EDITORIAL

Tectonic Shifts Open Door
to a New Global Security and Development Architecture

by Dennis Small

[Print version of this editorial]

Feb. 28—United States President Donald Trump ordered Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky to leave the White House on Friday without signing a much-publicized minerals deal between the two countries, after they had a heated exchange before media cameras in which Zelensky aggressively challenged Trump’s efforts to negotiate peace with Russian President Vladimir Putin. “You’re gambling with the lives of millions of people, you’re gambling with World War III,” Trump responded forcefully.

The extended, heated dispute, which also included Vice President J.D. Vance, immediately went viral, with the White House doing its share to make the incident known to the world.

A scheduled 1 p.m. Friday joint Trump-Zelensky press conference at the White House was summarily canceled, and instead Trump posted on his X site: “I have determined that President Zelensky is not ready for peace if America is involved, because he feels our involvement gives him a big advantage in negotiations. I don’t want advantage, I want peace. He disrespected the United States of America in its cherished Oval Office. He can come back when he is ready for peace.”

While these dramatic events were unfolding, Helga Zepp-LaRouche was addressing the 91st weekly meeting of the International Peace Coalition (IPC), in which she stressed that—

We are experiencing a very unprecedented change in the strategic situation, and one can actually say these are tectonic shifts going on which leave some people completely flabbergasted, and they don’t quite get what is happening. What one can say is that the so-called “collective West,” which tried to dominate the world through a unipolar world order, especially after the end of the Cold War, no longer exists. With a little bit more than four weeks of Trump in the White House, there is a split between the United States and Europe which is quite remarkable, and in my view, never to be fixed again.

London and Paris are blustering about stepping in to provide military security for Ukraine to continue the NATO war against Russia—but they confess they need the United States to “backstop” any such arrangements, or it won’t work. The parade of European leaders coming to Washington this week to push that agenda were each told “No”: French President Emmanuel Macron, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and finally—and most forcefully—Ukraine’s Zelensky.

U.S.-Russian relations, on the other hand, are slowly progressing in the right direction: towards peace and cooperation. Putin presented his thinking to a Feb. 27 meeting of the leaders of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB):

“You see, and we all see, how rapidly the world and the international situation are changing. In this regard, I would like to note that the first contacts with the new U.S. administration inspire certain hopes. There is a reciprocal commitment to work to restore interstate relations and to gradually address the enormous amount of systemic and strategic problems in the global architecture which once provoked the crises in Ukraine and other regions.”

Putin added that it is now possible to have “a dialogue on creating a system that will truly ensure a balance and mutual consideration of interests, an indivisible European and global security system for the long term, where the security of some countries cannot be ensured at the expense or to the detriment of the security of other countries, definitely not Russia.”

Zepp-LaRouche took special note of those statements by Putin in her remarks to the IPC, explaining that this call for a global security system—

is very much in line with what we have been pushing, albeit with slightly different language, in the Schiller Institute and the IPC since the outbreak of the Ukraine war: namely, the need to have a new security and development architecture. So, if based on the Russian discussions with the United States, Putin is now talking about the possibility of such a global architecture, I think this is a major change for the good and opens the window for the settlement of all other conflicts around the globe—especially, hopefully, also the one in the Middle East.