Feb. 15—While there will be multiple shifts of the international political terrain in the next 72 hours, Saturday’s Schiller Institute Conference, “100 Seconds to Midnight on the Doomsday Clock: We Need A New Security Architecture!”, subsumes those momentary shifts in the tactical landscape. As Executive Intelligence Review founder Lyndon LaRouche, once, in a different but comparable circumstance observed, “the world has entered a transitional period in which old habits of judgment and orientation are useless and even contraindicated for practical evaluation of most of the emerging phenomena of the strategic and national-tactical developments. For this reason, very few persons in the world…are intellectually pre-trained to understand those processes which will be decisive in determining the outcome of this immediate several weeks and months directly before us.”
Conflicting stories will no doubt appear in the next hours and days — assuming there are next hours and days — as to what is occurring, or will occur, in the various negotiations involving Germany, France, Ukraine, the United States, and Russia. EIR will seek, not merely to “unpack the news,” but, rather, to intervene into current history and advance it, using a method of statecraft based on LaRouche’s Four Laws of physical economy, sometimes referred to in shorthand as “the coincidence of opposites.” This method of policy making advocated by LaRouche, and by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, is seen in strategic proposals such as “Operation Ibn Sina,” recently presented in the now-posted Schiller Institute-Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC) Joint Forum, “The Humanitarian Crisis in Afghanistan: Toward A Long-Term Solution.”
The method is to start from the standpoint of the needs of the world as a whole — food, clean water, sanitation, housing, health care, and education — and to devise national policies and practices resulting in the successful creation of a technologically advanced world platform that benefits the greatest number of the world’s citizens, increasing the potential relative-population density of the planet.
War, particularly preventive war, condemned at the Nuremberg Trials as a crime against humanity, is antithetical to the general welfare of humanity and its posterity. Whatever its origin, the predator notion that “the fundamental organizing principle of society is for war” should not be allowed to become, at any time, the “organizing principle” of the foreign policy of the United States. A British-dominated United States, an unacceptable condition which has emphatically been the case since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, must be replaced by a citizenry that re-establishes the true identity of this nation by bringing it into collaboration with Russia, China, India, and other nations based on the American Revolution’s founding documents, including Hamilton’s Four Reports On Economics, advanced by Lyndon LaRouche in his Four Laws proposal.
Former French Secretary Roland Dumas, who was a central figure in the post-1989 negotiations involving NATO and the Soviet Union, has left no doubt in his recent Les Crises interview, available on Youtube, that he, James Baker, and other Western representatives had in fact pledged to Russia that NATO would not expand eastward:
“…In reality, we realized — Gorbachev, myself and President Mitterrand at the time— that there was no peace treaty to put an end to the war with Germany, and that, therefore, it was necessary to put an end to that unstable situation. That’s the reason we devised, with my friend Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the German Minister of Foreign Affairs, to engage in talks over every shortcoming, since there hadn’t been any peace treaty…. We had meetings in London, meetings in Paris, and, lastly, in Moscow, to bring the last piece of the global agreement together, in the presence of Gorbachev….” As to the later discussion concerning the disposition of NATO forces after a Warsaw Pact withdrawal from Central Europe, Dumas recounted: “The Minister of Foreign Affairs (Shevernadze) spoke and said: ’We, the Russian delegation want to know what will happen to NATO’S armaments as part of the disarmament.” Dumas said that the Russian delegation stated two demands. First, that the monuments to Soviet soldiers who fought against fascism in World War Two be maintained and respected. “Secondly, for troops from both the Warsaw Pact and NATO to make a commitment that there will not be movement of NATO troops into the Warsaw Pact regions that were about to be disarmed…. Gorbachev spoke, Shevardnadze spoke, I spoke. And I put forward the idea that [NATO military] forces must not move into formerly militarized regions.” Dumas stated that the Americans and the Germans agreed with this. “Before [German Foreign Minister] Genscher died, I asked him if he remembered this discussion. He answered; ‘Perfectly.’”
At the Malta summit on December 3, 1989, less than one month after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Bush and Gorbachev had “declared the end of the Cold War.” No eastward expansion was to occur. Now, NATO, expanded from 15 nations in 1989, to 30 nations, and seeking to make Ukraine #31 in violation of this earlier promise, stands poised on the Russian border, with the possibility of strategic miscalculation leading to total war higher than at any time since, and perhaps including,1962’s Cuban Missile Crisis.
The purpose of Executive Intelligence Review magazine, and the special method LaRouche created to inform the evaluative process of intelligence gathering that he required of his associates, is to encourage that all “self-evident” assumptions governing the “day-to-day” thinking of the citizen, be removed and replaced with a method of formulating the necessary policies, programs, and cooperation for the durable survival and prosperity of all. This is the essence of a sane economic, and therefore a sane security policy. Discussing this method, and proposing such a new security architecture, is the purpose of Saturday’s conference, which all lovers of truth should participate in.