New Opportunity

Feb. 7-President Trump's Feb. 10-11 summit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, offers the United States the opportunity to join in with the great new Eurasian-centered system of cooperation of the 21st Century- which includes Japan, China, Russia, and the more than 70 other nations, with 4.4 billion total population, which have joined in China's "Belt and Road Initiative" (BRI) of worldwide development corridors. It is indicative that Abe has prepared a contingency package for this upcoming summit, of 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 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. Putin's Russia and Japan have decided to overcome an intractable territorial dispute, by means of the two nations' coming to understand and trust each other through ever-closer massive economic cooperation, in their common interest. When Prime Minister Abe met President Putin in Vladivostok, on Russia's Pacific coast, last 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 between them. Additionally, they agreed to joint economic development of the territory disputed between them, the Kuril Islands. Final resolution of the sovereignty dispute will follow the deepened trust to result from this cooperation. When President Putin proposed this uniquely 21st-century path of negotiations with Japan, he, of course, 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 both 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.