E.I.R.STRATEGIC ALERT
WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
Volume 35, No. 17, April 29, 2021
Don’t Miss the Schiller Institute Conference on May 8!
The Schiller Institute will hold an international online confer ence on the afternoon and evening of May 8, which we en courage you to attend, on the theme “The Moral Collapse of the West Cries out for a New Paradigm”. Simultaneous trans lations will be provided over Zoom, for which advance regis tration is required. More information on schillerinstitute.com.
Biden’s Earth Day Bash
Meets Growing Resistance to Great Reset President Joe Biden welcomed 40 world leaders, as well as representatives of the financial world and environmental movements, to his “Leaders Summit on Climate” on April 22- 23, on the occasion of “Earth Day.” The stated intention of the Biden Administration was to pressure the various countries into achieving their targets for reducing greenhouse emissions even more quickly than now planned. But more fundamentally, as Helga Zepp-LaRouche pointed out in an April 24 article, the aim was to re-establish, after four years of the Trump presi dency, “the global leadership role of the United States in the ‘rule-based world order’ defined by Washington itself.” What also became apparent is “just how much the climate issue is being exploited for geopolitical purposes” (cf. below).
Fortunately, all the heads of state and government participat ing did not agree to submit to such a world order and its clearly Malthusian agenda. Chinese President Xi Jinping, in particular, insisted on the fundamental right of all nations, to sustainable economic and social development. Russia and India as well, as many less developed countries, refuse to sacrifice development to a “false god” of global warming (cf. more below).
A major part of the two-day summit was devoted to the “Great Reset”, a deindustrialzation and depopulation scheme under which the major banks are to cut off credit to countries and companies that emit too much carbon, as we have abun
dantly covered in our newsletter. Its main purpose in the short term, however, is to create a “green bubble” that will allow the rotten trans-Atlantic financial system to remain afloat a little bit longer. One aspect of this scam presented during the summit was the urgency to expand carbon markets, carbon pricing, and carbon taxing, as laid out by IMF Managing Direc
tor Kristalina Georgieva.
The European Union, for one, has been fully on board this
ideological scheme since the beginning with its “Green Deal”. The idea now is to impose the same folly on Africa, as urged by European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, on April 23 at the EU-Africa Forum on Green Investment. She claimed that a “Green Deal” should be the “centerpiece” of Af
rica’s recovery, just at it is in Europe. Brussels is working with the European Investment Bank, she added, to “cover the risk of green investment in Africa”, i.e., to punish investors and governments financially and economically that do not respect the climate change dictates. One can assume that military in
terventions would also be part of the deal.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche blasted the hypocrisy of such propos als in her article, titled “The Biggest Threat Is Not Climate Change, but Nuclear War and Indifference”. Given that 270 million people in the world are at risk of starvation this year alone, and that poverty has immensely increased, including as a result of the pandemic, it is a sign of complete moral bank ruptcy, she wrote, for the West to now attempt and shift onto those same countries the costs of “a scientifically completely untenable climate policy”. The only possible explanation for such horrific indifference “not only of ‘lifestyle greens’, but of the majority of the population”, to so much suffering, she concluded, is that their consciences “died long ago and have become green”.
The Right to Economic Development Is a Fundamental Human Right
Contrary to the line duly repeated at the Climate Summit by Western representatives, many world leaders do not consider an alleged global warming and CO2 emissions as the greatest existential threat to mankind, although recognizing the need to reduce pollution and to modernize industrial production.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, the first foreign leader to speak, did not announce any change in his government’s goals on carbon emissions or on the need to use coal and nuclear power, More importantly, he underlined the principle which marks the fundamental difference from the “Green philoso
phy” in the West, by placing the emphasis on increasing pro ductivity through science. “To protect the environment is to protect productivity, and to improve the environment is to boost productivity – the truth is as simple as that”, he said. He also emphasized the “common but differentiated responsi bilities” between the advanced sector and the developing sec-
tor, insisting that the concerns of the developing countries for economic growth must be accommodated.
