To Dialogue or To Clash: That Is the Question Facing Civilization

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met in Sochi, Russia with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and President Vladimir Putin on Monday. On clear instructions—and a tight leash—from President Donald Trump, Pompeo told the press after the meetings that he had “a productive set of conversations” with his hosts, and found that “there are places that our two countries can find where we can be cooperative, we could be productive.” Earlier this week President Trump had reiterated his wish to hold in-depth meetings with both Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Putin at the late June G20 meeting in Osaka, and Lavrov responded in Sochi by affirming that “if we receive an official invitation, we will respond positively.”

A day earlier, on May 13, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi had also been in Sochi meeting with Lavrov and Putin, and he used the occasion to stress that, notwithstanding the serious breakdown in trade negotiations with the U.S., “China, Russia and the United States should keep expanding cooperation and jointly contribute to world stability and global development.”

This is the last thing the British Empire wanted to see coming out of Sochi this week, since they know such a combination of powers is capable of putting them out of business permanently.

But there is also an irony in the Sochi developments that should not be missed, in order to understand the full complexity of the global strategic situation. It was the same Mike Pompeo who last year effusively eulogized the just-deceased British imperial gamemaster Bernard Lewis, the author of the perverse plan to trigger a “clash of civilizations” planet-wide. And more recently Pompeo has teamed up with National Security Advisor John Bolton, whenever Trump doesn’t have them on a tight enough leash, to promote that policy of “clash of civilizations” in every imaginable theater. Both Pompeo and Bolton are in that way functioning as operators on behalf of the British Empire’s deadly intent to destroy the Trump Presidency by dragging Trump into precisely the kind of regime-change wars he was elected to stop.

As former British diplomat Alastair Crooke pointed out in a May 13 article, the source of Pompeo and Bolton’s Iran policy (he could have added their policy toward Russia, China, Venezuela, Syria, North Korea, etc., etc.) is actually “the Bernard Lewis plan … a design to fracture all the countries in the region — from the Middle East to India — along ethnic, sectarian and linguistic lines. A radical Balkanization of the region.” It was Lewis, Crooke added, who “has been formidably influential in America — his policy ideas have towered over Presidents, policymakers and think-tanks, and they still do.” And it was he who actually coined the phrase “Clash of Civilizations.”

Lyndon LaRouche was far more precise in identifying the nature of the enemy and his policy. At the Feb. 15, 2003 Schiller Institute conference, LaRouche said that the Bernard Lewis Plan “is aimed at all of humanity, but it is aimed at Islam, both because of the crossroads between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, and because 1.3 billion Muslims — if you put that part of culture into chaos, then you cannot have peace in any part of Eurasia, and Eurasia is finished. And, therefore, you can rule the world.”

That is the British plan for a Clash of Civilizations. But then there’s the reality that came to the fore in Sochi, the dominant global dynamic of the Spirit of the New Silk Road that Helga Zepp-LaRouche has repeatedly identified, which is a dynamic moving the majority of the human race towards a Dialogue of Classical Civilizations that is coming together around China’s Belt and Road Initiative. In fact, on May 15-16, China will host a Conference on Development of Asian Civilizations (CDAC) in Beijing, which, Xinhua reported, was “initiated by Chinese President Xi Jinping to promote cross-civilizational exchanges and mutual learning across this culturally diverse continent, and build an Asian community with a shared future…. [xi] maintains that exchanges and mutual learning among civilizations have empowered human progress as well as world peace and development.”

And yet such a Dialogue of Civilizations can only succeed, the British Empire’s evil Bernard Lewis Plan for a Clash of Civilizations can only be defeated, if the deeper philosophical principles underlying such a needed dialogue are specified in the way Lyndon LaRouche has done. In his landmark study of Dec. 19, 2004, “The Dialogue of Eurasian Civilizations: Earth’s Next Fifty Years,” LaRouche wrote:

“The immediate crisis dictating the urgency of a dialogue of cultures can, and must be pin-pointed with aid of some concrete and sometimes abrasive observations, in the following exemplary way.

“Those products of Harvard University’s late Professor William Yandell Elliott’s work, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel P. Huntington, have concocted schemes, often in concert with a former leader of the United Kingdom’s Arab Bureau, Bernard Lewis, aiming to build a fascistic, world-wide Anglo-American parody of the Roman Empire … and also his [Huntington’s] recipe for world-wide religious warfare, his The Clash of Civilizations.”

LaRouche went on to warn that “the world is now lurching over the brink of a financial crisis beyond the experience of any person living today. We are caught, like a ship in a storm, within an already onrushing world crisis, which now threatens to plunge the planet as a whole into a new dark age.”

LaRouche then specified the required principles around which a solution can be organized:

“A rational world would adopt Vladimir I. Vernadsky’s defining of the Noosphere as the keystone for defining the physical-economic doctrines of management and development of all modern economies…. This use of the work of Vernadsky will prove to be of unique importance in bringing forth the now urgently needed transition from a division between European and Asian cultures, to the emergence of the presently needed true Eurasian culture. The dialogue of cultures, grounded in an agenda of such considerations, must function as a forum of general reference for developing acceptance for that process of progress toward such an emerging Eurasian culture, progress shared as a mode of policy-shaping dialogue and agreements among sovereign nations.”