The following live Executive
Intelligence Review event will take place on Monday, Jan.
12, at 10 a.m. (ET), and will be live-streamed
on YouTube in English. Spanish, French, and German
simultaneous interpretation will be available
via Zoom.
What the world witnessed on Jan. 3, 2026—the U.S. military assault
against Venezuela, and the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and
his wife Cilia Flores to stand trial in the United States—is not just
a return to Teddy Roosevelt’s “gunboat diplomacy” and “big stick”
policies. It is not only the theft of Venezuela’s oil. It even
involves more than the explicit threat to give the same bloody
treatment to Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, Brazil, Iran—and many other
nations—unless they submit to being Wall Street and the City of London
satraps.
The Venezuela events have to be considered alongside the Dec. 29
massive drone strike launched by NATO-backed Kiev forces on the home
of Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Novgorod region, a strike
intended to assassinate President Putin. The attack was an overt
attempt to cross Russia’s nuclear trip-wire, to launch a “decapitation
strike” which could have rapidly escalated into full-scale nuclear
war.
These events, taken together, mark a dramatic phase-change in the
global strategic situation: the plan to immediately end the era of
international law, of respect for national sovereignty and
non-intervention in the internal affairs of other states, and of the
principles set forth in the UN Charter which have helped guide
international relations since the defeat of fascism in World War II.
Now we are to descend fully into an Era of Bestiality, of Thomas
Hobbes’s “war of every man against every many” in which a global
“Leviathan” imposes his will—to the greater glory of maintaining the
bankrupt trans-Atlantic system under conditions of a breakdown
collapse of its $2 quadrillion speculative bubble.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller was
eloquent in his savage advocacy of this concept of Man and society in
a Jan. 5 interview with CNN: After asserting that “the United States
of America is running Venezuela,” Miller proclaimed: “We live in a
world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is
governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have
existed since the beginning of time.”
A Jan. 6 editorial in China’s semi-official
daily Global Times responded
clearly: “The overwhelming majority of countries are unwilling to
return to a Hobbesian international jungle governed by the law of the
strong preying on the weak.”
It was British intelligence agent, and sometimes philosopher,
Thomas Hobbes who famously stated in his
1651 Leviathan: “Hereby it is manifest that
during the time men live without a common power [Leviathan] to keep
them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and
such a war as is of every man against every man.… To this war of every
man against every man, this also is consequence; that nothing can be
unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have
there no place.”
Is this to be the concept of Man and society that will now prevail?
Has U.S. President Donald Trump, with his brazen attack on Venezuela,
at the same time, destroyed any prospect of a cooperative relationship
with Russia and China? That would be London’s intent, and that is the
crucial strategic issue posed today.
Or is Mankind not the unique creative species, the only one thus
far known to exist, who can govern his affairs according to reason,
who can flourish based on promoting the general welfare and the good
of the other? Can we not develop a new international security and
development architecture, a new paradigm worthy of the dignity of
Man?
Join the deliberation on these issues at EIR’s Emergency Roundtable
Dialogue on Monday, Jan. 12, from 10 a.m.-12 p.m. (ET), with
simultaneous interpretation in English, Spanish, French and
German.
Panelists will include, among
others:
Helga Zepp-LaRouche (Germany): founder, Schiller
Institute
Hon. Naledi Pandor (South Africa): former Minister
of International Relations and Cooperation; chair, Nelson Mandela
Foundation; chancellor, Nelson Mandela University
Prof. Zhang Weiwei (China): professor of
International Relations at Fudan University, Shanghai
Amb. Chas Freeman (U.S.): former ambassador to
Saudi Arabia, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International
Security Affairs, China scholar
Dmitri Trenin (Russia): Director and Academic
Supervisor of the Institute of World Military Economy and Strategy at
the HSE University (Moscow)
H.E. Donald Ramotar (Guyana): former President of
Guyana (2011-2015)
H.C. von Sponeck (Germany): former UN Assistant
Secretary General
María de los Ángeles Huerta (Mexico): former
Congresswoman
Namit Verma (India): author, security expert
Dennis Small (U.S.): EIR Ibero-America Editor
Commentator: Lt. Col. Ralph Bosshard
(Switzerland): former military adviser to the OSCE secretary
general
