THE MEETING AT RAMSTEIN

Since Sept. 8, NATO Strategy Has Moved to World War III with Russia

by Paul Gallagher

[Print version of this article]

Sept. 18—In an article and public speech last week, the chief of Ukraine’s armed forces demanded that NATO prepare and target a pre-emptive nuclear strike against Russian nuclear missile capabilities—also indicating that he well knew what this would start. All of NATO is already throwing advanced weapons, billions in money, training, technical intelligence means, and strategic planning into a now eight-years-long war on Russians with Ukraine as its Nazi-emblazoned spearpoint. Therefore the Sept. 7 article on the Ukrainian news site Ukrinform by Ukrainian Armed Forces Commander-in-Chief Gen Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, was a public sign of NATO’s new policy: a third world war for a military “knockout” of Russia—and in reality, a readiness to kill billions and destroy human civilization to claim global dominance.

Not since the fanatic British imperialist and Malthusian Bertrand Russell in 1946, had any public figure directly demanded a pre-emptive first strike against Russia, supposedly to knock out its nuclear weapons capabilities. Here is what General Zaluzhnyi and co-author Lt. Gen. Mykhailo Zabrodskyi, the First Deputy Chairman of the National Security, Defense, and Intelligence Committee of the Verkhovna Rada (Ukraine’s parliament), wrote in the Sept. 7 article, “Prospects for Running a Military Campaign in 2023: Ukraine’s Perspective”:

It is hard to imagine that even nuclear strikes will allow Russia to break Ukraine’s will to resist. But the threat that will emerge for the whole of Europe cannot be ignored. One cannot completely exclude the possibility of direct involvement of the world’s leading countries in a “limited” nuclear conflict, behind which the prospect of a Third World War is already directly visible.

As a forced step, which is still extremely necessary, we must return to the source of Russian confidence, which is impunity. Any Russian attempts at practical steps in the use of tactical nuclear weapons must be preempted by employing the entire arsenal of means at the disposal of world powers.

In our opinion, it is precisely taking into account such a complex and ambiguous combination of factors that the prospects of the 2023 military campaign should be considered. Only their full and comprehensive consideration will create the prerequisites for Ukraine to defeat the aggressor’s army and put to an end the destructive war that is raging in Europe. [emphasis added]

In other words, Russia can and must be defeated with the use of pre-emptive nuclear strikes by NATO powers, involving “the prospect of a Third World War.” The next day, Sept. 8, a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, involving close to 40 nations of “global NATO,” was held at the U.S. Air Base in Ramstein, Germany, convened and led by U.S. Defense Secretary, Gen. (ret.) Lloyd J. Austin III.

From there, under cover of worldwide media crowing about a Ukrainian counter-offensive in Kharkiv Oblast and the northern end of Lugansk Oblast, NATO’s strategy was shifted. It became one of all-out participation in fighting Russian forces, including bringing Ukraine de facto into NATO-member defense rights and privileges, and giving it weapons capable of striking deep into Russia. Generals Zaluzhnyi and Zabrodskyi had laid this out Sept. 7 as well:

Comprehensive efforts to equip and re-equip the Armed Forces of Ukraine with weapon systems of the appropriate range, with a proper long-term vision of the objectives, should become the long-sought game-changer. If Ukraine succeeds in receiving the appropriate weapons, operational and strategic prospects for 2023 will look totally different.

The Kiev Security Compact

On Sept. 13, the government of Ukraine proposed a “Kiev Security Compact,” prepared under the direct guidance of former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen (2009–2014), which demands NATO Article 5-type guarantees for Ukraine in its war with Russia.

In the intervening days since the Sept. 8 Ramstein Air Base meeting run by Lloyd Austin, Ukrainian forces had carried out the counter-offensive in Kharkiv and Lugansk. Western military experts such as Italy’s Lt. Gen. Fabio Mini, formerly chief of staff of the NATO Southern Command, publicly recognized that NATO military and intelligence forces had not only provided the weapons and the signals intelligence for this offensive, they had also planned where it would strike, and guided it.

It was then followed by the Sept. 13 proposal from Rasmussen and Ukraine’s Chief of the Presidential Office, Andrii Yermak, which amounted to Ukraine’s entry into NATO while engaged in war, and also to war between NATO’s chief military powers—first, the United States—and Russia.

