In July, 2001, the newly-elected President, George H. W. Bush, met with President Vladimir Putin. At the time, there was a hard-line push from the neo-cons to dump the ABM Treaty with Russia - so as to begin building missile-defense systems close to the Russian border, and so to pin down a potential Russian response to a first-strike nuclear attack. However, the transparent argument presented to Putin was that the US had to withdraw from the treaty so as to build new ABM systems to counter of the danger coming from "rogue states"such as Iran. Such systems, supposedly, would need to be placed in eastern Europe, so as to protect western Europe. (At one point, Putin attempted to ‘call the bluff’ of this charade about Iran, by offering the United States, a joint ABM system in southern Russia, significantly closer to the Iranian border. The silent response to Putin’s offer was deafening.) Putin was clear then, and has been clear for twenty years, that the US and Russia could collaborate against rogue states, but that ABM systems deployed on the Russian border, against a potential Russian counter-strike, was intolerably destabilizing. In the July, 2001 meeting, Putin offered Bush that Russia would agree to the US leaving the ABM Treaty, if a new treaty dealing with the amount of offensive nuclear weapons were put in place - something Bush evidently found agreeable.Back in Washington, the Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, John Bolton, became concerned that Bush wasn’t fully on board. The two went to Moscow a couple of weeks later to make clear that the US was withdrawing from the ABM Treaty without any new treaty. Rumsfeld’s meeting with Sergei Ivanov, the Defense Secretary, left Ivanov cold. Afterwards, Rumsfeld was allowed to meet with Putin, but to no avail. According to Bolton, Putin countered. "Putin raised the prospect of Russia’s joining NATO, saying, ‘We are being pushed out the system of civilized Western defense.’" Putin hit the nail on the head. Rumsfeld and Bolton indeed meant to push a "Clash of Civilizations," even if it involved thermonuclear saber-rattling.The Rumsfeld/Bolton message was not being well received. After more than a few hours of such an impasse, the Russians simply dropped the "LaRouche card." General Yuri Baluyevsky, the Deputy Chief of the General Staff, and the one in charge of negotiations with NATO over missile defense, asked Rumsfeld and Bolton if they knew who had actually originated Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative – a real offer for Russia and America to collaborate on a strategic defense, that would render nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete. Evidently, Rumsfeld and Bolton were ignorant, feigned ignorance, or simply froze. The General went on - it was "an economist named Lyndon LaRouche." Message delivered.Neither Rumsfeld nor Bolton spoke publicly about this intervention until years later, and then they pretended that General Baluyevsky was simply an Internet conspirophile. This is the Russian General in charge of missile defense negotiations, a man who was in no way ignorant of the Reagan SDI offer and of LaRouche’s role in back-channel discussions with the Russian authorities over the SDI. Rumsfeld’s 2011 memoir, "Known and Unknown gave his version: "At a dinner with Ivanov and senior Russian military officials, General Yuri Baluyevsky, then the country's second-ranking military officer, regaled us with a fascinating 'fact' I suspect he may have learned from the internet. The brains behind the U.S. missile-defense system he declared, as if he had unearthed an embarrassing secret, was 'an economist named Lyndon LaRouche.' ... To my knowledge, his influence on the American missile defense program was nil. I made an effort to correct the record for the assembled Russians. But the encounter was troubling. It was not in either of our interests that Russian military leaders should lack such basic knowledge about the United States and the ways American officials think and operate."Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky, Rumsfeld’s internet hound, shortly after this became Putin's First Deputy Minister of Defense and the Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces. Rumsfeld shocked and awed, i.e., blitzkrieged, the country into a victory that just won't go away.

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Questions taken up today: 1.) Is Putin right when he said that even if Russian forces sunk the HMS Defender, it would not lead to war? 2.) Do Europeans support the Green New Deal, as European Central Bank Chair Lagarde claims? Is it possible to have an honest debate on whether "climate change" is caused by human activities? 3.) Anything new to report on the status of Julian Assange? 4.) Is the 4th of July still relevant today?

At the Schiller Institute June 26-27 conference, “For the Common Good of All People, Not Rules Benefiting the Few!”, 37 speakers addressed the most important issues facing mankind today, and defined the level on which solutions can be worked out. This process is glaringly not the approach in the major world institutions at present, which are factionalized between the necessity and prospect of a new paradigm, as against those locked in the old paradigm, with great danger involved for everyone.This was manifest today in the Group of 20 meeting in Italy, the 2021 chair of the G20, at which foreign and development ministers and diplomats met in person—the first time in two years— and some virtually. The focus was on the pandemic and food supply crises. Speaking online, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi spoke of the need for coordinated action against the pandemic, saying sternly that the time for thinking in “zero-sum game” terms is over. There must be real collaboration. In contrast, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas used the occasion to criticize China and Russia for distributing their vaccines to countries as “vaccine diplomacy” for political purposes. Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche pointed out that the Matera gathering is one of a sequence of meetings which defines the framework to direct our efforts to make clear to the world, the type of solutions truly required, using the “spearhead” of the necessity for mobilizing for a world health security capacity. July 26-28 in Rome will be the Pre-Summit on World Food Systems, in conjunction with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Food Program and other UN agencies, which will be followed in September by the Summit of the same name at the time of the U.N. General Assembly in New York. In October is the G20 heads-of-state Summit. The enemy green climate track has the October Biodiversity conference in China, followed by the COP26 in Glasgow in November. The generic title of today’s G20 meeting was, “People, Planet, Prosperity,” with the most repeated word being “multilateralism.” U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken had the audacity to assert that the U.S. is leading the multilateral effort to distribute vaccines internationally. However, Wang Yi tweeted that, “multilateralism is not a high-sounding slogan, let alone gift-wrapping for the implementation of unilateral acts.” What is required, Wang said, is for nations to stabilize and expand the production and supply lines of vaccines and other necessities. Nations with vaccine capacity should lift any export impediments. Italian statesman Michele Geraci, in characterizing the Matera proceedings, said today specifically that it will be a world failure if “multilateralism” is taken to mean that 200 nations retrench, and in the face of crises, do not collaborate to deal with the pandemic, the economic tasks, and famine. Geraci, who has been part of prior Schiller Institute colloquies, spoke today in an interview with CGTN TV. Thus, today’s one-day G20 event, if anything, makes clear the responsibility to rapidly expand the dialogue process of the Schiller Institute, in policy and mobilization. Helga Zepp-LaRouche spoke today in particular, of the concept she had put forward over last weekend’s conference, of the necessity to re-tool the capacity locked up in the military-industrial complex, which, she said, she knows sounds utopian. But if we don’t, it will mean perpetuating the endless war policy, of the MICCIMAT, as it is called by Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst, warning of the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-tank complex. The danger of the “endless” war scenario turning into a final nuclear armageddon scenario couldn’t be made more clear, than by considering what is going on this very week in the up-close military exercises taking place simultaneously by NATO and Russia in both the Black Sea region and Eastern Mediterranean. Zepp-LaRouche noted of last weekend’s Schiller Institute sessions, that the entire conference was guided by the mode of thinking of the coincidence of opposites. Now more and more people are “getting it.” Forge the anti-Malthusian alliance.