Russian President Putin pointed out that Russia had reduced carbon emissions by half since the 1990s. Like China, Russia has a serious problem with real pollution, which it is resolv ing, with the side-effect of reducing carbon emissions. And like China, it intends to increase the use of nuclear power plants which “produce almost zero greenhouse gas emissions” and of coal fired plants. He closed by insisting on the need to fight poverty and close the gap between rich and poor.
Note that Xi and Putin both emphasized that climate poli cies, like all global issues, should be deliberated on in the framework of United Nations, which is in direct opposition to the unililateral “rules-based order” touted by Washington and Brussels and backed up by NATO.
From Latin America, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lo pez Obrador made clear that Mexico would continue to de velop and use its own hydrocarbon deposits, and reported that a vast reforestation program is now ongoing.
Of special interest was Gaston Browne, the Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda, an island state that the climate lobby claims is about to disappear under rising sea levels. He barely mentioned climate, but focused on the financial disaster which, due to the pandemic, is hitting countries like his that depend on tourism. He demanded that the debt of nations like his must be forgiven or reorganized, since it cannot be repaid.
Climate Change, a Convenient Cover for Geopolitics and War
What became increasingly clear over the past weeks is the in tention of the Western military establishment to link the pre text of “climate change” to the same old geopolitical agenda. This was unambiguously expressed on April 22 at the Leaders Summit by U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin: “We face all kinds of threats in our line of work, but few of them truly deserve to be called existential. The climate crisis does.… Cli mate change is making the world more unsafe and we need to act. The climate crisis is a profoundly destabilizing force for our world. As the Arctic melts, competition for resources and influence in the region increases. Closer to the Equator, rising temperatures and more frequent and intense extreme weather events in Africa and Central America threaten millions with drought, hunger, and displacement.”
This is a vicious statement for several reasons, one of which is the attempt to blame the pressing problems of hunger, mi gration and under-development in the world on the climate, when they are clearly the result of the neo-liberal economic and permanent war policies deliberately carried out under the present-day “British Empire”. Implicit in this drive is the threat to use military intervention and/or regime change coups to impose the Anglo-American “rules-based order”, as has been done in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen.
Earlier on the same day, the Pentagon’s Climate Action Team had posted articles which highlighted the geopolitical com petition for resources. Reducing population growth in under developed, mineral-rich countries has been a persistent theme of the Pentagon’s strategy papers for many years, with the climate crisis being a more recent addition. However, just days after his inauguration, Joe Biden officially made “climate con siderations” an “essential element of U.S. foreign policy and national security”.
Thus, climate change became an inherent part of Pentagon planning, at the same time as provocations of China and Rus
sia have markedly escalated, with the corresponding danger of leading to full-scale war.
Lest anyone doubt that danger, Admiral Charles Richard, the commander of the U.S. Strategic Command (StratCom), announced in February that he had instructed the Pentagon to upgrade the likelihood of nuclear war from “almost impos
sible” to a “very real possibility.” And on April 20, StratCom, which is responsible for the U.S. nuclear arsenal, published the following tweet: “The spectrum of conflict today is neither linear nor predictable. We must account for the possibility of conflict leading to conditions which could very rapidly drive an adversary to consider nuclear use as their least bad option.”
Such statements hardly received any media coverage, al though they were made in the context of an alarming escala tion of sanctions, expulsions of diplomats and military maneu vers against both Russia and China (cf. below).
MI6 Announces Plan To Spy
on Major Polluters, Starting with China Richard Moore, the Chief of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Ser vice (MI6), disclosed in an interview with Times Radio that MI6 agents are monitoring the world’s largest alleged pollut ers, particularly China, to ensure that they are honoring their international commitments regarding the environment. The “green spying” mission, he said, is due to the fact that MI6 views climate change as the “foremost international foreign policy item” for the United Kingdom and for the planet.
Why China? Because China is “certainly the largest emit ter” of carbon. The MI6 super-spy further said that his agency aims “to shine a light in places where people might not want it shone.... Where people sign up to commitments on climate change, it is perhaps our job to make sure that what they are really doing reflects what they have signed up to.” Mr. Moore did not explain what retaliatory measures would be taken against the “climate sinners”, but knowing the sordid past and present of Her Majesty’s Secret Service, they are not hard to imagine...
