The February 12, 2025 phone call between Donald John Trump and Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin led to a series of events which show that the intent of the two leaders is to forge a partnership that goes beyond ending the NATO-provoked war in Ukraine. In a post on Truth Social, the US President described the call as “a lengthy and highly productive phone call with President Vladimir Putin… We discussed Ukraine, the Middle East, Energy, Artificial Intelligence, the power of the US Dollar and various other subjects”, including “the great benefit that we will someday have in working together”.

The call was part of a rapid series of developments that left the European leaders distressed, to say the least, especially when it was made clear that they were not invited to participate in the dialogue, despite the servile collaboration of most of them in the war in Ukraine initiated by the Biden Administration and NATO to “weaken” Russia.

That same day the US Senate confirmed that Tulsi Gabbard would serve as Trump’s Director of National Intelligence. Gabbard has been a critic of the intelligence community, especially for its assessments which produced a series of endless wars, often influenced by British intelligence.

Two subsequent events added to the consternation of European leaders. At NATO’s Ukraine Defence Contact Group meeting in Brussels on February 13, 2025, US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth told his colleagues that the war must end on US terms, which would include: recognition that a return to Ukraine’s 2014 borders is “unrealistic”; NATO membership for Ukraine will not happen; any peacekeepers deployed will belong to a “non-NATO mission” and will include no US troops. Each of these points contradicted the demands made by spokespersons for European governments.

The very next day, US Vice President James David Vance delivered a speech at the Munich Security Conference that left the audience stunned! “The threat that I worry most about vis-a-vis Europe, is not Russia, not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values,” Vance said, referring to actions, such as overturning the election results in Romania, censorship of dissenting voices and the exclusion of alleged extremist parties of both the Left and the Right, including from the Munich Conference. His remarks were described by the European media as “blistering” and “demoralising”, and they led many to conclude that NATO could not continue in its present form.

As a select group of European leaders met on February 17, 2025 in Paris to formulate a response to the Trump team’s offensive, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Viktorovich Lavrov were traveling to Saudi Arabia to make preparations for a Trump-Putin Summit in Riyadh. During the telephonic conversation held two days before, they pledged to reverse the lack of dialogue that had prevailed for the last three years. They expressed the commitment to engaging on key international issues, including the conflicts in the Middle East and trade, in addition to ending the war in Ukraine.

As for the demoralised Europeans pulled together by Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer in Paris, there were plenty of laments, but apparently no final communique was released. There is, of course, a very promising course of action they could take, as laid out by the Schiller Institute, but that will require recognising that the “rules-based order” is a thing of the past.

How a Free Europe Could Profit from the Tectonic Changes Underway
Although the annual Munich Security Conference (MSC) still claims to be a venue for an exchange of views among decision-makers of security policy from around the world, it has become a blatant public relations event for NATO and for the interests of the Western military-industrial complex over the years. The lack of dialogue has led to a situation in which the danger of a nuclear war has never been so acute.

On the occasion of the conference this year, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the President of Schiller Institute, issued a statement blasting the “war party” and calling on NATO leaders to engage in a serious examination of their policy failures. The statement was also distributed as a leaflet at a protest rally in Munich, during which she, Ray McGovern and Scott Ritter were invited to address the crowd by video. Zepp-LaRouche stated: “The true character of the trans-Atlantic ‘elite’ is nowhere more evident than in their reaction to President Trump’s initiative to start a direct dialogue with President Putin in order to finally end the lost war in Ukraine.” Earlier, the US President said that he was willing to take into account Russia’s security interests and the danger of NATO expansion.

That reality is precisely what many European leaders still refuse to acknowledge, as seen during the meeting in Paris on February 17, hastily convened after the “bombshell speech” delivered by US Vice President Vance at the MSC. They may wish to keep the war going, in line with British designs; but it would not be so easy, since there is no consensus on how to proceed, even among those eight Heads of State and Government assembled in Paris.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche pointed out in her statement that the collapse of the old neoliberal unipolar world order, dominated by the Anglo-Americans, presents “an excellent opportunity for a new orientation that corresponds to the true interests of Germany and the other European nations”. The rapid growth of the BRICS states, for example, “shows the determination of the nations of the Global South to leave the era of 500 years of colonialism behind them, and to take their economic development into their own hands. Instead of expanding the geopolitical confrontation to the Indo-Pacific with ‘Global NATO’, Germany and the other European nations must seize the opportunity for our own future that lies in constructive cooperation with the BRICS states and the Global South, which makes up 85% of the world’s population”.

Zepp-LaRouche further said: “The tectonic changes in the strategic situation offer a fantastic opportunity for the European nations to work together on a new international security and development architecture that takes into account the interests of every single nation on this planet. For Germany, cooperation with the global majority offers the opportunity to get the economy back on track for growth, to help secure world peace, and to open up a positive future perspective for citizens.“

She added: “What we can contribute to the further development of the human species is neither Taurus missiles nor Leopard 2 tanks, but a renaissance of classical German culture, philosophy and science of Leibniz, Bach, Beethoven, Schiller, Einstein and Krafft Ehricke to name just a few.”

Read the full statement issued by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

This article was first published in Executive Intelligence Review (EIR) Strategic Alert weekly newsletter (Volume 39, No. 8) on February 20, 2025.

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Published by Koushik Das

Koushik Das (born on May 16, 1976 in Kolkata) is a career journalist. Based in the Indian capital of New Delhi, Koushik writes mainly about foreign policies and current geopolitical issues, and rarely about other topics. His own political ideas are highly influenced by Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Michael Oakeshott and others. English philosopher and political theorist Oakeshott (Dec 11, 1901-Dec 19, 1990) says that “in political activity, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea. There is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place, nor appointed destination. But we have to keep afloat”. (Rationalism in Politics, 1962) As a student of Political Science, Koushik loves to share his views on issues, which have great impacts on his thought process (and also on India, South Asia and of course on the global community), with his readers through his website – Boundless Ocean of Politics. By doing so, he tries to keep himself afloat. You will find some of his articles in https://inserbia.info/today/ (https://inserbia.info/today/author/kou_das13_i/), as he has been trying to assess the global geopolitics since 2003. You can also mail him at kousdas@gmail.com View all posts by Koushik Das