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Feb. 20—FLASH: The Elysée Palace released a statement early Feb. 21 Paris time, stating that President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin are prepared, in principle, to meet in a summit over Ukraine. The statement indicates that this follows the initiatives of President Emmanuel Macron to promote the “security and strategic stability in Europe.” The text states, “Presidents Biden and Putin have both accepted the principle of such a summit,” contingent on there being no invasion of Ukraine by Russia. No response from Washington nor Moscow is known by EIR at the time of this Alert.The title and theme of the keynote given by Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche, “Long-Term Survival: A New International Security Architecture,” at the Institute’s international conference Feb. 19, provides the way to look at key events in today’s fast-breaking, dangerous situation. There will be no “long term” for humanity, without curbing and ending the dangerous push by the U.S./U.K./NATO bloc for confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, to the point of igniting nuclear conflagration. We are called to act in the short term. Similarly, without short-term action, the deadly march of famine and disease are reaching the point of mass kill-off, and the end of any “long-term” survival for humanity, as of our present-day ranks of 7.8 billion people. On the war push, the weekend updates include the following. Today, French President Emmanuel Macron held calls with President Putin, Ukraine President Zelenskyy, and President Biden. In Washington, Biden met in the Situation Room of the White House for a special National Security Council (NSC,), with an expanded, in-person attendance, including heads of the Departments of Defense, Treasury, and State, the CIA, the NSC, and other agencies. The two-hour session, according to the read-out, concerned dealing with alleged Russian aggression against Ukraine. Before the meeting, Secretary of State Tony Blinken went on three Sunday morning network news programs to stress Biden’s announcement Feb. 18, that “intelligence” confirms that Putin has “made the decision” to attack Ukraine, unless diplomacy prevails. Blinken repeated that he will meet in person with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov Feb. 24, in Europe, if “Russia does not invade Ukraine” before that time. The G7 will also meet Feb. 24, hosted by Germany, current G7 chair, for the purpose of heads of state and government to discuss “the geopolitical situation related to the situation on the Russian-Ukrainian border.” This was announced Feb. 18, and also a joint G7 statement was issued Feb. 19, subtitled, “Russia’s threatening military build-up around Ukraine.” In the Donbas, escalated shelling and violence are continuing. Today, the Foreign Ministry of Belarus announced that certain of the joint exercises with Russia called “Union Resolve,” which were to have ended Feb. 20, will instead be continued, given the increased tension. Yesterday, President Putin, joined by Belarus President Lukashenko, observed a successful exercise of the nuclear-capable triad of air, submarine and ground missile launching. On the pandemic and famine front, the situation worsens. Look at the resurgence of well-known diseases, recently controlled, if not conquered. In Africa, Mali is the latest location of polio spreading; the African Union has announced plans to combat it, but resources are desperately short. In Afghanistan, measles is spreading, in addition to the impact of COVID-19. On COVID-19 itself, WHO Executive Director Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned Feb. 18, of the “dangerous narrative that the pandemic is over,” saying it is not true. “Not when 70,000 people a week are dying from a treatable and preventable disease…. Not when 83% of the population of Africa is yet to receive a single dose of vaccine. Not when health systems continue to strain and crack under the caseload. Not when we have a highly transmissible virus circulating almost unchecked, with too little surveillance to track its evolution.” Plus, conditions are ideal for the emergence of “more transmissible, more dangerous variants.” For the world food supply, there are huge shortfalls, from the combined impact of general hyperinflation, lack of infrastructure (covered up as “climate change”), cartel domination, and lack of concerted government action. There are absolute shortages in fertilizers, herbicides and fuels, among other key inputs. Beside the fact that the world 2022 wheat harvest is expected down by 10 million metric tons, the 2022 oilseed harvest will be down for the fourth year in a row. The South American Soybean Belt of Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina projects its harvests, starting soon, will be down by millions of tons. In China, major soy-processing facilities run by the cartels—Bunge, Louis Dreyfus, Cargill etc—have just announced temporary closures for several weeks, because of hyperinflation and short soy supplies. Chinese leaders can be expected to do something about this. But millions will die, in the “market democracies” of the dying Western casino system, unless we force nation-serving measures, as Lyndon LaRouche laid out in his development-economics programs so clearly. These are the situations requiring a vision for a new architecture for “long-term security,” and the courage for short term, emergency action. We can take up the call sounded in the Schiller Institute Feb. 19 conference, “100 Seconds to Midnight on the Doomsday Clock—We Need a New Security Architecture!” During the conference, in one of the video clips of Lyndon LaRouche, he spoke about the nature of man being to solve problems. Doing it, he said, brings joy. We have the opportunity for great joy right now, given the severity of the problems. A note of hope was sounded today at the close of the Beijing Winter Olympics. The music at the beautiful ceremony featured the Ode to Joy, by Ludwig van Beethoven and Friedrich Schiller.

Feb. 20—FLASH: It was announced early Feb. 21 (Paris time) by the Elysée, that President Joe Biden and President Vladimir Putin have agreed, in principle, to a summit.French President Emmanuel Macron’s first phone call today with President Putin lasted for an hour and 45 minutes. He next spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and later in the day, Macron spoke with President Biden, for 15 minutes. Then again, Macron and Putin spoke. The Elysée reported this morning that Macron’s intention was also to speak with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz “in the coming hours” — and also was intending to have discussions with the British and Italian Prime Ministers Boris Johnson and Mario Draghi. Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was also planning speak on the phone to his French counterpart Jean-Yves Le Drian, according to the Russian Foreign Ministry. The Elysée had earlier described Macron’s call to Moscow today as among “the last possible and necessary efforts to avoid a major conflict in Ukraine.” It followed a meeting between the two leaders in Moscow on Feb. 7. In their call today they both agreed that there should be a meeting between the OSCE, Ukraine, and Russia on Monday, Feb. 21. They also agreed that their foreign ministers should meet “in the coming days.” According to the Kremlin, Putin blamed what he called Ukrainian “provocations” over the escalation in fighting with pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. He also demanded that NATO and the United States “take seriously” Moscow’s demands regarding security—the issue at the heart of the current crisis. In a statement, the Kremlin said that “modern weapons and ammunition being sent to Ukraine by NATO member countries” were encouraging Kyiv to pursue a military solution in the Donbas region, which in turn was forcing civilians to leave. Russia wants guarantees that NATO will halt what it calls the alliance’s eastward expansion, rule out membership for Ukraine and other former Soviet countries, and roll back its military deployments in Central and Eastern Europe.

