EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR THURSDAY, JANUARY 20, 2022

Zepp-LaRouche: ‘We Are Now Down to the Wire’ in The Danger of War Between The U.S. and Russia

Jan. 19, 2022 (EIRNS)—U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken began three days of critical meetings in Europe on Wednesday, to discuss the Ukraine crisis and Russia’s adamant insistence that, if security talks with the U.S. are to continue, Russia must receive written responses to each of the points raised in the two draft treaty proposals they presented to the world on Dec. 17. Those proposed treaties, one with the United States and the other with NATO, state that Russia’s national security is gravely endangered by the threatened deployment of NATO advanced weapon systems on their very border, and by the proposed admission of Ukraine to the NATO alliance; and that therefore Russia must be given written guarantees that neither will occur—or else they will have to take “retaliatory military-technical measures” of their own.

On Wednesday, Blinken travelled to Kiev, Ukraine to meet with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. On Thursday he will go to Berlin to caucus with the foreign ministers of Germany, France and war-drive ring-leader United Kingdom. And on Friday he will go to Geneva to sit down with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

Blinken’s trip is not just another round of diplomacy: war or peace between the U.S. and Russia hangs in the balance.

Putin has warned repeatedly that Russia is being driven to adopt “appropriate retaliatory military-technical measures” of its own, which Gilbert Doctorow, a Brussels-based political analyst, believes would include deploying nuclear-armed SS-26 Iskander-M short-range ballistic missiles to Belarus and Kaliningrad to threaten NATO’s frontline states and eastern Germany, as well as possibly placing nuclear-armed Zircon sea-launched hypersonic cruise missiles off the coast of Washington, DC. which, Doctorow further points out, “Russia has previously stated could be utilized to destroy the U.S. capital before the President could escape on Air Force One.”

In his talks with Zelenskyy, Blinken set the tone for his Friday talk with Lavrov by yet again aggressively blaming Russia alone for the crisis, and demanding that they “de-escalate” by stopping the deployment of troops on their own territory, near the Ukraine border, or be prepared to be hit with scorched earth economic warfare by the West.

Lavrov, for his part, restated the Russian position after talks on Tuesday with German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock: “We are now awaiting answers to these proposals (the two draft treaties), as promised, in order to continue the talks.”

“The war danger is greater than ever, and we are on the verge of World War III,” Helga Zepp-LaRouche warned today. “We are now down to the wire and things will have to break one way or the other in the days ahead.” Although there is a growing chorus of voices calling for sanity in the U.S. and Europe, the control of U.S. policy by the British and their American war party confederates has not been broken. Furthermore, Zepp-LaRouche stated, the descent into war is being driven by the systemic breakdown of the trans-Atlantic financial system, which is now going out of control, as Lyndon LaRouche repeatedly explained.

But there is a second dynamic underway in the world, which is the emerging realignment of nations of all continents around China and Russia, and the Belt and Road Initiative as an alternative to the policy of Malthusian depopulation being promoted by the dying trans-Atlantic system. One indication of this is the visit of Iran’s President Raisi to Moscow where a 20-year package of development deals is under discussion. Another is the upcoming visit to Moscow and then Beijing by Argentine President Alberto Fernandez, where he plans to sign a memorandum of understanding on the Belt and Road Initiative.

If the United States remains hostile to this policy alternative, and continues to defend the City of London and Wall Street’s bankrupt system, then the world will in all likelihood careen towards thermonuclear war. If the U.S. joins with the Belt and Road, as Lyndon LaRouche advocated from the outset, then the prospects for peace and development are excellent.

We join with Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s call to make 2022 the Year of Lyndon LaRouche, and of the adoption of his policies.