U.S.A.-China Partnership: Hastening Slowly 

Watching the progress of the past days of the so-called "summit" meetings between China's President Jiang Zemin and U.S. President Bill Clinton, evoked the same eerie feeling experienced in observing the projection of a lapsed-time-cinematography image of a flower opening its petals. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact, that the continuous cultural existence of China spans 5,000 years. During the recent months of observing the preparations leading into this meeting, a prescience of words "hasten slowly" had often crept into my thoughts. 

That was the way the meeting between the two Presidents turned out. In the end, it appeared that only a few things of substantial significance were accomplished during the visit itself, but, that that handful of agreements has probably changed the world more than any other single event during the recent five years. Without doubt, this meeting has been the highest point of historic achievement reached by the Clinton Administration, in any field, thus far, since the January 1993 inauguration. 

The other reports in this EIR Special Feature will address the leading facts pertaining to the summit itself, and the hostile activities which attempted to prevent it from succeeding. My task is to provide something of more fundamental importance, a knowledgeable sense of the long-range historic implications of the circumstances in which this occurred. From my combined vantage-points, as perhaps the world's most successful long-range economic forecaster, and the depth of my daily engagement with crucial developments occurring in most parts of this planet, I believe that I understand the importance of this summit to a degree not otherwise available. I share that advantage with you now. 

As we approach the close of this century, civilization as it has been known on this planet during the past four centuries up to now, is in the process of disintegrating. By approximately the close of this century (a year or two plus or minus, at most), civilization as you have known it up to now will have disappeared. Either we shall put the old order, which has dominated the entire world of the Twentieth Century, out of its misery, by a sweeping, radical reform, or civilization as we have known it will simply disintegrate, together with the present international financial system already presently gripped by its onrushing death-agonies. 

Which way matters will go, to better or to worse, is not yet settled. Either way, in the better, or the worse, some trends are presently clearly established. For example, the role of the Atlantic Ocean, as the bridge between Europe and North America, is already becoming less and less important, as the importance of the bridge across the Pacific increases. 

One essential factor in this shift, is the new form of degeneration which has erupted in the political relations with a London-dominated Europe, and the weakening of the underlying basis for economic ties with Europe, as Europe willfully brings to an end, since 1989, its role as a continent of scientific and technological progress. 

The other factor, is the growth of the population in east and south Asia. Soon, the population of India will exceed that of China. The combined population of east, southeast, and south Asia, represents the overwhelming majority of the world's population, and population-growth. Proximate to a hungry Asia sits the great area of potential agricultural improvements on this planet, Africa; Australia aside, Africa is the most heavily {under}populated of the inhabited continents of this planet, a continent with vast, vastly under-utilized, existing agricultural acreage. 

If the United States is to have a hopeful future, not only must we correct our economic policies toward our neighbors to our South. The principal orientation of the U.S. must be across the Pacific and Indian Ocean. The pivot for that orientation is China. Together, China and the U.S.A. can shape a region of mutual economic and related security from the Americas, across the Pacific and Indian Ocean, supplemented by a reach across the South Atlantic to the western coast of Africa. Add up the present populations of those regions, combined. Certain broad conclusions should already be clear. 

Partnership with China is key to building secure and peaceful cooperation among the nations bordering the Asia side of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. 

The continued and secure economic development of all the nations in Asia, depends upon successful development of the vast, underdeveloped regions of the interior of Asia. An emerging partnership among key nations such as the U.S.A., China, India, Japan, and so on, provides the basis for managing residual conflicts among the states of Asia, through the benefits of successful economic cooperation. The meeting between President Jiang Zemin and President Bill Clinton, is a deceptively small, but indispensable step toward bringing such broader, multi-national cooperation into being. 

To this purpose, as President Abraham Lincoln's economist, Henry C. Carey, proposed for Nineteenth-Century Germany, Russia, and the nationalist forces of China, the key to the sustainable development of Asia as a whole, is a program mimicking the development of corridors of economic growth, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, along the side of the routes of the transcontinental railway system. An integrated network of corridors of modern transport, power, and water- and land-management, which we have identified as the extended "Eurasian Land-Bridge Development" reaching into Africa, and across the Bering Strait into North America, is the infrastructural key to the successful development of world economy during the coming century.

