As war preparations hit a feverish pace, driven by the usual false narratives from the Military-Industrial Complex war hawks, there are other warnings being stated quietly, hoping you are not paying attention. These have to do with the Fed's decision to "fight inflation" by raising interest rates, a strategy that risks triggering a wave of defaults of 54 mostly poor, heavily-indebted countries -- including Ukraine -- but also of debt-ridden zombie corporations, banks, insurance companies, etc. If you suspect there might be a connection between the war drive and the systemic financial collapse of the economy, you are right.

Harley Schlanger, a spokesman for the Schiller Institute and The LaRouche Organization, gave the following presentation at the Schiller Institute Conference on January 22, “A Difference in Leadership – Can a War with Russia Still Be Averted?”, following presentations by Russian Ambassador Dmitry Polyanskiy and Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche. HARLEY SCHLANGER: What I will show is that the U.S. official position -- that Russia is the cause of the problem, and Russia has to back down, Russia has to move back its troops and so on -- is either based on ignorance of history, or an arrogant view of the U.S. as the unilateral enforcer of a “rules-based order.” What I intend to show is that it’s the latter.Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov said the other day, that ignoring Russia’s legal concerns over the eastward expansion of NATO to include Ukraine and a deployment of forces, including weapons, near the Russian border, will have the most serious consequences. In stating this, he was repeating the formulation that I think is the most clear from President Putin, from his annual press conference on December 23rd. I want to read the quote from President Putin: “Our actions will not depend on the negotiation process, but rather on unconditional guarantees for Russia’s security concerns. In this connection, we have made it clear that any further movement of NATO to the East is unacceptable. Is there anything unclear about this? Are we deploying missiles near the U.S. border? No, we are not. It is the U.S. that has come to our home with its missiles, and is already standing on our doorstep. Is it going too far to demand that no strike systems be placed near our home? What is so unusual about this?” In listening to that, it’s very striking the similarity to the argument made to the American people on October 22, 1962 by President Kennedy, as to why he had to adopt a quarantine—which was actually a blockade—of Cuba, to stop the import of further Soviet missiles, during the 13 days of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Here’s what Kennedy said in that speech to the American people: “In the world today, due to the destructive power of nuclear weapons and the swiftness of ballistic missiles, any substantially increased possibility of their use, or any sudden change in their deployment may well be regarded as a definite threat to peace.” He talked about the build-up of the Soviet Union’s missiles in Cuba, and added:“In an area well known to have special and historical relationship to the United States,” and I might add parenthetically, exactly as Ukraine does with Russia today, “the sudden clandestine decision to station strategic weapons outside of Soviet soil, is a deliberately provocative and unjustified change in the status quo which cannot be accepted by this country.” I think you’ll see in his language, something very similar to what President Putin is saying today, which is why many people, including Helga, have called this a reverse Cuban Missile Crisis. I want to give you a quick view of what the idea of a “unipolar world” is, and what it means. The people who argue for the U.S. to be the main power, start from the standpoint that we’re “democratic,” we’re “good.” Therefore, when we deploy missiles, it’s for the good. As Dr. Andrey Kortunov (of the Russian International Affaires Council) told us: when the Russians deploy the missiles, since they are “bad,” these are “bad missiles” and have to be opposed. From that standpoint, we have to look at where this idea comes from. The underlying issue today, which is called into question by President Putin’s insistence on legally binding security guarantees, is that the construct of a unipolar world is dead. The whole idea that there’s only one nation on the planet which, because of its immense military power and economic power, can dictate the rules to the rest of the human race, and use satraps such as the European Union and NATO to help enforce it, no longer applies. The Western financial system is collapsing. There’s a further point, though. In reality, this idea never really existed, except in the minds of those who enforced it and tried to convince the rest of the world that it had no choice but to accept it. They believed that the collapse of the Soviet Union left them with no military obstacle to impose their unilateral decisions on strategic and financial matters. We’ve talked about this before. Helga brought it up again this afternoon. What is the “rules-based order”? Well, for the unilateralists, it’s the rules that sustain their control over the global economy. This goes back to a merger during the George Herbert Walker Bush administration, and actually before that. It occurred during the Reagan administration with the emergence of the Democratic Leadership Council taking over the Democratic party with its so-called “Third Way,” which became the approach of the Clinton administration. The idea of the neoconservatives and neo-liberals essentially joining as an American force to impose this unipolar world. In particular, it was the neo-cons who were the most arrogant, with their Project for a New American Century, in which they insisted that the United States had emerged as the only power on the planet. Therefore, they created a narrative to explain why everyone else has to march to the tune of the United States. The narrative starts with, “We won the Cold War.” Second, the victory in the Cold War was one of “democracy” and the “free market.” The third point: This means that every nation must submit to those who won the Cold War, because we’re the good guys; we did what was right. The fourth point, which is usually not expressed, is that this means there’s no more sovereignty, no morePeace of Westphalia, as Tony Blair blatantly stated repeatedly in trips to the United States. The idea that there’s a common good is no longer acceptable. The idea that there should be no interference in other nations’ internal affairs, which was part of the Peace of Westphalia, is no longer valid. That the “common good” is whatever the unipolar power insists on. I want to give you a sense of what the so-called “democratic order” that this “rules-based order” has done in the world in the last 30 years.

