When Russia fired its new hypersonic intermediate-range ballistic missile last Friday, decimating a Ukrainian weapons depot in Dnipro, it was effectively a message to the West that Russia was not playing around. The attack came after the United States had lifted restrictions on Ukraine’s use of long-range missiles to strike Russia—and Ukraine’s ensuing use of such missiles—crossing a red line which put the U.S. in direct, open conflict with Russia. The message should have been clear: further escalation means all options are now on the table.
But the response so far from Western officials appears to be: “Screw you.” Ukraine (read: the Pentagon) launched two more strikes into Russia’s Kursk region using long-range ATACMS missiles—one against a Russian S-400 system on Saturday, and another on an airport early Monday morning, injuring personnel there. Russia’s Defense Ministry, in reporting on the situation, included the chilling comment at the end: “Retaliatory measures are being prepared.”
Meanwhile, European NATO leaders are equally signaling their intention to escalate. The Ukraine-NATO Council convened an emergency meeting Tuesday, where they vowed they would not let the Oreshnik “change the course of the conflict.” Earlier on Monday, European defense ministers met in Berlin to discuss continuing their military support to Ukraine regardless of any change in the incoming Trump administration. All the while there are growing rumors about the deployment of NATO troops to Ukraine, and a report by Bloomberg that the UK had sent Ukraine dozens of its long-range Storm Shadow missiles to Ukraine weeks ago, as if in preparation for the current round of attacks.
This intention was made even clearer by the chair of NATO’s Military Committee Rob Bauer, who announced that the alliance is changing from merely a “defensive alliance” to one that is prepared to “shoot the archer,” i.e., Russia. Toward that end, Bauer claimed that NATO is now working to develop “deep precision strike” capabilities, leading Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov to conclude that NATO is openly discussing preemptive strikes, and that “all decency has simply been thrown aside, and true intentions are already being announced publicly.”
These developments show, more than ever before, that the world is at a point where there are no longer any guardrails, and even the slightest misstep could ignite an irreversible chain reaction of events that rapidly leads to a thermonuclear exchange. NATO is now rushing for the final trigger.
The problem with confronting Russia like this, as Donald Trump said during his September debate with Kamala Harris when pressed on whether he wants Ukraine to “win,” is that: “He’s [Putin] got a thing that other people don’t have: he’s got nuclear weapons.” Trump is right, and even this sliver of sanity is enough for the Anglo-American war hawks to want to create a situation in which peace is impossible. However, what Trump has so far failed to mention or propose is an actual solution to this crisis. This question is taken up by the Schiller Institute’s newly-released report, focused on transforming what is a global crisis—the end of the reigning “rules-based order”—into the birth of a new era, where sovereign yet cooperating nation-states join together in the task of the type of economic development common to all.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute, states in the introduction of the report: “Consider the potential if the United States and Europe were to cooperate with the BRICS, and with China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), to unleash science-driven industrialization worldwide. There are now 151 nations from all continents that have joined the BRI…. The obvious and easy way to overcome the danger of war and confrontation is to convince the countries of the Collective West—the European nations and even the U.S.—to stop confrontation and adopt a mode of cooperation with this growing Global Majority.”
This will also be the subject of the upcoming Dec. 7-8 Schiller Institute conference, which will be a crucial organizing event to take advantage of this historic opportunity.
