Helga Zepp-LaRouche

The following statement was issued March 8 by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute, for immediate and widespread international circulation and endorsement. It is being issued at a time when Europe is at an historic crossroads, where a different alternative must be urgently put on the table if a catastrophe is to be avoided. We encourage signatures of endorsement from all walks of life to force this issue out into the public debate as quickly as possible.

The European Union (EU) and most European governments are in the grips of a war hysteria that can only be compared to the warmongering madness that broke out before World War One. Astronomical sums are slated to be spent on rearmament: European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wants to invest €800 billion(!) in the “Rearm Europe” plan, but by invoking Article 122 of the EU’s Lisbon Treaty to bypass the European Parliament. The likely next German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who had promised before the [Feb. 23] election that the CDU would not touch the debt brake, now says the exact opposite after the election: he proposes, to begin with, €400 billion(!) for arms buildup, and €500 billion for “infrastructure,” which will largely serve military purposes, but without setting an upper limit (!) for military spending—“Whatever it takes!” as Merz put it. Those are the infamous words Mario Draghi used during the euro crisis to signify that all the money floodgates should be opened. And this at a time when the German physical economy is in free fall, when some European countries are being crushed by gigantic mountains of debt and Europe has already been largely left behind economically.

And why such a sudden fantastic increase in money, as if there were no tomorrow? U.S. President Donald Trump is talking to Russian President Vladimir Putin and wants to bring the Ukraine war, which has long been lost militarily, to an end through negotiation, and thus end the horrific dying of Ukrainians and Russians. At the same time, Trump is pulling the world back from the brink of a thermonuclear world war, from which we were only a hair’s breadth away due to the escalation of the previous U.S. administration.

But rather than congratulating Trump and supporting him, the European Union—which was, after all, the winner of the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize—as well as UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron and Merz are attempting to continue the war in Ukraine “to the last Ukrainian,” even though experts estimate that it has already taken the lives of over one million Ukrainians and around 300,000 Russians.

The Europeans are thus attempting a repeat of the sabotage with which UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson torpedoed the Istanbul agreement between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in March 2022, which could have ended the war after a few weeks, and so is responsible for all the deaths since then.

At the same time, different secret services in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, etc. are producing forecasts that say Russia will allegedly have built up its military capabilities to such a point by 2029-30 that it will then be able to attack one or more other EU states. This is a purely geopolitically motivated assertion for which there is no evidence whatsoever, but which could turn out to happen if Europe continues to focus on confrontation, on the motto: “What I shout into the forest, will come back as an echo.”

Various institutes, such as the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, point out that neither the German Bundeswehr, nor the British or French armed forces are even remotely capable of engaging in a direct confrontation with the world’s strongest nuclear power—Russia. The Kiel Institute warned, for example, that at current procurement rates, it would take the Bundeswehr up to 100 years to reach the level of its 2004 stocks. The British Army has just 219 tanks, while Russia produces over 1000 per year. The British Royal Air Force has just 173 combat aircraft! Italy has an impressive 150 main battle tanks! Macron’s offer to use French nuclear weapons as a nuclear umbrella for the whole of Europe should be seen as a provocation of Russia more than as actual protection.

Tom Harrington, Professor Emeritus at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, aptly summed up the reaction of Europeans: “If you are a chihuahua and you play a Doberman for many years on TV, you can forget that you’re actually a chihuahua. That can lead to much delusion when the director calls off the production.”

If the EU and the individual European member states now sabotage Trump’s intention to end, together with Russia, the Ukraine war which was a proxy war between the U.S. and Russia from the beginning, then they are making a catastrophic historical mistake. If they then also attempt to finance the enormous lack of military capabilities by creating money outside the regular budgets, they are repeating German Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht’s policy of Mefo bills from the 1930s. At that point, the great war with Russia and with all the countries with which Russia is in a strategic partnership would become a self-fulfilling prophecy!

The European establishments have so far failed to reflect on their own strategic mistakes of recent decades, which have led to the current situation so unpleasant for them. Instead of seizing the great historic opportunity presented by the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification to establish a peace order that was absolutely possible at the time, all of Europe ended up following the policies of the Anglo-American neocons. Instead of dissolving NATO together with the Warsaw Pact in 1991, the West broke all the promises it had made to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and expanded NATO no less than six times—by a total of 1000 kilometers—up to the borders of Russia, thus creating the conditions for a reverse Cuban missile crisis. In addition, the policy of sanctions, regime change and interventionist wars, especially in Southwest Asia, created an enormous backlash throughout the Global South.

