This article appears in the February 28, 2025 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
As Trump Moves To Restore Relations with Russia, Eurocrats Are Panicking
[Print version of this article]
Feb. 22—The dizzying pace of developments on the world stage over the last month since United States President Donald Trump’s inauguration has left most of the world—including many of the principal actors in these events—at a loss to explain what is happening, and why things are moving so rapidly.
In the last week alone, the entire post-war geopolitical order has begun to crumble. The U.S. and Russia have resumed the path of rational discussion among equals, following a ninety-minute phone call on February 12 between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. This opened the possibility of an abrupt end to the NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, while sharply reducing the danger of imminent thermonuclear war, which emerged as a real threat when former U.S. President Joe Biden and NATO approved the use of long-range missile strikes from Ukraine deep into Russian territory.
The European establishment, which has been an enthusiastic participant in the Anglo-American plan to “weaken” Russia since foolishly swallowing the line that “if Putin isn’t stopped in Ukraine, his forces will keep moving west,” has been hit by one shock after another, as the long-suppressed drive for peace has been unleashed, and appears to be unstoppable.
Trump and Putin Break Containment
The Schiller Institute’s Helga Zepp-LaRouche described the February 12 phone call between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin as “a game-changer” and as “a relief to the whole world,” as it ended the nearly-three-year cutoff of communication enforced by the “Collective Biden” administration. The read-out on the call produced by both sides shows that the intent of the two leaders is to forge a partnership which goes beyond ending the NATO-provoked war in Ukraine. Trump described the call in a post on Truth Social as “a lengthy and highly productive phone call.... We discussed Ukraine, the Middle East, energy, artificial intelligence, the power of the [U.S.] dollar, and various other subjects,” including “the great benefit that we will someday have in working together.”
The call was the trigger for a rapid series of developments which left European leaders befuddled and distressed, especially when it was made clear that they were not invited to participate in the U.S.-Russia dialogue, despite their servile obedience to NATO in the war in Ukraine.
Among those developments was the Senate confirmation of Tulsi Gabbard to serve as Trump’s Director of National Intelligence. She has been a harsh critic of the intelligence community, rejecting assessments which produced a series of endless wars and intelligence failures, often under the influence of British intelligence and related Non-Governmental Organizations. Leaders of the Anglo-American intelligence community, such as former MI6 head Sir Richard Dearlove, joined the usual suspects of compromised intelligence operatives from the Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations—such as former Vice President Dick Cheney, former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and unhinged war hawk John Bolton—in opposing her appointment. They denounced her as “inexperienced,” susceptible to “conspiracy theories,” and acting as a mouthpiece for “brutal dictators” such as Putin and Syria’s former President Bashar al-Assad. One Gabbard supporter from the intelligence community said her opponents were less concerned with providing security for America than with keeping themselves out of prison!
Tellingly, upon her confirmation and swearing in by President Trump, Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD)—the notorious U.S.-funded black-ops group that maintains hit lists on individuals they label “information terrorists”—rescinded their claims against her. The CCD had put Gabbard on several of its lists of “Russian propagandists” in 2022 and 2023, calling her one who had been “working for a foreign audience for the Kremlin’s money for several years … on its payroll.” On Feb. 13, the day after Gabbard was confirmed in the Senate, the head of the CCD issued a statement declaring that the claims against Gabbard were “unfounded” and that the individuals responsible for their publication had been fired.
Two subsequent events in Europe added to the consternation of European leaders. A presentation by U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth at NATO’s Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting in Brussels on Feb. 12 left NATO in “disarray,” according to media reports. Hegseth told them the Ukraine war must end on U.S. terms, including: recognition that it is “unrealistic” to return to Ukraine’s 2014 borders; NATO membership for Ukraine will not happen; any peacekeepers deployed will be a “non-NATO mission” and will include no U.S. troops. Each of these points contradicted the expectations of spokesmen for European governments.
A speech delivered by U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance the next day at the Munich Security Conference left the audience stunned. “The threat that I worry most about vis-à-vis Europe, is not Russia, not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values,” Vance said, referring to actions such as overturning the election in Romania, censorship of dissenting voices, and the exclusion of allegedly extremist parties of the left and right from the conference. His remarks were described by European media as “blistering” and “demoralizing.”
