WILL THE LAW OF THE JUNGLE PREVAIL?

The spectacle that was President Donald Trump’s speech to the Davos World Economic Forum on Wednesday, January 21, presented an alarming picture of the state of mind of a U.S. Presidency ruled by the Beast-Man ideology of Joseph de Maistre, the inhuman belief that rule by terror and coercion, the Thrasymachan “might makes right,” must govern human affairs. “Once the attack ended,” Trump said of the U.S. assault on Venezuela, “they said, ‘Let’s make a deal.’ More people should do that.”

The next people in line for such a “deal” seem to be the people of Denmark. Trump made abundantly clear throughout his speech, at times more insulting than others, that there is no way that the U.S. cannot own Greenland.

“Greenland is a vast, almost entirely uninhabited and undeveloped territory that’s sitting undefended in a key strategic location between the United States, Russia, and China … right smack in the middle…. All we want from Denmark for national and international security and to keep our very energetic and dangerous potential enemies at bay is this land on which we’re going to build the greatest Golden Dome ever built.”

Such a Golden Dome is, however, in the eyes of many experts, a complete fantasy. Not only would it cost hundreds of billions of dollars, but with Russia’s new Burevestnik nuclear powered missile, capable of flying over the South Pole, the world in which the Golden Dome preserves American dominance doesn’t exist—it is a mere delusion of a collapsed geopolitical, imperial world order.

Offering an important voice of sanity from the United States in the face of this, three American Catholic Cardinals issued a joint statement on January 19, “Charting a Moral Vision of American Foreign Policy,” which points to “the most profound and searing debate about the moral foundation for America’s actions in the world since the end of the Cold War. The events in Venezuela, Ukraine and Greenland have raised basic questions about the use of military force and the meaning of peace.” Citing Pope Leo XIV’s January 9 address to the Vatican diplomatic corps, the Cardinals call for “a truly moral foundation for international relations” in the face of a “zeal for war” and the seeking of peace “through weapons as a condition for asserting one’s own dominion.”

The insanity in Davos will continue on January 22, as Trump will lead a signing ceremony for his $1-billion-a-seat “Board of Peace,” which very few leaders have yet assented to join. Commentary from China Institute of International Studies scholar Li Zixin puts the issue plainly: “This act of ‘privatizing’ international affairs and ‘commodifying’ regional peace not only disregards the will of the Palestinian people but also poses a huge challenge to the existing international governance system and norms of conduct…. This ‘club governance’ model reduces international law to a private contract among major powers, forcing the world back into the law of the jungle.”

But what can be done in the face of such naked lawlessness?

“I fundamentally agree with Leibniz, who thought that any evil evokes an even better and stronger good,” Helga Zepp-LaRouche told her audience in her webcast of January 21, “because the laws of the universe are such that that is just the way it works, it’s an anti-entropic conception. That is why even if sometimes one really gets the shivers about what is happening, I almost never lose the idea that something can be done about it, that there is always a way out for any problem if one puts their mind to it, and if you find good comrades and colleagues and friends and associates who work together.…”

Become one of those colleagues, friends, and associates, starting with the 138th meeting of the International Peace Coalition on January 23, and join those who seek to replace the ever-growing evil now gripping world affairs with a new international security and development architecture that can provide for humanity an even greater good.