The Coming Crash Can Be Prevented

Jan. 9-French President Emmanuel Macron, in his speech in Xi'an on the first leg of his visit to China, has unleashed a highly significant intervention into the nearly universal idiocy dominating the European Union. To make a transformation of this sort requires, first, the acknowledgment of the horror now dominating the political and economic conditions in the West, and the degenerate frame of mind of the elites, the media, and much of the population in Europe and the United States. Secondly, it requires acknowledgment of the historic New Paradigm unleashed by China's New Silk Road. Third, it requires the vision to see that bringing Europe and the United States to fully join with China's Belt and Road Initiative, as nearly the entire rest of the world has done, provides the necessary basis for creating the new world order based on peace and development. Macron has taken a major step to accomplish these three measures-although you certainly would not know it by reading the Western press. On the first, Macron noted that China "has managed to lift 700 million people out of poverty in recent decades. This is true for France too, where we are confronted with mass unemployment, with the imperative needed to give future prospects to a whole part of our population, but it is a challenge of the world that lives today in a crisis of globalized capitalism, which has, in recent decades, exploded social inequalities and the concentration of wealth." On the strategic side, Macron said the West must overcome the "unilateral imperialism" conducted by France and other European powers in Africa and elsewhere, adding: "We must draw the lessons of the past. Every time we tried to impose the 'truth' or the 'law' against the people themselves, we were wrong, and sometimes we have produced an even worse situation, such as in Iraq, or Libya today. We need to work together to develop the respect of sovereignty of the people." He spoke directly against the geopolitical paradigm dominating Western thought: "There should be neither a disguised supremacy, nor a conflict between competing supremacies. All our art, if I may use that word, will not be the art of war, but an art of cooperation, balanced in order to ensure on the geostrategic, political, and economic level, the harmony our world needs." He referred to the West as a "tired, post-modern world, where the great epics were forbidden." And most importantly, Macron identified the New Silk Road as the connection required between all peoples to achieve this new world order. "I think that the initiative of the New Silk Roads," he said, "can meet our interests, those of France and of Europe, if we give ourselves the means to really work together. . . . It is up to Europe and Asia, up to France and China, to define and propose together the rules of a game in which we will all win, or we will all lose. I have come thus to tell China my determination to have the Euro-Chinese partnership enter into the 21st Century with this new grammar we must all define together." He praised China's work in Africa, where "China has invested heavily in recent years, in infrastructure, raw materials, with a financial force that European countries do not have." He called for French-Chinese cooperation in Africa, to "carry out projects that are really useful for the growth of the continent, financially sustainable-because the future is there, because we must not reproduce the mistakes of the past of creating political and financial dependence, under the pretext of development." Most of the Western press, if they cover the visit at all, foolishly portray it as "anti-Trump," or a lecture to China to open its markets. This again demonstrates that Western leaders and their media spokespersons are unwilling, or unable, to part with their geopolitical glasses, their zero-sum, Darwinian mentality.