‘World War Three or a New Global Security and Development Architecture?’

July 14—Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche delivered the following keynote address on July 12 to Panel I of the Schiller Institute conference in Berlin, Germany. The title of the panel is, “Cooperation between the BRICS and Europe to Implement the Oasis Plan and the Agenda 2063 for Africa.” Subheads have been added.

HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Dear conference participants, dear friends of the Schiller Institute, here on site and everywhere in the world, wherever you may be watching, dear friends of humanity!

We have gathered here because we want to show a way out of a highly threatening strategic situation and counteract widespread pessimism—indeed, fatalism. It is indeed possible to intervene in history, provided one has a good plan and can mobilize sufficient forces to implement it! I would therefore like to preface our conference with this quote from Friedrich Schiller’s work on the Decline of the Netherlands:

“Great and comforting is the thought that, despite the defiant presumptions of princely power, there is still a remedy available, that their most calculated plans will be brought to shame by human freedom, that hearty resistance can bend even the outstretched arm of a despot, that heroic perseverance can finally exhaust his terrible resources.” Let us give a “new and irrefutable example of what people can dare to do for a good cause and what they can achieve through unity.”

To do this, however, we must first wake our contemporaries from their apparent sleepwalking, into which they seem to have fallen, especially here in Germany. The world has never been closer to a point of no return, to a potential end point in history where the final catastrophe of a global nuclear war becomes inevitable.

In many of his works, Friedrich Schiller used the term punctum saliens, which in drama and history describes the moment when everything starts moving inexorably. In his Fourth Letter on Don Carlos, he writes: “Every action has its punctum saliens, where it leaps from possibility into reality.” In relation to history, we can pinpoint these points of no return—when, for example, it was too late to prevent World War I or World War II. In relation to the immediate future, however, manifold uncertainties cloud this insight—when it becomes certain that a third, and this time final, global war, this time a nuclear war, will break out, it will be too late. Humanity, and with it our history, will be wiped out.

We are currently witnessing the collapse of the world order as it emerged after World War II and then again in a modified form after the end of the Cold War. One of the most significant milestones in this development was on August 15, 1971, when President Nixon embarked on the fatal path of deregulated monetarism with the introduction of flexible exchange rates; the consequences of which Lyndon LaRouche prophetically predicted would lead to a new depression, a new fascism, and a new world war, unless a completely new world economic system was created in time. That is exactly where we stand today!

Taking a Look Back

To understand how we could have arrived at this point only 35 years after German reunification, let us take a look back! For a brief period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification, we experienced a golden age for humanity, one of those rare moments in history when the course can be completely reset: the former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, Jack Matlock, emphasized at a recent conference of the Schiller Institute that even before its dissolution in 1991, the Soviet Union no longer posed a threat; so there was no longer any enemy. It would therefore have been entirely possible to establish a new peace order for the 21st Century with the end of the Cold War. Lyndon LaRouche initially proposed the economic basis for this peace order with his “Productive Triangle Paris-Berlin-Vienna” program and then with the Eurasian Land Bridge. At that time, we fought for our right to sovereignty, which is also enshrined in the Two + Four Treaty for Germany, but we have been completely cheated of this sovereignty, not only in the new federal states, but in Germany as a whole!

U.S.-Russian-German-British and French documents that have since been declassified and are now available in the U.S. National Archives, the State Department, Pentagon, presidential libraries, and various national archives and university libraries, prove not one, but a veritable flood of security promises against NATO’s eastward expansion that were made to Gorbachev and Shevardnadze by Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner.

These documents clearly show that the promise not to expand NATO one inch to the east was so central that the Russian complaints of having been deceived are absolutely justified.

The keynote speech given by Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher at a conference of the Protestant Academy in Tutzing on January 31, 1990, played a decisive role. Genscher emphasized: “We do not want unity at the expense of third parties…. It is NATO’s responsibility to make it clear: Whatever happens in the Warsaw Pact, there will be no expansion of NATO territory to the east; i.e., closer to the borders of the Soviet Union. These security guarantees are important for the Soviet Union and its behavior.” Significantly, Genscher’s speech has virtually disappeared from the internet and can only be found with some technical effort.

The “Tutzing Formula” was to set off a storm of important diplomatic talks over the next ten days, culminating in the decisive meeting between Kohl and Gorbachev on February 10, at which Gorbachev gave his agreement in principle to German reunification.

