agreements, a referendum would have to be held on the status of the Donbass. The former President of Ukraine also wrote a letter to President Trump requesting “an objective legal and political assessment of the actions of U.S. officials during the Ukrainian crisis. Today we know that this was generously financed, paid for by various international funds”, and was supported by the West and the United States. In addition, he indicated that the former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt supported actions of the authorities who used heavy equipment against the civilian population of eastern Ukraine. Last week, the Schiller Institute circulated a special dossier on the events at the time as well as the efforts of the same networks today to pull off a similar coup in the United States, and held demonstrations in several cities (cf. SAS 8/17). The demonstration in New York City was widely covered by Tass .
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