EDITORIAL

Who’s Running Biden’s Government?

by Dennis Small

[Print version of this editorial]

June 29—After watching the debacle billed as the Trump-Biden Presidential debate on June 27, thoughtful people around the world are urgently asking the critical question: Biden is clearly not running the U.S. government, so who is? Who actually controls the policies and actions of the man who has his finger on the nuclear button, as the United States and the United Kingdom escalate two wars (Ukraine and Southwest Asia), either of which could lead to a nuclear confrontation with Russia and China?

Former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard was perfectly blunt: “The problem isn’t just that Biden is old. The problem is he’s insane. Only a madman would not consider a nuclear holocaust/war an existential threat, saying ‘the ONLY existential threat to humanity is climate change.’ Only an insane person would say this, and this insane person has the power to launch a nuclear weapon.”

Australian commentator Caitlin Johnstone wrote, “Everybody’s focusing on what Joe Biden’s dementia-addled debate performance says about his ability to win re-election, instead of on the fact that the current, sitting President of the United States has dementia.”

Veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh asked urgently: “Whatever happens, we have a president—now fully unveiled—who just may not be responsible for what he does in the coming campaign, not to mention his actions in the Middle East and Ukraine…. Whatever happened to the 25th Amendment that authorizes the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet to declare the president incompetent? What is going on in the Biden White House?”

Useful commentaries such as these, however, don’t themselves point to the solution to the unprecedented crisis they are describing. That solution lies in the direction of the West’s accepting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s June 14 proposal for a new Eurasian security architecture, including a peace plan for Ukraine, which he offered to the nations of the region, including those of Western Europe and NATO, as a starting point for negotiations. A few important voices in the West have taken up that offer so far, but many, many more are needed, and very quickly—Putin and other Russian officials have made it clear that the offer cannot remain on the table forever, because NATO’s war provocations against Russia are escalating.

Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche told participants in the 56th weekly meeting of the International Peace Coalition on June 28, that “our task is as urgent as it ever was, and getting more urgent by the hour…. What we are trying to do is to intensify the process of discussion, especially among those people who do understand why this is so dangerous; why Putin is absolutely correct when he says, we are just at the point of no return…. So, we are right now trying to expand the discussion among such people on both sides of the Atlantic. Hopefully that will result in some kind of process, where we have a group of prominent people come together.”

Zepp-LaRouche added that, “I think the light at the end of the tunnel is there; because we can see how the majority of nations are moving towards a New Paradigm based on completely different principles. Therefore, I think we are absolutely on the right track in what we are trying to do.”