There is now a shooting war in Europe—the Azerbaijan-Armenian strife in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, with some reports claiming thousands killed. As of this moment, there are mediation moves through the UN, and through the OSCE Minsk Group, whose principals—the heads of state of France, Russia and the U.S.—may be conferring by phone today and tomorrow, at the initiation of French President Macron. Despite the fact that there are longstanding issues present in the South Caucasus, the significance of there being live-fire strife in this region, lies in its location in the geography of the confrontation zones being tightened along the borders of Russia and China.
In Belarus, there is a regime-change assault in play, not just against the government of President Aleksandr Lukashenko, but to destabilize Russia. It is getting hotter. The U.K., Canada, and certain other nations have now unilaterally declared sanctions against Belarus President Lukashenko. Meantime, from Russia comes a very stern statement from the director of the Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergei Naryshkin. He identifies U.S. agencies by name—the CIA and Department of Defense, and State Department-associated NGOs, for their complicity in training of operatives, done in third countries, to act inside Belarus to further instability.
Any one of these European hot spots, plus the friction zones on China’s borders, can be the source of the “little war” that turns into the big war. Nonetheless, one of the leading U.S. advocates of this foreign policy of strife, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, is proceeding on his European tour, giving orders right and left for nations to line up against Russia and China. Today Pompeo reached a new low, by conducting geopolitics in the name of religion. He spoke at a Vatican conference titled, “Advancing and Defending Religious Freedom Through Diplomacy.” He said, “Nowhere is religious freedom under assault more than it is inside of China…. [The] CCP, frightened by its own lack of democratic legitimacy, works day and night to snuff out the lamp of freedom, especially religious freedom, on a horrifying scale.” Next week, Pompeo is going to East Asia, to meet in Japan with the foreign ministers of the QUAD—intended to be an anti-China bloc, including Australia and India — and to also visit South Korea and Mongolia.
This is all happening amidst turmoil during the election countdown in the U.S., being deliberately stoked as a regime-change operation against the United States, and the ongoing coup against President Donald Trump. However, questions relevant to this world picture were not even raised during last night’s frenzied exchanges in the first presidential debate. Even ignoring all the media and pundit spin, a higher-level approach is urgent.
Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche, in today’s weekly webcast, addressed this. In the realm of foreign relations, she stressed that there are “red lines” to respect. For example, if the U.S. puts military forces into Taiwan, or attacks islands in the South China Sea, Chinese representatives have stated that this would be grounds for attacking the bases from which such attackers came, and fighting “to the end.” She stressed, “This is the language which is clearly a reflection of the fact that anybody in China or Russia who looks at the situation as a totality, at the absolute escalation, and puts out clear warnings that there are red lines, these countries are not going to capitulate. That obviously means that we are on the verge of a large conflict, in the worst case, World War III.
“As we approach the U.S. election, I think that we have to move in a completely different direction, because any provocation to try to create a situation where the re-election of Trump would be made so chaotic, with a possible coup in the U.S., with street violence, and with an event of international nature—a military incident—this is really an acute and realistic danger.
“This is why we keep demanding that there should be a summit of the major nuclear powers, even if it looks like it is not likely. The more the danger is increasing, the more urgent a summit becomes. Because we are sitting on a true powderkeg, which could really end up in a catastrophe.”
