April 11, 2025 (EIRNS)—We are in a situation of unprecedented turmoil, from economic shocks, financial breakdown, galloping militarization, and warfare. In the midst of all this, the very positive event took place today in St. Petersburg, where President Vladimir Putin met with U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff. Preliminary indications are that the dialogue was productive. The Kremlin reported that it was “focused on the aspects of the Ukraine crisis settlement.” Significantly, it is reported that Russian Special Envoy Kirill Dmitriev also attended the meeting, who had visited the White House on April 2, and had met with Witkoff today before the meeting with Putin.
This St. Petersburg meeting exemplifies that diplomacy—especially among Russia, China, India, the United States and many more powers, must be brought to bear on all questions, instead of geopolitics and perpetual conflict. There is the positive initiative tomorrow, of the “indirect” talks in Muscat involving delegations from the U.S. and Iran. The nuclear question is the chief topic.
However, swirling around these diplomatic initiatives are threats, insults, and most significantly, the tariff warfare initiated from Washington, plus the push for strikes on Iran, called for by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Today, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute, filed an article to appear in the upcoming German weekly newspaper, Neues Solidarität, headlined, “Trade War, Rearmament, World War? Or a New Security Architecture?” She opens:
“By unilaterally imposing tariffs on the entire world, then ‘pausing’ them, then raising the tariffs on China to 145%, President Trump did not cause, but he did trigger, a process that could lead in the relatively short term to the disintegration of the global financial system, which is already on the verge of collapse. This escalation is moving towards ‘uncharted waters’ and risks leading to an ‘outright financial war,’ according to the global head of foreign exchange research at Deutsche Bank, George Saravelos. As a result, a systemic crisis of the global financial system threatens, with the acute danger that the existing flashpoints of war could escalate up to a Third World War!”
China last night imposed tariffs on U.S. imports of 125%, in response to the U.S. imposition of 145% tariffs against China. Today, President Xi Jinping spoke of the necessity for diplomatic relations, not bullying. Xi warned, when speaking to the media along with Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who is visiting Beijing, “There is no winner in a tariff war, and going against the world will only result in self-isolation.” Foreign Minister Wang Yi today said, “China, as a responsible member of the international community, stands firm not only to defend its legitimate rights and interests, but also to safeguard the common interests of the international community to ensure that humanity is not dragged back into a jungle world where might makes right.”
Zepp-LaRouche in her article points out the damage from continuing the tariff warfare confrontation course. She writes, “In the short term, if Trump sticks to his tariff war, there will be a wave of bankruptcies in the countries of the Global South, and among U.S. companies and farmers, as well as a rise in inflation and the ensuing private bankruptcies, while owners of U.S. Treasuries could be forced to convert them into hundred-year bonds, as Trump economic advisor Stephen Miran suggests. It could also be called expropriation.”
The same dangerous, delusionary thinking was on display in Europe today, in and around the meeting in Brussels of the so-called “Coalition of the Willing” (willing to provide military aid to Ukraine, that is), and also in Warsaw at the meeting of the EU Finance Ministers today and tomorrow. The British delegation at the Coalition beat the drum for continuing arms to Ukraine, as well as rearming Europe. How? Have a new “fund,” says former Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, who spelled this out in an article yesterday, calling for an “economic coalition of the willing.” He described ways to collect resources, and start discussing “a Europe-wide, off-balance-sheet, special-purpose defense and security fund.” A similar concept is on the agenda tomorrow of the EU Finance Ministers, as an “intergovernmental defense fund.”
But putting aside these hallucinations about funds and expropriations, the decrepit condition of the European economies, and especially Britain, is worse by the hour. Today U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer called a special session of the Parliament for tomorrow—the first one in four years, because of the nation’s steel-making crisis. British Steel’s last two remaining blast furnaces in the whole kingdom, are on the point of shutdown. Two shut down last year. This will leave the country with no integrated steel works at all. The U.K. will be 100% dependent on imports and recycled scrap. So much for heavy rearmament, in the lead country of the Coalition of the Willing!
“So what can be done?” asks Zepp-LaRouche in her article today. “In such a dual existential crisis—the threat of financial collapse and the danger of war—band-aids will not help. We need a completely new paradigm in international relations, a return to diplomacy as a means of conflict resolution, and the overcoming of geopolitics by focusing on the common interests of mankind.” She spells this out further, in her article posted below in full by EIR.news.
The Schiller Institute released a new document April 10, now available in many languages, for rapid and wide international circulation on, “what to do.” The headline explains, “What Each and Every Nation Must Do Now: Wall Street Gave Us This Crisis; LaRouche Has the Solution.”
