The final flights bringing foreigners and Afghan refugees out of Kabul are now in process, with President Biden sticking to the Aug. 31 deadline. A second U.S. drone attack today, in Kabul, claimed to take out a car with several intended suicide bombers inside who were heading to the airport. The profound issue facing the world today is whether or not the U.S. will join with China, Russia and the countries in the region to begin an economic development process for this war-torn nation, to become the prosperous crossroad of Eastern and Western civilizations, or to become again an impoverished center of terrorism and drug production. If the former, such a transformation would serve as a model for the development of the other nations destroyed by the Anglo-American regime change wars over the past 20 years, establishing the notion of “peace through development” as the necessary new paradigm to replace the failed geopolitics of British imperialism.

In Iraq today, the government held a ten-nation conference entitled “Conference for Cooperation and Partnership,” including France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Qatar, Turkey, Kuwait, U.A.E. and Jordan. Like Libya and Syria, Iraq’s industrial infrastructure was utterly destroyed by the insane and illegal regime change war, falsely justified through lies by Tony Blair and the Bush-Cheney administration. While China has offered to bring the Belt and Road process into Iraq through an oil-for-infrastructure plan, this has been repeatedly sabotaged by foreign interests and manipulated intrigue within Iraq, just as the reconstruction of Syria has been prevented by the vile U.S. “Caesar Sanctions,” punishing any country which offers to invest in Syrian reconstruction. These imperial sanctions policies must be ended if the current descent into a new Dark Age is to be reversed.

The Schiller Institute has provided the framework for the world to come together behind Afghan development in a series of conferences and publications (see “Afghanistan—A Turning Point in History After the Failed Regime-Change Era” and “Will Afghanistan Trigger a Paradigm Change?”). This approach—to end the geopolitical division of the world into warring tribes, and to address the common aims of mankind—is not just a good idea, or a naive dream. The choice of peace through development, which has driven every renaissance throughout history, is the only option to end the current global crises—the out-of-control pandemic; the exploding financial bubble; the threat of thermonuclear war; and the cultural decay dragging the Western nations into a drug-infested perversity reminiscent of the last days of the Roman Empire.

The upcoming 20th anniversary of 9/11 will be the occasion of a Schiller Institute conference celebrating the cultural and intellectual ideas required to defeat this evil, and to bring about, at this moment of profound phase-change in human history, the necessary creative direction required of our citizens, and citizens around the world (details of the conference will be available soon). Anticipating that event, the Schiller Institute has announced the publication of the first issue of a new quarterly magazine of art, science and statecraft, Leonore. The announcement of the new publication asks: “What would a world look like if every young person could fully exercise their creativity?” Leonore will be sent automatically to every sustaining member of the Schiller Institute. Click here to become a sustaining member.