EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR THURSDAY JANUARY 12, 2023

The EU and Japan Join NATO; Nuclear War Has Just Been Brought That Much Closer to Your Doorstep

Jan. 11, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—“Who authorized the EU and NATO to form an alliance to establish a Global NATO dictatorship?” Helga Zepp-LaRouche demanded in her weekly webcast today. “Voters in the countries have not been asked about that; there has been no public debate; I don’t think that any parliaments were consulted,” she asserted acerbically. And yet that decision has worsened an already red-hot strategic situation, which could descend into nuclear confrontation with Russia and China at any moment.

Zepp-LaRouche was referring to the “Joint Declaration on EU-NATO Cooperation” issued on Jan. 10, whereby a “NATO-EU strategic partnership” was announced centered on closely coordinating their provocative campaigns against “Russian aggression” and “China’s growing assertiveness.” All 27 EU member nations were instructed that, like it or not, whether or not they are also members of NATO, they should ensure “the fullest possible involvement ... with the [NATO] Alliance in its initiatives.”

Also today, the U.S. and Japan began their 2+2 meetings in Washington of their defense and foreign ministers, which will be followed by a Jan. 13 White House meeting of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida with President Joe Biden. At that meeting, the two countries will announce, according to the Washington Post, “a deepening of the two countries’ strategic alliance,” including equipping an 18,000-strong U.S. Marine Corps force in Okinawa “with advanced capabilities, such as missiles that could be fired at Chinese ships in the event of a Taiwan conflict.” An unnamed senior administration official left no doubt as to the import of the radical escalation: “This is about Japan essentially aligning with the United States, in many ways like a NATO ally.” Another applauded: “This is one of the most significant advances in U.S. force posture in the region in at least a decade.”

The Washington Post article is also explicit about how this could lead to a direct U.S.-China military confrontation: “Japan and China also have been engaged in a long-running territorial dispute over the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea northeast of Taiwan, where an escalation could draw the United States—which has pledged to defend Japan under a security treaty—into a conflict with China.”

The model for Global NATO’s scheduled shooting war with China is Ukraine—as Lt. Gen. James Bierman, commanding general of the Third Marine Expeditionary Force (III MEF) and of Marine Forces Japan, frankly admitted in a Jan. 8 interview with the Financial Times. Beginning in 2014, “we earnestly got after preparing for future conflict: training for the Ukrainians, pre-positioning of supplies, identification of sites from which we could operate support, sustain operations,” he said. “We call that setting the theater. And we are setting the theater in Japan, in the Philippines, in other locations.”

Bierman also made it crystal clear who would be throwing the first punch: “As we square off with the Chinese adversary, who is going to own the starting pistol and is going to have the ability potentially to initiate hostilities....”

To recapitulate: The United States has stoked the fires of a strategic confrontation with Russia in Ukraine, to the tune of well over $100 billion (and counting) in military expenditures that have gone into the deep pockets of Military Industrial Complex corporations such as Raytheon and Lockheed Martin—while Americans are being fleeced by inflation, poverty is on the rise, and essential infrastructure collapses at every turn. And the U.S. and NATO are now about to launch a second, Asian front in a shooting war which is designed to cross China’s red line around the Taiwan issue!

“We have to demand a stop to the war because it has the danger of going out of control” into full-scale nuclear war, Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche warned in her webcast. “If it comes to nuclear war, if only one weapon is used, that is the annihilation of civilization. Most people nowadays, the younger generation in particular, have no inkling of what a nuclear war would mean.... The whole human race would be wiped out. Nobody would be alive to even investigate why this happened!”

Zepp-LaRouche stressed that the full implications of such a nuclear war have to register with people, as the starting point of any serious discussion of strategy. “I think you have to start with that, because nuclear war must be avoided at all costs.... Unless you make that crystal clear, you are not in the real world.” She urged that millions if not billions of people around the world need to watch the detailed documentation of the nature of nuclear war issued by American nuclear specialist Steven Starr.

“We absolutely have to have an international mobilization,” she continued, “to take up the offer of Pope Francis, who offered the venue of the Vatican for negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, without any preconditions. We need to have international pressure from inside the United States and Europe in particular,” to stop the mad drive to nuclear war. “And then we have to move very quickly to a new international security and development architecture which takes into account the interest of every country on the planet.”

“Either we make that jump, that shift,” she concluded, “or the fate of humanity is dubious.”

Zepp-LaRouche discussed the nature of that needed shift, in the closing section of her remarks to the Jan. 10 Schiller Institute forum, “What About International Law, Mrs. Merkel?”:

“If we are to find a way out at this late stage, seconds to midnight, then a wide, overwhelming publicity must be created worldwide demanding that a diplomatic solution be found. Pope Francis’s offer of the Vatican’s premises for unconditional negotiations is the best option; other mediation proposals, such as those of President Lula and other states of the Global South, as well as President Erdoğan’s efforts, must be coalesced around the Vatican’s initiative. I therefore ask you all to sign our Open Letter from the Latin American Parliamentarians’ Initiative to the Pope....

“We need a new international security and development architecture that includes the interest of every state, including Ukraine, Russia, China and all other nations. To this end, I have brought Ten Principles to the discussion, which I ask you all to read and discuss. The main idea of them is that we, as human beings, are the creative species in the universe, and therefore able to find the higher level of reason at which any problem can be solved.”