March 9, 2024 (EIRNS)—The 40th consecutive weekly online meeting of the International Peace Coalition on March 8 opened with a warning from Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche that we are continuing to flirt with nuclear war. She cited the upcoming NATO “Steadfast Defender” exercise where 90,000 troops will explicitly rehearse a war with Russia as an example of the supercharged environment. The mainstream media, rather than looking at the increasing danger of World War III, marked by the recent scandal of the leaked audio in which German military officers discuss covert means of directly entering the Ukraine war, are focusing their attention on speculation over who leaked the audio file.
Turning to the situation in Southwest Asia, she said that the conflict in Gaza is being driven by geopolitical motives and cannot be looked at separately from Ukraine. Several UN Special Rapporteurs are now calling it genocide, calling attention to the growing danger of starvation, and saying that it is intentional on the part of the Netanyahu regime. Investigation of genocide will inevitably bring us to the question of U.S. and German involvement and culpability. The Oasis Plan, as proposed by Lyndon LaRouche in 1975, provides the only way out of this ghastly situation.
Zepp-LaRouche’s strategic overview was followed by military and intelligence experts who expanded on the nature of the war danger.
Col. Richard Black (ret.), former chief of the U.S. Army’s Criminal Law Division at the Pentagon, observed that the Ukraine war was the lead item in President Biden’s “State of the Union” address, underscoring that whenever a President says he won’t send U.S. troops, it’s almost a promise to do the opposite.
German Lt. Col. Ulrich Scholz (ret.), a former NATO planner and lecturer on air warfare, warned: “NATO nations have not trained together for decades, and are not capable of going to war. If the Americans don’t do it, nobody’s going to do it.” Regarding the war propaganda in Europe, he said, “All the war talk is a face-saving exercise. They want out.” His advice? “Look for an area where we have common interests and stop the shooting.”
Helga Zepp-LaRouche interrupted the proceedings to report that the U.S. Embassy in Moscow has now advised Americans that they should leave Russia, or if they are unable to leave, they should remain in their homes. Numerous countries that routinely ape U.S. foreign policy gestures have followed suit.
Former U.S. diplomat, CIA officer, and vice-chair of the National Intelligence Council, Graham Fuller told the gathering: “The fundamental problem of world stability today lies in the inability of the United States to read the tea leaves, to understand the geopolitical shifts in the world today.”
He said that the U.S. is no longer the sole superpower; the U.S. can’t face this reality, and this is the danger. “One of the problems of democracy is that you have to galvanize the entire population to go to war.... You’ve got to demonize the enemy, demonize Putin, make it a struggle between absolute good and absolute evil.” Fuller asserted that advocacy of democracy is being used as a weapon, but we don’t support democracy when it is inconvenient. “We have a United States today which is perhaps the most ideologically driven nation in the world.”
Prof. Richard Sakwa, British Emeritus Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent, warned: “We are now in the foothills of the Third World War.” He said that we should distinguish between two levels: the world as it was structured in response to the horrors of World War II, with the UN and international law in the spirit of “Never Again”; and the paradigm which replaced this after 1989, or what he termed the “Second Cold War.”
