Trump’s China Speech: An Unmitigated Disaster

The anti-China escalations that we have fought against over the past weeks have come to a head, with President Trump’s destructive speech today in the Rose Garden, in which he repeated all the major charges against China that you can imagine and proposed taking many of the steps urged by the most despicable of his staff. Trump blamed China for destroying American jobs, an argument LaRouchePAC dismantled in its video No, China Didn’t Steal Your Dreams.

He said the Chinese “broke their word to the world on ensuring the autonomy of Hong Kong” and that Hong Kong’s special status with the United States will now be revoked.

The spread of the “Wuhan virus” was China’s fault, he insisted, claiming that China had ignored its WHO reporting obligations, pressured the WHO to “mislead the world,” and has “total control” over the WHO. So the United States is terminating its relationship with the World Health Organization.

He repeated the lie that China shut down internal travel from Wuhan while allowing sick Chinese to spread around the world, a claim debunked in the Schiller Institute’s video The Economics of Defeating the Coronavirus.

“China has replaced its promised formula of ‘One Country, Two Systems’ with ‘One Country, One System,’” Trump intoned.

Reached for comment, Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche gave her assessment: “This speech is an unmitigated disaster. If this is the U.S. attitude towards China, the world is facing major turbulence. This must be reversed. Any thinking person can see that in the combination of existential problems facing us — including the pandemic, the spreading economic depression, the looming famine, and the oncoming financial crisis — it absolutely remains true what Lyndon LaRouche said on so many occasions, in many speeches and articles, that only the combination of the United States, Russia, China, and India can solve these problems. And that remains our policy.”

In a video interview conducted just a few hours before Trump’s presentation, Zepp-LaRouche filled out the context for the new Hong Kong security law and warned of the dangers of escalating conflict. Gangs of violent rioters — with outside support, training, and funding — are causing tremendous problems in Hong Kong, jeopardizing its peace and security. It is entirely legitimate to bring this foreign interference under control. “This U.S.-China conflict is probably the most dangerous strategic conflict. You cannot contain a country of 1.4 billion people, whose government has set out on a correct economic policy by emphasizing scientific and technological progress.” She cautioned that the only way China’s rise could be stopped is World War III, which could not be won, leaving the strategy of “decoupling” and forcing the rest of the world to take sides in a new Cold War. This would lead to a total collapse of the real economy.

Obstacles to cooperation between the U.S., Russia, China, and India must be identified and overcome if the world is to have the hope of finally bringing into existence the economic and political paradigm that will unlock the tremendous capability for human development, to end poverty, make beautiful discoveries, and reach to the stars — to which end Lyndon LaRouche devoted his life’s work.