World War
Again Knocks at Europe’s Door

by Dennis Small

[Print version of this editorial]

June 22—It is one week since Russian President Vladimir Putin presented a comprehensive initiative for a new Eurasian security architecture, including a negotiated peace to stop the escalating war in Ukraine, for the world’s consideration. He did this on June 14 in an hour-long address to leaders of Russia’s Foreign Ministry, excerpts of which are included in this issue, and he was explicit that his proposal was designed to ensure the security of all nations—including those of Europe and NATO.

Other than the near-instant, curt rejection of the offer by U.S. President Joe Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, there has been a deafening silence about the Putin proposal from government and other policy-making circles in the West—despite the fact that the U.S. and Russia are now on a trajectory pointing towards nuclear confrontation in the near term. Asked by journalists, Kremlin adviser Yury Ushakov confirmed that the West has not reached out to Moscow directly to discuss the Putin proposal.

Undeterred, Putin reiterated the gist of his proposal in June 21 remarks to graduates of Russia’s higher military schools:

Recently, at the meeting with Foreign Ministry senior staff, I described our vision on creating equal and indivisible security in Eurasia. We are ready for a broad international discussion of these key, vital issues, with our colleagues in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the CIS, the EAEU, BRICS, and with other international associations, including European and NATO states. Naturally, when they are ready for it.

The Western Establishment, it seems, is not yet ready.

As Igor Istomin, a leading Russian international affairs expert at the Foreign Ministry’s MGIMO University, put it in a June 19 article: “As its Ukrainian proxy faces defeat, the U.S.-led bloc is becoming increasingly reckless.” Istomin worried that “the West is moving ever closer to the brink of direct military confrontation” with Russia, and that as a result, “the possibility of a trans-European war is closer today than at any time since the mid-20th century.”

One cannot disagree with Istomin’s reading: All indications are that NATO is in fact actively preparing its forces for near-term war on European soil—again.

Voices for sanity, however, do exist in the West, and on both sides of the Atlantic. On June 21, the International Peace Coalition (IPC), in its 55th weekly meeting, heard and adopted a resolution welcoming the kind of dialogue Putin is calling for. The resolution was presented by Joachim Bonatz, Vice President of the East German Board of Trustees of Associations, the Ostdeutsches Kuratorium von Verbänden e.V. (OKV), and it was supported by leading military and intelligence figures from the U.S., France and elsewhere. Both a report on the IPC meeting and the text of the resolution are included below in this issue. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller and initiator of the IPC, also strongly backed the initiative, and today called for its rapid international distribution and prompt expansion of collaboration on both sides of the Atlantic to take up Putin’s peace proposal.