The MI6 chief also took the occasion to slam the “reckless behaviour” of Russia.
Putin Responds to Escalating Provocations from Washington, London and Brussels Russian President Putin issued a “stern warning” in his 17th annual State of the Nation address on April 21 to those who threaten Russia’s fundamental sovereign interests. His remarks were especially sharp regarding the strategic crisis stemming from ongoing geopolitical provocations in Ukraine and against Belarus, even as he reiterated his desire for more cooperation, including a renewal of his call for a summit of the Permanent 5 members of the United Nations Security Council.
He particularly targeted the West’s use of sanctions and regime change operations as foreign policy tools. We quote: “everyone in the world seems to be used to the practice of politically motivated, illegal economic sanctions and to certain actors’ brutal attempts to impose their will on others by force. But today, this practice is degenerating into something even more dangerous -- I am referring to the recently exposed di
rect interference in Belarus in an attempt to orchestrate a coup d’état and assassinate the President of that country. At the same time, it is typical that even such flagrant actions have not been condemned by the so-called collective West. Nobody seemed to notice. Everyone pretends nothing is happening.”
He repeated several times that Russia’s response to such
EIR STRATEGIC ALERT 2 WEEKLY NEWSLETTER n°17 / 2021
provocations has been “restrained”, adding that his govern ment would rather engage in dialogue than in severing rela tions. “But if someone mistakes our good intentions for in difference or weakness and intends to burn or even blow up
these bridges, they must know that Russia’s response will be asymmetrical, swift and tough.
“Those behind provocations that threaten the core interests of our security will regret what they have done in a way they have not regretted anything for a long time.” He concluded this section of his speech by stating that he hopes “that no one will think about crossing the ‘red line’ with regard to Russia.”
Putin’s address was delivered as NATO’s Defender Europe 21 military maneuvers, the largest in years, were underway, and as tensions reached a boiling point over Ukraine, with U.S troops in Europe put on the “highest alert” status. Ukrainian officials, including President Zelensky, are calling for expe
dited entry into NATO (one of Russia’s “red lines”), while Presi dent Biden and others promised that the U.S. and NATO would not abandon them to the “aggressive” Russians. Even more threatening was the discovery of an assassination plot against Belarus President Lukashenko, as part of a regime change coup in Minsk. Accepting Ukraine into NATO, combined with a coup in Belarus, would potentially place NATO troops and offensive
weapons on the entire western border of Russia. Whether Joe Biden and the war hawks in his Administration and among NATO members are taking Putin’s warning seri ously will be watched closely in Moscow. Just two weeks ago, Washington enhanced its financial warfare measures against Russia (cf. SAS 16/21), and new sanctions are envisaged, while the U.S. ambassador in Minsk took the highly provoca tive step of meeting with the supposed opposition leader to President Lukashenko on April 21.
Former U.S. Colonel: There Is Absolutely No Legal or Moral Justification for Sanctions Colonel (ret.) Richard Black, former chief of the Army Crimi nal Law Division at the Pentagon, and former member of the Virginia Senate, is a highly respected and outspoken critic of the permanent war, regime change policy of the United States, who has been a featured speaker at several Schiller Institute conferences (cf. SAS 12/21, 51/20). Following the recent ap peal of Helga Zepp-LaRouche to stop the genocide against Syria and Yemen (cf. SAS 16/21), he was interviewed on April 23 by Harley Schlanger of the SI on the U.S. policy toward Syria, which he has “studied intensely” since 2011.
At the time, Col. Black explained, he was shocked to dis cover that the CIA and other special forces were deployed to coordinate the efforts of the al-Qaeda linked terrorists who were attacking the Syrian government. To this day, the U.S. not only continues to support the extremist Islamist forces to topple President Bassar al Assad, but is occupying the northern part of the country together with Turkish forces.