The “Kiev Security Compact International Security Guarantees for Ukraine: Recommendations” was drafted by a working group on security co-chaired by Yermak and Rasmussen, with other unnamed “Western experts, including former and acting politicians and scientists” participating, according to press accounts. It calls for a large group of “guarantor” countries to sign a binding security document, and they would also be charged with its enforcement. The amorphous proposed group includes: The United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Canada, Poland, Turkey, France, other countries of Northern, Central, and Southern Europe, and Baltic states. Its provisions would include:

• Ukraine’s intent to join NATO:

Ukraine’s aspiration to join NATO and benefit from its mutual defense arrangements is safeguarded in its Constitution. This aspiration is the sovereign decision of Ukraine. Both NATO and EU membership will significantly bolster Ukraine’s security in the long-term.

• Article 5-type protection, clearly including again the nuclear strikes by NATO powers:

In case of aggression, the joint document should spell out extended guarantee commitments by guarantors to use all elements of their national and collective power and take appropriate measures—which may include diplomatic, economic, and military means—to enable Ukraine to stop the aggression, restore its sovereignty, ensure its security, military edge, and capability to deter its enemies and defend itself by itself against any threat.

• A “multi-decade” plan to fully arm Ukraine:

Ukraine needs the resources to maintain a significant defensive force capable of withstanding the Russian Federation’s armed forces and paramilitaries. This requires a multi-decade effort of sustained investment in Ukraine’s defense industrial base, scalable weapons transfers and intelligence support from allies, intensive training missions and joint exercises under the European Union and NATO flags.

Russia’s response came from Dmitry Medvedev, Russian Security Council deputy chair and former Russian President, in a Telegram post Sept. 13:

The Kiev camarilla has given birth to a project of “security guarantees” which are essentially a prologue to a third world war, [effectively] applying Article 5 of the North Atlantic Pact to Ukraine…. It directly concerns NATO’s hybrid war with Russia…. Sooner or later the military campaign will achieve another level. The campaign will follow its own military scenario, involving ever more new participants.

Speaking to RIA Novosti, the same day, Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Antonov, warned that Washington’s delivery to Ukraine of ATACMS missiles with a range of 300 km, would mean that the war was directly between America and Russia. Antonov said this would put large Russian cities, as well as transport and industrial infrastructure facilities, in the area of possible destruction. “Such a scenario would mean direct involvement of the United States in a military confrontation with Russia.”

Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche told China Radio International that day:

People have to wake up. This present policy of confrontation against Russia, and by implication against China as well, is bringing the world very close to a possible world war.

Zepp-LaRouche pointed to the Sept. 12 statement by Russia’s Ambassador to Germany, Sergey Nechayev, that Germany’s decision to send advanced weapons to Ukraine with no limitation on those weapons striking anywhere in Russia, “is a ‘red line’ that the German government … should not have crossed.”

Behind NATO’s Insanity

The character of the media propaganda in “global NATO” nations about the war, particularly the thousand scribblers insisting that Russian President Vladimir Putin must and will be defeated and thrown out of power as a “failure,” makes it particularly clear that NATO’s geopolitical and military leaders are trying to provoke a nuclear attack by Russia, and at the same time are now planning to pre-empt it with their own. They give themselves “permission” to have this actually insane intention, by reasoning that the nuclear exchanges will be “limited.” But even Generals Zaluzhnyi and Zabrodskyi in their Sept. 7 call to prepare for nuclear war with Russia, acknowledge that they doubt this assumption. Nuclear arms experts such as Prof. Theodore Postol at MIT have explained many times that even a single nuclear weapon cannot, today, be used by a major nuclear power without escalating to the use of the total arsenals of all combatants—an unsurvivable World War III.

But this crazy risk of the loss of all human civilization, characteristic of each of the wars of NATO powers in this century, was explained by Lyndon LaRouche in 2011 in a public speech. The financial oligarchy of London and Wall Street and its peers in other NATO capitals think that direct war between NATO and Russia will allow them to “write off their debts and go about their business” of looting populations. But the world’s population, LaRouche added then, would be greatly reduced by starvation and disease even if the UK geopoliticians and NATO “won” the war they envisioned.

A Russian saying has been quoted in this regard, including by Sergei Glazyev in his appreciation of LaRouche in this issue: “War writes off everything.”

After the global financial crash of 2007-08, the global bubble of debt in which this financial oligarchy holds the lion’s share of the assets, expanded by 50% in a decade, to well over $300 trillion—more than $1 quadrillion when derivatives bets on those debts are included. War with Russia, and implicitly war with China, is that financial oligarchy’s bet to “write off their debts and go about their business” of greatly increased looting of households and businesses—the latter through the runaway inflation their central banks, and the war, have set off since 2019.

If millions know that their livelihoods are being lost and their lives put at risk for that, it may be NATO nations’ governments that fall, not Russia’s or China’s.