EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR SUNDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2021

Are Some of the Elites Coming to Their Senses?

Dec. 10, 2021 (EIRNS)—Perhaps the strongest evidence that President Biden may indeed be attempting to head off World War III was a headline today in London’s preeminent newspaper, the Daily Telegraph: “Joe Biden’s Offer of NATO Talks To Avert Russian Invasion of Ukraine Is Big Win for Vladimir Putin.”

Biden’s announcement after the Summit with Putin on Dec. 7 that there would soon be a meeting of the U.S., France, Germany, Italy and the U.K., with Russia, to discuss Putin’s call for legal guarantees that NATO would move no closer to the Russian border, nor deploy major weapon systems on its border, has sent chills through the Anglo-American imperial institutions. The Telegraph’s Russia correspondent Roland Oliphant had this to say: “Russian diplomats/officials/whoever have been telling me they want this conversation for literally years. I never thought they’d get to have it, but here we are.”

Several Russian officials have expressed “cautious optimism” that the extremely dangerous rush to military confrontation can be reversed. As expressed by Senator Vladimir Dzhabarov, the Russian Federation Council First Deputy Chair of the Committee on Foreign Affairs: “What’s reassuring is that Biden is an old-school politician after all.... We hope that the wise Biden will prevent the red lines from being crossed.”

The level of danger can not be exaggerated. Sergey Ryabkov, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister, told the Federation Council on Dec. 9 that, “Unfortunately, we see that our warnings are ignored, and NATO’s military infrastructure is getting as close to us as possible.” Asked if this could reach the level of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, Ryabkov said that it was totally possible, “if comrades on the other side fail to understand and keep doing what they are doing.... That would be a total failure of diplomacy, a failure of foreign policy, but there is still time to try to reach an agreement based on reason.... People realize that it can’t go further that way.”

In 1962, President John Kennedy and his brother Robert, then the Attorney General and the President’s closest advisor, barely avoided war with the Soviet Union through wise, and stealthy, diplomacy, ending a nuclear showdown through compromise. Oliver Stone, who has released a film titled “JFK Revisited, A Documentary,” 30 years after his famous 1991 film “JFK,” noted on Dec. 6 that “since Kennedy was killed, no American President, not one—think about it—has been able to touch the military complex, or this intelligence agency complex.” Whether “old-school politician” Joe Biden will be able to repeat the Kennedy diplomacy in the current nuclear showdown, this time with both Russia and China, will depend on the level of international pressure brought to bear from an aroused American population, which is now beginning to wake up to the collapse taking place in nearly every aspect of life within the U.S., and from an international community which is increasingly aware that the U.S. is careening towards a war which could end civilization as we know it.

In the last two weeks, a senior U.S. diplomat and a former leading CIA official stepped forward to conduct interviews with EIR, both sending warnings through this platform that there are madmen in positions of power who are trying to drag the country into war with Russia, China and Iran.

Ambassador Chas Freeman, who played a major role in the opening of relations with China in the 1970s, and in formulating our relations with both China and Taiwan at that time, told EIR on Nov. 29 that the Trump and Biden administrations have gone past the “red line” which could provoke a war with China: “In the finessing of the issue of Taiwan in U.S.-China relations, essentially, the United States agreed to three conditions: one, that we would end official relations with Taipei; two, that we would withdraw all military personnel and installations from the island; and three, we would void our defense commitment to the island. We have now gone back on each of these commitments.”

Graham Fuller, an Islamic scholar who served 20 years in the CIA, including four years in Hong Kong, told EIR in a Dec. 9 interview (to be released soon) that the U.S. elites have been unable to come to terms with the fact the nation is no longer the single hegemonic power in the world, that China has emerged as a “near-peer” competitor in nearly every aspect. If the U.S. fails to “tamp down its rhetoric,” he warned, the consequences could be catastrophic. He added that calling Iran a terrorist state was “grotesque,” while accusing China of genocide against the Uighurs was ridiculous.

Both Chas Freeman and Graham Fuller believe President Biden does not want a war, but neither are they confident that he can overcome the addiction to war among the United States’ elites and the military-industrial complex. The danger is great, and in such a situation in history, the potential power of every individual is vastly increased, as a worried and frightened population looks for the truth behind the lies coming from the politicians and the media. It is time to listen to the wise words of Lyndon LaRouche.