Feb. 19—Working on a comparison of the current strategic crisis to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, U.S. historian and political scientist Joshua Shifrinson found documents in the British National Archive which further prove that Western leaders did give Moscow assurances in diplomatic contacts in 1990 and 1991 that NATO would not be expanded Eastward. The documents include one quoting German representative Jürgen Chrobog at a meeting “of the political directors of the foreign ministries of the United States, Great Britain, France and Germany in Bonn on March 6, 1991.” According to the memo, Chrobog expressed, “We made it clear in the two-plus-four negotiations that we would not extend NATO beyond the Elbe. Therefore, we cannot offer NATO membership to Poland and the others.”The documents also show that U.S. Ambassador Raymond Seitz agreed with Chrobog, saying: “We have made it clear to the Soviet Union—in two-plus-four as well as other talks—that we will not take advantage of the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe…. NATO should not expand to the East, either formally or informally.” All mainstream media are covering this archive find. However—such as Der Spiegel—they claim that NATO did not break a promise, which was never laid down in legally binding form, but just made adjustments of their policies after the conciliatory atmosphere of the 1990s ceased to exist afterward, and because Russia was no longer as weak as it had been during the Yeltsin period. The change in NATO attitudes, and openly breaking their promises, was not “intentional,” as Russia charges, but just developed over the time, Der Spiegel proclaims.

Feb. 19—The Schiller Institute Conference held today under the title “100 Seconds to Midnight on Doomsday Clock—We Need a New Security Architecture!” gathered leading figures from around the world to address, in the first panel, the mindless march to war between nuclear powers taking place over the artificially created crisis in Ukraine, and, in the second panel, the hope made real for the world in the Joint Communiqué by China and Russia on Feb. 4 declaring a new era for mankind.The conference began with a performance of the second movement of the Brahms Op. 100 violin sonata, performed by Norbert Brainin and Günter Ludwig in 1995, followed by prescient words from Lyndon LaRouche, speaking over 20 years ago, warning that the policies in place at that time would lead to precisely the danger of nuclear war being faced today. The first panel, “Who and What Are Driving the Rush towards World War? How close are we?” opened with a keynote by Harley Schlanger, a leading spokesman for The LaRouche Organization, asking if the world will move forward into a new era of peace through development, or descend into a new dark age and global warfare. He reviewed the failure of the United States to create a new world security architecture when the Soviet Union collapsed, falling instead into the geopolitical fantasy of the “end of history,” that the world would henceforth bow down to the Anglo-American version of liberal democracy. What ensued was a flight into wild speculation on Wall Street and the City of London, and illegal neo-colonial wars of choice by the Anglo-Americans, which together brought the Western economies to ruin and created today’s hyperinflation. However, the emergence of the Chinese economic miracle, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and the Russia-China cooperation on all matters of strategy and economy, has provided the core of a new world order based on peaceful cooperation of all nations in economic development. The potential of this cooperation reaching out to all of Europe sent the geopolitical lords in the City of London and Wall Street into a panic, in keeping with Sir Halford Mackinder’s warning the Empire must control the “Heartland.” Natalia Vitrenko, the Chairwoman of the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, and a long time friend and associate of the Schiller Institute, presented a devastating picture of the actual conditions in Ukraine, of desperate poverty, near total collapse of both industry and agriculture, brought about by the 2104 coup led by self-professed Nazi organizations and militias supported by the U.S. and U.K., who turned the nation over to the IMF and Western bankers who looted the country to the bone. Now, with the West using Ukraine as a pawn in the effort to destroy Russia, they have shipped billions of dollars of modern weapons into the country, while the economy is in free fall, with massive capital flight, the loss of access to any foreign investment or credit, and the collapse of the currency. This, Vitrenko said, is exactly the result she had warned of in 2014, while speaking on a Schiller Institute tour of Germany, France and Italy. There must be de-nazification, she concluded, and a return to Ukraine as a neutral nation. The conference then heard from Col. Alain Corvez (ret.), a former Counselor for the French Defense and Interior Ministries, who declared that the current global crisis marked the end of American supremacy. It was the hubris of the American leaders in 1991 who chose to dictate to the world rather than use the collapse of the East bloc to establish a just new world order based on multipolarity. Then, breaking pledges given to Russia in return for peacefully withdrawing military forces from the former Soviet republics, they moved NATO eastward, now threatening to place their war machine on Russia’s border. Russia’s demand for security guarantees are reasonable, he said, and should be welcomed by all nations. While European countries are officially following the U.S. lies about Russian intentions, they have different needs and interests, such that in this “big moment,” they will likely break away from the anti-Russia hysteria. NATO should be dissolved, he concluded. Jens Jørgen Nielsen, a Danish professor and expert on Russia and the former Soviet Union, recalled the fear of nuclear war during the Cold War, and the relief when the Berlin Wall fell. But the promise of a new peaceful order was destroyed when NATO began to expand, ignoring the “indivisible security” agreed to in several treaties. He blamed President Bill Clinton for the first expansion, against the strong advice of leading figures. Now, the U.S. does wildly illegal things simply “because they can.” Jim Jatras, a former U.S. diplomat and advisor to the Republican leadership in the Senate, asserted that the crisis is not really about Ukraine, but the U.S. and U.K. refusal to even consider Russia’s core demand for security guarantees. The U.S. belief that they had the right, following the collapse of the U.S.S.R., to impose their idea of “democracy, human rights and free trade” upon all nations, reminded Jatras of the “Trotskyite, Bolshevik slogan of ‘peace, progress and communism’ they wanted to impose on the world.” Eurasian integration through the Belt and Road goes against the U.S./U.K. idea that NATO had to “Keep the U.S. in, Russia out, and Germany down.” Pakistani political economist Shakeel Ahmad Ramay then discussed Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan’s important visit to Beijing, discussing the disastrous conditions in Afghanistan, and Pakistan’s historic and current role. The U.S. objects to Pakistan’s role in the Belt and Road Initiative and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), but they will not pull out. The BRI is an opportunity for all nations. [The complete transcript of Panel 1, including Q&A, appears in Documentation.] The second panel, Crafting a new strategic architecture: The Russian-Chinese Feb. 4 joint agreement, the World Land-Bridge economic development perspective, began with the 3rd and 4th movements of Beethoven’s sonata for violin and piano in G Major Op. 96, also performed by Brainin and Ludwig. Two video excerpts of Lyndon LaRouche were shown, from May 4, 2001, and November 1985 was played, calling for the New Silk Road approach to building up all of Eurasia, with Russia as a central part, as a pivot to world recovery, and contrasting that to Africa, to see that the general welfare for all nations, for the common good, was “the only chance for this planet.” Helga Zepp-LaRouche gave the keynote, noting that any honest view of the world today “from above” would see the rising economic progress in China and Asia compared to the failing Western system, which appears oblivious to the need for a new paradigm. We are on the brink of war, which can only be fully prevented by ending geopolitics, she said. She marveled at neocon Secretary of State Tony Blinken and German Green Party Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock being “joined at the hip” in their wild lies against Russia at the Munich Security Conference. The collapse of the U.S.S.R. did not mean the superiority of the Western liberal system, she said, as evidenced by the horrendous conditions of most of the developing nations. She quoted Roalnd Dumas, Hans-Dietrich Genscher and Ambassador Jack Matlock, who were all involved in the 1991 agreements with Russia, all asserting that the West did absolutely promise that NATO would not move an inch beyond Germany. Zepp-LaRouche described her role with her husband in the creation of the New Silk Road (BRI), and presented the historic Feb. 4 joint statement by Presidents XI Jinping and Vladimir Putin as the declaration of a new era, without geopolitics, which the U.S. and Europe must be convinced to join, rather than attempt to destroy. A new Peace of Westphalia is required, with all nations addressing the actual needs of mankind as a whole. “We are the greatest species,” she said. “Prove it! Make this the star-hour of the immortal species.” Dr. Wang Wen, the Executive Dean of the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies and Professor of the Silk Road School at Renmin University in Beijing, discussed the relationship between Xi and Putin, meeting 38 times over the past 9 years leading to the historic Feb. 4 Joint Declaration of a new era. This includes rapidly expanding economic cooperation while also “watching each other’s backs” in the current dangerous global climate, in which “a certain country” believes it has the right to interfere in other nations. Alejandro Yaya, from the Argentina Civil Institute of Space Technology, described some of the results of Argentine President Alberto Fernández’s historic visits to Russia and China, where Argentina joined the BRI. The agreements include rehabilitating the nation’s rail system, with rolling stock, locomotives and cars coming from China and Russia. Russia will build a fourth nuclear power plant in Argentina, with other agreements on space cooperation, Huawei developing the country’s telecom system, and the exchange of technical expertise in both directions. Graham Fuller, a 27-year State Department and CIA official and former vice-chair of the National Intelligence Council, ridiculed Tony Blinken’s claim, in regard to Ukraine and Russia, that there is no longer any such thing as “spheres of influence.” He reviewed America’s history, which has been entirely built on claims of spheres of influence, such that now they consider the whole world as part of its own sphere. He discussed the difficult role of small countries living near major powers, be it Russia, China, India or the U.S.. He quoted Mexican President Porfirio Díaz who said: “Poor Mexico. So far from God, and so close to the United States.” Now, these powers need to sit down together and create a better system. Dr. Carlos Gallardo, the President of the Christian Democratic Party of Peru, which recently voted to pledge “adherence” to the Schiller Institute and the Belt and Road Initiative, presented the party’s support to the BRI by describing the historical road project of the Inca, whose territory went from present-day Colombia down to Argentina, with parts of Brazil, in the 16th century, all connected by the road system. “How could we not believe in the Belt and Road?” He displayed maps of the proposed bi-oceanic rail system proposed through cooperation with China. The last speaker was Tony Magliano, a syndicated Catholic social justice and peace columnist, who reviewed the mass starvation taking place around the world, focused on Afghanistan, remarking that the “humanitarian aid being offered to Afghanistan by the U.S. totals about three days’ worth of the spending over the past 20 years for the bombing and destruction of the country.” A rich dialogue by the participants followed each panel. The panels and discussion are being transcribed for publication in Executive Intelligence Review. To watch the conference (preferably with your friends and family), go here.

