This transcript appears in the February 25, 2022 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

[Print version of this transcript]

HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE

Long-Term Survival: A New International Security Architecture

The following is the edited transcript of the keynote presentation by Helga Zepp-LaRouche to Panel 2 of the Schiller Institute conference, “100 Seconds to Midnight on the Doomsday Clock: We Need a New Security Architecture!” on February 19, 2022. Mrs. LaRouche is the founder and Chairwoman of the Schiller Institute.

Dennis Small (moderator): Helga Zepp-LaRouche was Lyndon LaRouche’s wife and closest political collaborator for decades. She is known to most of you as the founder and leader of the Schiller Institute, as a scholar of Nicholas of Cusa and Friedrich Schiller, and the author of recent initiatives such as Operation Ibn Sina and the Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites. She’s known also as the “Silk Road Lady.” And of course, she is the widow of the great American statesman and world citizen Lyndon LaRouche.

With Mr. LaRouche, Helga traveled to over 40 nations around the world, meeting with prominent leaders and thinkers, and with him, she shared a profound commitment to the full sovereignty and development of every nation, on every continent.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: Good afternoon, or good evening, depending on where you are.

If one looks at the present strategic situation from above—from the long historical arc of history, how should mankind give itself institutions that guarantee his long-term survival, as well as from the present dynamic between a rising China, and Asia in general, and a failing Western liberal system—it seems to be obvious that the outcome of this historical era must be a new paradigm in international relations. The continuation of geopolitics, which presently has brought us to the brink of nuclear war, and the madness of which [there] is nowhere a clearer expression than in the military doctrine expressed in the Global Lightning maneuver—which just took place and which assumes protracted nuclear war-fighting—geopolitics, which has brought the world two world wars in the 20th Century, and which, in the age of nuclear weapons, would lead to the annihilation of mankind, has to be replaced. It has to be replaced with an international security architecture that guarantees the security interests of every nation on the planet, including Russia and China, as well as the developing countries.

Set the Record Straight

The idea is attributed to Confucius, that the first thing to solve a problem, is to bring the notions in order; because if the notions are in disorder, it leads to misunderstanding which leads to quarrels, which leads to the shaking of the foundations of the state, and there can be no harmony in the world.

Therefore, it is one of the most urgent tasks, to clarify the difference between the historical truth of what happened during the last 30 years, since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the official “narrative” told in the Western mainstream media, and which dominates in these days the Munich Security Conference, where you find a good representation of the elite of the NATO faction. It seems that Secretary of State Tony Blinken and German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock seemed to be joined at the hip—which is quite an amazing spectacle.

The official line of these forces is that Putin is the aggressor, that Russia is the only country that changed borders in Europe in the post-War period by force, namely in Crimea, and that the only relevant fight is between the liberal democracies, which are naturally good, and the aggressive, autocratic states, which are obviously bad; that NATO never did anything wrong; and that Russia is denying the right of sovereign countries such as Ukraine, to choose the alliance they want to be part of. The last thing certain of these media and politicians want is a precise investigation of how this present situation evolved.

But to set the record straight is the indispensable precondition to arrive at a positive resolution of the present situation. The collapse of the Soviet Union did not prove the superiority of the Western liberal model. It collapsed for exactly the reasons identified by Lyndon LaRouche in 1984: its adherence to the Ogarkov doctrine; the refusal to accept President Reagan’s offer to cooperate in what was later called the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which was authored by Lyndon LaRouche; and the clinging to the principles of what the Soviet economist Preobrazhensky had termed “primitive socialist accumulation.” Pope John Paul II warned emphatically that the West should not draw the conclusion that they were morally superior, and as a proof, he pointed to the condition of the developing sector, which was poor and underdeveloped as a byproduct of that Western liberal system.

In this period, between the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact, there was a real chance for something completely new: Communism had disappeared; the West had no more enemy; Lyndon LaRouche and his movement had proposed, first, the Productive Triangle Paris-Berlin-Vienna, and then, the Eurasian Land-Bridge, as the basis for the creation of a peace order for the 21st Century.

The former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock has repeatedly argued, emphatically, that the Soviet Union did not represent a threat in the last years of its existence, and that the Cold War did not end with the Soviet Union, but had actually ended two years earlier, because Gorbachev had agreed to the democratization of Eastern Europe and various internal reforms; which is why a large part of the Russian population hated him, and regarded him as a traitor, unlike people in the West, and in Germany in particular, where large crowds chanted “Gorby! Gorby! Gorby!”