That area, Col. Black pointed out, “is the breadbasket for all of Syria. The vast bulk of the wheat produced to feed the Syrian nation is produced there. We deliberately have cut that off. Most of the oil and natural gas is also produced there, and by occupying that area, we have seized the oil and natural gas.” But even that was not sufficient to bring down the gov
ernment, so new sanctions, under the Caesar Act, went into effect last summer, which target any foreign entity engaged in commerce with the country. “The purpose of this is to create famine and destitution within Syria, and to prevent them from rebuilding after ten years of war that we have imposed on
them.” A blockade on medical supplies has also been in force for many years now.
When asked how people can be mobilized to oppose such a barbaric policy, Sen. Black stressed how important it is to understand the actual effects that sanctions have. “I think if Americans understood what their government was doing, they would be aghast.” The official line is that only the leadership of the relevant country is targeted, but that is “unequivocally false”. Sanctions “create starvation and hardship for common people”, who suddenly find they can’t afford to feed their fam
ily anymore.
“Sanctions are fundamentally cruel, evil actions, and there is simply no justification. If you’re not in an active state of war with a nation—which I hope doesn’t happen—there is no legal justification for them, and there certainly is no moral justifica
tion. They are just the antithesis of Christianity; they are the antithesis of other religions, of Islam. They are incompatible with any notion of mercy and kindness and decency.”
Sen. Black thanked the Schiller Institute for the campaign it is carrying out internationally to put an end to this despicable policy. This will be a major theme of the virtual conference the SI will hold on May 8.
Germany: A Green Chancellor Candidate Firmly Rooted in Transatlantic Geopolitics The time when the German Green Party professed anti-Es tablishment, anti-militarist and anti-NATO views, is long since past. But if any doubts still subsisted, they must have been dis sipated by the nomination of Annalena Baerbock as the party’s chancellor candidate. Just how little the financial elite fears her policy orientation was expressed by none other than the head of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, during an April 23 press conference. Asked about the inexperience of the Green candidate, Lagarde surprised everyone by praising her as “a young woman who is very committed to climate change and environmental protection”, which are “very important is sues for me as well”.
On military matters, Annalena Baerbock would likely be no less conformist. She not only supports the increase of defense expenditures in order to equip soldiers with better weapons and materials to carry out “humanitarian” interventions, but has criticized Europe’s failure to intervene in time in Syria, thereby leaving the country exposed to the alleged atrocities that followed.
Strategically, Baerbock is opposed to the completion of the new gas pipeline between Russia and Germany (and Europe), calling it an affront to Ukraine as well as a project that in creases energy dependency on Russia (and on natural gas). “I would have since long withdrawn political support for Nord Stream 2”, she said in an interview in the April 25 Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, in which she also called for “in creasing the pressure on Russia” over the crisis in Ukraine and the Donbass.
In the same interview, the Green leader described German and European relations with China as a “competition between systems”, of “authoritarian forces versus liberal democracies”. China’s “Belt and Road” initiative, in her view, is not just nice investments, but “hardcore power politics.” And she accused Beijing of imposing “forced labor” on the Uyghur population.
As for relations with the Biden Administration, she is looking forward to a restart of the U.S.-German alliance, in the form of a “transatlantic climate partnership”. Implicitly endorsing a European Army, she calls for advancing a defense and security
EIR STRATEGIC ALERT n°17 / 2021 WEEKLY NEWSLETTER 3
union. And although explicitly asked, she did not support the withdrawal of American nuclear weapons from Germany... On many other occasions, Annalena Baerbock has expound ed on her climate protection targets. In terms of industrial production, she has advocated advancing the official exit dates for coal from 2038 to 2030, and for cars without electric en gines to 2030. She favors, of course, the production of “green steel”, i.e., with the power source no longer being coal but renewables such as solar and wind, which, she claims, would offer Germany opportunities to export to the rest of Europe and prevent “authoritarian China” from flooding the market with its own steel.
Knowing that Annalena Baerbock was trained in interna tional law at the London School of Economics as an exchange student 16 years ago, one better understands her propensity to hard-core geopolitics.
