Nomination of New Russian Defense Minister Recalls Lyndon LaRouche’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)

From time to time, unexpected echoes are heard behind the familiar commonplaces of the “news.” Unexpected patterns emerge—like the poet Shelley’s “clouds in starlight widely spread”—which trace deeper features of strategy and human existence. So it is with President Putin’s May 12 nomination of economist and former minister Andrei R. Belousov to replace Sergei Shoigu as Russia’s Defense Minister.

The themes sounded around this nomination recall Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.’s, 1982-83 SDI negotiations with the Soviet Union at the direction of Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council. Also, LaRouche’s later trips to post-communist Russia—as the author of the SDI policy—at the invitation of leading Russian scientists.

The real “crime” which caused Robert Mueller, George HW Bush, and British-linked forces to railroad Lyndon LaRouche to prison in 1989—as they are now trying to do with President Trump—was that he had convinced Ronald Reagan of the grand strategic plan which Reagan announced on March 23, 1983, under the name of the “Strategic Defense Initiative. As with President Trump, LaRouche’s real “crime” was not what he was charged with in court. His only crime was daring to make policy without having first “paid his dues.” That is, he made policy without first tugging his forelock in fealty to the oligarchical “families” of the Ruling Class.

To relate the full scope of LaRouche’s SDI policy as he developed it over two decades is beyond the scope of this article. For that, the reader is referred to his 1984 “Draft Memorandum of Agreement between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.”

To sketch it briefly: LaRouche totally rejected the Kissinger doctrine of “Mutually Assured Destruction.” Kissinger had called for banning the development of any defense against thermonuclear ICBM’s, on the theory that the superpowers’ assured ability to destroy each other would somehow prevent nuclear war. (Ronald Reagan rejected it similarly. He could not accept what he called “revenge weapons,” whose only purpose was to destroy the adversary even while the US would also be destroyed.)

LaRouche’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)

On May 2, 1977, Gen. George Keegan (USAF-ret.) disclosed Soviet advances in use of particle beams to shoot down ICBMs in Aviation Week. LaRouche immediately began to develop a proposal for “mutually assured survival.” It called for rapid development of defensive beam weapons by both superpowers, coupled with massive spinoffs into boosting the high-technology civilian economy. The precedent here was the revolutionizing of the civilian economy by the Kennedy Moon program, which gave us modern computers, among other major advances. LaRouche knew that the Soviet system would suppress such spinoffs into their civilian economy, but he proposed that the US could help with that problem if the Soviets accepted the agreement, which included capital-goods exports into the developing sector, for rapid combined development.

President Trump’s recent calls for ballistic missile defense also recall the LaRouche-Reagan SDI, which Trump supported.

Dr. Edward Teller and other senior American patriots joined LaRouche in this campaign, as did generals of European NATO allies, and eventually Ronald Reagan, as we said. From the Soviet side, the Brezhnev government appeared open to the LaRouche-Reagan proposal in backchannel negotiations which LaRouche conducted for the National Security Council during 1982-83. But the Andropov government which succeeded Brezhnev in November, 1982, rejected everything. Andropov’s successor Gorbachov publicly demanded that the US government jail LaRouche.

In 1983, LaRouche forecast that that Soviet rejection would catalyze the downfall of their system within about five years, as their economy was brought down by ever-rising defense outlays choking off the civilian economy—rather than benefitting it through new technologies. He forecast that the “Western” system would follow over a somewhat longer period.

Who is Andrei Removich Belousov?

In explaining the Belousov nomination, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov emphasized precisely the most important themes of LaRouche’s SDI policy. First, he stressed the need to integrate the military within the civilian economy. (Reuters omits this remark, only noting the need for “synergy.”) This refers to the central issue of technological “spinoffs.”

Next, he said that defense and related spending had gone from 3% of gross domestic product to 6.7% because of the war, and was heading for 7.4%, a figure which evoked the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s. This refers to the precise way in which the Soviets’ rejection of the SDI offer brought down their system, as LaRouche had forecast, and to how Russia’s leadership intends to handle the problem the Soviets could not.

Born in Moscow in 1959, Belousov received an honors doctorate in economics from Moscow State University in 1981. Thereafter, he worked as an economics researcher until 2006. For the first five years, 1981-86, he was a researcher for CEMI, the Central Institute for Mathematical Economics. A prominent leader of CEMI was Academician Dmitry S. L’vov, head of the economics division of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who crossed paths with LaRouche in Russia during 2001. They were brought together by LaRouche’s friend, the man he called a brilliant young Russian economist, Sergei Glazyev.

Meanwhile, while continuing economic research in an institute he himself had established, Belousov became exterior economics advisor to the Prime Minister of Russia, 2000-2006. From there, his path led upwards to Minister of Economic Development and First Deputy Prime Minister. He was an economic advisor to President Putin when he was nominated for Defense Minister.

In his decades of work with Russia and Russians, Lyndon LaRouche fought for precisely the same principles for which he fought throughout his life. That work continues, and in it, LaRouche lives on still.