Promises Made and Broken

The argument that there was never a promise to Russia that NATO would not expand to the East, is a blatant lie, which has been exposed by contemporary witnesses such as Matlock. There is a discussion by then U.S. Secretary of State James Baker III on Feb. 9, 1990, where he confirmed to Gorbachev that NATO would “not move one inch to the East.” And very recently, in a spectacular fashion, by Roland Dumas, then French foreign minister at that time. Obviously, because of the acute war danger, he broke his silence of many years five days ago, and testified in a long interview with the French website Les Crises, what he had told our French representative Jacques Cheminade, privately, already three years ago: That in those days, a very important negotiation about disarmament and demilitarization of the Warsaw Pact were going on. Dumas said:

And the discussion started as follows. It was the Russian diplomat through Gorbachev, but also through the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Shevardnadze who asked to speak, and who said, “We, the Russian delegation, want to know what’s going to happen to NATO’s armament in the context of disarmament? And we demand,”—I remember very well; he was formal—“that the Allied troops observe two obligations.” The first one, in which he was very sentimental, is the one related to the maintenance of monuments in all Soviet countries to the glory of the Soviet army. The second is that there should be a commitment of Warsaw Pact and NATO troops, and there should be no movement of NATO troops in the regions of the Soviet pact that are going to be disarmed. And on the question, why that was not written down in the actual treaties, he said: “This was not mentioned. This is to say that people, as cautious as the Americans, the people of the Atlantic Alliance, we did not ask that it be recorded. It is possible, but in relation to the character of the general discussion, that is to say, an attempt to disarm in order to put an end to the risk of war, because that is what counted, and to prepare for another period in the context of the time which was disarmament, it was logical.”

So this discussion took place: It took place, first of all, because the Russians asked for it, because we supported it—myself, first; and the Americans, too; and the Germans, of course.

Jack Matlock emphasizes that the promise that even before the end of the Soviet Union, it was generally accepted that security had to be security for all, and that there was an argument in which Gorbachev justified the reduction of armament to the Soviet military. Matlock also recounts that President Bush Sr. advised the Ukrainians, in one of his last speeches in Kiev, when there was still a Soviet Union, that they should join Gorbachev’s voluntary federation that he was proposing, and he warned the Ukrainians against “suicidal nationalism.”

Let’s look at the video of German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher who confirmed that very clearly.

[video in German]

Narrator: In return for German unity, the West promised not to let NATO advance further east. In Washington, the then foreign minister makes far-reaching promises.

Hans-Dietrich Genscher: We agreed that there is no intention to expand the NATO defense area to the East. That applies, by the way, not only with regard to the G.D.R. [East Germany] which we don’t want to incorporate there, but that applies quite generally.

[screen display: “1999”: video shows Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and three foreign ministers at a podium. Behind them are the U.S., NATO, and other flags.]

Narrator: A short-lived promise. The first East European countries are admitted to NATO. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright beams as she hugs her counterparts from Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. A threatening grip from Moscow’s point of view. But they are too weak to react. [end video]

So, you have Dumas, Genscher, Matlock, who all confirm that these promises were made, and clearly countering the official statement that such promises were never made, which is always repeated by Secretary General of NATO [Jens] Stoltenberg.

Just today, Spiegel magazine in Germany reports about a recently surfaced, previously secret, classified document in the British National Archives, which was discovered by the U.S. political scientist Joshua Shifrinson, about a meeting between the political directors of the foreign ministries of the U.S., Great Britain, France, and Germany in Bonn on the 6th of March in 1991. The document says that all agreed that NATO membership for East European countries would be unacceptable. Jürgen Chrobog, representative of Bonn, is quoted, that—

An expansion of NATO beyond the Elbe would be unacceptable. Therefore, NATO membership should not be offered to Poland and others.

The U.S. representative at that meeting, Raymond Seitz, agreed that they promised to the Soviets in the 2+4 talks, that NATO would not expand formally, nor informally, to the east.

For Lack of a New European Security Architecture …

Spiegel notes that the Russians already complained in 1993, long before Putin, that the expansion of NATO to the east would violate the spirit of the 2+4 talks. It was not written down, but both sides acted in 1990 in good faith, something which seems to have [been] lost completely.

