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Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping held what amounted to an emergency summit meeting today by video conference. Announced only two days ago, the summit directly addressed two distinct kinds of “nuclear war” being threatened against the two countries by the bellicose and bankrupt U.K.-U.S. financial Establishment:

1. The Dec. 7 call by Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) to consider “first-use nuclear action” military strikes against Russia, using the Ukraine crisis as justification. Wicker is the second ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Despite the storm of protests from the left and the right that his remarks unleashed, the Senator has yet to retract his demented provocation. Moreover, the NATO drive eastward, along with the arming of Ukraine and other nations on Russia’s very border, is continuing relentlessly—a drive which Russia continues to warn is crossing a red-line and will lead to a Russian response.

2. The repeated call to carry out the “nuclear option” in financial warfare against Russia—expelling them from the SWIFT global financial payments system. This would be tantamount to laying financial siege to Russia, to try to starve them into submission, as is being done against Afghanistan. This “nuclear option” was called for just last week by U.S. Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, the architect of the 2014 Nazi coup d’état in Ukraine, and it was publicly threatened by Secretary of State Tony Blinken right after the Dec. 7 summit talks between Biden and Putin. Similar threats were voiced by President Biden himself immediately before his June 2021 meeting with Putin.

What did Putin and Xi discuss today when the cameras for the press were turned off? They clearly reviewed the danger of war, and their commitment to help strengthen each other’s security in the face of threats surrounding both Ukraine and Taiwan. Otherwise, the public account provided by Kremlin adviser Yuri Ushakov provides further insight: “Particular attention was paid by the two leaders to the need to intensify efforts to form an independent financial infrastructure to service trade operations between Russia and China,” Ushakov reported. “We mean creating an infrastructure that cannot be influenced by third countries.”

Does this mean that Russia and China are about to announce that they are breaking with the dollar system, and decoupling their economies from the West? Probably not. Does it mean that they have put in place defensive measures to deal with a financial “nuclear option” launched against them? Probably so.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche commented today that if Russia and China are driven to adopt full-scale countermeasures against the SWIFT system, this could well be the straw that breaks the camel’s back of the entire bankrupt trans-Atlantic financial system. Fortunately, the potential of China’s Belt and Road Initiative is available to take its place, and to replace today’s Malthusian policy of deindustrialization and depopulation with a new system focused on high-technology physical economic growth.

Take a step back and consider Putin’s recent diplomacy—the same Putin whom Lyndon LaRouche frequently described as a “strategic genius” who should not be underestimated. Putin made sure to flank his critical Dec. 7 summit with President Biden: before, with a Dec. 6 summit meeting in New Delhi with India’s Prime Minister Modi; and after, with today’s emergency summit with President Xi. Another topic raised between Putin and Xi, according to Ushakov, was the intention of holding a three-way summit of Russia-India-China in the immediate future.

And the United States? President Biden, along with circles that might be described as “realists” in Washington, seems inclined to seek a negotiated solution to the crisis surrounding Russia and Ukraine. But his policy palace guard—Blinken, Sullivan, Nuland et al.—is not, and for now they are dominant in Washington. Nor are the owners of the Western speculative financial system in a mood to negotiate—they can’t. Their system is in a breakdown collapse, and their only hope is to force through a transition to a fascist, Malthusian order.

America, to survive and prosper, will have to adopt the pathway long-recommended by Lyndon LaRouche, of establishing a four-power alliance with the power to usher in a New Paradigm of global development—an alliance among the U.S., Russia, China and India, acting on behalf of all humanity.