When former President Donald Trump accepted the Republican nomination for President Thursday night—six days after being hit in the ear by a would-be assassin’s bullet, which was less than an inch away from being a kill-shot—a frail President Joe Biden was in isolation, diagnosed with COVID, and under enormous pressure to end his campaign for re-election. Lost in the midst of this drama is that Ukrainian soldiers are dying in large numbers daily in NATO’s proxy war against Russia; children are continuing to be slaughtered by Israel Defense Forces using U.S. weapons in Gaza and the West Bank; and NATO moved ahead with its plan for “Global NATO” at its Washington, D.C. summit, committed to a confrontation with China in the not-so-distant future. Each day, NATO forces are at the edge of crossing “red lines,” providing Ukraine’s shattered military with more powerful and longer-range missiles to target Russia, taking the risk that an “accident” could lead to an escalation, and even the use of nuclear weapons.
It is in this context that Helga Zepp-LaRouche, chairwoman of the Schiller Institute, described the strategic situation as “fragile,” stating that humanity is “an inch away from total chaos,” and calling for the urgent convening of a “Council of Reason” of “Elder Statesmen,” to “explore the potential for a new international security and development architecture, which can take into account the interests of every single country on the planet.” Yet even as she described the situation as a “Sarajevo 2.0,” referring to the assassination which triggered World War I, she pointed hopefully to the diplomatic initiative of Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán as a pathway out of the crisis.
Given the uncertainties surrounding the assassination attempt against Trump, and the long history of the deployment of an International Assassination Bureau [[1]] against statesmen pursuing peace, it is conceivable that the targeting of Trump was not an arbitrary decision made by a “lone assassin”—which is the preliminary conclusion reached by the FBI—but a response by a panicked establishment to the end of their Unipolar Order. Perhaps Orbán’s July 11 meeting with Trump in Mar-a-Lago, Florida had something to do with the shooting two days later, in Butler County, Pennsylvania.
A ‘Security Disaster’
The many unanswered questions about the attempted assassination of Trump have given rise to speculation of malfeasance by the Secret Service. Was it incompetence which led to the failure to cover the roof of a building from which the shots were fired by the 20-year old shooter, a mere 140 meters from Trump? Why was there not better coordination between local law enforcement and the Secret Service? Given that it was known that there was a suspicious figure on the roof, why was Trump allowed to proceed into the potential line of fire?
Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle acknowledged multiple failures by her agency, and called it “unacceptable.” There have been calls for her firing, and Congressmen are demanding a “thorough investigation.” Given the multiple examples of official cover-ups of past assassinations, such as those of President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., it is not surprising that there is wide-spread skepticism surrounding this event.
Zepp-LaRouche said she believes this must be addressed, saying that Trump can “make sure that the investigation this time does not lead to a cover-up.” She hoped that Trump “learned the lesson” from his failure to declassify the documents on the Kennedy assassination, as the ongoing cover-up protects the security and intelligence agencies involved in assassinations, as well as in operations such as Russiagate, which undermined his Presidency.
A Volatile Political Game
Given the hyper-polarization in the U.S., the assassination attempt was unfortunately not something which was unexpected. The angry rhetoric of the campaign has become virulent. To Trump supporters, President Biden is not just too old and perhaps demented, but is also accused of leading a leftist/socialist/communist assault on America’s core values, with the backing of the Chinese Communist Party. To Biden’s backers, Donald Trump’s MAGA movement has attracted extreme right-wing, white nationalists, who cheer on their leader’s authoritarian drive to shut down the border, to keep out immigrants who are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Trump has called Biden a “brain-dead zombie,” while Biden supporters refer to Trump as a “Hitler.” On a private call with donors on July 8, Biden said, “It’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.”
Two weeks before the attempted assassination, on July 1, LaRouche independent candidate for U.S. Senate Diane Sare issued a statement warning of a “possible threat” to Trump. She wrote that “well-placed intelligence sources report that the anti-Trump extremists within the U.S. political establishment are becoming increasingly desperate to prevent Donald Trump’s reelection by any means necessary, including possible assassination.” She added that she takes this possibility “very seriously, especially after the assassination attempt two months ago against Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico.” She said, “They may fear that Trump would be freer in a second term, not having to worry about running again.”
Orbán’s Search For A Negotiated Settlement
While the NATO summit mapped out a strategy for Permanent War in defense of its collapsing and increasingly-rejected Unipolar Order, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, holding the six-month presidency of the Council of the European Union, continued his efforts for a negotiated settlement to end the war in Ukraine. A central feature of his activity was highlighted in an interview with the Financial Times (FT), regarding his July 11 meeting with Donald Trump. That meeting followed Orbán’s July 2 meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, his July 5 meeting with Vladimir Putin, and his July 8 meeting with China’s Xi Jinping.
The FT reported that:
Donald Trump will quickly demand peace talks between Russia and Ukraine if he wins November’s U.S. presidential election and has developed ‘well-founded plans’ for doing so, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has claimed.... That prospect means the EU should reopen direct diplomatic communication with Russia and start ‘high-level’ negotiations with China to find a peaceful solution to the war in Ukraine, the Hungarian prime minister said in a private letter to EU leaders following consultations in Moscow and Beijing.
“We can expect no peace initiative coming from [Trump] until the elections. I can however surely state that shortly after his election victory, he will not wait until his inauguration, but will be ready to act as a peace broker immediately,” Orbán wrote in his letter sent to European Council president Charles Michel and other EU leaders.
Not reported by the FT, were comments by Orbán’s political director, Balázs Orbán (no relation), who was also present at the Mar-a-Lago meeting with Trump. He reports that the Prime Minister and the former President discussed, among other things, the “unprecedented divisions and calls for violence [that] are taking place in America.” Orbán’s political director observed that “the West clearly thinks that it is at war with Russia, and that all means are permitted in war. In other words, anyone who speaks against the war consensus is the internal enemy against whom all means are permitted. This approach dominates in the Western press against the pro-peace politicians and this affects Hungary as well.”
Sabotage by EU
Following Orbán’s diplomatic visits, officials in the European Union were so upset that some began working to strip away Hungary’s powers during its role as president of the EU Council. Proposals were even made to cut Hungary’s presidency short. When Ursula von der Leyen was re-elected as president of the European Commission on July 18, she attacked Orbán’s diplomatic meetings as an “appeasement mission,” not a “peace mission.” As part of the campaign to “Trump-proof” NATO and Europe, she insisted that Europe needed to take the next step in creating a “European Union of defense,” a “single market” that would make Europe less “dependent on foreign allies.”
Considered within the context of the bellicose NATO summit in Washington and the nearly-successful assassination of candidate Trump, this single-minded obsession with militarization to defend a collapsing world order, exemplified by von der Leyen’s comments, should provide an added impetus for Zepp-LaRouche’s call for the convening of a Council of Reason of Elder Statesmen. She said that the near-miss, by less than an inch, of the murder of Trump can provide an image for people to “imagine that that is how far away we are from World War III.”
It is not enough to cheer for Orban, Xi, or leaders of the Global South, to resolve the present existential crisis. A pathway to peace exists. It is up to citizens of all nations to mobilize for the new strategic and development architecture which is so urgently needed.
[[1]]: The LaRouche Organization has produced a well-documented report on this: [[“Stop NATO’s World War: Dismantle the International Assassination Bureau.”]][[https://laroucheorganization.com/stop-natos-world-war-dismantle-international-assassination-bureau]]
