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!
