EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR FRIDAY, MAY 6, 2022

Global NATO Prepares To Unleash ‘Financial Nuclear War’ Against the World

May 5, 2022 (EIRNS)—The Western political elites who have brought us to the brink of nuclear war, are now openly preparing to unleash “economic MAD—mutually assured destruction” against the global economy. They intend to launch the same scorched-earth economic warfare against China that they have turned against Russia: seizing foreign reserve assets, cutting them off from SWIFT—for the moment still the world’s principal international payments system—and sanctioning anyone who dares import from, or export to, China.

Global NATO’s Washington, D.C., outpost, the Atlantic Council, has been “Wargaming a Western Freeze of China’s Foreign Reserves,” Council senior fellow and former banker Hung Tran reported on April 29. The pretext to be used is China’s refusal to join the West’s assault on Russia. He concluded that “in a scenario of Western sanctions coupled with Chinese countermeasures, both sides will suffer substantial damages. This could lead to a situation of economic MAD—or mutually assured destruction—reinforcing the more catastrophic nuclear MAD.”

Planning for this is gearing up as President Biden prepares to head off for meetings in Asia at the end of May, with Global NATO’s intention to encircle China top on his agenda. U.S. and U.K. officials are consulting closely on how and when to best to impose sanctions on China, the most recent (public) discussion being Tuesday’s phone call on May 3 between Secretary of State Tony Blinken and Foreign Secretary Liz “Geopolitics Is Back!” Truss. The State Department tells us “economic consequences for those who continue to provide financial or material support that aids the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine” was a leading topic of that call.

To propose to cut China out of the global economy is clinically insane, and cannot be done. China is a nation of 1.4 billion people, 18% of all the people in the world, the nation with the fastest rate of scientific and technological development on this planet, which also has significant trade relations with most every nation in the globe—the U.S. and the European Union emphatically included.

But the elites of the West are “wargaming” exactly such measures. The Atlantic Council suggests containing the “geopolitical” intent of the sanctions just short of full “economic MAD.” The Global Economics Director of S&P Global’s IHS Markit subsidiary, one Todd Lee, proposed in his May 4 risk analysis of the “prospects and impact of ‘shock and awe’ financial sanctions against China,” that if the West didn’t cut off China from the international payments system, but “only” stole its foreign exchange reserves, the West could get away with it.

Such infantile, game-theory-driven, table-top exercises on how to decouple China from the world economy are as insane as the arguments that a “limited” nuclear war can be waged.

As retired U.S. Col. Larry Wilkerson stressed April 29 in his interview with Paul Jay, decades of military war games and computer simulations have all come to the conclusion that dropping one nuclear bomb, even within a purportedly-limited “tactical” context, gets out of hand and cannot be controlled.

It is crazy to push a nuclear power into a situation where they have no other choice, Wilkerson warned.

Yes, but that is precisely what is being done against Russia, and soon against China as well. The U.S. military and intelligence establishment is deliberately pushing stories into the media of how the U.S. military has been training and advising a Ukrainian military seeking war with Russia since the 2014 coup, and they are still in charge today. The New York Times published a provocative article on May 4 asserting that “U.S. Intelligence Is Helping Ukraine Kill Russian Generals,” citing anonymous “senior officials.” The Times as much as says that it was assigned to write the article in order to be provocative.

“Although the administration remains wary of inflaming Mr. Putin to the point that he further escalates his attacks ... current and former officials said the White House finds some value in warning Russia that Ukraine has the weight of the United States and NATO behind it,” their “sources” told them.

National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson demurred after the story was published, that U.S. intelligence wasn’t provided to the Ukrainian forces “with the intent to kill Russian generals.”

How can we allow these insane, degenerate “elites” to blow up this beautiful world and human species? Join our mobilization to stop nuclear war, financial or military, in time!

Remember: once one nuclear weapon is fired, the whole arsenal goes. And that is the end of civilization, if not the human species.

This strategic disaster could be turned around in one week, Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche insisted earlier this week. The Institute demonstrated how the world can be pulled together around the concept of a new paradigm in its April 9 conference. Top figures from Russia, China, India, and South Africa, joined by leading people from other nations and regions, all worked together, fighting for the same idea: that the interest of one is the interest of all. Watch the conference, and then get others to do the same.

All it will take to shift the entire international debate, is the decision of a handful of top-level people, or a few dozen medium-level people, to spread this paradigm of security based on the common development of each and all, Zepp-LaRouche insisted. We know we can pull the political forces together to do this, with confidence in the human mind and what the Schiller Institute has already set in motion, the depth of the crisis will shake people into motion.