EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR THURSDAY JUNE 22, 2023

Zepp-LaRouche on Building an International Peace Coalition

June 21, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—In her June 21 weekly online Live Dialogue, Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche made the following opening remarks:

It’s a quickly developing world, indeed. First of all, the visit of Secretary of State Blinken in China seemed to go well. At least he met with the Chinese Foreign Minister, then he met with President Xi Jinping for half an hour, who afterwards said the meeting was productive. Now, unfortunately, I think even before Blinken left China, President Biden, in a private fundraising dinner, called Xi Jinping a “dictator.” And that has caused a very angry reaction by the Chinese Foreign Ministry, and their spokeswoman Mao Ning called it an absolutely unacceptable provocation.

The Chinese have said repeatedly that what Western leaders say doesn’t mean much. And then when Blinken says one thing, but then President Biden says something like that, it puts the whole thing into question again. I think this is really a problem!

You have at the same time, the Chinese delegation with Prime Minister Li Qiang, in both Germany, and then tomorrow going to France, for an inter-government dialogue, which according to the preliminary reports we have here from Germany was not bad, and that was mainly due to the composition of the delegation, where on the German side, Foreign Minister Baerbock and Defense Minister Pistorius did not participate. So, let’s say, there is a stronger impulse and a statement by German industry right now that it is totally against their interest to “de-risk” with China, which in any case is just some other word for decoupling.

The reports coming from Ukraine are that the so-called Ukrainian offensive did not really go well, which poses the question very seriously of bringing this horrible war to an end, which is just costing more human lives.

And in that context, I must say that the statement which was put out, even before his speech in New Hampshire by presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., where he again quoted the statement of the former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who said that the (Ukraine- Russia) peace talks were actually on the verge of succeeding in March 2022, and that it was then the intervention of especially the British Boris Johnson who ruined that, because Johnson gave the message to Zelenskyy that NATO insists that the war go on. And then Kennedy said that he demands that Biden makes two apologies: one to the American people because he has led the U.S. army de facto into a terrible war which is totally against the interests of the American people; and secondly, more importantly to the Ukrainian people, because it is destroying their country.

I think this is very important. I did not have time to read the Kennedy speech which he gave yesterday—I just saw some notes about it: He is calling for the U.S. to return to the peace policy of John Kennedy. I mean, this is essentially what we had put out in an appeal to the next President of the United States to do exactly that. We have started to collect many signatures from around the world on that statement, because lots of people in the whole world want the United States to become a power of peace, again.

So, I think this is very encouraging. Because you have Trump, who absolutely found some harsh words on the war policy, who will be a candidate no matter what the legal prosecution of Trump will be. So you will have in all likelihood, Trump on the Republican side, and in all likelihood Kennedy on the Democratic side, which means that there will be, for the first time in a very long time, a real election campaign in the United States.

Now, I have been warning Americans against falling into an election mania, because, as George Washington said when he left office, people should not fall into the trap of political parties, because parties tend to be interest representatives, and therefore not the national interest. And especially because the main decisions about where the world will go, war or peace, financial collapse or a new paradigm of a new economic system, these decisions in all likelihood will be made long before November 5, 2024, and therefore, it is important to keep an international focus on where the world is moving. So, I think this is a very interesting environment, where options do exist.

The danger of war remains extremely high. Not only did Russia now put tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, but there are reports that the U.S. is talking about putting tactical nuclear weapons into Romania and Poland. The Russians have answered very strongly against that, because that’s the places where the American missile defense systems have been installed, and it’s very clear that they can be transformed from defensive into offensive systems in an extremely short period of time.

I can only say, the war danger is not less, it’s growing, and this is why our International Peace Coalition efforts are so extremely important. We had the second, very successful discussion—more people, more forces are joining. And I think that that is definitely an answer we have to have against this growing war danger.