U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin emerged from their four-hour summit discussion in Geneva, Switzerland, to present to the world a “U.S.-Russia Presidential Joint Statement on Strategic Stability,” whose brief text includes the following central commitment: “Today, we reaffirm the principle that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” That exact phrase was used by Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev in their famous November 1985 summit at the height of the Cold War, in the very same location.

Presidents Biden and Putin further agreed to establish a bilateral Strategic Stability Dialogue for teams of experts on both sides to begin work on the myriad security-related problems facing the two countries, and the world. The summit meeting, both leaders agreed, was constructive, and a first step toward improving U.S.-Russian relations, which have sunk to their lowest level in decades, perhaps ever.

Strategically, this is a step back from the brink, and an urgently needed one. But it is a small first step, which is not yet secure and which the enemies of peaceful cooperation among the U.S., Russia, and China will deploy heavily to stop. To advance the peace process requires cooperation among leaders of the world’s major nations, especially Russia, China, and the United States.

The upcoming June 26-27 International Schiller Institute four-panel conference is the best opportunity mankind has to make this a viable, durable commitment. Political and institutional leaders from around the world will address the urgency of building an anti-Malthusian alliance to end both the rush to war and the insane “Green New Deal” effort to halt progress and depopulate the globe. Most importantly, we will present the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche as the only viable, long-term strategy for winning a durable peace.

Today’s small step, in order to succeed, must now be followed by the implementation of those policies: cooperation to build a world-class health system in every nation on the planet in order to defeat the pandemic; joint work in space sciences and exploration; and the bankruptcy reorganization of the existing financial system to stop the looming hyperinflationary explosion from destroying all physical economies.

Back in March 1984, Lyndon LaRouche addressed exactly these issues, in a document titled “The LaRouche Doctrine: Draft Memorandum of Agreement Between the United States of America and the U.S.S.R.” 

LaRouche prepared the document a year after his discussions with the Reagan administration had led to Ronald Reagan’s famous announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative on March 23, 1983, and a little more than a year before Reagan took this approach to the 1985 summit with Gorbachev in Geneva. In it LaRouche stated:

“The political foundation for durable peace must be: a) The unconditional sovereignty of each and all nation-states, and b) Cooperation among sovereign nation-states to the effect of promoting unlimited opportunities to participate in the benefits of technological progress, to the mutual benefit of each and all.

“The most crucial feature of present implementation of such a policy of durable peace is a profound change in the monetary, economic, and political relations between the dominant powers and those relatively subordinated nations often classed as ‘developing nations.’ Unless the inequities lingering in the aftermath of modem colonialism are progressively remedied, there can be no durable peace on this planet today.

“Insofar as the United States and Soviet Union acknowledge the progress of the productive powers of labor throughout the planet to be in the vital strategic interests of each and both, the two powers are bound to that degree and in that way by a common interest. This is the kernel of the political and economic policies of practice indispensable to the fostering of durable peace between those two powers….”

Register for the Schiller Institute conference here.