EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR FRIDAY AUGUST 18, 2023

The Coming Strategic Earthquake

Aug. 17, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—A choice must be made; an earthquake is brewing; the pressure is building; the rupture is inevitable; the abyss cannot be straddled. The globe cannot survive half slave and half free.

A new paradigm, represented by the BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, bilateral and multilateral agreements for security and development, challenges and would overcome the failing hegemonic power of Anglo-American NATO. But the would-be world imperium is willing to lead the world into nuclear warfare to prevent their system from being challenged.

These two outlooks can no longer exist together on this planet. We will succeed in transforming NATO, by an international effort, or we may all perish in the death throes of a collapsing hegemon.

The move towards a new paradigm shows new impetus every day. The defense ministers of Saudi Arabia and Iran met in Russia on Aug. 16. On Aug. 17, the Iranian foreign minister visited his Saudi counterpart in Riyadh. Regarding the rising BRICS grouping, former Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl said in an interview today, “We observe a total transformation of geopolitics, international relations, which also affects institutions.”

The haughty blindness to the changing world situation was apparent to Kneissl upon her taking office in 2017. She explained that she had asked staff for documentation on how the EU and Austria saw the BRICS. “There was not a single paper, not a single one,” she has revealed. “And this is what I call Eurocentrism, you see, because this was absent during debates in the EU. And it is interesting that they were simply not interested in this, and now Macron is knocking on the door, seeking to get in, saying: ‘May I come to the party, please? No, I have not actually been invited, but I would like to become a part of the party.’ ”

Meanwhile, looking to the supposedly democratic side of the fraudulent democracy-vs-autocracy division of the world, the electoral process in the United States is becoming something no self-respecting banana republic would tolerate. Donald Trump, the leading opponent to the incumbent President by far, has been subjected to four indictments in an absolutely obvious attempt to prevent his return to the White House, and to send a message to anyone else who might try achieve a change in the United States, that the “six ways from Sunday” that Sen. Chuck Schumer cravenly said the intelligence community would use to retaliate against Trump, are just merest beginning. The latest two indictments—one federal and one in the State of Georgia—rely significantly on claims that Trump knowingly lied about the election. That is, they claim that Trump knew he had lost, knew that there had been no vote fraud, knew that there had been no ballot improprieties, knew that the 2020 election had been the “most secure” ever, etc., but he still persisted in making claims to the contrary for the purpose of staying in office.

Meanwhile, the same prosecutor who had offered a wildly generous plea deal to Hunter Biden—a deal that was slapped down almost immediately by the judge, once she read it—was promoted to become the special counsel for investigations into the President’s son.

These chilling developments show both how unencumbered by principles are those who think that anything is acceptable if it stops Trump, and the extent to which the ideals the United States was created to embody are being sacrificed by those seeking to fully transform the nation into the sort of Empire against which it won its independence.

It is more urgent than ever to achieve in NATO-land a radical reconfiguration, of seemingly impossible scope and speed.