On Friday, the eyes of the world were focused on the White House meeting between the Collective Biden and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, on the critical question of whether or not the White House will approve the London-authored policy of unleashing NATO’s precision-guided long-range missiles against Russia, using Ukraine as their cat’s-paw. Prior to the D.C. meeting, Secretary of State Blinken and British Foreign Secretary Lammy had met in Kiev with Zelenskyy, and leaked to the media that the deal had been agreed upon, but to not expect a formal announcement coming out of the Biden-Starmer meeting.
As expected, White House National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby, speaking just ahead of the Biden-Starmer meeting, would only repeat: “I would not expect there to be any announcements on this coming out of the meeting today. There’s been no change to our policy ... with respect to the long-range strike capability inside Russia, and I’d leave it at that.” Nor was any announcement made after the meeting. Kirby did admit that Russian President Putin’s stark warning of Sept. 12 about the grave consequences should such a decision be made, had in fact registered in Washington: “So, yeah, we take these comments seriously.” But Kirby was quick to add dismissively: “But it is not something that we haven’t heard before.”
Whether or not the White House has actually hit the pause button, or is merely planning to announce their approval a few days later, as has often happened with major escalations regarding Ukraine, the underlying situation facing the world has not changed.
As Russia’s Ambassador to the United Nations said Friday, echoing comments made by President Putin a day earlier: “If such a decision [to approve Ukraine’s use of long-range missiles] is made, that means NATO countries are starting an open war against Russia. In that case, we will obviously be forced to make certain decisions, with all the attendant consequences for Western aggressors.” It doesn’t matter if Ukrainians are the ones to pull the final trigger, he went on, “NATO would become directly involved in military action against a nuclear power. I don’t think I have to explain what consequences that would have.”
This is an “extremely alarming situation,” Helga Zepp-LaRouche told a meeting of the International Peace Coalition on Friday. “I think we are at a point of no return. I think it is a completely different matter than everything we have seen so far. It brings the danger of a nuclear escalation as close as possibly days away.”
The danger, of course, does not come from a one-off decision to breach the next escalation in Ukraine, or from one president or presidential candidate who happens to be more bombastic than another. The danger comes from the implosion of the current unipolar system, which is utterly incapable of—or unwilling to—provide a viable future to the citizens of the whole world.
But a solution is needed, and the question remains: Why do so many ignore this existential danger even when it’s staring them in the face? Why don’t more people have the courage, or the foresight, to act in a moment when the world is in a state of turmoil and breakdown? Where will a change come from?
This was the subject taken up by Zepp-LaRouche in her decision to create the International Peace Coalition—a unique framework capable of intervening into a situation lacking enough leaders with the courage to pull the world back from the brink. Now, over a year later, the coalition is beginning to show its true strength.
Confronting this fundamental question during Friday’s meeting, Dr. Mubarak Awad, the co-founder of Nonviolence International and one of the leaders in the Freedom Flotilla movement to break the siege on Gaza, posed the following: “What, as an individual, as a group, as a church, as a synagogue, as a mosque … what can they do?... They have to have a voice—the church cannot be quiet, they cannot be silent. Religious people cannot be quiet, cannot be silent….
“What happened in Hiroshima in Japan—now they are 100 times bigger, larger, and more devastating than ever. They are more serious and we cannot afford another war or a war with a nuclear bomb. So we, as human beings, as individuals, as an activist, as peacemakers, we have to tell people who are surrounding us, who are our neighbors, who are officials in any countries, that this is a disaster which has to be stopped.”
His simple but powerful point—that we must develop and use our voice—was further developed by Zepp-LaRouche in her closing of the meeting:
“I think that is why we have to really work to overcome the underlying axiomatic contradiction, and move from geopolitics into a New Paradigm of the one humanity first. National interests, civilizational interests are good; they have a place. National cultures are wonderful. But I think we have to move humanity from an historical standpoint to the idea that we have to be one humanity. I think that that is not a utopia. If we survive as a human species on this planet, it will have to be that way. If you think about the longer arc of history, if we are in 100 years like little boys kicking each other against the knee, we will not even get there….
“Next month in Kazan, the BRICS will have their annual summit. A lot of new members will be announced, and if we allow ourselves to be an adversary to that new economic system that is emerging, then war is inevitable. Therefore, I think we have to do everything possible so that this idea—that we have to have enemies just to make the military-industrial complex happy and their profit rates—this is an idea which has to go. We have to have a retooling of those industrial capacities which are wasted right now in military production, or else we will not survive. I think it requires a mental jump. We have to think about humanity and the history of mankind in the universe in a completely different fashion.”
The necessary, not the practical, must now guide our words and actions. Otherwise mankind may soon find itself extinct. As Zepp-LaRouche concluded: “We have the most important two months ahead of us in the history of mankind.”
