by Harley Schlanger, LaRouche Organization:
The announcement that President Biden canceled his October 10-12 trip to Germany provided a third short term reprieve from making a decision to lift restrictions preventing Ukraine from firing U.S. and U.K. long-range missiles against targets inside Russia. Ukraine’s “President” Zelensky has been insistently demanding that Biden give a green light for this drastic escalation against Russia. He has support for this provocative threat from the U.S. Secretary of State Blinken, British Foreign Secretary Lammy, and the usual gang of neocons from numerous Anglo-American think tanks and media. Also championing this course has been British Prime Minister Starmer, who had hoped to receive Biden’s approval during a summit on September 13 in Washington, or on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly session on September 24.
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On both occasions, those demanding an escalation were disappointed by Biden’s refusal. Perhaps they believed that the third time would be a charm, and that Biden would acquiesce to pressure while attending the Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting at Ramstein Airbase on October 12. With the cancellation of the Ramstein meeting, their hopes have been pushed back to the next NATO Defense Minister’s summit, on October 17.
Biden’s hesitancy to meet their demands is reported to stem from an ongoing debate between military officials in the Pentagon and some in intelligence, versus the hard-core war hawks and Russophobes around Blinken and the Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines. The former appear to take Russian President Putin at his word, when he said that under Russia’s revised nuclear doctrine, he would consider long-range strikes by non-nuclear nations to be an act of war by those aiding the attacks — that is, the NATO members — and that there would be severe consequences; while the utopians among the neocons argue that Putin is bluffing, and NATO must call his bluff. Some among the latter are under the delusion that the U.S. could win a nuclear war against Russia.
The latter grouping is propelled by a growing desperation, stemming from the recognition that Ukraine is not only losing the war, but the end is fast approaching. Even the normally pro-war {Financial Times} admitted there is a “mood shift” occurring in Washington and western capitals. Yet, thus far, this shift has not led to calls for negotiations to replace escalation.
The Threat of Nuclear War
The refusal of NATO officials thus far to seek a diplomatic pathway to end the war was a topic in the weekly dialogue “Global War or Universal Peace — Who Shall Decide?” with the chairwoman of the Schiller Institute, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, on October 9. We are reaching the point, she said, which former German Bundeswehr Chief of Staff Gen. Harald Kujat (ret.) “had warned about one year ago: that NATO will come to the point of decision of either having a negotiated solution, one which will be accepted by Russia … or go for an escalation.
“I’m afraid,” she continued, “that we are sitting in the immediate vicinity of a decision to escalate which could lead, in the worst case, to a global nuclear war.”
This urgent warning was reiterated by Zepp-LaRouche in her statement opening the weekly Zoom call of the International Peace Coalition on October 11. She spoke of the wars in Ukraine and southwest Asia as “two powder kegs” which are increasing the threat of unleashing a nuclear war. A sobering confirmation of this was presented by former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who spoke next. Ritter said, “We’ve never been closer to nuclear demise than we are today.” He pointed out that Iran’s nuclear technology capability means that it is “not a large technological leap to have a device ready for fissile material,” so that Iran could produce “a nuclear gun” in a very short period of time. Israel has nuclear weapons, which no one talks about. And above all, Iran is strategically aligned with fellow BRICS member Russia. If there is no intervention to end the insane drive from Israel to attack Iran, we may all soon be dead!
As this call as proceeding, Zelensky responded to the cancellation of Biden’s visit with a frantic road trip to Rome, Paris and London, in an effort to breathe life into his dead-on-arrival “peace plan”, combining the demand for more aid with an appeal to free Ukraine to fire missiles deep into Russia. His message included the now standard line of the Russophobic war hawks: If you don’t help us now to defeat Russia, you will be next.
This unsubstantiated warning has dominated discussion among European leaders, who are fearful that the fight against Russia will be abandoned by the U.S. if Donald Trump wins the presidential election in November. The new foreign policy chief of the EU, Kaja Kallas from Estonia, and the new head of NATO, Mark Rutte, were selected as hard-liners who share European Commission President von der Leyen’s paranoid view that Putin is preparing to send Russian troops to overrun Europe once Ukraine surrenders.
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