Tony Papert hosts Promethean Action Saturday Class (7 Feb 2026) featuring Will Wertz on the “Core Five” concept - reported by Defense One1 as an unpublished draft element of the 2025 US National Security Strategy proposing regular summits among the US, Russia, China, India, and Japan as a world force for peace, first focused on stabilizing the Middle East and normalizing Israel–Saudi relations.
Wertz connects this to Lyndon LaRouche’s longstanding “new Bretton Woods” and “Four Powers” proposals, cites Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko’s comments on the Core Five’s significance, and argues the idea is reflected in President Trump’s creation of a UN-supported “Board of Peace” mechanism for conflict resolution beyond Gaza, noting many European allies and most Five Eyes members refused to join while Russia, China, India, and Japan were invited.
He discusses Marco Rubio’s Munich Security Conference speech defending Western Christian civilization and criticizing Europe’s malaise, and he reviews themes he attributes to the Trump administration’s strategy documents:
rejecting globalism
prioritizing national sovereignty
ending deindustrialization and net-zero policies
seeking a cessation of hostilities in Ukraine to restore strategic stability with Russia
resisting EU transnational regulation, and
limiting NATO expansion
Wertz also references a Bloomberg report on a Russian “Dmitriev Package” memo describing potential U.S.–Russia understandings on the dollar system, energy policy (including nuclear), and broader stabilization, and he highlights Hamiltonian economics and the American System (Hamilton, Henry C. Carey, Friedrich List) as the economic foundation for a great-power peace-through-development approach, emphasizing the political stakes of U.S. midterms for sustaining this agenda.
00:00 Welcome & Why the “Core Five” Matters Now (Rubio at Munich)
03:10 LaRouche’s Roots: New Bretton Woods & Fixing Global Trade Imbalances
08:53 Defense One Leak Explained: What the Core Five Would Do
10:40 From Four Powers to Core Five: Will Wertz’s Books & the Strategic Lineage
12:33 Why These Five? Economic Weight, PPP GDP Charts & Limits of the G7
14:43 Global Reaction & the “Board of Peace” Connection
18:57 Bypassing EU/UK Malaise: Who Joined, Who Refused, and Why It Matters
23:32 Civilization vs Empire: Sovereignty, Renaissance Roots, and Anti-Globalism
33:03 Inside the National Security Strategy: Europe, Ukraine, and the Nation-State Principle
46:05 Trump’s Monroe Doctrine 2.0: Development Finance, Ex-Im, and Ending Migration Drivers
51:15 Indo-Pacific & China: Conditions for a “Decent Peace” and a New Bretton Woods
55:27 Hamiltonian Economics & the 50-Year Outlook (Closing)
About Will Wertz
William F. Wertz, Jr. was born and raised in New Jersey, USA. He received an academic scholarship to attend Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, USA. While at Wesleyan, he enrolled in the College of Letters. During the first semester of his sophomore year, he studied abroad in Vienna, Austria, and at the University of Cologne in West Germany. He graduated from Wesleyan University in 1967, Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with a Bachelor of Arts degree. He received a National Education and Defense Act Fellowship to study at Harvard University, but left Harvard before receiving a graduate degree.
In 1971, he joined the political movement founded by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., because he agreed with LaRouche that world peace could only be established by rejecting supra-national forms of government, respecting national sovereignty, using anti-Malthusian American System methods of economic development, and by a cultural renaissance.
In 1976, he ran unsuccessfully in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in Washington State against Henry Jackson, and in 1982 in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in California against Jerry Brown. He was also the West Coast Coordinator of the National Democratic Policy Committee (NDPC) from 1980-84.
In 1984, he began to coordinate a project for the Schiller Institute to translate the works of the German poet Friedrich Schiller into English. He has since then been the editor and primary translator of four books of translations of the works of Schiller (Friedrich Schiller: Poet of Freedom) These works include translations of the dramas Don Carlos, Wilhelm Tell, the Virgin of Orleans and Mary Stuart, numerous poems including the “Ode to Joy,” “Hope” and the “Cranes of Ibycus,” and such aesthetical writings as “On the Aesthetical Education of Man,” “Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” “On the Sublime” and the “Kallias Letters.”
He also translated and published many of the works of Nicolaus of Cusa, the father of the sovereign nation state and modern science (Toward a New Council of Florence: ‘ON THE PEACE OF FAITH’ and Other Works by Nicolaus of Cusa), several of which had never been translated into English before, including “On Conjectures,” “On Beryllus,” “On the Filiation of God,” “On Searching for God,” “On Equality” and “The Summit of Vision.”
From 1992 to 2006, he was editor-in-chief of Fidelio, the cultural and scientific journal of the Schiller Institute, and President of the Schiller Institute from 1992 to 2019, when he resigned.
He is co-author of The Four Powers by Lyndon LaRouche, published in 2019, and the author of Beware the British East India Company! Towards an Alliance between the USA, Russia, China, and India to Finally Defeat the British Empire, published in 2023.
About Tony Papert
Tony Papert is a founding member of the LaRouche movement, having been committed to Lyndon LaRouche and his ideas since the mid-1960s.
He was an early leader of the SDS Labor Committee and a founding member of the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC), which was founded and controlled by Lyndon LaRouche.
Papert was expelled from the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) in early June 1968 for his views on the working class and subsequently joined the Labor Committee.
An FBI COINTELPRO leaflet attacking Tony Papert and the Labor Committee was circulated in early April 1969.
Papert was appointed by LaRouche as an editor of Executive Intelligence Review (EIR) magazine, a position he co-edited for some years in the second and third decades of this century.
He is a regular host of Promethean Action’s Saturday class series and has participated in numerous discussions on topics such as the Third Christian Renaissance, classical education, geopolitics, and the potential for a new Bretton Woods World Monetary System.
He has also hosted discussions with individuals like Bob Ingraham, Paul Glumaz, Dan Leach, Will Wertz, and Bruce Director.
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