Zepp-LaRouche: Dismantle NATO to Resolve Tensions with Russia

At the heart of the growing tensions between the U.S. and Russia over Ukraine is the demand by President Putin that the U.S. and NATO sign legally binding treaties which guarantee Russia’s security. This is not a new issue, but goes back to talks in February 1990, when then U.S. Secretary of State Baker promised there would be no eastward expansion of NATO, “not one inch”, in return for the acceptance by the Soviets of the reunification of Germany. The U.S. and NATO have broken this promise repeatedly, with NATO moving 1,000 kilometers eastward, to the borders of Russia, over the last thirty years.

The promise to eventually bring Ukraine into NATO, and the prospect of advanced weaponry being placed there even before then, have hardened Mr. Putin’s commitment to force the issue of new treaty agreements. The deployment of possible nuclear missiles in Ukraine which could strike Moscow in 4 to 5 minutes is a clear “red line” for Russia. For Putin, NATO membership for Ukraine is not negotiable.

This issue was addressed by Helga Zepp-LaRouche in her weekly webcast dialogue on Jan. 13, during which she warned that the danger comes from the arrogant mindset which characterizes the war party in the trans-Atlantic region. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and the key NATO leaders, such as Jens Stoltenberg, believe that the U.S. must remain the dominant world power, that the “victory” in the Cold War gives it the right to force the submission of all other nations to its vision of a unipolar world. However, the economic emergence of China, the modernization of the Russian military, and their alliance as sovereign nations, represent a threat to this post-Cold War unipolar order, especially given the accelerating collapse of the western economies and financial system.

Therefore, Helga Zepp-LaRouche posed a pointed question: Does it make sense for the nations of Europe to remain in a military alliance which threatens to launch a war in Europe, which would destroy every one of them? We now have a situation, she went on, where we have to replace NATO “with a new security architecture which guarantees the survival and security interests of all.”

She compared the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War, with the Versailles agreement at the end of World War I. The principles in the Peace of Westphalia were that “for the sake of peace, you have to forgive all that was done by the one side or the other”, and you have to “take into account ‘the interest of the other’…because you cannot continuously have peace if you ignore blatantly the security interests” of the other nations.

In contrast, the victors in the First World War accused Germany of sole responsibility for the war, and imposed on it enormous, punitive reparations, which led to hyperinflation, then a depression and subsequent social chaos, which paved the way for the rise of the Nazis.

Today, rather than assuming peace can be achieved by imposing a unipolar order backed by the military power of the U.S./NATO alliance, committed to defend that global order which benefits primarily the City of London-Wall Street-Silicon Valley financial interests, “we need a security architecture which takes into account the interest of everybody, and that emphatically includes Russia, it emphatically includes China.”

Under such an agreement, the impulse for seeking military solutions for economic crises can be replaced by cooperation for mutual benefit, which is the only real path for peace.