Feb. 18—Today leaders of the two eastern border provinces of Ukraine, Donetsk and Luhansk, each gave orders for many of their residents to evacuate to nearby Russia, to be out of harm’s way from the mounting fire from Ukraine forces, which had intensified over Thursday night. Long lines of cars formed in the dark, en route to Rostov, where, under directives of President Vladimir Putin, temporary arrangements have been made for their accommodation. There is no basis for quick conjecture what this will eventually mean, given the many narratives issuing forth from NATO networks that Putin is bound to be staging a false-flag incident for an excuse to invade.Russian President Putin reiterated at a press briefing today at the Kremlin that there is no alternative to Kiev working things out with the Donetsk and Luhansk peoples, as spelled out in the Minsk agreement, but Kiev has refused to speak with them at all. Putin said, “All Kiev has to do is sit down at the negotiating table with representatives of Donbas and agree on political, military, economic and humanitarian measures to end this conflict. Regrettably, right now we are watching, on the contrary, an escalation in Donbas.” The recourse for Donbas residents to have to leave home to seek safety is the latest dramatic consequence of the armed confrontationism perpetrated in the name of “rules-based order” and “democracy” by the U.S./U.K./NATO bloc, now in full-sail, endangering all-out war. In our fight for forces of reason to intervene against this, the Schiller Institute’s international conference Feb. 19 is a major rallying point. It is titled, “100 Seconds to Midnight on the Doomsday Clock: We Need a New Security Architecture.” Enlist everyone, everywhere, to step up and join the mobilization. U.S. government and institutional figures are deployed in force, in person, throughout Europe right now, to scream the select narrative that Russia is chronically aggressive, Putin lies and operates from a “playbook,” and his forces on Russia’s western border aren’t there for military drills, but for invasion of Ukraine. This morning, Secretary of State Tony Blinken said this, alongside German Defense Minister Annalena Baerbock at the Munich Security Conference opening. Kamala Harris, also attending the conference, said this in a special meeting with NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg and leaders of the Baltic nations. U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said this in Poland today, and in Brussels the last two days, at the sessions of NATO defense ministers. Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan is also in Brussels repeating the refrain. In addition, U.S. Congressmen are in Munich on the same Russia-the-enemy line, including Sen. Rob Portman, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi. Biden’s environment envoy John Kerry is part of the pack. And the U.K. is right in there, with Foreign Secretary Liz Truss being in Ukraine yesterday, pushing the new U.K.-Poland-Ukraine defense alliance. However, the more they doth assert their narratives, the less believable they are. The City of London’s weekly The Economist today takes the cake, declaring that Putin has deployed 190,000 troops on Ukraine’s border, in readiness for Russia’s invasion. A growing number throughout Europe, and the world over are distancing from this mad rush. So not surprisingly, U.S./U.K./NATO “unity” was a principal theme this afternoon in a special, short “status” briefing by President Biden, during which he said that he has evidence that Putin has made the decision to invade Ukraine. He said he had briefed a bipartisan group of Congress on this today, a group of NATO heads of state, and is acting “to ensure we continue to remain in lockstep,” despite Russia’s attempts to divide us. He twice spoke of “unity, determination and resolve,” and being “united and resolved.” He closed on how “the free world is united.” Biden added during the question period, that there is still the “choice of diplomacy” that Putin can make, to stop the invasion. He reported that Blinken and Lavrov will meet Feb. 24 in Europe, unless there is an invasion. He said that the G7 will meet next week. Biden cited recent instances in eastern Ukraine—shelling of a pre-school, and the question of a mass grave—as false flags by Russia. Blinken this morning also stressed how we’re “unified in collective security” against Russia. The one American national who stood out for sanity and morality today at the Munich Security Conference was David Beasley, Executive Director of the World Food Program. At a session titled, “Seed Change Needed: Ensuring Food Security,” he spoke out for ending world hunger, in glaring distinction from the otherwise very green, cartel panelists. What kind of world is it, when out of 7.8 billion people today, 810 million don’t have enough food, and millions more are at the point of death by starvation? Will we go to 10 billion in 2050, and there will be mass hunger in Chicago and Paris? We need to save lives; we need a new system. Register for the Feb. 19 conference.

