Belt and Road Fireworks

The Carnegie Hall concert and symposium celebrating the work of Sylvia Olden Lee at the end of last week, and the upcoming Food for Peace conference at the end of this week, are the two LaRouche movement “bookends” providing conceptual leadership and programmatic direction, to what is shaping up as one of the most dramatic weeks of international diplomacy in recent history.

First, there is the July 4 summit meeting in Moscow between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, with expected results that have led both sides to characterize the meeting as “the event of the year.” They plan to consolidate coordination between China’s Belt and Road Initiative and the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union; they will open up new areas of scientific cooperation, including in the Arctic; and they intend to work closely together to combat terrorism, the drug trade, and other threats to global security.

As Helga Zepp-LaRouche noted today, the Xi-Putin summit is shaping up as the defining issue at this strategic conjuncture. The July 7-8 G20 meeting in Hamburg, on the other hand, is threatening to be more of a street carnival than a serious summit: U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble have teamed up to try to ban any discussion of serious financial reform, such as Glass-Steagall and Lyndon LaRouche’s Four Laws, which alone would give meaning to the G20 summit, and make the trans-Atlantic sector fit to join the Belt and Road Initiative.

But the so-called “sidelines” of the G20 summit are looking far more productive than the formal agenda that the Merkel government has set for the summit itself. The heads of state of China, Japan, South Korea, and of course the U.S., have scheduled multiple meetings on the sidelines of the summit. Russia’s Putin has scheduled no fewer than 11 bilateral meetings on the summit sidelines—and that is without counting his expected meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump, the meeting which “is crucial and everybody has been waiting for,” in the words of Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov.

If the U.S., Russia, and China can work together, Helga Zepp-LaRouche commented, then there is a pathway out of the current breakdown crisis. That will require defusing the multiple provocations that the bankrupt British Empire is placing in their path—from Syria, to the South China Sea, to the Korean Peninsula—and they will have to address the breakdown financial crisis, which is the Sword of Damocles hanging over the West, with the only programmatic and conceptual tools that will work: those provided by Lyndon LaRouche.