Economic Growth and Security: Why the West Can’t Win in Ukraine

During one session of the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, President Putin also spoke of using “new physical principles” in weapons development. His comments were met with an eerie silence from the usual arrogant blabbermouths in the West who think they understand the Russian President. There was some gossip that he is hinting at developing “Super Weapons”. One anonymous source dismissively said there is a “veil of mystery” around his comments.

But there is nothing mysterious about what he said. However, the overall silence and ignorant posturing demonstrate why the Trans-Atlantic nations cannot win in Ukraine, and why their economies are tanking: they are clueless, perhaps willfully so, of the relationship between a healthy, growing physical economy and a nation’s security.

Vladimir Putin’s remarks were relatively straightforward. In response to the question, “What is Russia’s future”?, he said, “We are the makers of our future… Scientists engage in R&D. Industrialists work in the sphere of material production, agriculture, in the industrial sector, etc. Cultural figures create images to preserve our values, which shape the inner life of every person and each citizen of Russia. All of this taken together will certainly yield a result… This means that we will develop our own country and make it even stronger in cooperation with our partners and friends and in integration with the overwhelming majority of countries that represent most of the world population.”

He concluded his response as follows: “I have already mentioned industry, science, and so on. But in so doing, we must under all circumstances preserve the soul of Russia, the soul of our multi-ethnic and multi-faith nation. This humanitarian component, along with science, education and real production, will be the basis upon which this country will advance, while feeling and taking itself as a sovereign and fully independent state with good prospects for development.”

Putin’s discussion calls to mind the many presentations and programmatic articles by Lyndon LaRouche, when he was campaigning for the adoption of his Strategic Defense Initiative throughout the late 1970s and 1980s. LaRouche repeatedly emphasized that scientific advance creates the basis for a new technological platform which can protect a nation’s security, while offering a passage to a new era of strategic relations based on sharing the benefits of that new platform.

While this may be “mysterious” to those indoctrinated in the British geopolitical school of Kissinger and Brzezinski, LaRouche’s ideas were discussed in writings and in-person dialogues he had with Russian scientists, as with more sane intelligence officials in the West. That there has thus far been so little serious analysis and commentary on Putin’s remarks in Vladivostok is evidence of the overall disastrous decline in strategic thinking in the West.