As Presidents Biden and Putin spoke for nearly an hour by phone Thursday, with war-hawks throughout the NATO countries’ governments and think-tanks demanding complete NATO encirclement of Russia, the problem these two leaders should be talking about was expressed in a news headline: “With famine looming over Afghanistan, millions struggle for every meal.” (NBC News, Dec. 30).
What does it profit the United States if it gain the encirclement of Russia and China with bases and missiles, and completely lose its soul by letting hundreds of millions die of starvation and pandemic? The sanest experts are warning: Even as you reach for that encirclement and impossible military superiority, you are likely triggering a war which will go nuclear and destroy civilization!
Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche has repeated again on Dec. 29 in addressing a commemorative event: President Biden should accept the draft treaty proposed by President Putin and agree that Ukraine, on Russia’s border and part of it for centuries, will not join NATO. Long-time CIA analyst and founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity Ray McGovern, agreed. And on “The Critical Hour” radio broadcast Dec. 27, McGovern brought out that no media or officials are mentioning that 10,000 of the Russian troops who had moved closer to Ukraine in November have now been withdrawn back away from it, and called this a critical part of a negotiation that should be leading to a resolution of the standoff in January. Danish Russia expert Jens Joergen Nielsen, in an interview with EIR today, said he would tell Biden, “It is wise for you to engage with Putin, because the alternative is war.” And retired German Bundeswehr Inspector General Harald Kujat, on radio today, said the security of the NATO nations will be improved if Ukraine is not admitted.
But this is not merely a discussion of “strategy,” but of the common aims of humanity, for which the United States was a powerful and leading force.
In 1988 Lyndon LaRouche, after five years of “strategic” crisis in which he had forecast the dissolution of the Soviet Union while others forecast it would invade Western Europe, went to Berlin and publicly proposed a “Food for Peace” solution, in which the Western nations would develop the agriculture of Poland so that it could feed itself, and the Soviet Union would accept the unification of Germany. No one else thought these possible, but they occurred then; and promises were made to Mikhail Gorbachev that unified Germany would be the last NATO state; promises then broken by NATO to lead to today’s U.S.-Russia standoff. LaRouche widened his proposals in a “Food for Peace” conference in Chicago in December 1988—“Who will give us this day our daily bread?,” he asked on behalf of hundreds of millions, just weeks before he was imprisoned.
Now, a modern healthcare system must be built in Afghanistan; its financial reserves released from U.S. sanctions; and food aid and food production made possible. President Putin proposed this as well, during the current negotiations with the Biden Administration, on Dec. 23. This is a matter for American, Russian, and Chinese collaboration for the common welfare of mankind, or millions will starve in the post-war destruction of that country.
Therefore, accept the non-alignment of Ukraine. Take the path out of this potentially thermonuclear standoff into collaboration against pandemic and famine; on to the exploration and colonization of space; on to the development of nuclear power and fusion energy technologies. Those should be the missions of great powers, not to encircle and intimidate each other until the irreversible, unsurvivable war breaks out.