Jan. 2—The 135th consecutive weekly meeting of the International Peace Coalition (IPC) on Friday, Jan. 2, 2026, began with remarks by its initiator, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, who forecast that “2026 will be a year of even more dramatic changes.” The “all-dominating new development,” she said, was the Dec. 28-29, 2025 Ukrainian attack with 91 drones on the Valdai residence of Russian President Vladimir Putin. If Putin had been killed, the situation could have spiraled toward World War III. The Ukrainian government denied responsibility, and the CIA supported their claim. But then on Jan. 1, Russia presented evidence in the form of a well-preserved navigation system from one of the drones which had been shot down, revealing the Ukrainian origins of the attack.

The killing in Gaza and the West Bank continues, she reported, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is fêted at U.S. President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago posh resort in Palm Beach, Florida. The U.S. attack on Venezuela could lead to a continent-wide destabilization. The China-Taiwan situation is worsening. Japan and Germany, two of the Axis powers in World War II, are rearming. All of these developments underline the urgent need for a New Security and Development Architecture.

Flirting with Nuclear War

Wolfgang Effenberger is a German journalist and author of Pax Americana (2004) and The Underestimated Power (2022). He warned that the United States has upgraded its military command structure in Germany, which heightens the threat to peace. Despite initial assurances from the United States that no missile systems will be stationed there, the German government has announced that such systems are, in fact, on the agenda, including the hypersonic missiles known as Dark Eagle, if the U.S. manages to develop them in a deployable form.

This poses a threat to Russia, not one of deterrence but of a potential first strike. Effenberger described the short flight time of nuclear missiles from Germany to Russia as “a knife to the throat.” If the INF Treaty [Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty] were still in place, these missiles would have been prohibited, but U.S. President Donald Trump walked away from the treaty in his first administration. On February 5, 2026 we will see the end of the last strategic arms limitation treaty, New START. He cited nuclear arms expert Dr. Theodore Postol’s warnings against backing Russia into a corner with nuclear weapons.

Beto Almeida, a Brazilian co-founder of TeleSUR, and a member of the advisory board for the Brazilian Press Association, reviewed the world’s hot spots, with an initial emphasis on the China-Taiwan tensions and the U.S. assault on Venezuela. He then went on to review the history of how NATO had promised Russia that it would not expand eastward, and then promptly broke that promise. He recalled that U.S. State Department functionary and neocon icon Victoria Nuland had publicly admitted U.S. involvement with the Maidan coup in Ukraine, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel had publicly admitted the West’s fraudulent involvement in the Minsk Accords.

He decried the cynicism of Ukraine’s denial of involvement in the drone attack on Putin’s residence, calling it terrorism. The narrative in the West is framed in such a way as to make it appear that the threat is coming from Russia, he said, when the reality is that Russia is under attack. Almeida echoed Trump’s reported remarks in a phone call with Putin, “Thank God we didn’t give [Ukraine] Tomahawks.”

Zepp-LaRouche thanked them for their remarks, underscoring the danger of the current brinksmanship, such as the threats by NATO commanders, including U.S. General Christopher Donahue [commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa], of an attack on Kaliningrad.

IPC co-moderator Dennis Small observed that the attack on Putin’s residence meets the criterion for a nuclear response under Russian strategic doctrine. The attack could not have occurred without U.S. technical support, and Russian commentators are also increasingly pointing to the British role. The Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) doctrine of deterrence depended upon a “modicum of sanity,” which is no longer present. NATO leaders have stated explicitly that they think they can win a nuclear exchange.

Almeida described it as significant that Russia, which no longer identifies as a socialist nation, has a working partnership with China that is closer than at any time in the past. The Western nations could also change their paradigm to work with new institutions like the BRICS, rather than clinging to “the unipolar position of destroying everything.”

Proposed Initiatives

Zepp-LaRouche proposed that we should use this session of the IPC to launch several initiatives. She suggested that IPC participants should send a letter to President Trump, asking him to “discontinue the policies of the Biden administration” and halt the deployment of strategic weapons in Europe. She also proposed a combined endorsement of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Global Governance Initiative and Pope Leo XIV’s recommendation of Nicholas of Cusa’s method of the “coincidence of opposites,” using these two kindred conceptions to raise the level of the discussion globally. Almeida suggested that letters be sent not only to Trump, but also to other leaders from around the planet. During the discussion, this sentiment was echoed by other participants.

Many Germans participated in the discussion. Zepp-LaRouche expressed her disappointment in the failure of the German peace movement to mobilize in sufficient numbers to make a difference. She attributed this failure to factional squabbling, and said that we must redefine the debate from a higher vantage point, which is why she proposes a combined endorsement of Xi’s Global Governance Initiative and Pope Leo’s recommendation of Nicholas of Cusa’s method of the coincidence of opposites, to free people from the axiomatic trap of geopolitical dogma.

Economic Issues

Questions came in on economic issues, including one about the exposés of corruption in Ukraine and aid monies going to Ukrainian and U.S. officials as kickbacks, and one about the corruption in the war-machine economy. Dennis Small responded by saying, “The biggest corruption in the military budget is the military budget itself.” The military industries in the United States are owned by the financial speculators. “You’ve got these categories of pure speculation, which is what is destroying the system.”

Contrasting today’s economy with the highly successful period following the passage in the United States of the Glass-Steagall Banking Act of 1933, Small said that today we have the inverse of Glass-Steagall: Instead of low interest rates to provide incentives for production and higher rates to discourage speculation, in today’s economy, we reward speculation and suffocate production.

Almeida added that China’s production-oriented economy is a stabilizing influence globally, while the United States. has promoted a destabilizing orgy of speculation.

In her concluding remarks, Zepp-LaRouche said that she had often asked herself, why was the Age of Reason not implemented at the time of Friedrich Schiller [German poet, historian and philosopher, 1759-1805] and Wilhelm von Humboldt [Prussian philosopher, diplomat and linguist, 1767-1835], when it was so widely discussed? She came to the conclusion that science and technology had not advanced to the point where poverty could be eradicated. The average person must have economic security in order to live a life of reason. Today it is eminently feasible to eliminate poverty; the time is ripe for a new paradigm. We need “this beautiful vision” and we need to “move with power and energy to implement it.