Considering the sheer volume of these promises, there can be no doubt that they played a key role in persuading the Russian leadership at the time to show enormous generosity in facilitating German reunification—and that was just 45 years after the end of World War II! This makes it all the more understandable that Russia viewed the West’s subsequent policy as a tremendous breach of trust.

9/11 and the Unipolar World

The motive for this change of direction lay in the fact that the neocons and their Wolfowitz doctrine prevailed in the U.S., which was intended to consolidate the U.S.’s leading role in a new unipolar world order. According to this doctrine, the U.S. reserves the right to decide alone when and where to intervene militarily, including preventive strikes against perceived threats. Despite changing administrations, they determined policy as an expression of a permanent bureaucracy. What followed was the rejection of the Westphalian system of peace by Blair in his speech in Chicago in 1999, replaced by the policy of “Right2Protect,” the “humanitarian intervention wars,” which, after September 11, 2001, which LaRouche had prophetically predicted as the coming Reichstag fire on January 3, were waged under the banner of the “war on terror” in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, as well as color revolutions and regime changes, as well as NATO’s eastward expansion, accompanied by the unilateral termination of all arms control and disarmament treaties: ABM, INF, Open Sky, and KSE.

While the U.S. administrations had no problem with Yeltsin, who willingly submitted to the IMF’s shock therapy, and thus allowed Russia’s industrial capacity to be reduced to only 30% between 1991 and 1994, Putin’s efforts to restore Russia’s status as a world power stood in the way of the vision of a unipolar world order. The Maidan coup of 2014, in which Victoria Nuland played an unforgettable role, marked the serious beginning of a proxy war by NATO against Russia. The admission by Angela Merkel and François Hollande that the Minsk Agreement had only served to train Ukrainian forces to NATO standards, has contributed significantly to the now total loss of trust.

Ukraine Is NATO's War

Western military experts have pointed out that the relatively small Russian troop deployment in February 2022 proves that Putin had no intention of attacking the whole of Ukraine, but wanted to come to the aid of the Russian-speaking population in eastern Ukraine.

On March 31 of this year, the New York Times published a 13,000-word article presenting the results of a year-long investigation based on 300 interviews, which documented that the U.S. had been commanding the war in Ukraine directly from the Clay Barracks in Wiesbaden since at least mid-April 2022; practically at the same time as Boris Johnson’s intervention in Kyiv, which sabotaged the diplomatic solution reached in Istanbul between Russia and Ukraine.

While the official narrative of an “unprovoked war of aggression” remains the dogma with which even NATO-critical politicians feel compelled to begin their speeches, NATO’s full involvement in this conflict is overwhelmingly documented. David Ignatius, the notorious mouthpiece of the permanent bureaucracy in the U.S., revealed as early as 2022 in a series of articles in the Washington Post where the conviction of politicians comes from who, despite all the evidence on the battlefield and in the economy, incessantly repeat that “Russia will be ruined” or, as German Chancellor Merz says, “Putin must lose.”

Behind this lies the belief that the new revolution in warfare that has taken place in Ukraine, combining the trench warfare of World War I with the “most modern weapons of the 21st Century,” namely the use of AI to spy on the enemy, has checkmated Russia. Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, sees it this way: “The power of the most advanced algorithmic warfare systems is now so great that it is equivalent to having tactical nuclear weapons against an enemy who only has conventional ones. The general public underestimates this. Our adversaries no longer do.” And Gen. Mark Milley, Chief of Staff of the Army, said at the end of 2022: “We are currently witnessing the way wars will be fought and won for many years to come.”

NATO Will Fight a Nuclear War

We are part of a military alliance with NATO in which Germany’s survival is not a priority. On November 20, 2024, Admiral Thomas Buchanan of U.S. STRATCOM in Washington stated at an event titled, “Report Launch: Project Atom 2024” hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), that the U.S. would be prepared to engage in a nuclear exchange if U.S. global leadership were at stake. His only reservation was that the U.S. should ensure that it retained enough nuclear weapons to maintain U.S. hegemony afterwards. Admiral Buchanan’s remarks were not a slip of the tongue; they were backed up by the “Nuclear Posture Review” (NPR) 2022, in which President Biden (or whoever was in charge in the final years of the Biden administration) reserves the right to use nuclear weapons preemptively if the “vital interests” of the U.S. or its allies are threatened, although renowned experts such as Ted Postol as well as participants in NATO maneuvers, point out that Germany’s survival would not be taken into account in an emergency.

