The Lead

by Dennis Small (EIRNS) — Aug. 08, 2024

On Sunday August 4, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov—one of the country’s most senior diplomats—delivered studied, sobering remarks in an interview with “Rossiya-1” TV channel. He announced that “the era of Moscow’s unilateral concessions [to the U.S. and NATO] is now definitely over.” He also reported on “extremely disturbing” terrorist plans against Russia—apparently including a plot by the U.S.-backed Ukrainian government to assassinate President Putin.

But arguably most significant of all was Ryabkov’s assertion that “the problem is that there are no circuit breakers anymore…. Strikes on the territory of Russia are allowed. The Americans’ assurances that no such decisions have been made and no indulgences were granted to Kiev, are worthless.”

As if to prove Ryabkov right, just two days later some 1,000 elite Ukrainian troops launched a major incursion deep into Russia’s Kursk Region. The Biden administration, the European Union, and leading trans-Atlantic think tanks all jumped to defend Ukraine’s action. The Pandora’s box of systematic NATO-backed land and air strikes into Russian territory has now been opened.

“The problem is that there are no circuit breakers anymore.…”

The danger of sparking a global world war around the Israeli genocide in Gaza and provocations across Southwest Asia is nearly as great as that coming from the Ukraine theater. How else to read the immediate presence, after the July 31 Israeli targeted assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iran, of U.S. Centcom Commander Gen. Michael Kurilla in Tel Aviv and of Secretary of the Russian Security Council Sergey Shoigu in Tehran?

There are two additional features of this strategic breakdown crisis which make the situation more dangerous still.

First: Wartime censorship and crackdowns on free speech and assembly are rapidly being put in place across the Western world, lest any “narrative” other than the official one be whispered in any corner of the realm. The efforts to intimidate and silence outspoken critics, such as Scott Ritter and Tulsi Gabbard; similar efforts underway in Germany and other EU countries against various media; and the rapid growth of the Nazi Molfar/CCD hit lists, funded by the U.S. and U.K. governments—these are all components of the war drive described above.

Second: The breakdown of the speculation-infested trans-Atlantic financial system is leading to violent financial flows, such as those behind this week’s Black Monday meltdown of stock markets around the world. Global South nations are being subjected to levels of IMF-imposed austerity and looting that make stable governments impossible—opening the doors to de facto NATO-led military occupation. This is making the Global South’s definitive break with the dollar-denominated speculative system all the more necessary, and possible, at the upcoming Oct. 22-24 BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia.

Deputy Foreign Minister Ryabkov has issued the needed warning: “Those who listen only to themselves, sitting in Washington, in Brussels, in Warsaw, or wherever, ought to pay attention.”

Better still, Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche has pointed to the solution to that warning:

“I think we are absolutely on the edge of the apocalypse on two fronts,” Zepp-LaRouche stated during her Aug. 7 weekly webcast. “One is naturally the Middle East, and the other one is the escalation of the situation in Ukraine. I think this requires an extraordinary mobilization of many people and many forces around the world to shift the situation…. The New Paradigm [means] to think of the One Humanity; how we will live together 100 years from now; how we can overcome all the supposedly so important conflicts, and really think of what it is that unites us as the human species.”

To that end, plan to attend the Aug. 9 meeting of the International Peace Coalition: “Final Call Before World War Three—Or First Steps to a New Peace Paradigm?”