This article appears in the April 7, 2023 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Peace with Russia—for a New Global Security and Development Architecture
[Print version of this article]
April 1—This is a translation of the presentation made in German by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, chairwoman of Civil Rights Movement Solidarity (BüSo), opening the second part of the conference, “Dialogue Instead of Weapons: Nonpartisan Action Against the War,” organized by the East German Board of Associations (OKV) in Berlin, Germany on March 27, 2023.
What brings us together here is the shared concern that we are currently in a spiral of escalation between the U.S. and Russia which, in the worst case scenario, could lead to a short-term nuclear world war that could wipe out all life on earth in a subsequent nuclear winter. The former Chief of Staff of the German Armed Forces, General Kujat, recently warned that, unlike in the Cuban Missile Crisis, we are not governed today by politicians who would be able to assess the existing risks, who would be smart enough to avert them, and who would be willing to make compromises. You can put it another way: We are currently at the mercy of forces that are giving up all sovereignty, and are risking Germany’s existence with their policies, both in terms of security policy, and of the existence of Germany as an industrial nation.
The most important thing now, with the help of all possible forces in the world, is to reach a ceasefire in Ukraine, and peace talks that take into account the interests of Ukraine and Russia, as soon as possible. Several world leaders have offered their help as mediators: President Xi Jinping with his 12-point plan, President Lula of Brazil with a peace club of several countries in the Global South, President Erdoğan and, very importantly, Pope Francis. It is obvious that none of these individuals can be accused of being a “Putin sympathizer,” or of repeating the Russian narrative, which has become the death-blow argument used to strangle any non-NATO perspective, or to make it a candidate for “prebunking.” Prebunking is the preventive inoculation against possible independent thinking, as expressed in the new EU guidelines.
The war in Ukraine is a tragedy that should never have happened, but it was far from “unprovoked.” The then U.S. Ambassador to Moscow, Jack Matlock, is by no means the only one to testify to the U.S. promises made to Gorbachev, that NATO would expand “not an inch” eastward in exchange for peaceful German reunification. But parallel to these verbal promises, the neocons were already deploying to both parties—i.e., Cheney, Rumsfeld, Hillary Clinton, Victoria Nuland and Biden—and essentially agreed on what would become known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine: the doctrine for a unipolar world order based on the Anglo-American special relationship. This doctrine states that no country can ever be allowed to overtake the United States economically, politically, or militarily.
So instead of taking the dissolution of the Soviet Union as an opportunity to establish a peaceful order, for which the political climate absolutely existed at the time, the neocons sensed the opportunity for the establishment of a global Leviathan in the spirit of Thomas Hobbes.
The transformation of the former superpower, the Soviet Union, into a commodity-exporting Third World country happened with the help of neoliberal “shock therapy,” which reduced Russia’s industry to just 30% of its former capacity between 1991 and 1994. Even then, Russia—feared as a potential competitor on the world market thanks to its enormous resources and better trained scientists and workers—was to be permanently eliminated.
What followed next were five NATO eastward expansions and the application of the instruments of the unipolar world: color revolutions, regime change, wars of intervention, to be administered until compliant governments were installed all over the world, and Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history,” that is, the spread of the Western model of democracy, would be realized everywhere.
From this point of view, there was nothing wrong with Yeltsin, but there was plenty wrong with Putin, who refused to allow Russia to be downgraded to what Obama called a mere “regional power,” and put Russia back on the agenda as a world power. China was allowed membership in the WTO on the erroneous assumption that it would adopt the neoliberal model.
Many will remember Putin’s optimistic speech to the German Bundestag in 2001, which he delivered largely in the language of “Goethe, Schiller and Kant,” and his promotion of a “modern, durable and stable international security architecture.” But just a year later, the U.S. unilaterally withdrew from the ABM treaty, signaling its intention to implement a first-strike option in its military doctrine.