But the European establishments have so far been incapable of reflecting on their mistakes out of the obvious fear that it will profit their critics. Faced with the choice of joining Trump’s new U.S. peace policy, they are aligning behind the British policy—and thus the country leading the war policy!

Clearly, the European pro-Atlantic establishments have still not realized that the historical momentum has already shifted massively to Asia. Several nations there have growth rates that the European economy can only dream of. The economic success of China is due to its economic policy, which gives the priority to investment in infrastructure, the real economy, innovation, excellence in education and increased productivity through investment in cutting-edge technologies.

China’s trading partners benefit from this policy, which is based on win-win cooperation, as it is also economically beneficial for China. Organizations such as the BRICS, which now has 19 members and partners and many more hoping to join, as well as ASEAN, SCO, EAEU and others, now represent an attractive alternative to the unipolar “rules-based” order based purely on military alliances and geopolitical interests. Above all, it is by now well known that the application of these “rules” is a highly arbitrary matter.

Europe has reacted to Trump’s sudden signals for an end to the Ukraine war and a resumption of diplomacy with Russia with great panic—and cries for war. But there is still time to correct this potentially fatal course. If Europe wants to overcome its current economic misery, the way out lies in cooperation with the nations of the Global South, which has long since become the Global Majority.

Humanity has reached the point where it must overcome the old patterns of thought steeped in geopolitics and the Cold War and replace them with a new global security and development architecture that takes into account the interests of all nations on this planet. A positive example for this is provided by the Peace of Westphalia, which came about because the warring parties came to the conclusion that if the war continued, no one would be able to enjoy victory, since there would be no survivors. How much more convincing this argument is in times of thermonuclear weapons which, if used, would lead to the extinction of all mankind!

• We call on European politicians to come to their senses!

• Do not repeat the mistakes of the 1930s!

• Humanity is at the most important crossroads in its history!

• For a new paradigm: cooperation instead of confrontation!

• For immediate negotiations on a new Peace of Westphalia!

• For an end to the war in Ukraine through negotiations and diplomacy!

• For an end to the war in Gaza through diplomacy, the recognition of the two-state solution and the economic development of the entire region!

• No stationing of American medium-range missiles in Germany!

Feb. 14, 2025 (EIRNS)—The following statement by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, President of the Schiller Institute, will be circulated at the Munich Security Council. EIR’s translation is by Daniel Platt

Leading military experts—especially from the U.S.A.—agree that the world has never been as close to the brink of global nuclear war as it is today. Even if the immediate danger of escalation to nuclear war over the Ukraine crisis is hopefully averted after the telephone conversation between President Trump and President Putin, this danger could erupt in Southwest Asia in the short term if President Trump does not abandon his proposal, which violates international law, to relocate all Palestinians from Gaza and even from the West Bank—or in the medium term if a “Global NATO” participates in a confrontation with China in the Pacific.

The reason for the danger of war is that after the end of the Cold War, the transatlantic establishment felt called upon to form a unipolar world government and has since then tried to eliminate governments they dislike, those that challenge the dominance of the collective West. The scandal surrounding the manipulations by USAID in over 100 countries is currently causing a stir. It turns out that the “rules-based order” works with color revolutions, regime changes, coups, corruption, etc. The cuts in the U.S.A.’s so-called “soft power” now offer the opportunity to strengthen the independence of the states previously affected and, for example, to strengthen cooperation between the states of the Global South for mutual benefit.

When the Munich Security Conference was still called the Wehrkundetagung [Defense Science Conference] and was led by real security experts such as Ewald von Kleist and Horst Teltschik, this conference was still a place for dialogue between representatives of different worldviews, as should actually be a matter of course for representatives of around 200 nations on this planet. At that time, the participants bore their own costs, apart from those for the conference venue. Since then, the Munich Security Conference has become a PR event for the military-industrial complex, where the lobby of the arms manufacturers on both sides of the Atlantic and their favorite politicians reinforce each other’s shared narratives about how the world should be interpreted and which nations are the “good guys,” the democracies, or the “bad guys,” the autocracies. Also welcome are the artificially built-up stars of color revolutions, or particularly prominent “war-ready people,” who are supposed to be the beneficiaries of a special media glamor, so that they can better prepare the population for the coming great war.

It would actually be more appropriate for those gathered here under the banner of NATO to finally subject themselves to critical self-reflection and recognize that their entire policy has failed, because it is based on false axiomatics.

• The “end of history” claimed by Francis Fukuyama after the collapse of the Soviet Union did not happen, because the rest of the world refused to adopt the model of Western liberal democracy, and instead preferred to revive its own cultures, some of which are thousands of years old.