From the moment last Friday that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken announced that they had met and agreed that the U.S. would provide a written response to Russia’s urgent security concerns, the British have been working overtime to make sure that nothing of the sort ever happens—or at least that whatever written response Blinken provides will be a further anti-Russian provocation.First, there are the stepped-up direct military deployments: another American planeload of sophisticated weapons for the pro-Nazi Kiev government; the transfer of Ukrainian rocket launchers and other heavy weapons to the conflict zone with Donbas; and the Pentagon confirming that President Biden had instructed them to put 8,500 U.S.-based troops on heightened alert for potential deployment to Europe, based on a briefing on “military options” presented to him by Defense Secretary Austin and Joint Chiefs of Staff head Gen. Milley. Those options included sending up to 50,000 U.S. troops to Eastern Europe—steps which the Russians will read as a direct military threat. Then there are the British psy-ops: British intelligence reached a fact-less finding that Russia intended to topple the Kiev government and put in their own puppet (denied by the Russian government); an anonymous diplomat in Beijing reported that Chinese President Xi Jinping had asked Putin to hold off on invading Ukraine until after the Winter Olympics (denied by the Chinese and Russian governments); and yet another round of anti-Russian bravado by Blinken (there will be “massive consequences” for Russia if a “single additional Russian force” enters Ukraine) and by Karen Pierce, the British ambassador to the United States (“you’ll always find the U.K. at the forward end of the spectrum” in going after Russia). “What is clear,” Helga Zepp-LaRouche reported today, “is that we are in an extremely dangerous situation and, given the number of lunatics in leading positions and also the absolute certainty of miscalculation based on wrong epistemological approaches, I think the only conclusion we can have out of this present situation is that we have to go into an all-out anti-war mobilization, waking up especially the American public, because that is the main force which is uninformed about what the danger of the situation is.” Russia expects an answer this week, she continued, and that answer cannot fail to address their existential security concerns by putting in writing guarantees that NATO will cease its eastward expansion up to Russia’s borders. But at this point, everything indicates that the U.S. will do nothing of the kind. If that is the case, Zepp-LaRouche warned, then we are in a showdown for a countdown to Russia’s activation of “military technical measures” of their own—which could include the deployment of hypersonic Zircon missiles on submarines within five-minutes flight time of both American coasts. For an anti-war mobilization to be successful, however, it must not simply issue pronouncements against war, but it must address two key policy points: 1) identify who is behind the war drive, and why (the collapsing trans-Atlantic financial empire); and 2) present a program to build a durable peace—based on the policies of global economic reconstruction encapsulated in LaRouche’s Four Laws. As then-presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche summarized the matter nearly 40 years ago, in the opening sentence of a March 30, 1984 “Draft Memorandum of Agreement between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.”: “Article 1: General conditions for peace. The political foundation for durable peace must be: a) The unconditional sovereignty of each and all nation-states, and b) Cooperation among sovereign nation-states to the effect of promoting unlimited opportunities to participate in the benefits of technological progress, to the mutual benefit of each and all.”