Feb. 17—“Why Ukraine? Why now?” Although what had been promoted as the day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has come and gone, and as Russia mobilizes to move troops from its western border regions and Belarus back to their bases, the tremendous threat of military conflict has not abated. Shrill cries continue to emanate from the U.S., UK, NATO, and legacy media. And the threat cannot be resolved by actions taken within the “Ukrainian” arena itself.The strategic crisis manifesting itself in eastern Ukraine did not find its origin in that region, and cannot be understood as an event. It is the local eruption of an unresolvable tension inherent in the conflict between the physical-economic necessities of a growing and thriving humanity, and the dying unipolar Anglo-American geopolitical system, which tolerates no rivals to its hegemony. The very identity of that oligarchical system is threatened by the rise of China and the independence of Russia. It is the threat to that oligarchical identity that is driving the conflicts currently seen in Ukraine and Taiwan. It is the bankruptcy of the hyperinflating economies of the trans-Atlantic that demands more-than-endless bailouts to maintain its control. And it is the anti-human nature of that elite that expresses itself in the zero-growth fascism to be enforced through “green” mandates. But the February 4 joint agreement between Russia and China expresses in the starkest of terms that the Anglo-American zero-growth financial empire is over: “Today, the world is going through momentous changes, and humanity is entering a new era of rapid development and profound transformation…. A trend has emerged towards redistribution of power in the world; and the international community is showing a growing demand for leadership aiming at peaceful and gradual development.” The “rules-based order” of the so-called West will become the “international law-based order” of the future. The use of “democracy” and “human rights” as pretexts for interfering in other nations’ affairs is over. Security must take on a global, inclusive character. NATO has outlived any useful purpose it once had, and it is time to “jointly build international relations of a new type.” This Russia-China relationship “has no limits” and “there are no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation.” The threat of war, of nuclear war that could end civilization, can only be defeated by ushering in, globally, a new paradigm of international relations and of human self-identity. No longer can the bankrupt Anglo-American elites be allowed to dictate their agenda to the entire planet. The world — emphatically including the US itself! — must be freed from this malady of mankind, to take up the beautiful and inspiring challenges of mastering nuclear fusion, eliminating poverty worldwide within a decade, expanding our abilities in space, and revolutionizing the infrastructure platforms of the planet. The peril and promise of this moment of a shattering of paradigms are the topics of the Schiller Institute’s conference this Saturday: “100 Seconds to Midnight on the Doomsday Clock: We Need a New Security Architecture!”

What does fusion power (30 years away?) have to do with preventing hyperinflation and stopping the oncoming financial blowout? Paul Gallagher discussed this LIVE on the LaRouche Fireside Chat Tonight

Feb. 16—In her weekly webcast today, Helga Zepp-LaRouche stated that the world took a small step back from the brink, as the British-proclaimed deadline for a supposed Russian invasion of Ukraine came and went today without incident. Rather, diplomacy seems to be gathering a bit of a toe-hold, with the back-to-back visits to Moscow and Kiev of French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, along with a growing chorus of American voices demanding strategic sanity from the U.S. government.“This is an important step,” Zepp-LaRouche commented, “but obviously a lot more has to happen.” She noted that an environment is being created “to force a discussion about Putin’s demands to the U.S. and NATO to have security guarantees that NATO will not expand further to the east, and that no offensive weapon systems would be installed along the Russian border.” “I hope that diplomacy can play a bigger role again,” Zepp-LaRouche continued, including the idea that has been circulating that a new “Helsinki 2” agreement among the super-powers should be organized. “But I think even Helsinki 2 is not enough, because we need a new international security architecture which takes into account the security interest of every single country.” What is needed is “a global new security architecture that would mean the end of geopolitics. That is the necessary step mankind has to take if you want to get out of this dilemma of potential world war for good.” Simply appealing for peace is useful, she continued, but “it falls completely short, because it does not address where the war danger comes from. Sure, the war danger comes from the military-industrial complex, who need their wars to keep their machine going. But you cannot separate the interests of the military-industrial complex from Wall Street, the City of London, Silicon Valley, etc. The fact is that the neo-liberal financial system is blowing out and the war danger comes from that, because there are some people in these circles who would rather risk World War III than allow that a multipolar world develop. Especially now with China and Russia being in a new strategic partnership, which is a completely new element in the situation. The war danger comes from the fact that these neoliberal circles are experiencing their Waterloo.” Zepp-LaRouche concluded: “This is the powder keg on which we are sitting…. There is no solution within this system. This system is finished, and the only solution would be to do exactly what Lyndon LaRouche proposed for many years, namely to have a complete reorganization of the bankrupt system, a global Glass-Steagall banking separation, and then go to a Hamiltonian banking system and set up a New Bretton Woods system which provides for a long-term low-interest credit for development of the developing sector in particular. That could be done very easily, in cooperation with the Belt and Road Initiative. So a solution is eminently possible.” Please register to attend the Schiller Institute’s Feb. 19 international conference, “100 Seconds to Midnight on the Doomsday Clock: We Need a New Security Architecture!”

