EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR MONDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2022

The Counter to War Drive Is Building, But Decisive Break Is Urgent

Feb. 13, 2022 (EIRNS)—The question of what will happen next, and when, in the contrived confrontation by the NATO bloc against Russia in Europe, remains hanging in the air and very dangerous. More counter forces of sanity are speaking out, but a decisive break is urgent.

Over the weekend, U.S. spokesmen continued their drumroll of assertions against Russian aggression, and their bogus charge that Russia will attack Ukraine, in statements by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, speaking from Hawaii, by National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and by Pentagon spokesman John Kirby. They were militantly vague on when and how. Sullivan on CNN this morning said, on the time frame of a Russian attack, that we are “in the window,” and it could be “any day now,” or otherwise “after the Olympics” which end on Feb. 20. Sullivan said that Russia can be expected to stage a false-flag incident, because, for among other reasons, it is just “consistent with the Russian playbook” to do that kind of thing. No evidence is needed.

Assessing the situation, Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche said today that the “ambiguity of potential false flags will remain, until someone cuts through this.... We need a decisive break.”

Former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) spoke out strongly over the weekend, exposing those behind the insane war drive against Russia. She tweeted out a 4-minute clip from her appearance on Fox News Saturday evening, with a tweet explaining how

“Biden can very easily prevent a war with Russia by guaranteeing that Ukraine will not become a member of NATO.” On TV, she charged that “Biden and military leaders actually want Russia to invade Ukraine. Why would they do so? It gives Biden the excuse to levy draconian sanctions ... and it cements the Cold War in place.... The military-industrial complex is the one that benefits from this; they clearly control the Biden Administration; warmongers on both sides in Washington who have been drumming up these tensions.”

There is also an increasing activation and prominence of anti-war groups in the U.S.

Besides the NATO focus on confrontation over Ukraine, the global NATO mobilization in the Indo-Pacific is in full swing. After the ministerial Quad meeting in Australia this past week, the White House issued a 19-page document, “Indo-Pacific Strategy of the United States.” Blinken plugged its world supremacy point of view yesterday, speaking in a joint press availability in Honolulu, where he met with foreign ministers of Japan Hayashi Yoshimasa and South Korea Chung Eui-yong. Blinken said that, “In the meeting that the three of us had, we discussed the threat that Russia’s aggression poses—not only to Ukraine, but to the entire international rules-based order, which has provided a foundation for decades of shared security and prosperity, for our people here in this region and, again, around the globe.”

He said of his fellow ministers that, “we agreed to stick together in our response to Russia.”

It is against his triumphalism that certain opposition viewpoints stand out, which are coming from establishment figures in Europe. On Feb. 11, the French weekly Marianne carried an article headlined, “NATO Exit: Urgency Absolute,” which urges that France leave NATO. That “will signal Europe’s independence from American exceptionalism, the renewal of multilateralism, the emergence of a multipolar world....” It is by German economist Peter Dittus, former Secretary General of the Bank for International Settlements, and former Deputy Governor of the Banque de France Hervé Hannoun, former BIS Deputy Managing Director.

Today, a warning is sounded by Russian policy expert Fyodor Lukyanov, “How the World Sleepwalked into Another Cuban Missile Crisis.” In his article in RT, after stressing the current danger over the Ukraine confrontation, he advises that, “The best-case scenario would be the same as during the Cuban Missile Crisis. At some point, both sides would recognize the grave danger posed by further escalation and start direct substantive negotiations in order to work out the fundamentals of mutual guarantees.”

The Saturday, Feb. 19 Schiller Institute online international conference is a critical contribution toward the “decisive break” we need, to stop the mad mobilization toward collapse and war. Register and spread the word. It is on Feb. 19, 10 a.m. (EST): “100 Seconds to Midnight on the Doomsday Clock: We Need a New Security Architecture!”