Trump vs. Zelensky and European Impotence
In response, French President Emmanuel Macron, joined by UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and outgoing German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, convened a meeting on February 17 in Paris to formulate a response to the Trump team’s offensive. But by the time of their meeting, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov were headed with their teams to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to discuss normalization of relations and prepare for a Trump-Putin summit. While the participants in Riyadh reported progress, affirming that they would remain in regular contact, the demoralized Europeans in Paris engaged in whining about being left on the outside, while failing to come up with a plan of action—except to meet again, very soon!
Just when the collective European leadership was thinking that their situation could not get any worse following the setbacks of the last week, it did! A desperate and dissociated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, perhaps sensing that his usefulness to the Unipolar Order’s neocons has expired, attacked President Trump publicly for not inviting him to the U.S.-Russia meeting in Riyadh. He charged that Trump “lives in this disinformation space” created by Russia. Trump returned the fire, posting a blast at Zelensky on Truth Social. “Think of it, a modestly successful comedian, Volodymyr Zelensky, talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn’t be won, that never had to start, but a War that he, without the U.S. and ‘TRUMP,’ will never be able to settle.”
He concluded, calling Zelensky, “A dictator without elections,” writing that he had “better move fast or he is not going to have a country left.”
The anti-Trump media responded with their usual venom against him, quibbling over how much money has actually been spent on the war, but obviously upset that in his opening to Putin, he is moving not just to end the war, but to reshape the security architecture which has been designed for the benefit of corrupt and greedy corporatist oligarchs. Vice President J.D. Vance also responded: “Zelensky is getting really bad advice, and I don’t know from whom.” He added pointedly: “This is not a good way to deal with President Trump.”
As has often proven to be the case, the source of such “really bad advice” is the network of geopolitical ideologues nostalgic for the good old days of the British Empire. Think tanks with long association with British intelligence, such as the Royal United Services Institute and Chatham House, have issued calls for Britain and Europe in general to rally the troops, to carry the war against Russia down to the last Ukrainian, since the U.S. seems to be bowing out. Typical of the Russophobia coming from these networks is the “advice” presented in the City of London’s Economist on February 20 in an article, “How Europe Must Respond as Trump and Putin Smash the Post-War Order,” which calls for an unprecedented military build-up in Europe, including an expanded nuclear security umbrella by France and the UK, to counter the alleged threat from Russia.
A New Architecture Must Now Be Put on the Table
These sorts of unhinged and irresponsible responses explain why Helga Zepp-LaRouche has emphasized repeatedly that to achieve a peaceful resolution between the West and Russia, statesmen must overcome geopolitics and enter into a new paradigm of win-win cooperation among sovereign nations, working together to promote the interests of humanity as a whole.
While the Munich Security Council was ongoing, a protest rally was held in Munich during which Zepp-LaRouche, Ray McGovern, and Scott Ritter were invited to address the crowd by video. Zepp-LaRouche noted in her remarks: “The true character of the trans-Atlantic ‘elite’ is nowhere more evident than in their reaction to President Trump’s initiative to start a direct dialogue with President Putin in order to finally end the lost war in Ukraine.”
She elaborated on this theme in a statement which was distributed at the rally in Munich by a team of BüSo organizers—whose slate of candidates for Germany’s Feb. 23 elections includes Zepp-LaRouche. In her statement, Zepp-LaRouche points out that the collapse of the old neoliberal world order presents “an excellent opportunity for a new orientation that corresponds to the true interests of Germany and the other European nations.” The rapid growth of the BRICS association of nations, for example—
shows the determination of the nations of the Global South to leave the era of 500 years of colonialism behind them, and to take their economic development into their own hands. Instead of expanding the geopolitical confrontation to the Indo-Pacific with “Global NATO,” Germany and the other European nations must seize the opportunity for our own future that lies in constructive cooperation with the BRICS states and the Global South, which make up 85% of the world’s population.
Zepp-LaRouche’s statement concludes that—
The tectonic changes in the strategic situation offer a fantastic opportunity for the European nations to work together on a new international security and development architecture that takes into account the interests of every single nation on this planet. For Germany, cooperation with the Global Majority offers the opportunity to get the economy back on track for growth, to help secure world peace, and to open up a positive future perspective for citizens. What we can contribute to the further development of the human species is neither Taurus missiles nor Leopard 2 tanks, but a renaissance of Classical German culture, philosophy and science of Leibniz, Bach, Beethoven, Schiller, Einstein, and Krafft Ehricke, to name just a few.
The peace dynamic which has emerged in the last two weeks points to a solution to the Ukraine conflict, which can open the door for a new security and development architecture for the world.
And this is what the frazzled defenders of the old order fear.