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.

PARIS, Feb. 15, 2022 (EIRNS)—In a powerful intervention into the current crisis, Roland Dumas, French President François Mitterrand’s Foreign Affairs Minister (1984-’86, ’88-’93) and therefore a direct eye- and ear-witness, in a 27-minute interview with the French website Les Crises, completely debunks the Anglo-American claims that “nothing” was promised to Russia.The interview was posted on Feb. 12 on YouTube in four separate versions, each of them subtitled in one of the four languages of the Normandy Format: Russian, English, German, and French. The French-language channel of RT reports: “The former head of French diplomacy explains that he took part in the discussions to which Russia refers today when it evokes Western promises of non-expansion of NATO, made to the USSR at the end of the Cold War.” Moscow’s claim that the West would not expand NATO to its borders "are strongly questioned within the Western political-media landscape, where they are sometimes presented as a ‘myth’ or as a ‘historical untruth’. Western promises, but still? In an interview published on February 13 on the website Les Crises, the former head of French diplomacy Roland Dumas returned to the subject, recalling that he himself participated in the discussions to which Russia refers. “In 1990, Roland Dumas, then-French Minister of Foreign Affairs, took part in the negotiations leading up to the Moscow Treaty, which focused primarily on the reunification of Germany, and during which general considerations aimed at putting a definitive end to the Cold War were also discussed. This discussion took place first of all because the Russians asked for it [and] because we supported it. According to him, the USSR delegation had submitted two major requests to its Western allies at the time: “—one concerned the maintenance of monuments to the glory of the Soviet army after the departure of its troops; “—the other concerned a Western commitment that ‘there would be no movement of NATO troops in the regions of the Soviet pact’ that [were] to be disarmed. “‘This discussion took place, first of all because the Russians asked for it [and] because we supported it: me first, the Americans too, and the Germans of course,’ the former senior diplomat explained then. ‘I remember the scene very well, [James] Baker [then US Secretary of State] intervened after me and said: “Even if Mr. Dumas had not asked for it, I would have asked for it,”’ he recounts, referring to the Western commitment to a non-expansion of NATO to the east.” RT confirms this with statements by Gorbachov, who said, “Another issue we raised was discussed: ensuring that NATO’s military structures did not advance and that additional Alliance armed forces were not deployed on the territory of the former GDR after German reunification.” At the end of 2021, in the midst of a diplomatic crisis over the thorny Ukrainian issue, Gorbachev said about the West: “It has gone to their heads, arrogance, self-satisfaction, they have proclaimed themselves winners of the Cold War while we had together saved the world from confrontation…. How can we expect fair relations with the United States, with the West, in this situation?” According to him, the Western side wanted to “build a new empire” and “that’s where the idea of NATO enlargement was born.”

Feb. 14—The Biden Administration, with a very bad misjudgment of the real condition of Afghanistan after 20 years of NATO’s war there, made a rushed pull-out and then moved to seize all the country’s cash and punish its people with no food, medical care or shelter in the dead of winter. It never even told America’s NATO “allies” what it was doing. It’s leaving a country destroyed.Can the Biden White House now be allowed to make an even worse disaster in Europe—even a nuclear disaster—in a crisis, the “Ukraine crisis,” which could set off a war to destroy humanity itself? The more and more angry and aggressive bluffing of Russia by the Biden Administration over Ukraine has brought us closer to nuclear war than we have ever been since October 1962, when the whole world was terrified by the Cuban Missiles Crisis. One possibility is that Biden and his dubious national security team is looking for a victory to sell at home, by telling us Russia will invade Ukraine next week, tomorrow, any minute … and then when Russia does not invade, telling us Biden’s threat of crushing economic punishment stopped Putin. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said this was the “elaborate charade” yesterday on Twitter. Former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock put out the idea in a column today, writing for the American Committee for U.S.-Russia Accord. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in her own way, hinted at it Sunday on “ABC This Week”: “If we were not threatening the sanctions and the rest, it would guarantee that Putin would invade…. So, if Russia doesn’t invade, it’s not that he never intended to. It’s just that the sanctions worked.” But we cannot rest on hope that this is political fakery. The Biden White House is punishing Afghanistan incompetently, but with a vengeance. It wants to punish Russia and destroy its economy. Senior White House officials said it in a background press briefing Jan. 25: The goal is “hit Putin’s strategic ambitions to industrialize his economy quite hard…. Undercut Putin’s aspirations to exert influence on the world stage.” The officials vowed, “we’re talking about denying to Russia downstream products that are critical to its own ambitions to develop high-tech capabilities in aerospace and defense, lasers and sensors, maritime, AI, robotics, quantum, etc. … And so, as we build this effort with our allies and partners, we’re willing to work with any country in order to deny Russia an input that it needs to diversify its economy.” With that goal, Biden’s team—which had “everything under control” in Afghanistan—is daring Russian President Putin to go to war. It is squeezing Ukraine’s President Zelensky so hard that he feels compelled to contradict every Russian invasion forecast that London and Washington make. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, in her widely read analysis Feb. 6, said “We Are 100 Seconds to Midnight on the Doomsday Clock: We Need a New Security Architecture.” Two European bankers put out a call for France to block Ukraine’s entry to NATO and leave the NATO strategic command, now, anything to stop the march toward war. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz went to Ukraine today to say, “The issue of [Ukraine’s] membership in the alliance [NATO] is not on the agenda,” so Russia should stop worrying about it. But the NATO weaponry America is pouring into Ukraine and around it is unprecedented: Ukraine’s Defense Minister admits it now has far more anti-tank missiles than Russian tank targets. We all need to mobilize ourselves, not to “watch and wait,” as most were scared into doing in October 1962. There is no John F. Kennedy here to solve this. The solution is to compel more breaks toward negotiation, and to attack the cause, the threat of hyperinflationary collapse which the Biden Administration and Federal Reserve have done so much to bring on themselves and us. Our next D-Day is Saturday, Feb. 19, the Schiller Institute’s all-day conference with the message of Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s Feb. 6 article: We need a new security architecture, one based on economic recovery and development. Register for the conference and organize others.

