EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR THURSDAY, JUNE 17, 2021

A Step Back from the Brink—and What It Now Takes To Win a Durable Peace

June 16, 2021 (EIRNS)—U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin emerged from their four-hour summit discussion today in Geneva, Switzerland, to present to the world a “U.S.-Russia Presidential Joint Statement on Strategic Stability,” whose brief text includes the following central commitment: “Today, we reaffirm the principle that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” That exact phrase was used by Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev in their famous November 1985 summit at the height of the Cold War, in the very same location.

Presidents Biden and Putin further agreed to establish a bilateral Strategic Stability Dialogue for teams of experts on both sides to begin work on the myriad security-related problems facing the two countries, and the world. The summit meeting, both leaders agreed, was constructive, and a first step towards improving U.S.-Russian relations, which have sunk to their lowest level in decades, perhaps ever.

Strategically, this is a step back from the brink, and an urgently needed one. But it is a small first step, which is not yet secure and which the enemies of peaceful cooperation between the U.S., Russia and China will deploy heavily to stop. In fact, the very fact that President Biden met with Putin at all, let alone reached a modest agreement to begin talks, has already provoked wild hysteria among the press hyenas, who tore into Biden at his post-summit press conference in a way they had previously reserved for President Trump. Those media are the paid hit-men for the bankrupt Wall Street and City of London interests, and their Establishment operators in the military-industrial complex, the intelligence agencies, and elsewhere, whose survival depends on stopping U.S. cooperation with Russia and China at all costs.

The LaRouche Organization and the Schiller Institute have been insistently warning of the danger of nuclear war, precisely because of the unsalvageable bankruptcy of the entire trans-Atlantic financial system. We have sounded the alarm against the British-led drive to impose Malthusian depopulation across the planet, in the guise of the Great Green Reset. And, most importantly, we have restated and elaborated on the policies presented by Lyndon LaRouche as the only viable long-term strategy for winning a durable peace.

Today’s small step, to succeed, must now be followed by the implementation of those policies: cooperation to build a world-class health system in every nation on the planet in order to defeat the pandemic; joint work in space sciences and exploration; and the bankruptcy reorganization of the existing financial system to stop the looming hyperinflationary explosion from destroying all physical economies.

Back in March 1984, Lyndon LaRouche addressed exactly these issues, in a document titled “The LaRouche Doctrine: Draft Memorandum of Agreement Between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.” LaRouche prepared the document a year after his discussions with the Reagan administration had led to Ronald Reagan’s famous announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative in March 1983, and a little more than a year before Reagan took this approach to the 1985 summit with Gorbachev in Geneva. In it LaRouche stated:

“The political foundation for durable peace must be: a) The unconditional sovereignty of each and all nation-states, and b) Cooperation among sovereign nation-states to the effect of promoting unlimited opportunities to participate in the benefits of technological progress, to the mutual benefit of each and all.

“The most crucial feature of present implementation of such a policy of durable peace is a profound change in the monetary, economic, and political relations between the dominant powers and those relatively subordinated nations often classed as ‘developing nations.’ Unless the inequities lingering in the aftermath of modem colonialism are progressively remedied, there can be no durable peace on this planet.

“Insofar as the United States and Soviet Union acknowledge the progress of the productive powers of labor throughout the planet to be in the vital strategic interests of each and both, the two powers are bound to that degree and in that way by a common interest. This is the kernel of the political and economic policies of practice indispensable to the fostering of durable peace between those two powers....

“The powers jointly agree upon the adoption of two tasks as the common interest of mankind, as well as the specific interest of each of the two powers: 1) The establishment of full economic equity respecting the conditions of individual life in all nations of this planet during a period of not more than 50 years; 2) Man’s exploration and colonization of nearby space as the continuing common objective and interest of mankind during and beyond the completion of the first task. The adoption of these two working-goals as the common task and respective interest in common of the two powers and other cooperating nations, constitutes the central point of reference for erosion of the potential political and economic causes of warfare between the powers.”