What a Road Is For

Aug. 2, 2026 (EIRNS)—“The essence of any effective leadership of a nation,” Lyndon LaRouche wrote in 2002, “is to be measured as the intellectual power of foresight and will, to set effectively into motion today, future generations’ achievement which could not be realized within the bounds of a single generation.” He was writing about basic economic infrastructure—transport, power, water management, land reclamation—which he measured in cycles of two generations and more. Dennis Small put the same thought to the EIR roundtable on July 31: “Railroads are crucial not to get from point A to point B. It’s crucial for opening up a new technology platform over an entire area of development.”

Now the opposing view of infrastructure:

On July 27 a fellow of the Middle East Forum wrote in the Israeli paper Ynet about the 1,055-kilometer expressway running down Morocco’s Atlantic coast to Dakhla, now named for Donald Trump. Anyone reading the naming as vanity, he wrote, was “shallow and strategically blind.” The road “is not a vanity project. It is a deliberate instrument of state power.” With the deep-water port at Dakhla it forms “an economic and administrative shield”—“not merely a transport corridor” but “a practical tool of counter-subversion and long-term denial.”

Is a great work of infrastructure built to raise up the people who live along it, or to dominate them?

That highway is real and useful, and it runs through Western Sahara, where the referendum on self-determination promised in the 1991 ceasefire has never been held, past camps holding 173,000 refugees, and is named for the president who recognized the annexation as the price of a diplomatic realignment. Three hundred kilometers north, at Ceuta, 60,000 human beings crossed a border that stood open, and were treated as pressure against Spain. At least 72 lost their lives in the crossing.

The same week also shows the proper approach to infrastructure. On July 28, 1,400 meters beneath the Alps, tunnelers working south from Austria and north from Italy broke through the last rock between them; the Brenner Base Tunnel will still be carrying freight between Munich and Verona in the year 2130, while the munitions produced this year will be counted as nothing but waste.

A development in Hungary shows a counter example. On Aug. 2 the Paks nuclear station—half the country’s electricity—shut down completely for the first time in 44 years, because the Danube ran too low to cool it. That is not a verdict on nuclear power’s fragility in the face of climate change. It is the result of fifty years of unbuilt water works. It makes LaRouche’s point that infrastructure is what a nation must set in motion for future generations.

Pope Leo XIV, speaking on Sunday, asked for “solutions of peace, stability, and justice”—not peace at any cost, his encyclical insists, but “the true peace born of justice.” Paul VI put it concisely in 1967: development is the new name for peace. In New York this weekend, Diane Sare and Jose Vega took that argument into the street, organizing around stopping section 1217 of the NDAA and building for a September 11 performance of Beethoven’s Ninth. One organizer, met by a man frothing about imminent Iranian missile attacks, asked him whether he believed mankind inherently evil—and whether he agreed with Beethoven that if people understood his music there would be no more war.

Circulate the July 31 EIR roundtable, “Solve the Immigration Crisis with Development.” A road can be a shield or it can be a platform for growth, and the difference is not in the asphalt.