Madmen Declare War ‘Any Day Now’

We Must Act Now for
A New Security Architecture

by Mike Billington

[Print version of this editorial]

Feb.14—The Chickenhawks running the Biden Administration, Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, declared over the Feb.12-13 weekend that war would likely start during the following week. While calling this “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” their actual meaning may well be their psychotic plan to unleash well-armed and well-trained Nazi militia in Ukraine against the Donbas. Unnamed sources in the White House and in NATO even informed the media that this would take place precisely on Wednesday, Feb. 16.

The plan, they failed to report, is to provoke a military response from Russia, to defend their compatriots among the Ukrainian citizens in the Donbas from this Nazi assault, which would then be declared the much-anticipated “Russian invasion.” This is intended to detonate either the West’s “nuclear option” of draconian economic sanctions, 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 22,” 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?

Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s Feb. 6 statement, “100 Seconds to Midnight on the Doomsday Clock: We Need a New Security Architecture!” published in the Feb. 11 EIR, invokes the principle of the Peace of Westphalia, saying it “must guarantee the interests of all states and, above all, their right to economic and cultural development. The maintenance of world peace presupposes a total and definitive renunciation of Malthusian politics; and requires undivided access to the achievements of scientific and technological advance for all nations.”

Two former officials of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the German Peter Dittus and Frenchman Hervé Hannoun, released an extraordinary statement in the French publication Marianne on Feb. 11, calling for France to leave NATO, asserting that NATO under American leadership is prepared to sacrifice Europe, and perhaps the world, to maintain its past glory as the world’s unipolar controller of all things economic and strategic. These two are not “anti-war activists,” rather, they are French and German leaders within 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.’”

Recalling the France envisioned by President Charles De Gaulle, they write:

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. 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.

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 five permanent members of the UN Security Council (the United States, United Kingdom, China, Russia, and France), a P5 whose composition must be maintained and whose role as regulator of world peace must be enhanced.

That full statement is being circulated in several languages by 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 International Relations Entering a New Era and Global Sustainable Development.” The joint statement declares that unipolar control over the economy and security of the world is no longer to be tolerated. 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, saying further:

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 full joint statement was published in the Feb. 11 issue of EIR.

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 seminar 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. 19, on the theme: “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” The invitation to the conference is here.