This article appears in the April 18, 2025 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Trade War, Rearmament, World War? Or a New Security Architecture?
[Print version of this article]
April 11—The following article by Helga Zepp-LaRouche will appear in the upcoming issue of the German weekly newspaper, Neue Solidarität. It is translated by EIR.
By unilaterally imposing tariffs on the entire world, then “pausing” them, then raising the tariffs on China to 145%, United States President Donald Trump did not cause, but he did trigger, a process that could lead in the relatively short term to the disintegration of the global financial system, which is already on the verge of collapse. This escalation is moving toward “uncharted waters” and risks leading to an “outright financial war,” according to the global head of foreign exchange research at Deutsche Bank, George Saravelos. As a result, a systemic crisis of the global financial system threatens, with the acute danger that the existing flash points of war could escalate up to a Third World War!
But even before this latest aggravation of the strategic situation, we here in Germany were preparing for war. We are told that because of the “unprovoked Russian war of aggression,” we must become “ready for war,” that Russia will attack Germany and other European nations militarily by 2029 at the latest, so we have to invest hundreds of billions of euros in armament, the German Army is going into schools to recruit, and the Interior Ministry says school children should be trained in war preparedness. A certain Lieutenant General Andre Bodemann explains, in respect to “Operation Plan Germany,” that people will soon have to get used to seeing the transport of many dead and injured in the streets again, Volkswagen is once again producing armaments, like 80 years ago, which will be used against Russia again. The whole world is looking at Germany in horror, wondering how this is possible, given our country’s history. How on earth did we get to this point just 35 years after the peaceful revolution in East Germany and German reunification?
The great historic opportunity of Germany and the world to use the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent end of the Cold War to establish a peace order for the 21st Century was missed. While the Russian leadership agreed to the reunification of Germany and its membership of NATO, very generously so in the light of German history, the neocons in Washington and London were already scheming to establish a unipolar world.
Declassified U.S, Russian, German, British and French documents, now available in the U.S. National Archives, State Department, Pentagon, presidential libraries and various national archives and university libraries, prove that a deluge of promises against NATO expansion eastward was made to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, by Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner. These documents show clearly that the Russian complaints about having been deceived are absolutely justified. Former CIA Director Robert Gates admits unequivocally that Gorbachev and others were deliberately led to believe that NATO would not expand to the East.
Was the sixfold eastward expansion of NATO and the deployment of offensive weapons systems on Russia’s border, which means a de facto reverse Cuban Missile Crisis for Russia, not a provocation? And now, on March 31, the New York Times published a 13,000-word article on the results of a year-long investigation based on 300 interviews, that documents that the U.S. was commanding the Ukraine war out of the Clay Barracks in Wiesbaden since mid-April 2022 at the latest. Does this not fully confirm that this is a classic proxy war between the U.S. and Russia? Military experts from many countries have convincingly demonstrated that Russia has neither the intention nor the personnel and military capacity for a war of aggression against Europe.
If Trump, regardless of his tariff policy, is now attempting to end this war and thereby the deaths in Ukraine, shouldn’t Germany and Europe support this 100% instead of wanting to continue the war in a “Coalition of the Willing”?
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wants an EU military budget of €800 billion. Incoming German Chancellor Friedrich Merz broke his campaign promise immediately after his election, pushed through an amendment to the Basic Law and will implement a military budget of €400 billion to begin with, but potentially with no upper limit. This gigantic militarization will also result in enormous cuts in social expenses. For that, German depositors are to be persuaded to invest their savings in armament bonds—a form of modern Mefo bills. Given Trump’s tariff policy which threatens to involuntarily “unwind” the entire financial system with its bubble of $2 quadrillion of outstanding derivative contracts, even such plunder would be like leaves swept away in the wind. If there is one thing we can learn from history, it is the certainty that at the end of such rearmament frenzies comes war, always along the motto: First they want your money, then they want your children.
In the short term, if Trump sticks to his tariff war, there will be a wave of bankruptcies in the countries of the Global South, and among U.S. companies and farmers, as well as a rise in inflation and the ensuing private bankruptcies, while owners of U.S. Treasuries could be forced to convert them into hundred-year bonds, as Trump economic adviser Steve Miran suggests. It could also be called expropriation.
So what can be done? In such a dual existential crisis—the threat of financial collapse and the danger of war—band-aids will not help. We need a completely new paradigm in international relations, a return to diplomacy as a means of conflict resolution, and the overcoming of geopolitics by focusing on the common interests of mankind.
1. Germany and the other European nations must organize for an international conference to be put on the agenda immediately to resolve to create a new global security and development architecture. This conference must first agree on common principles as laid out in the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence and the UN Charter. In this spirit, a new Bretton Woods system must then be created, which above all overcomes the underdevelopment of the countries of the Global South through a fair credit system.
2. A banking system in the tradition of the Glass-Steagall Act, as introduced by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, must guarantee the continuous service of industry, agriculture and trade. Credit creation must be brought under the control of sovereign governments through the creation of national banks. In Germany, the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau after the Second World War can be a reference point.
3. This conference must then put an end to all wars in the world, in the spirit of the principles of the Peace of Westphalia, and launch the reconstruction of the former war zones through a just post-war order.
4. New arms control treaties must be negotiated immediately, and an extensive conversion of the industrial capacities of the military-industrial complex into useful industrial production must begin.
5. The common challenges for mankind, such as overcoming hunger and poverty, creating a modern health system for all nations, universal education for all people and other existential issues must be solved in cooperation with the BRICS states and nations of the Global South.
6. This conference takes on the goal of promoting a dialogue among cultures based on the fact that mankind’s identity is our common ability to reason, which enables us to always find a solution to all problems on a higher level than the one on which they originated.
Therefore, take these calls to action:
Join the International Peace Coalition, which has been holding a Zoom conference every Friday at 11:00 am (EDT)/17:00 hours (CET) for 97 weeks!
Take part in all Easter marches and peace demonstrations!
Don’t leave our future in the hands of the warmongers!