Feb. 14—In a long and very direct address today on the American Committee for U.S.-Russian Accord’s “ACURA Viewpoint,” the last U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock (1987-92) presents the entire history, which led from the end of the Cold War to the present obvious threat of superpower hot war. Matlock begins by saying he “cannot dismiss the suspicion that we are witnessing an elaborate charade” by Biden to “prevent” a non-existent Russian invasion of Ukraine. And later he notes that Biden campaigned for President in 2008 on the line, “I will stand up to Vladimir Putin,” a particularly absurd posture at that time, but most of his piece is tracing the mistakes of U.S. and NATO policy which turned Russia from virtual NATO ally to adversary in what could become an all-out nuclear war.First, ignorance around nuclear weapons. Matlock admits that as a Moscow embassy staffer in 1962, he translated Khrushchev’s messages to JFK in the Cuban Missiles Crisis, and he and his colleagues were unaware of the actual nature of the settlement of that crisis, and would have cheered for American bombing of Russian sites in Cuba—which would have been fatal to several major cities including Washington, D.C.: “It is quite dangerous to get involved in military confrontations with countries with nuclear weapons.” But for the most part, the hubris of “we won the Cold War,” against which both Pope John Paul II and Lyndon LaRouche warned. Matlock quotes his own testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1997 when the Clinton Administration proposed the expansion of NATO: “I consider the Administration’s recommendation to take new members into NATO at this time misguided. If it should be approved by the United States Senate, it may well go down in history as the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War. Far from improving the security of the United States, its Allies, and the nations that wish to enter the Alliance, it could well encourage a chain of events that could produce the most serious security threat to this nation since the Soviet Union collapsed.” Matlock proposes a "common sense" approach: "What President Putin is demanding, an end to NATO expansion and creation of a security structure in Europe that insures Russia’s security along with that of others is eminently reasonable. He is not demanding the exit of any NATO member and he is threatening none. By any pragmatic, common sense standard it is in the interest of the United States to promote peace, not conflict. To try to detach Ukraine from Russian influence—the avowed aim of those who agitated for the “color revolutions”—was a fool’s errand, and a dangerous one. Have we so soon forgotten the lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis? Now, to say that approving Putin’s demands is in the objective interest of the United States does not mean that it will be easy to do. The leaders of both the Democratic and Republican parties have developed such a Russophobic stance (a story requiring a separate study) that it will take great political skill to navigate the treacherous political waters and achieve a rational outcome. President Biden has made it clear that the United States will not intervene with its own troops if Russia invades Ukraine. So why move them into Eastern Europe? Just to show hawks in Congress that he is standing firm? For what? Nobody is threatening Poland or Bulgaria except waves of refugees fleeing Syria, Afghanistan and the desiccated areas of the African savannah. So what is the 82nd Airborne supposed to do?"

Feb. 13—The question of what will happen next, and when, in the contrived confrontation by the NATO bloc against Russia in Europe, remains hanging in the air and very dangerous. More counter forces of sanity are speaking out, but a decisive break is urgent.Over the weekend, U.S. spokesmen continued their drumroll of assertions against Russian aggression, and their bogus charge that Russia will attack Ukraine, in statements by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, speaking from Hawaii, by National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and by Pentagon spokesman John Kirby. They were militantly vague on when and how. Sullivan on CNN this morning said, on the time frame of a Russian attack, that we are “in the window,” and it could be “any day now,” or otherwise “after the Olympics” which end on Feb. 20. Sullivan said that Russia can be expected to stage a false-flag incident, because, for among other reasons, it is just “consistent with the Russian playbook” to do that kind of thing. No evidence is needed. Assessing the situation, Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche said today that the “ambiguity of potential false flags will remain, until someone cuts through this…. We need a decisive break.” Former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) spoke out strongly over the weekend, exposing those behind the insane war drive against Russia. She tweeted out a 4-minute clip from her appearance on Fox News Saturday evening, with a tweet explaining how “Biden can very easily prevent a war with Russia by guaranteeing that Ukraine will not become a member of NATO.” On TV, she charged that “Biden and military leaders actually want Russia to invade Ukraine. Why would they do so? It gives Biden the excuse to levy draconian sanctions … and it cements the Cold War in place…. The military-industrial complex is the one that benefits from this; they clearly control the Biden Administration; warmongers on both sides in Washington who have been drumming up these tensions.” There is also an increasing activation and prominence of anti-war groups in the U.S. Besides the NATO focus on confrontation over Ukraine, the global NATO mobilization in the Indo-Pacific is in full swing. After the ministerial QUAD meeting in Australia this past week, the White House issued a 19-page document, “Indo-Pacific Strategy of the United States.” Blinken plugged its world supremacy point of view yesterday, speaking from Honolulu, where he met with foreign ministers of Japan and South Korea. Blinken said that, “In the meeting that the three of us had, we discussed the threat that Russia’s aggression poses—not only to Ukraine, but to the entire international rules-based order, which has provided a foundation for decades of shared security and prosperity, for our people here in this region and, again, around the globe.” He said of his fellow ministers that, “we agreed to stick together in our response to Russia.” It is against his triumphalism that certain opposition viewpoints stand out, which are coming from establishment figures in Europe. On Feb. 11, the French weekly Marianne carried an article headlined, “NATO Exit: Urgency Absolute,” which urges that France leave NATO. That “will signal Europe’s independence from American exceptionalism, the renewal of multilateralism, the emergence of a multipolar world….” It is by German economist Peter Dittus, former Secretary General of the Bank for International Settlements, and former Deputy Governor of the Banque de France Hervé Hannoun, former BIS Deputy Managing Director. Today, a warning is sounded by Russian policy expert Fyodor Lukyanov, “How the World Sleepwalked into Another Cuban Missile Crisis.” In his article in RT, after stressing the current danger over the Ukraine confrontation, he advises that, “The best-case scenario would be the same as during the Cuban Missile Crisis. At some point, both sides would recognize the grave danger posed by further escalation and start direct substantive negotiations in order to work out the fundamentals of mutual guarantees.” The Saturday Feb. 19 Schiller Institute online international conference is a critical contribution toward the “decisive break” we need, to stop the mad mobilization toward collapse and war. Register and spread the word. It is on Feb. 19, 10 a.m. (EST): “100 Seconds to Midnight on the Doomsday Clock: We Need a New Security Architecture!”