Otherwise, Buchanan’s view that tactical nuclear wars can take place and be won is pure fantasy. Postol has convincingly demonstrated why such a “limited” use would lead to the use of all nuclear weapons. Incidentally, just one day after Buchanan’s lecture, Putin demonstrated with the deployment of the first Oreshnik hypersonic missile in Dnipro that Russia now has a non-nuclear weapon—using kinetic energy alone due to its high speed (up to Mach 10-11)—against which there is no defense system, while Karp and Milley’s predictions at that time had not been proven true on the battlefield.

It is inconceivable: only 80 years after the collapse of National Socialism in Germany and the end of World War II, and, under the impression of the ruins, the then-quite serious “Never again!” slogan, this country is to be made “warlike” again at all levels of society. And the most frightening thing about this is that a large part of German society either seems to have accepted the narrative spread by the mainstream media about the reasons for this, or feels paralyzed. Between the EU’s “Rearm Europe” program and the so-called “defense and resilience clause” (also known as “security and defense exceptions”), which is a kind of enabling act, we are now on the path to an arms race that allows unlimited borrowing for defense spending.

In doing so, the existential interests of the German people, whom all members of the government have sworn in an oath of office to protect from harm, are being completely sacrificed on the altar of transatlantic subservience.

Finding a Way Out of the Darkness

The purpose of our conference is to show a way out of this impasse. We must put a new global security and development architecture on the agenda in good time; one that takes into account the security and economic interests of all states on this planet. And this is absolutely possible, because the geopolitical view that one absolutely needs an enemy has long since found an alternative. The attempt to establish a unipolar world order has suffered a major setback for some time now, because after 500 years of colonialism, the nations of the Global South were by no means prepared to submit to a unipolar world order. The experience of unilateral sanctions imposed on many states, the utilization of the dollar as a weapon, credit and trade conditions perceived as unfair, and much more, all contributed to activating the spirit of Bandung, a milestone in the history of the Non-Aligned Movement.

China’s unprecedented economic rise, which lifted 850 million of its citizens out of poverty in around 40 years and eliminated extreme poverty by the end of 2021—considered unprecedented in the history of global poverty reduction—as well as China’s meteoric rise in science and technology—which, according to the Australian think tank ASPI, has made it the world leader in 57 of 63 cutting-edge technologies—has made it the primary threat in the eyes of Anglo-American neocons, but has proven to be a true blessing for the countries of the Global South. Since President Xi Jinping declared the New Silk Road to be China’s official policy in 2013, a program that had a great affinity with our Eurasian Land Bridge of 1991 and is increasingly converging with our World Land-Bridge program of 2014, China is now working with almost 150 nations on the Belt and Road Initiative. China had a trade volume with the countries of the Global South of approximately €2.5 trillion in 2023, and even that is only a fraction of the potential of the projects that have been started.

BRICS: More Than Half of Humanity

The BRICS, which now includes ten member states and ten partners representing more than half of humanity, have just concluded their annual summit in Rio. And all speakers, including many from guest countries, enthusiastically and firmly expressed their intention to build a just economic system that offers all participating nations the prospect of finally overcoming poverty, building their economies, and developing health and education systems, and to participate in the scientific and technological progress of humanity on the basis of division of labor and equality. The BRICS explicitly do not see themselves as an alternative to NATO, and certainly not as a bloc; they are open to cooperation with all countries of the world. So, President Trump is wrong when he claims that the BRICS were founded to harm the US; they were founded to overcome the underdevelopment of the Global Majority!

Don’t believe a word you read in the Western media about the BRICS! Supposedly they are divided, because Xi and Putin did not participate in the latest summit, and the momentum has been lost. The opposite is true: Although all BRICS countries are under enormous pressure and are responding to this pressure in very different ways, the trend toward a new era for humanity is unstoppable. The nations of the Global South are determined to realize their right to equal economic development, to no longer be suppliers of raw materials, but to build up the value chain in their own countries, develop industry and agriculture, and become middle-income countries in the near future.

