NATO’s Expansion Enters a New Phase with Accession of Finland and Sweden; Global Showdown Between the U.S./NATO and Russia Sharply Worsens

May 18—The governments of Finland and Sweden today presented their formal requests to promptly join NATO, and were received with hurrahs and hosannahs by the war-crazed governments of the United States and most of Europe, as well as the financial Establishment of the City of London and Wall Street.

Not so the Russian government. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said the matter was under full analysis by Moscow, since it involved a major reconfiguration of forces in Europe, after which “we will have to take compensatory measures, and nobody will stand to gain.” Behind Ryabkov’s terse comment lies the grim reality that Russia is hardening its policy posture on a number of strategic fronts in response to the unrelenting war drive which threatens their very existence as a nation—including persistent discussion in the West that unthinkable nuclear war against Russia just might be “thinkable.”

For example, Nikolai Patrushev, the head of Russia’s Security Council, yesterday stated that Moscow had to “use this preventive measure [military action in Ukraine], because the level of threats to national security, disregard to our country’s interest has entered a new level, which threatened Russia’s very statehood and existence.” His words and tenor recall Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko’s May 10 summary of the conditions under which Russian military doctrine states that Russia “is allowed to use nuclear weapons,” which includes “if the country faces an existential threat through the use of conventional weapons.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov yesterday stated bluntly that “I should say that they [the Western states] are hostile states, because what they are doing is war.” The Foreign Ministry has announced that Russia is withdrawing from the Council of the Baltic Sea States, and Duma Committees are now studying Russian withdrawal from the WHO and the WTO.

This strategic decoupling between East and West is dangerous beyond the comprehension of most people. So, too, is the economic decoupling that the Establishment’s sadistic sanctions policy is intentionally producing. Both of these war fronts—the strategic and the economic—are being inexorably driven by the onrushing systemic breakdown crisis of the trans-Atlantic financial world, precisely as Lyndon LaRouche warned would happen.

The governments of the U.S. and Europe have quickly come up with billions to fund Nazis in Ukraine and to provoke nuclear war, including funds for the neo-Nazis of the Azov Battalion who are killers made from the same cookie-cutter as deranged Buffalo racist Payton Gendron. They are in fact creating, funding and arming a universal fascist movement using Ukraine as their staging ground. And yet those same governments cannot find a penny to put baby formula on store shelves, nor to stop global hyperinflation or provide food for starving hundreds of millions—and soon billions—of souls across the planet.

As the world crashes into a full-scale global depression and breakdown crisis in the weeks and months ahead, as daily essentials such as food and fuel become out of reach, you and your neighbor are going to have to wake up and realize LaRouche was right along, and join the Schiller Institute’s call: The world needs funding for farms, for health, for energy—not for Nazis in Ukraine and for a nuclear World War III.

The Schiller Institute has organized twin conferences on May 25 and 26 on either side of the Atlantic to discuss how to stop the war drive. And in late June, there will be a major international two-day conference to continue the process set in motion around the Schiller Institute’s April 9 conference, to mobilize the forces internationally to stop the war and stop the starvation by building a new international security and development architecture around Lyndon LaRouche’s program.