July 31, 2025 (EIRNS)—On July 24 , 2025, some 40 scholars, business leaders, diplomats, and journalists gathered at the Chinese Embassy in Berlin to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Potsdam Conference. Chinese Ambassador Deng Hongbo, the host of the event titled “Upholding a Correct Historical Perspective on World War II and the Post-War International Order,” gave a keynote address and welcomed the panelists and guests. Among the nine high-level speakers was Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder and president of the Schiller Institute. Other speakers included a former ambassador, the CEO of a major business association, and academic heads of German universities. Below is the full text of Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s remarks.
It seems incredible: 80 short years after the end of World War II, a great number of experts agree that the world is closer to the brink of World War III than it was even during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And while many people in the rubblefields of Germany in 1945 certainly meant it when they said “Never again fascism! Never again war!” it is extremely shocking to see how many of our contemporaries have forgotten history, as if a general amnesia has set in regarding the horrors of the civilian catastrophe that both world wars caused in large parts of the planet.
The Potsdam Conference established the political and geographical reorganization of Germany, the so-called five “Ds”: demilitarization, denazification, democratization, decentralization, and decartelization, and in a separate declaration concerning Japan, the return of all occupied territories to China and thus the one-China policy. Recent historical research, however, has shed light on deficits in the implementation of denazification, among other things.
A closer look at the background to the Potsdam Communiqué, during which the political and geographical reorganization of Germany was discussed, makes clear that it was not about establishing a lasting peace, but rather about the prelude to the Cold War and a continuation of geopolitics. While the negotiations in Potsdam were still ongoing, President Truman gave the order on July 25, 1945 for the atomic bomb to be dropped on Hiroshima at some date “after August 3,” as soon as “weather conditions permitted.” Historical research has since shown beyond a doubt that it was no longer necessary militarily, since Japanese Emperor Hirohito had already initiated negotiations on a surrender with Pope Pius XII’s secretary for diplomatic affairs Giovanni Montini, who later became Pope Paul VI. Nevertheless, the official narrative is repeated, that the lives of “1 million American soldiers” were saved by the atomic bombs.
The purpose of this first-ever use of the atomic bomb was in fact to make the experience so horrible, that the Soviets would agree to submit to the dictates of the United States, an illusion that was shattered at the latest by the Sputnik shock. Even before that, in May 1945, Churchill had instructed his staff to draw up a plan for a pre-emptive war against the Soviet Union, which was delivered to him by this staff on May 22, under the codename “Operation Unthinkable.”
After the subsequent Cold War came to an end with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, which, according to then-U.S. ambassador in Moscow Jack Matlock, had ceased to be considered a threat to the West for some time, and after the Iron Curtain had disappeared, the conditions would in fact have been met for the reaffirmation of the UN Charter as the basis for the world order and for the establishment of a peace order for the 21st Century.
But instead of seizing this historic opportunity, the neocons in the U.S. and the U.K. were overcome by a triumphalism that went together with the illusion that the “West” had won the Cold War. Francis Fukuyama went so far as to make the shortest-lived forecast ever concerning the “end of history,” by which he meant the spread of neoliberal democracy around the world.
What followed was the attempt to establish an Anglo-American-dominated unipolar world, which led to a massive undermining of the world order as defined by the Yalta process, Potsdam, and the UN Charter. In the meantime, this order has de facto ceased to exist. Countless examples of that could be cited, such as the recent statement by U.S. General Christopher Donahue, commander of the U.S. Army for Europe and Africa, who recently stated that NATO is able to cut off the enclave of Kaliningrad, which had been assigned to Russia at Potsdam, from Russia in an “unheard of” timeframe.
Time is too short here to even begin to describe the disintegration of the world order, from the apparent inability of the world community to prevent the genocide (as characterized by the ICJ) in Gaza, to the recent unprovoked military strikes against Iran, etc., etc., which has led in sum to the de facto non-existence of international law.
So, what needs to be done to prevent an escalation into a third, this time final, world war?
There was already in European history an example of the successful overcoming of geopolitics: the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which ended 150 years of religious war in Europe. This gave birth to the idea that any peace order must always take into account the “interests of the other,” in fact of all “others.” We must therefore urgently put on the agenda the establishment of a new global security and development architecture which, in the tradition of the Peace of Westphalia, establishes a new paradigm in international relations that actually does take into account the interests of all countries of the planet.
President Xi Jinping’s idea of the common future of humanity represents this new paradigm, in that the concept of the one humanity takes precedence over the multiplicity of nations, i.e., the one is a higher order than the many. If the interests of individual nations are brought into affinity with the interests of humanity as a whole, then the supposed contradiction is eliminated. The Confucian idea of the harmonious development of all into a great whole and Nicholas of Cusa’s idea of the development of all microcosms as a prerequisite for concordance in the macrocosm correspond to the same lawfulness and to the principle of Pope Paul VI that the new name for peace is development. That same idea can be found in President Xi’s three initiatives, the GSI, GDI, and GCI [the Global Security Initiative, Global Development Initiative, and the Global Civilization Initiative].
Humanity is the only known creative species in the universe to date, and our creative reason always enables us to discover a solution to all problems that are on a higher level than the one on which the problems arose. It is this state of mind that we need today!
See Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s Ten Principles of a New International Security and Development Architecture