The Schiller Institute has prepared a study for this conference, currently in progress, on how Europe, together with China and other BRICS countries, can support the countries of Africa and Southwest Asia; in particular through joint ventures in this development. We have initially focused on the three key countries, Germany, France, and Italy, with the other countries to follow, in order to show that such cooperation not only helps Africa and the Middle East, but that these joint ventures can also become the driving force for overcoming the deep economic crisis in which Europe’s economy currently finds itself.

Instead of pouring trillions of euros into rearmament, which destroys productive capacity from the point of view of the real economy, we should join forces with China to invest in areas that have always been at the forefront of successful industrialization: Widespread energy production and distribution; basic continental infrastructure; and, beyond that, investment in some so-called “game changer” projects, such as the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, which is a showcase for Africa-Europe-China cooperation that addresses two of the most pressing issues—water and electricity. Furthermore, the Transaqua Project, which enables water management, hydropower, transportation, and agro-industrial development projects for 12 countries in the heart of Africa; and finally the Grand Inga Dam Hydroelectric Project, which will generate more than a third of the electricity currently produced in all of Africa.

Despite the economic crisis, European countries still have the scientific and technological know-how that is urgently needed in Africa. Europe is gaining growing markets from increasingly wealthy customers, and is resolving the refugee crisis in the only humane way possible; by creating good reasons for young people in particular to stay in their own countries, rather than drowning in the Mediterranean or vegetating in camps that Pope Francis has described as concentration camps.

For Southwest Asia, we propose the Oasis Plan, which begins with canals between the Mediterranean, Red, and Dead Seas, the desalination of large quantities of seawater for desert irrigation, and ultimately the greening and economic development of all of Southwest Asia as the center of the ancient Silk Road between Asia, Africa, and Europe. Here, too, cooperation between China and other BRICS countries with Europe and the countries of the region can implement the mandate of Pope Paul VI, “The new name for peace is development”—Pope Leo also speaks of “development as a weapon” for lasting peace in the region.

The Fight for Peace Through Development

Today’s conference of the Schiller Institute is the start of a campaign throughout Europe, Africa, and Asia to implement this program of joint ventures as a motor for overcoming the economic crisis, and as a prospect for peace. And I am particularly pleased that we have gained the cooperation of the Chinese Academy of Contemporary China and World Studies (ACCWS), whose vice president, Daqi Fan, will address us in a video message.

This type of cooperation to solve the most pressing problems facing humanity also corresponds to the mindset we need to put a new global security and development architecture on the agenda, one that takes into account the interests of every country on earth. Only by realizing such a new paradigm in international relations can we escape the consequences of the far-reaching collapse of international law and international relations, which has resulted from the toleration of genocide in Gaza and the recent attacks on Iran; namely, a general descent into anarchy.

We have reached a real punctum saliens in history, but nothing could be further from Schiller’s reasoning than to understand this term fatalistically; quite the contrary. Very early on, in his Philosophical Letters, “Julius to Raphael,” he wrote in 1786: “There is a certain punctum saliens of reason, where all concepts are reversed, where the soul flies beyond the data of the senses….” It is the moment of transition from fear to freedom.

I, and probably many other people, have often asked myself how the German people, who have produced so many outstanding poets, thinkers, and inventors, could allow themselves to be deprived of their sovereignty in this way. Schiller showed the way out with his concept of the “sublime.” In On the Sublime (1793), he writes: “There is a critical point where the power of nature oppresses the spirit just enough that it saves itself with a sudden leap into the sphere of freedom.” This moment is the punctum saliens, in which man struggles out of paralyzing fear to moral self-assertion.

Throughout his life’s work, Schiller grappled with this question of the sublime, of how man learns to act greater than circumstances seem to allow him to through aesthetic education. In a letter to Goethe on January 7, 1795, he wrote: “There is a punctum saliens in every art where the mechanical is transformed into the free, and this point must be found by genius.” And in Grace and Dignity, he says that humans show dignity when they find the decisive moment of self-control in the conflict between duty and inclination. The punctum saliens is the revolutionary moment in history when we realize our humanity.

We will therefore do everything in our power to honor our namesake and prove ourselves worthy of the beautiful image he had of humanity: I would like to conclude with a few lines from his fragment called “German Greatness”:

"That is not the greatness of the Germans, Whether to conquer with the sword, To penetrate the realm of spirits To struggle manfully with madness That is worthy of his zeal.

"A higher victory has been won By those who wield the lightning of truth Who liberate the spirits themselves To fight for freedom of reason Means justice for all peoples And applies for all eternity."