Feb.12—The Chickenhawks running the Biden Administration—Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan—have declared that their psychotic plan to unleash the well-armed and well-trained Nazi militia in Ukraine against the Donbas is set to be implemented in the coming week. While Blinken and Sullivan say that a “Russian invasion of Ukraine can come at any moment,” unnamed sources in the White House and in NATO have informed the media that this will take place precisely on Wednesday, Feb. 16. The plan, they failed to report, is to provoke a response from the Russian military to defend their compatriots among the Ukrainian citizens in the Donbas from this Nazi assault, which will then be declared the much-anticipated “Russian invasion.” This, they imagine, will detonate either the West’s “nuclear sanctions” option, which they believe will destroy Russia (but which will do far greater damage to the Anglo-American allies in Europe), or they will go straight to military warfare. Given that the U.S. has just completed a nuclear war-fighting exercise “Global Lightning,” based on the insane, utopian fantasy that a prolonged nuclear war could be fought and won, the human race is facing an existential question—do we have the moral fitness to survive?Two former directors of the Bank for International Settlements, one French and one German, released an extraordinary document on Feb. 11 (see below) calling for France to leave NATO, asserting that NATO is now led by American “expansionists” who are prepared to sacrifice Europe, and perhaps the world, to maintain their past glory as the world’s unipolar controller of all things economic and strategic. (While they blame this entirely on American control of NATO, they do at least acknowledge the British hand: that it is the “alliance with adventurism of the Anglo-Saxons.”) These are not “anti-war activists”—these are rather French and German leaders of the establishment. They assert that the clearly “unprecedented brainwashing conducted by the United States and NATO on the theme of the ‘imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine’” may well “go down in history as an episode of disinformation along the lines of the fabricated intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction in 2003.” The antics of NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg, they add, is reminiscent of the “famous Orwellian inversion: ‘Peace Is War.’” The full document is being circulated in several languages by EIR and the Schiller Institute. What could drive supposedly educated people like Blinken and Sullivan to such madness? The truth of the matter is increasingly clear, both to governments and to a growing plurality of the citizens of the trans-Atlantic nations: The Western world is entering a Dark Age, while most of the rest of the world is being motivated by a new force, represented by the extraordinary Feb. 4 declaration by Russia and China: “On the International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development.” The document declares the end of the toleration by the world’s nations of unipolar control over the economy and security of the world. The “rules-based order” manufactured by the “only superpower,” which was invented to replace the principles of peaceful coexistence in the UN Charter, will no longer be acknowledged. As the Feb. 4 document states: “The world is going through momentous changes, and humanity is entering a new era of rapid development and profound transformation. It sees the development of such processes and phenomena as multipolarity, economic globalization, the advent of information society, cultural diversity, transformation of the global governance architecture and world order; there is increasing interrelation and interdependence between the States; a trend has emerged towards redistribution of power in the world; and the international community is showing a growing demand for the leadership aiming at peaceful and gradual development.” The human race has today been called upon by history and by the Creator to respond to this moment of truth, to answer the question posed above: Do we have the moral fitness to survive? Will we call upon all nations, and all the diverse cultures of humanity, to join together in this “New Era” of peace through development, or will the remnants of the failed era of empire and geopolitics bring the world to a fiery end? The Schiller Institute, following the conference on the humanitarian disaster in Afghanistan, co-sponsored by the Russian International Affairs Council on Thursday Feb. 10, will hold a full day conference on Saturday, Feb. 19th, on the theme that “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” The invitation to the conference is here: Please register, and circulate the invitation widely.