Three days before the “special operation” on February 21, 2022, Putin said in a long speech: “I am going to say something now that I have never said publicly. When outgoing U.S. President Bill Clinton visited Moscow in 2000, I asked him how America felt about including Russia in NATO.” The answer was very circumspect, and shortly thereafter America’s true position became apparent in its open support for terrorists in the North Caucasus. In his speech at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, Putin pointed out dramatically how extensively Russia’s security interests had already been disregarded, and red lines crossed. The appeal was ignored, as were countless others since, the most recent being on December 17, 2021, when Putin demanded legally binding security guarantees from the U.S. and NATO. The answers addressed only tangential issues.
The ‘Decolonization’ of Russia
The sums that London and Washington have spent over the past two decades on so-called civil society in Russia, funding protest actions and polarization, far overshadow the $5 billion that Victoria Nuland admitted spending in Ukraine. The aim of this operation is nothing less than the “decolonization” of Russia, its complete fragmentation into, depending on the author, three to twelve independent nations, as Zbigniew Brzezinski propagated throughout his life and, according to Deputy National Security Advisor Robert Gates, became as early as 1991 an obsession for Dick Cheney, who not only aimed at the destruction of the Soviet Union, but of Russia itself.
Since then, various organizations and institutions in Great Britain and the USA have been pursuing precisely this objective, such as the U.S. government’s Helsinki Commission, which held an online seminar on June 23, 2022 entitled: “Decolonizing Russia: A Moral and Strategic Imperative,” in which the splitting of Russia into ten regions was demanded. The so-called “Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum,” which was founded by the Russian dissident Ilya Ponomarev—who incidentally declared himself responsible for the murder of Ms. Dugina, in which he was even said to have played a leading role—held four conferences in Poland and the Czech Republic, which dealt with the breakup of Russia. Ponomarev boasted that he supported “partisans” in their sabotage actions.
Deutschlandfunk reported these activities, which if they took place elsewhere would be described as terrorist attacks, as quite normal and welcome. A joint conference of two organizations close to the U.S. government, the Jamestown Foundation and the Hudson Institute, was held in Washington on February 14, 2023, for which one of the keynote speakers, Luke Coffey (Hudson Institute Fellow and former Margaret Thatcher Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and the first non-British adviser to the UK Minister of Defense) had already prepared a six-page document in December entitled: “Preparing for the Final Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Dissolution of the Russian Federation.” It is this perspective of the existential threat to Russia that has brought Putin to the point where he referred to the existing Russian nuclear doctrine and spoke of the use of nuclear weapons when the very existence of the Russian Federation is threatened, which of course is left out by the media.
So much for the topic of “unprovoked aggression,” for which I, as a “non-agent of Putin,” of course, have only used a small selection from a very large number of public western sources, due to time constraints.
A New Global Security Architecture
We urgently need to get out of this geopolitical trap. That is why, back in April of last year, I proposed a new global security and development architecture that must take into account the interests of every single nation in the world. The Ten Principles that I have formulated as a basis for this are circulating in many countries and institutions. The creation of such a new architecture is also the only plan on the table to overcome the systemic crisis of the trans-Atlantic financial system, which is the real driver behind the threat of war.
The nations of the Global South, which represent by far the majority of humanity, have successfully refused to be drawn into the geopolitical confrontation between the U.S., on the one hand, and Russia and China on the other. The nascent peace movement in Germany urgently needs to unite with this global majority, because we all have the same problem.
This architecture and the Ten Principles include the absolute recognition of national sovereignty, the overcoming of poverty with the help of a new international credit system, a modern health system in every country, universal education for all, the infrastructural development and industrial development of all countries, the prohibition and the technological nullification of all weapons of mass destruction, and the creation of an entirely new paradigm in international relations.
This proposal is already circulating in important circles around the world, and I would ask you to include it in this discussion.
We are in an epochal upheaval in which the Non-Aligned Movement plays the most important role. Therein lies the hope for Germany.