Czech Republic: President Zeman
Denounces Anti Russian “Hysteria”
Tensions between the Czech Republic and Russia rapidly es calated after the Czech government suddenly accused two Russian agents of being behind the destruction of an ammo depot in the village of Vrbetice that took place... over six years ago! Prague then proceeded to expel 18 Russian diplomats, to which Moscow responded by expelling 20 Czech diplomats, prompting NATO countries, including the Biden Administra tion, to express “solidarity” with the Czechs. Other sanctions have been threatened on both sides.
Czech President Milos Zeman, however, as well his prede cessor Vaclav Klaus, have moved to calm the situation. On April 25, after one week of silence to allow for further analysis, President Zeman declared in an emergency address to the na tion: “I can state that the report of the Security Information Service says and I underline this -- that there is neither proof nor evidence [of eyewitnesses] that these two agents were at the [ammo depot] in Vrbetice. When the premises of the second depot were examined right before the explosion there, no explosive device was found there,”
Pointing to the out-of-the-blue nature of the Czech govern ment charges, Zeman added that the “Security Information Service had never before mentioned the incident in Vrbetice over the past six years.” While not denying any Russian impli cation, he called for a thorough investigation of the matter. He also did not rule out that there had been some sort of “game” among special services.
Earlier, on April 22, following a personal meeting with Pres ident Zeman, Vaclav Klaus had also cautioned the Czech gov ernment against leveling wild accusations at Russia to please the West. “That we, [the Czech Republic] are barking at one of the world powers, makes me feel ashamed and dismayed and extinguishes any desire to try to do anything in this country,” he told the Blesk daily. “Here, we look very much like a tiny pooch. We are barking at Russia, because we think that the US and NATO are ready to throw their weight behind us. I find this policy somewhat foolish.”
The Death of Chad President Déby Threatens to Destabilize the Entire Sahel On April 20, Chad President Idriss Déby passed away from wounds he received in an alleged rebel attack in the north of the country, while he was reviewing frontline troops just after being re-elected for another mandate. His son, himself
an army general and head of the Presidential Guard, was ap pointed as his successor with the task of holding new elections in 18 months. The offensive by the rebels and their backers could have enormous implications, as Chad is smack in the center of north Africa, surrounded by unstable countries both east and west.
Asking the question “cui prodest” (who benefits from the destabilization) quickly leads to a list of countries and forces that have organized regime changes in Northern Africa and the Middle East over the past decade. That list would match that of the countries and forces that have opposed the Lake Chad replenishment project, called Transaqua, that Deby had endorsed, including just a few days before his death (cf. SAS 15/21).
In an article written a few weeks before the Chadian Presi dent was killed, and published on the Atlantic Council’s web site, author Cameron Hudson warned that if Idriss Deby lost the elections, it would send “shock waves from the Red Sea to the Atlantic”.
In the past, Chadian rebel groups were among the wide range of militias and jihadi terrorists supported by Qatar and Turkey, that were involved in the civil war in Libya as well as in other countries of the region. They are now being re
deployed in the framework of a strategy aimed against both China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Russia’s growing interest in economic cooperation with the region. In addition to Chad, they are targeting the Central African Republic (CAR), a key country, together with the Democratic Republic of Congo, for the Transaqua project.
In this context, it is useful to consider a strategy paper by British geopoliticians at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), published on Feb. 12, under the title Russia’s strategy in the Central African Republic, which claims that Moscow is using its presence in the CAR as “a springboard for expanded influence in Central Africa” (see https://rusi.org/commentary/ russia-strategy-central-african-republic).
Russia has recently expanded by 300 the number of its advisers in the CAR under a UN mandate, at the request of President Touadera. They are there to help the government fight the groups that refused to join the Khartoum agreement mediated by Russia between the government and opposition groups. The strategy paper warns that Russia is countering France’s longstanding influence in the country.
Moreover, Russia has strengthened its relationship with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) by condemning preda tory resource extraction by foreign companies, and would like to spearhead large-scale infrastructure projects there. With Rwanda, Rosatom signed a nuclear science center construc tion deal with in 2019 that could serve as a gateway to Central Africa, while Moscou has opposed external interference in the Burundi and Cameroon security crises.
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