That good faith was, however, not shared by all even then. Instead of a new system that would provide security for all, which could also have been Russia joining NATO, the neocons in the U.S. and their British colleagues started the Project for a New American Century, which was a project to build an unipolar world. The irrational exuberance did not only take over the markets, as Alan Greenspan noted at a certain point in the ’90s, but it was the euphoria that the Western liberal system had “won” the Cold War, which became the narrative that replaced the historical fact.

The silly and utterly unproven, wrong argument by Francis Fukuyama about the “End of History,” meaning that Liberal Democracy would expand to every country on the planet, started to lay a smokescreen over the minds of the Western Establishments. The means by which this unipolar world was supposed to come into being, however, were not so pretty. Color revolutions—orange, rose, white, yellow, Arab—almost the entire spectrum of the rainbow was promoted through billions of dollars: $5 billion for Ukraine alone, for NGOs, before 2014, as Victoria Nuland bragged openly. It included support for a coup in Kiev in 2014, which brought openly-confessing Nazi elements in the tradition of Stepan Bandera to power, networks which had been maintained by the intelligence services of NATO, in such organizations as the Anti-Bolshevik Nations Bloc in the post-War period for a potential confrontation with the Soviet Union.

So, these intelligence services knew exactly who did the coup on the Maidan. It was in reaction to the brutal suppression of the Russian-speaking people in the Ukraine, that people in Crimea voted, in a referendum, that they wanted to join Russia; so there was no forced change in the borders of Crimea. It was a legitimate referendum of the population of Crimea.

Naturally in this process, the UN Charter and international law had to be replaced by the “rules-based order.” That happened with the great support of [former UK Prime Minister] Tony Blair, who argued in 1999, in Chicago, for humanitarian interventionist wars, the “Right to Protect”; that the end of the Peace of Westphalia had to be declared.

The circumstances of Sept. 11, 2001, of which Lyndon had warned nine months before it happened, as a “Reichstag’s fire” about to happen, eliminated a good part of the civil rights in the United States, and laid the basis for the endless wars, starting with Afghanistan—the first war based on lies. What followed were the lies of [Secretary of State] Colin Powell in front of the UN in 2003 about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; followed by the wars in Libya, murdering [Muammar] Gaddafi; the attempt to topple the Assad government in Syria; and directly and indirectly many other military operations.

Millions of dead and injured, millions of refugees were the result.

Did all of this serve the interest of the United States, or the West in general?

A gigantic blowback was the result. Putin, who in the first years of his Presidency had a lot of admirers in the West, became increasingly unpopular with the architects of the unipolar world, because he did not submit to the “rules-based order.” He started to reassert the role of Russia as a world player. In 2008, in Georgia, and in 2015 in Syria, and now, recently, by demanding that NATO’s eastward expansion not only be stopped, but reversed, to the status of 1997; and by demanding written, legally binding guarantees by the U.S. and NATO, that Ukraine would never become a member; that there should not be offensive weapons systems along the Russian border; and that NATO not advance farther to the east.

If one considers the history of the last 30 years, this is actually a quite modest request; also in light of the fact that Ukraine does not fulfill the requirements of the NATO Treaty, Articles 5 and 10, as Gen. [Harald] Kujat, the former Inspector of the Bundeswehr, correctly argues.

The Russia-China Joint Statement

In the meantime, another aspect of blowback to the “rules-based” order has taken prominence. China, which had its own design for a Eurasian Land-Bridge, reacted very well to the programs proposed by the Schiller Institute for a New Silk Road, but felt initially too economically weak to carry through with these plans after the so-called “Asia Crisis” in 1997, in which the currencies of some Asian countries were brutally speculated down by such people as [George] Soros, robbing countries in a week of what their populations had worked for in decades.

China’s reaction to this experience and general aims of poverty alleviation worldwide, was the announcement of the New Silk Road by President Xi Jinping in 2013 in Kazakhstan. This largest infrastructure project in history has become a huge success story with nearly 150 countries participating. But especially the continuing economic rise of China as the locomotive of the Belt and Road Initiative, caused the proponents of the unipolar world and their financiers in the City of London, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley to more and more characterize Russia and China as “autocratic,” “authoritarian,” and worse.

