EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR TUESDAY JANUARY 24, 2023

Red Lines Do Exist; Once Crossed, There Won’t Be a Second Chance

Jan. 23, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—If you breathed a sigh of relief after last week’s Ramstein Air Base meeting, because it did not succeed in pressuring Germany to send Leopard tanks to Ukraine, and that therefore tensions in the war against Russia had somewhat abated, better think again.

The disheveled vulture Boris Johnson swooped into Kiev this morning in a surprise visit to bolster the Nazi government there by pronouncing that “this is the moment to double down, and to give the Ukrainians all the tools they need.” He also denounced the German government of Olaf Scholz for failing to authorize tank deliveries. On cue, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock publicly announced a policy directly contrary to what Chancellor Scholz had established for his government, saying that Germany would allow Poland to send Leopard tanks to Ukraine if only they asked.

Last week, on Jan. 18, BoJo had provocatively advocated for crossing all of Russia’s red lines, including a direct attack on Crimea and even entertained the option of a nuclear exchange with Russia. “If Russia were to use a nuclear weapon... the West, I’m afraid, will be obliged to launch retaliatory action of one kind or another... From the point of view of the ordinary Russians, it would be an absolute catastrophe.” He added that “we aren’t talking about a nuclear confrontation between NATO and Russia,” and that even if the Russians were annoyed, “the probability of a nuclear attack was low.”

In response to such insanity, Russian leaders continue to speak out in the clearest terms. Deputy Director of the National Security Council Dmitry Medvedev warned yesterday that, since Ramstein showed that “our enemies will try to maul or even destroy us endlessly... a new military alliance may appear at a certain point in time” to take on the Global NATO apparatus. A day earlier, Vyacheslav Volodin, (in Russian) the Speaker of the Russian State Duma, stated that

“deliveries of offensive weapons to the Kiev regime will lead to a global catastrophe. If Washington and NATO countries supply weapons that will be used to strike civilian cities and attempt to seize our territories, as they threaten, this will lead to retaliatory measures using more powerful weapons... Given the technological superiority of Russian weapons, foreign politicians making such decisions need to understand that this could end in a global tragedy that will destroy their countries.”

Volodin concluded with cold precision: “Arguments that the nuclear powers have not previously used weapons of mass destruction in local conflicts are untenable. Because these states did not face a situation where there was a threat to the security of their citizens and the territorial integrity of the country.”

In light of this, Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche drew the only sane conclusion possible, in a conversation today with American colleagues. “Red lines do exist,” she emphasized. We are currently in a countdown either to a nuclear showdown or to a new international security and development architecture, she stated, and the window of opportunity to resolve the crisis will not stay open forever. Contrary to what the majority of our fellow citizens believe, she said, history is not a Hollywood soap opera where there’s always another episode at hand.

At the same time, an entirely new financial and economic system based on real physical-economic development is being built to replace the bankrupt trans-Atlantic financial empire. And that, Zepp-LaRouche asserted, is the real bone of contention that has driven Global NATO into an all-out war mode against China and Russia.

President Vladimir Putin again posed the outlines of such a new system in a speech to the heads of state of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), posted on the Kremlin site on Jan. 23. “We propose that efforts be pooled in the development and implementation of cutting-edge scientific and technical solutions in the leading economic sectors,” for the EAEU nations and others interested in working with them, such as Egypt, Iran, India, Indonesia and the U.A.E., Putin stated.

Leading Russian economist Sergey Glazyev elaborated on the need for a radical global shift, in a series of recent articles, calling for “the creation of a new international settlement currency instead of the current IMF reserve currencies,” and added: “Russia, together with its eastern and southern partners, has a unique chance to ‘jump off’ the sinking ship of the dollar-centric debt economy, ensuring its own development and mutual trade in the accumulated and extracted strategic resources.”

The upcoming Feb. 4 international Schiller Institute conference, “The Age of Reason or the Annihilation of Humanity?” will deliberate on both the war danger, and the economic and cultural policies needed to resume Mankind’s proper role in the universe. As President John F. Kennedy stated in his famous Commencement Address at American University on June 10, 1963: “Nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy—or of a collective death-wish for the world.”