Crossing Russia’s Red Lines at the Risk of Nuclear War

At the weekly meeting of the International Peace Coalition April 5, Helga Zepp-LaRouche warned that after all failed efforts to contain Russia, “we are now at the point of decision”. If the red line is crossed, a world war and a nuclear war are possible. Both Emmanuel Macron’s threat to send French troops to Ukraine and U.S. Secretary of State Blinken’s stated intention to bring Ukraine into NATO can be such a red line.

Mrs. LaRouche’s warning is shared by experienced international figures, such as Antongiulio de Robertis, Vice President of the Italian Atlantic Treaty Association, and Prof. Pino Arlacchi, former director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

In an article for the web magazine Pluralia, de Robertis compared the current strategic situation to the one that led to World War I, drawing on Christopher Clark’s famous book The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. Even after the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Josef in Sarajevo in 1914, no one believed the war was about to start. It was only after Vienna’s ultimatum to Serbia that European monarchs and heads of state interrupted their vacations. Today, de Robertis notes, we are dangerously underestimating the possibility that a new war – a nuclear war – could occur.

In the Ukrainian conflict, the West has progressively raised the threshold of belligerency, to the point of eliminating any limits on military assistance to Kyiv. This implies that the other side adopts a similar attitude. “Therefore, there cannot but be a concern to avoid the initiation of the same unstoppable mechanism of 1914 that drove European leaders to enter the war as sleepwalkers.”

Prof. Arlacchi, in an exclusive interview to the Schiller Institute to be published in EIR magazine (https://larouchepub.com/), ruled out any intention of either NATO or Russia to actually declare war on one other, but “sometimes there is a dynamic of tit-for-tat that can bring you to that point”, i.e., to “something that could end up in the annihilation of human society.”

To avoid stumbling into such a tragedy, Helga Zepp-LaRouche told the IPC, the majority of nations need to choose a new system that guarantees “the long-term survivability of mankind as a whole”. While some people may think that creating an alternative system to the failing dollar-based system will suffice, “I’m absolutely convinced that that is not the case.” Unlike the Soviet Union, which disintegrated relatively peacefully in 1991, she pointed out, with “NATO being armed to the teeth, and with the military-industrial complex playing such an absolutely dominant role in the United States, in Great Britain, and now unfortunately, also increasingly in the European Union, I don’t think the West will give up as peacefully as the Soviets did in 1991. I’m afraid that they will try to impose their conception of the world order, and that will lead to World War III.”

Therefore, while countries of the Global South should be strengthened to be able to “act on the world stage of history“, we must go beyond the idea of a multipolar world, “because multipolarity still implies the possibility of geopolitical conflict”. The very idea that other nations are “enemies” must be defeated in the framework of a New Paradigm (cf. “Ten Principles Of A New International Security And Development Architecture” here).