By Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Dec. 8 2025
The following statement has been released by the Schiller Institute for immediate circulation internationally. It was written as a rallying call during this period of change and new strategic openings, and individuals are encouraged to endorse it. In addition, websites and journals are encouraged to publish this article in full or in part, with attribution to the Schiller Institute.
Dec. 8—Although the recently published 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS) was received by some leading circles in Europe with a mixture of gnashing of teeth, temper tantrums, and despair, it should be considered, under the circumstances, as having usefully provoked a crisis that was long overdue. It represents a break with the U.S. President Joe Biden administration’s security doctrine regarding U.S. leadership in a unipolar world order in favor of a more balanced policy toward Russia. But at the same time it advocates for the losing strategy of trying to contain China, and, in particular, stop its economic cooperation with the nations of the Global South, especially in the Western Hemisphere. Under today’s conditions of a financial meltdown of the Trans-Atlantic system, the new document has created the opportunity for a rational reassessment of one’s own security interests and the redesign of the international security architecture.
The document expressly prohibits further expansion of NATO, which de facto rules out NATO membership for Ukraine, since the so-called “Coalition of the Willing” cannot impose such membership against the will of the United States. It also effectively ends the concept of a “Global NATO,” as well as the “interoperability” of the European Union (EU) with this Global NATO.
Instead of huffing and puffing about not needing “advice from outside,” as German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul put it, Europeans would do better to take seriously the admittedly harsh wake-up call contained in the NSS paper, namely that the European continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years if the current trends of economic decline continue. It even warns of a “civilizational erasure.”
The biggest mistake we in Europe could make right now would be to arrogantly dismiss this warning as further proof of U.S. President Donald Trump’s unpredictability. For the “civilizational erasure” of Europe is a threat not only because of the continuation of the current economic policy—massive austerity in all social areas to the benefit of an unscrupulous arms industry—but even more imminently by the absolutely irresponsible and hopeless attempt to inflict a “strategic defeat” on Russia.
The new United States NSS offers a much-needed opportunity to withdraw from NATO, as it pursues a strategy that has not corresponded to our fundamental security interests for quite some time. NATO should have been dissolved at the end of the Cold War, just as the Warsaw Pact was in 1991, in favor of a peace order for the 21st century—which would have been entirely possible at the time. Instead, NATO transformed itself from a formerly defensive alliance into an offensive alliance. The final straw came when the highest-ranking NATO military officer, Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, chair of the NATO Military Committee, gave an interview where he called for a “more aggressive response by NATO to the war in Ukraine.” A “preemptive strike” against Russia, he said, was also conceivable, which could of course be considered a “defensive action.” George Orwell, anyone? “Attack is defense, war is peace!”
Russian President Vladimir Putin responded with unmistakable clarity that Russia had no intention of starting a war with Europe. He had already emphasized this hundreds of times. However, if Europe itself were to start such a war, he added, Russia would be “immediately ready” and such a conflict would be ended very quickly in Russia’s favor, unlike the “surgical” approach used in Ukraine. Russian political scientist Sergei Karaganov was even more direct in an interview with journalist Dr. Éva Péli on October 30 in Moscow, stating that if a major war broke out in Europe, Europe would cease to exist.
While serious efforts are being made by the American and Russian governments to end the war through negotiations, the European “Coalition of the Willing,” consisting of Germany, France, Great Britain, Poland, the Baltic states, and the EU Commission, continues to focus on inflicting a “strategic defeat” on Russia. It must be clear to any thinking person that this is impossible against what is now the world’s strongest nuclear power, unless one is willing to accept the end of humanity. Following the recent meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels, Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó accused these European forces of trying to prevent peace efforts and drag Europe into a war with Russia. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán even warned on Saturday (Dec. 6) in Kecskemet that European leaders had already decided to go to war against Russia and that a large Hungarian delegation would visit Moscow in the coming days.
Despite the fact that in Germany every statement about the war in Ukraine must repeat the mantra that it is “Putin’s unprovoked war of aggression in violation of international law” to avoid being labeled a Putin puppet, the near-unanimous view throughout the Global South and among American experts such as Jeffrey Sachs, John Mearsheimer, Ray McGovern, Chas Freeman, and many others, is that it was NATO’s fivefold eastward expansion by 1,000 km—contrary to the promise made at the end of the Cold War not to expand NATO “one inch” to the east—that triggered the war. By early 2022, offensive weapons systems near the Russian border had effectively created a reverse Cuban Missile Crisis, and Putin’s appeals for legally binding security guarantees were simply ignored.