In an op-ed published on Feb. 11, 2022, by the French “souverainist” weekly Marianne, Peter Dittus and Hervé Hannoun, argue in favor of a French exit from the integrated command of NATO. The German economist Peter Dittus is the former secretary general of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), while Frenchman Hannoun is its deputy director general. We reprint it here in full:“Faced with the Ukrainian Crisis, France’s NATO-EXIT Is an Absolute Emergency” Breaking with the policy of non-alignment followed by de Gaulle, Giscard and Mitterrand for 43 years, France once again became a member of the integrated military command of NATO in 2009, without the French people having been consulted by referendum. The current Ukrainian crisis reveals the serious perils to which France is exposed by being attached to a defensive collective security organization under the command of the United States that has become expansionist. Since November 2021, the French, like other peoples of the West, have been subjected to an unprecedented mental conditioning conducted by the United States and NATO on the theme of the “imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine,” which may go down in history as an episode of disinformation along the lines of the fabricated intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction in 2003. What is the reality? Millions of Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the two self-proclaimed Donbas people’s republics live under sporadic firing and shelling by the Ukrainian army against separatist forces. The concentration of Russian troops on Ukraine’s borders is obviously aimed at dissuading Kiev from attempting to regain direct control of the enclaves of Donetsk and Luhansk by force. NATO’s successful disinformation on Ukraine has consisted in presenting Putin’s moral obligation to defend these Russian-speaking populations—which Ukraine wants to progressively deprive of the right to speak their language—as a prelude to the total annexation of Ukraine by Russia. The Myth of an ‘Imminent Russian Invasion’ NATO manages to pass off a concentration of Russian troops ready to come to the rescue of Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the Donbas as an “imminent Russian invasion” of the whole of Ukraine, including Odessa, Kharkiv and Kiev. An insane invasion that in reality Russia completely rules out … unless it is pushed into it by a possible prior Ukrainian attack on the Donbas. The only war that NATO seems to be winning is the one of information. We show in our book [OTANexit: Urgence Absolue, Peter Dittus and Hervé Hannoun, Jan. 16, 2022] the striking German propaganda map in the weekly Bild of December 4, 2021, giving an imaginary detailed plan of the “imminent Russian invasion.” The role of propaganda is terrifying, because of the charge of hatred generated by the lies on both sides. On the NATO side, the aggressive and bellicose discourse of Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg is irresistibly reminiscent of the famous Orwellian inversion: “Peace Is War.” And If France Had the Solution? Paris must avoid the military spiral into which the United States and NATO want to drag it. In the coming weeks, it must not allow itself to be involved in a war in Eastern Europe that is not its own. France has already agreed to deploy hundreds of men in a NATO battle group in Estonia. On January 1, it took the lead in the NATO Rapid Response Force, which includes at least 7,700 French soldiers. President Macron has just announced the possible dispatch of 1,000 French troops to Romania under the NATO banner on the “Eastern flank,” in the Black Sea region. The military escalation is dangerous. For the security of the French people, it is necessary to exclude committing the French army under the banner of NATO in a war in Ukraine or Belarus. On the other hand, France has a diplomatic weapon to resolve the serious crisis between NATO and Russia. The detonator of this crisis was the stubbornness of Jens Stoltenberg and the Americans to pursue since 2018 a creeping process of accession of Ukraine to NATO, called “open door policy,” seen by Russia as a threat to its security. To put an end to the current confrontation, President Macron should simply declare solemnly in the name of France that his country will oppose any request from Ukraine to join NATO. As decisions on membership of the Alliance require unanimity, France can exercise a veto. In doing so, the President would be in line with the commitments he made during his 2017 presidential campaign not to support NATO’s expansion to Ukraine. It would be an elegant way out of the crisis. Alas, the French President, during his visit to Moscow and then to Kiev on February 7 and 8, 2022, did not consider this simple solution because French diplomacy did not oppose in the NATO bodies the mad “open door policy” to the membership of Ukraine and Georgia in NATO. On the other hand, France supports NATO and the G7 in their demand for the return of Crimea to Ukraine, knowing full well that it cannot be done without a war, possibly nuclear. American Subordination At the time of the (Maastricht) 1992 referendum on the EU treaty, no one could have imagined that this great project of Mitterrand and Kohl for peace would be deviated from, from 1998 onward, by the American geopolitical project to take de facto control of the European common defense and security policy. This was due to the simultaneous enlargement of the EU and NATO to ten Eastern European countries between 1991 and 2007, and also to President Sarkozy’s decision, with far-reaching consequences, to abandon in 2008 the Gaullist strategic position of refusing to participate in NATO’s integrated military command. From the moment that 21 of the 27 EU countries, including France, became full members of NATO, the initial spirit of Maastricht was betrayed, because “Europe for peace” was inevitably going to be thwarted by the interference of the United States, with its own geopolitical objectives, in the common European defense and security policy. In reality, there can be no independent French or European defense within the current framework of participation in the integrated military command of NATO by France and 21 other European Union states. The concept of “European strategic autonomy” within NATO is an illusion, given the control of the United States over this Alliance. The EU seeks to hide this fundamental flaw behind a vague concept: the “strategic compass.” The fundamental incompatibility between the U.S.-controlled NATO and an independent French or European defense does not prevent our leaders from defending the thesis of complementarity between the EU and NATO in terms of defense, as summarized on December 11, 2021 by the French Minister of Foreign Affairs: “We are keen for the EU and NATO to complement and reinforce each other in order to contribute to strengthening security and defense in Europe. This is the meaning of the strategic compass that will be adopted during the French Presidency of the EU Council.” Defense: The Impasse of ‘At the Same Time’ The EU’s “strategic compass” is above all an effort to provide a conceptual framework for the false idea that “European strategic autonomy” in relation to the United States is compatible with the NATO membership of the vast majority of EU member states. This complementarity between NATO and the EU, the “at the same time” applied to defense, is an illusion. The fussy logic of national independence has given way to the vague and misleading concept of strategic autonomy and the search for interdependence and interoperability with our “allies.” Beyond the immediate crisis surrounding Ukraine, the [French] presidential elections of April 10 and 24 must allow for a decision on the question of NATO. All those who reject NATO’s march towards the war that is brewing on the Eastern borders of the EU have a unique opportunity, with the presidential election of 2022, to send a simple and clear message of peace to the leaders of our country, in one word: NATO-EXIT (Otanexit). It is a question of ensuring that a candidate for peace is elected President, who is committed to putting an end to France’s alignment with NATO. One can think that the outgoing President will want to avoid a debate in the presidential campaign on the question of our military alliances in NATO: alliance with the adventurism of the Anglo-Saxons, whose arrogance was revealed by the Australian submarine affair, unnatural alliance with Islamist Turkey, alliance with Polish nationalism, and tomorrow perhaps, alliance with a Germany that could use NATO as a springboard for its remilitarization, or even alliance with Kosovo against Serbia. This list alone allows us to measure the risks of a collective security system comprising 30 heterogeneous nations, and dominated by one of them. An Unconstitutional ‘Defense Union’ On January 7, 2022, in a joint press conference with President Macron in Paris, the President of the European Commission allowed herself a federalist statement that exceeded her prerogatives: “We agree that we need a real defense union.” In the presence of President Macron, she spoke of adding a “Defense Union” to the Economic and Monetary Union in the future, without taking into account the fact that this statement is contrary to the French Constitution, which is based on national independence, national sovereignty and national defense. It is necessary to oppose the stealthy European federalism that is currently being practiced, which cannot replace a federalism that is democratically accepted—or rejected—by referendum, according to the procedure followed in 1992 by François Mitterrand for the transfer of monetary sovereignty provided for in the Maastricht Treaty. The French people must reject the concept of defense union under the banner of NATO that Ursula von der Leyen wants to impose on them. France’s current alignment with NATO, through its participation in the integrated military command under American leadership, is a strategic dead end for a country with a universal vocation like France. Today, this country has a historic role to play in stopping the march towards war in Europe initiated by the NATO sleepwalkers. France’s exit from NATO, which will mark the end of the alignment of France’s foreign security policy with the United States, will have an immense impact on the world. It will signal Europe’s independence from American exceptionalism, the renewal of multilateralism, the emergence of a multipolar world and the rapid demise of the obsolete NATO framework. France will then rediscover its universal vocation, contributing to the global balance for peace, and playing, thanks to its rediscovered impartiality, a role of synthesis within the P5, the concert of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Russia, and France), a P5 whose composition must be maintained and whose role as regulator of world peace must be enhanced.

Feb. 11 -- Since the latest escalation of accusations against Vladimir Putin and Russia began in late November 2021, triggered by claims that he is preparing an invasion of Ukraine, one constant has been the role played by Chatham House and the Atlantic Council (AC) in beating the drums for war. The two institutions are close allies among the Anglo-American think tanks, and have been at the forefront in promoting narratives building tensions between U.S.-NATO forces and Russia. They each run frequent webinars, in which "Associate Fellows" join with former ambassadors and retired military to spin tales of "imminently expected" Russian incursions, which find their way into U.S. and British foreign office briefings about the need for unity to deter the fiendish Russians. These online events are backed by articles, citing these "experts", along with the "anonymous" sources so beloved by fanatic War Hawks.