London: The dark side of the Earth

Not only did British intelligence deploy most of the opposition to the U.S.A.-China "summit" agreements, within the U.S. Congress, Hollywood, the U.S. press, and elsewhere inside the U.S.A., during the recent months. British Commonwealth and allied western European financial interests, reportedly assisted by the Clinton Administration's enemy, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, used the occasion of President Jiang Zemin's presence inside the U.S.A., in an unsuccessful effort to break the will of China's government, through a concerted speculative attack upon Hongkong. 

These British attacks upon China, the U.S.A., Nigeria, Malaysia, Taiwan, and so on, can not be understood without considering the several very long cycles in modern history, which are converging upon a breaking-point, as we near the close of this century. These have been addressed at significant length, in a number of published locations earlier, including earlier editions of EIR. It is sufficient to summarize the matter. Consider three concentric long cycles, beginning with the longest. 

1. The betrayal of the League of Cambrai's effort to break the oligarchical-financial power of Venice, resulted in a stand-off, in which neither the cause of modern national economy, nor the system of financier-oligarchical rule, could establish absolute power over the other. Thus, the emerging nation-states of Europe, during the past four centuries to date, have been mixed economies, in which, usually, it has been the financier-oligarchy interest which has maintained the power of an occupying parasite upon the body of national economy. 

2. This defines a long cycle, which began to come to an end about thirty years ago, with the shift into a "rock-drug-sex youth-counterculture" and "post-industrial" utopianism. That shift, of approximately thirty years, has shifted the world away from the kind of national economy which characterized modern European civilization until about thirty years ago, toward ever-increasing emphasis upon purely speculative finance. That form of economy is now facing its inevitable doom. 

3. The 1989-1991 collapse of the Soviet system was used, by Prime Minister Thatcher's Britain, France's President Mitterrand, and U.S. President George Bush, as the opportunity to set in motion the systematic, rapid destruction of the nation-state and national economy, and to replace that with a "new world order" of globalization and liquidation of national sovereignty of all nation-states, including the U.S.A. This marked the explosion of the replacement of investment, by casino-style gambling, the so-called "derivatives" bubble, and the piratical depredations of London-directed scoundrels such as the widely hated George Soros. 

Now, as my "Triple Curve" function sums this up, all three cycles are converging upon a common end-point, as we near the close of this century. 

In this circumstance, those European and related financier-oligarchical interests, which pivot around the Anglo-Dutch monarchies, have entered their death-agony, lashing out with violent, lunatic thrashings, of a sort which only a reptilian species in its death-agony might muster. This monster is deadly, but nonetheless doomed, as the persistent stench of scandal around the British monarchy reminds one of the Biblical account of Belshazzar's feast. The British monarchy, and its homicidal savagery against both President Clinton's U.S.A. and President Jiang Zemin's China, exemplifies the world's strategic situation at this juncture. 

The kind of world represented by these three concentric cycles is doomed. We have the choice of reorganizing world affairs around the pure principle of national economy--as the principles of Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Henry C. Carey, and Abraham Lincoln typify those principles for U.S. patriots; or, the inevitable, presently ongoing disintegration of both the world financial system and the present system of mixed types of nation-state economies, will plunge the entirety of the planet into a kind of barbarism, a "new dark age," somewhat akin to the "new dark age" which depopulated Europe during the middle of the Fourteenth Century. 

The true significance of the recent summit is brought into focus when it is examined against the backdrop of the cycles just summarized. In a world, in which the old system, as identified by reference to those cycles, expresses an unwholesome creature seized by its own moral unfitness to survive, the meeting between the two Presidents, here in Washington, this week, shows itself the seed-crystal around which an alternative can be built, a better age for humanity than the one which is now in the process of destroying itself today. 

1. On May 18, 1990, at a conference in Washington on religion and ecology, co-sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund and the North American Congress on Religion and Ecology. See article on p.64 of this issue. 

2. Continued under the new name of "World Wide Fund for Nature." See, report of the WWF, "North America Conservation Assessment."