Feb. 21, 2025 (EIRNS)—The subtitle of the City of London’s Feb. 20 The Economist article “How Europe Must Respond as Trump and Putin Smash the Post-War Order” was even more revealing than the headline: “The region has had its bleakest week since the fall of the Iron Curtain. The implications have yet to set in.”
Reeling from the just-concluded Feb. 14-16 Munich Security Conference and the cold slap of U.S. Vice-President J.D. Vance’s speech, Europe’s Lilliputian leaders have not been able to regain their emotional, let alone their geopolitical footing. It might have been thought by those who hoped that what they were seeing was not, in fact, happening prematurely to render such a definitive judgment as The Economist subtitle suggests, so soon after the Feb.12 Putin-Trump phone call, and the subsequent meetings of Secretary of State Marc Rubio and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
The British, however, strongly disagree with their still-delusional cohorts. “Mr. Trump appears ready to walk away from Ukraine which he falsely blames for the war. Calling its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a ‘dictator,’ Mr. Trump warned him that he had ‘better move fast or he is not going to have a country left.’ America may try to impose an unstable ceasefire on Ukraine with only weak security guarantees that limit its right to re-arm.” That is, America has chosen to “stop the gravy train,” especially after Zelenskyy admitted that he didn’t know where $100 billion of America’s contribution to the war effort had gone.
Russia and the United States met as the most powerful military forces on the planet, in pursuit of re-establishing official relations. As President of the United States, Joe Biden not only did not speak with Vladimir Putin for two years, but his administration authorized Ukraine to use American military equipment, intelligence and perhaps even “advisory personnel” to attack the territory of pre-2014 Russia with American long-range missiles, and without consulting the U.S. President-elect, this past November. Once the non-consulted President-elect became President by law, those attacks stopped. The world has in the last month moved slightly away from the abyss of thermonuclear war.
As for Zelenskyy being a dictator—he banned 11 political parties in March of 2022, suppressing his opposition, and has not lifted that ban. He closed the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, still the largest in the country, despite the ban. In July 8 of 2022, National Public Radio reporter Emily Feng announced, “President Zelenskyy has consolidated all TV platforms in Ukraine into one state broadcast and restricted political rivals. Political opposition fears such civil liberty constraints could continue.” Russian-language use has been severely restricted. Zelenskyy and his government made it illegal for Ukraine to negotiate peace with Russia in June of 2023—which makes it hard to understand why he would be angry about not being invited to a meeting in a third country, in which the American President’s representatives would raise with Russian representatives, among many other matters, how the killing in Ukraine could be stopped.
And as for the European Union: Sovereignty is not exactly the strong suit of a confederation that refuses to bring to justice the detonators of the $8 billion Nord Stream pipelines, who caused one of the greatest environmental disasters in history, in their act of industrial sabotage. Why are those ecology criminals that blew up Nord Stream in September 2022 not brought to justice? Maybe because they are the same people now advancing war and destruction over the bodies of 1 million Ukrainians or more. War and death are their only real commitment, not “the ecology,” and not humanity.
The nation of Egypt, in a contrasting exercise of national sovereignty, has made the following announcement: “From a technical and engineering perspective, we possess the full capability to restore Gaza to a condition even better than its pre-destruction state within three years.” This is directly conceived of as an answer to Trump’s “Gaza Riviera” proposal. They intend to discuss this at the upcoming March 4 emergency Arab Summit meeting.
In a just-concluded interview with Executive Intelligence Review, Graham Fuller, 25-year veteran of the CIA, former U.S. diplomat, and Islamic scholar, said, of the LaRouche Oasis Plan for Southwest Asia, "it needs to be introduced as part of a broader peace plan. One of the reasons that, however fine an idea it has been, the fact is that the local rivalries, and particularly rivalries projected by the United States in (its) Cold War mode, has made regional cooperation all but impossible. I mean, Syria, for example, would need to figure quite seriously, or Iraq for that matter, (because of) the Tigris and Euphrates (rivers.) All of these states would need to figure very seriously in any kind of regional water plan.
“But that’s been impossible”—that is, up until now. As with the Oasis Plan, will also not work unless all the nations of Southwest Asia are, in one way or another, integrated into such a plan. A new security and development architecture must emerge, for Palestine and Southwest Asia to survive, grow and develop. Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s Ten Principles are an efficient compass in this maelstrom of rapid change.
The events of the past eight days involving Trump and Putin show how quickly such a new architecture, freed from British interference, could come into existence. We must, therefore, not be caught below the level of events, and organize from above, treating each of the immediate days ahead as a potential doorway to, even on that day, change current history through the power of truly human ideas.