• NATO fought a war in Afghanistan for 20 (!) years, in which the U.S.A. alone spent $2 trillion. When NATO drew the conclusion of having lost the war against 65,000 Taliban fighters, and shamefully withdrew from Kabul airport in August 2021, they left behind a country in what was then the worst humanitarian crisis. The image of “local forces” desperately clinging to the planes remains a synonym for NATO’s “success.”

• As then-NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg admitted, the war in Ukraine began in 2014 and not in February 2022. The goal was to “weaken Russia” (Lloyd Austin), “ruin Russia” (Annalena Baerbock), and: “Russia must not win the war” (Olaf Scholz). Since then, NATO states have spent immense sums on armaments and training and have “put together” ever new packages of sanctions against Russia. And the result? Russia has a growth rate of around 4%—and the German economy is in free fall.

• The true character of the trans-Atlantic “elite” is nowhere more evident than in their reaction to President Trump’s initiative to start a direct dialogue with President Putin in order to finally end the lost war in Ukraine. Trump says what every reasonable person understands, namely that Russia’s security interests must be taken into account and that the war in Ukraine was the result of NATO’s Eastward expansion. The loud indignation of the war hawks on both sides of the Atlantic exposes their geopolitical intentions, which are so obviously failing miserably. This list of failed policies could go on and on.

After the “turning point” announced by Chancellor Scholz, and the associated increased military spending led to rising inflation and budget cuts in the social system, infrastructure, education, etc., Friedrich Merz’s demands for 3% and President Trump’s demands for 5% of gross domestic product for military spending now threaten that this will come entirely at the expense of pensions, health care, daycare centers, the renovation of the dilapidated infrastructure, etc. Hjalmar Schacht sends his regards: The costs of war are simply being passed on to the population through austerity measures!

We are currently experiencing total deindustrialization in Germany in favor of the profit maximation of the trans-Atlantic financial oligarchy, while over 20% of the population is threatened by poverty. If the massive militarization and rearmament now demanded is added to this, the middle class will also collapse, the welfare state will be dismantled, and Germany will become a formerly industrialized country. Germany, which was once respected and admired throughout the world, is now pitied or laughed at because it obviously does not have a government that knows how to represent its interests.

The old neoliberal order, in which Germany and the whole of Europe only had vassal status in the unipolar world order dominated by the Anglo-Americans, has failed. This represents an excellent opportunity for a new orientation that corresponds to the true interests of Germany and the other European nations. The rapid growth of the BRICS states—which already represent 22 nations and thus 46% of the world’s population, with numerous new applications for membership—shows the determination of the nations of the Global South to leave the era of 500 years of colonialism behind them, and to take their economic development into their own hands. Instead of expanding the geopolitical confrontation to the Indo-Pacific with “Global NATO,” Germany and the other European nations must seize the opportunity for our own future that lies in constructive cooperation with the BRICS states and the Global South, which makes up 85% of the world’s population.

NATO lost its raison d’être in 1991 when the Warsaw Pact was dissolved. The premise that there must always be an enemy, and that relations between nations must always be a zero-sum game, in which one wins and the other loses, is a barbaric concept that does not correspond to human nature, but only serves the profit interests of the military-industrial complex. The losers are always the poor suckers who have to lose their lives on the battlefield.

The tectonic changes in the strategic situation offer a fantastic opportunity for the European nations to work together on a new international security and development architecture that takes into account the interests of every single nation on this planet. For Germany, cooperation with the global majority offers the opportunity to get the economy back on track for growth, to help secure world peace, and to open up a positive future perspective for citizens.

What we can contribute to the further development of the human species is neither Taurus missiles nor Leopard 2 tanks, but a renaissance of classical German culture, philosophy and science by Leibniz, Bach, Beethoven, Schiller, Einstein, and Krafft Ehricke, to name just a few. The failure of the neoliberal unipolar world order presents a great opportunity to shed the imposed corset of the associated counterculture that has been imposed on Germany since the days of the CIA-funded “Congress for Cultural Freedom.”

If Germany has anything to contribute to the new emerging world order, then it is the optimistic view of humanity that is expressed in the poetry and compositions of German classical music.

No, there is a limit to the power of a tyrant. When the oppressed cannot find justice anywhere, When the burden becomes unbearable —he reaches up to heaven with courage, And brings down his eternal rights, Which hang up there, inalienable And unbreakable like the stars themselves—

Friedrich Schiller, Wilhelm Tell, Rütli Oath scene.

(zepp-larouche@eir.de)