The war could have ended in March 2022 with the Istanbul Agreement between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which was notoriously sabotaged by then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Now, after almost four years of grueling war and the loss of millions of lives, there is no denying what the former Inspector General of the German Armed Forces and former Chairman of the NATO Military Committee, Harald Kujat, has repeatedly emphasized: that Ukraine has never been in a position to turn the strategic situation around—and certainly is not now, when entire sections of the front are collapsing, when frontline troops and forced conscripts are deserting in droves, and when international military experts openly discuss the fact that the war has been lost. In this situation, for the highest-ranking NATO officer to talk about preemptive strikes is highly irresponsible and amounts to a call for collective suicide.
In the nearly four years that this war of attrition has lasted, neither the EU Commission nor European heads of state have made any attempt to end the war through negotiations. On the contrary, when a diplomatic solution between Putin and Zelensky was practically agreed upon in March 2022 with the Istanbul Agreement, Europe, and of course then-President Biden, watched in silence as Boris Johnson squelched the opportunity. Now, when there is a justified prospect that the war could be ended by Trump and Putin, and relations between the two largest nuclear powers could be normalized, NATO is talking about preemptive strikes!
NATO is no longer an Atlantic defensive alliance, but considers itself as the military arm to defend the unipolar world order that has been pursued since the end of the Cold War. But that order has long since been replaced by the partnership between countries of the Global South, which are no longer willing to submit to the imperial and colonial structures of the collective West, but are building a new world economic order with their BRICS and SCO organizations, based on sovereignty and mutual and equal development. We must not oppose this new world order, which brings 500 years of colonialism to an end, and allows the nations of the Global Majority to overcome poverty and underdevelopment for the first time. We must rather cooperate with these countries and thus open a new chapter in human history!
In these times of epochal change, several regional crises have the potential to escalate into a major war. Following the ongoing catastrophe in the Middle East, a new and highly dangerous escalation between Japan and China has recently broken out. Now that Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has questioned the One China policy, which is indisputable under international law, and even raised the possibility of Japanese military intervention in Taiwan, concern is growing throughout the Indo-Pacific region about the resurgence of militarism in Japan. This is very similar to what is occurring in Europe, and evokes the most terrible memories of the joint action of the Axis powers in World War II, which was responsible for 27 million deaths in the Soviet Union and 35 million casualties in China.
If we have learned anything from the two world wars, we should recognize that now is the time to reconnect to where we left off at the end of the Cold War, when we took the wrong turn. At that time, there was no longer an enemy, so it would have been very easy to establish a new international peace order. Today, 35 years later, the complete fallacy of the arrogant and short-lived prediction of the “end of history” is evident, as is the enormous boomerang effect of the attempt to establish a unipolar world order.
Each respective country must announce its withdrawal from NATO and, at the same time, convene a new conference in the tradition of the Peace of Westphalia, at which a new international security and development architecture must be developed that takes into account the interests of every nation on this planet.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has already proposed a similar approach with his Global Governance Initiative. President Putin has also raised the idea of a Eurasian security architecture. There is also hope because young people in Germany are participating in a school strike, since they neither want to serve as cannon fodder nor shoot people in foreign countries.
We have reached a point in the universal history of mankind where we must leave behind not only half a millennium of colonialism, but also the mindset that led to two world wars in the 20th century: geopolitics. We must leave behind once and for all the barbaric idea that we always need an enemy, that man is a wolf to man, as Thomas Hobbes, the ideologist of the British Empire, believed. This barbaric view of humanity is expressed in NATO’s promotional video “From Foresight to Warfight,” which states: “War will always remain an essential human endeavor. Manipulating the opponent’s emotions and understanding will be just as important as denying access to our spaces. The human mind will be a battle space in its own right.” Anyone who watches this video and does not reject this sick worldview has already lost the battle for his or her own mind.
We are the only species known in the universe that is endowed with creative reason, and we must now use it by putting the idea of one humanity first as we establish a new order.
Accordingly, we, the undersigned, endorse the Schiller Institute’s call for governments to withdraw from NATO, and initiate conferences for a new international security and development architecture in the tradition of the Peace of Westphalia.
