Trump-Abe Summit: Japan Opens Bridge to Eurasia

By Tony Papert

President Trump’s Feb. 10-11 summit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe offers the United States the opportunity to join with the great new Eurasian-centered system of cooperation of the 21st Century—a new system of great nations which includes Japan, China, and Russia, plus the more than 70 other nations, with 4.4 billion total population, all of which have joined China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) of worldwide development corridors.

Abe has prepared a contingency package for this upcoming summit, which includes Japanese hi-tech investment in the United States to create hundreds of thousands of good jobs. Japanese media report that Prime Minister Abe has prepared a plan which includes large-scale investment in high-speed rail in Texas and California, along with other infrastructural investment, as well as mutual cooperation towards advanced nuclear power, space technology, and other breakthrough technologies.

Japan’s development of this package for Washington must be understood as a spinoff of the revolutionary agreements being made between Japan and Russia over recent months. The two countries have been negotiating a peace agreement; they have officially been at war with each other for over 70 years. But these “peace negotiations” are unique in form: they would never have been possible outside the context of the new, Eurasia-centered agreement among nations—of which most Americans are still completely unaware.

Prime Minister first met with Putin in Sochi, Russia, in May, 2016, against the direct behest of then President Obama, insisting on a dialogue with Putin in the new Eurasian context. When Prime Minister Abe met President Putin again in Vladivostok, on Russia’s Pacific coast later in September, he proposed eight points of economic cooperation, which included major Japanese investment to help develop the Russian Far East (or eastern Siberia).

When Putin returned the visit in December, the eight points were reaffirmed and elaborated. Additionally, they agreed to joint economic development of the territory disputed between them, the Kuril Islands. Final resolution of this sovereignty dispute will follow from the deepened trust as a result of this cooperation. When President Putin proposed this uniquely 21st-century path of negotiations with Japan, he had in mind Chinese President Xi Jinping’s 2013 launching of the Belt and Road Initiative, a revolutionary vision of infrastructural development corridors linking all of Eurasia, spreading out into the Middle East and Africa, and, via a Bering Strait tunnel, into northeast Asia and to both of the American continents as well.

As we have reported, the Belt and Road initiative is the outgrowth of policy-proposals which Lyndon and Helga LaRouche have continuously fought for since 1988, and as a system of development, since the early 1970s.

The nations of Eurasia, led by Russia, China, and now Japan, are saying to the United States, “We’ve opened up a new way to live and collaborate. Will you accept it and join it?” Clearly Japan, as a long term U.S. ally, can now play a unique bridge towards the development of a new international system with the cornerstone being the tripart relationship of Russia, China, and the United States.

The Bering Strait Bridge, which crosses the 54 mile gap between Alaska and the far east of Russia, is a key part to accessing the significantly untapped northern Pacific Basin areas. The nations of this region, i.e. U.S.A, Russia, Canada, China, Japan, and the Koreas, are located in an area with a large percentage of the world’s untapped natural resources, and have some of the most advanced technologies in fusion research, space exploration, nuclear power, and high-speed rail, and are now in state of potential collaboration. With this, and much more at stake, the Trump-Abe summit itself becomes a potential bridge between the U.S. and the growing Eurasian world of the greatest economic consequence.

Lyndon LaRouche was recently asked about this potential. “President Trump will not be a problem here,” LaRouche told associates on Feb. 6. Rather, U.S. adherence to the new agreement among the nations will be the way in which the new President can fulfill his campaign promise that no American who wants to work will be unable to find a job.

“We have only a short period in which to consolidate this,” LaRouche said. “We have a solid group of leaders who firmly agree on principles of action; they must be consolidated as a unity. We’ve got a clean job, and it must remain that. What could ruin it, is if some third party were allowed barge in and try to impose their own, different principles.

“The initial leading forces have selected themselves. Others who want to enter must qualify themselves; they can’t be allowed to just walk on in. We have to make that decision.”

Such potentials for change regarding the relations of the world’s major nations are rare moments in world history. The LaRouche vision for the world landbridge has been in the making since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Now, President Trump has an opportunity to shape world history, and bring to bare a new and better world economic system. There is nothing of greater importance for the U.S. or the world.

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