These attacks had predictably that effect which was the nightmare of such people as Zbigniew Brzezinski, Dick Cheney, and the like, namely, that these two countries—Russia and China—have created an unprecedented partnership. On February 4, at the beginning of the Winter Olympic Games in Beijing, President Putin and President Xi Jinping signed a document for a comprehensive strategic partnership which, according to their own descriptions, represents a model for future international relations among nations, which will be based on the mutual pursuit of the interest of the other, in the full spectrum of economic, political, cultural, and military fields.

This agreement has formally ended the idea of an unipolar world. It is a fact of history, there to stay, not least because it combines the marginal military advantage of Russia with the strength of the Chinese economy; and in practice, it makes such threats as were uttered by the two unnamed White House officials—that the U.S. would prevent Russia, in case of an invasion of Ukraine, from diversifying from oil and gas, and deny it access to advanced technologies—it made it obsolete.

It is time now for all clear-thinking and peace-loving people in the West to review the strategic and historical situation, without prejudice or ideological bias. If mankind is supposed to have a secure and happy future, we have to give up thinking in geopolitical terms of confrontation, and replace it with a design for cooperation of all nations for a shared future of humanity. Because that is what we have, for good or for bad.

A New ‘Peace of Westphalia’

It is past time to declare NATO as obsolete, and replace it with an international security architecture, which guarantees the security interests of all nations on the planet. Rather than treating the new comprehensive partnership by Russia and China as a hostile entity which must be combatted with a new arms race, the nations of Europe, the United States, and other continents should signal the willingness to engage in a new Peace of Westphalia negotiation, which will be based on the interest of the other, and the common good of all. It was clear to the forces who negotiated this treaty, from 1644 to 1648, that there could be no winner in the continuation of the Thirty-Years’ War, which was really the culmination of 150 years of religious war in Europe, in which one-third of the people and assets had been destroyed.

How much more it would be clear to all sides today that a continuation of the confrontation, including the threat of nuclear extinction of the entire human species, will leave nobody as a winner.

Such a new Treaty of Westphalia must be based on principles which are in cohesion with natural law and the lawfulness of the physical universe. It must reflect the beauty of the human species, which is the only known—so far—endowed with creative reason, which separates us from all animals and other forms of life. Naturally, like the original Treaty of Westphalia, it will have to deal with all specific topics, such as the Minsk II Agreements and other territorial disputes; but also the great challenges of our time, such as a world health [delivery] system to combat pandemics; solving the world famine of Biblical dimensions that [World Food Program Executive Director] David Beasley is talking about; poverty alleviation worldwide; and other questions of the common good of all of mankind.

The immediate task ahead is to organize the cooperation of all countries with projects of the Belt and Road Initiative, which are already laid out in a much more comprehensive way in the report we published in 2014, The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge, which is a comprehensive plan for the development and integration of all continents of the planet.

It must deal with the immediate danger of a systemic collapse of a systemic collapse of the trans-Atlantic financial system, for which the Four Laws designed by Lyndon LaRouche many years ago are the available remedy. And it must define those areas of indispensable international cooperation, such as the fastest-possible realization of a new economic platform based on thermonuclear fusion energy, to achieve energy and raw materials security for all nations. It must define peaceful cooperation in space research, space travel, and space colonization.

We are the creative species, and now is the moment in our history to prove it.

One last point. If one compares the success of the Peace of Westphalia with the utter failure of the [1919] Versailles Treaty—which did not take into account the interest of all participating parties, but was just the prelude to the next world war—then it should be obvious that the principle of sovereignty of all nations, united by a higher goal of one humanity, must be upheld.

So, we should go back to the spirit of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, which could have been a “star hour of humanity” (in German, eine Sternstunde der Menschheit), and the potential of the 2+4 Agreement, which was … a de facto peace treaty for Germany, ending the post-war period and theoretically establishing the German sovereignty. But, as everybody knows, because of the following development described above, that sovereignty never arrived in the minds of the Germans where, contrary to France, where the sovereignists are in a majority, the word “sovereignist” is not even known to the average citizen in Germany. That must be remedied and accomplished as well.

So, let’s transform this extremely dangerous moment into a chance to form a new era of humanity. Let’s create a real “star hour of mankind,” worthy of the immortal species that we are designed to be.

Thank you.

Dennis Small: Thank you Helga, for placing on the table before us today, for this discussion, the broadest possible framework—the necessary framework—for finding a way out for humanity, that is indeed at the edge of the precipice of its possible own extinction. It is in that regard, truly a punctum saliens for mankind.