EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR TUESDAY JUNE 6, 2023

The Turbulent Weeks Ahead

June 5, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—Something of a proverbial “perfect storm” is brewing strategically in the immediate weeks and months ahead.

First: NATO, led by the U.K. and the U.S., is locked on a trajectory for a head-on collision with nuclear Russia in the Ukraine theater. The July 11-12 NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania is set to de facto incorporate Ukraine into NATO, leaving the de jure details for down the line—assuming there is a down-the-line after the West plays nuclear chicken with Russia.

Second: NATO’s provocative expansion into the Asia-Pacific theater has gone into high gear, as was evident at the recent IISS Shangri-La Dialogue (“Asia’s premier security and defense summit,” as its organizers like to call it), including anti-Chinese naval maneuvers by the U.S. in the Taiwan Strait timed to underscore the message.

Third: Expect a sharp escalation in financial and related warfare against the Global South over the next three months, leading up to the Aug. 22-24 BRICS summit in South Africa, as the City of London and Wall Street try to destroy any nation that dares to jump ship from the West’s sinking financial Titanic, and join the new financial architecture that is emerging around the BRICS-Plus.

Consider the latest developments around Russia, Argentina and Turkiye in that regard.

Russia’s national Security Council issued a statement on June 3 stating that its top priority is “developing measures aimed at blocking Western attempts to stage-manage an economic crisis in Russia, which carries the threat of social instability in the country.” President Putin is also weighing the security considerations of participating in the late August BRICS summit in South Africa, given the threats to arrest him—or worse—based on a spurious ICC arrest warrant.

Argentina is facing financial warfare and capital flight, along with IMF demands for deadly austerity, as it attempts to stay alive by establishing sizable yuan-based trade and investment deals with China, and with neighbor Brazil.

Turkiye’s new Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek, a former senior Merrill Lynch bond strategist, has announced that Turkiye will return to the fold of “compliance with international norms,” sharply increasing domestic interest rates purportedly to address its 40% inflation, while Goldman Sachs announced the bankers’ intent to use capital flight to force a 33% devaluation of the Turkish lira.

Russia, Argentina and Turkiye—like most of the Global South—are meanwhile working overtime to put in place trade and investment deals in local currencies with China and other nations, to try to sidestep the financial strangulation and sanctions that London’s dollar-based system means for them. The BRICS summit in Johannesburg on Aug. 22-24 could well be a decisive inflection point in the effort to devise a new global development architecture, with an included feature of a new common currency.

“This is going to be a period of sudden, sharp changes,” Helga Zepp-LaRouche told associates today. Do not expect a linear extrapolation of current events; it is likely that there will be sudden turns—some for better, perhaps most for worse. But those very sharp changes will also create the openings for organizing a greatly increased mass mobilization against the threat of nuclear war, and in favor of a new global economic order.

“We are heading into the stormiest of periods,” Zepp-LaRouche said, but this can also mean a sudden breakout of opposition to today’s policies—“if we do our job right,” she concluded.

The Schiller Institute’s June 10 online conference, “The World Needs JFK’s Vision of Peace!” will be an immediate rallying point for those policies, along with the international Days of Action surrounding that conference.