March 9—Two weeks into the Ukraine-Russia war, policymakers in the West are nervously discussing whether or not the scorched earth financial warfare they have launched against Russia—and the world—will backfire. Will it blow out their entire trans-Atlantic system before they can bring Russia to heel? Might it instead lead to a formidable Russia-China economic counter-bloc, outside and against the West’s speculative system of looting? Could it possibly even unleash nuclear war?

These are questions which would have been rejected as apocalyptic and foolish just one month ago; but today they are being openly discussed in the Western media as the existential questions of the day. They are precisely the issues that Lyndon LaRouche for decades warned would soon be on Mankind’s agenda, as the systemic breakdown crisis drove the world towards pandemics and wars.

A particularly distressing problem for the London and Wall Street financial Establishment is the fact that growing political circles in the West are waking up to the fact that their countries on every continent—Germany, Japan, the U.S., Argentina, Nigeria, Thailand, etc.—are as much in the cross-hairs of this demented policy as is Russia. It is dawning on them that LaRouche was right all along: that the military and financial warfare against Russia is simply the excuse for down-shifting the entire world economy back into the Middle Ages.

“Wait a minute! That’s my food, my gasoline, my housing, my job that just went up in smoke!” is becoming an increasingly common, frantic response to the crisis.

The world is indeed breaking apart, Helga Zepp-LaRouche emphasized today, and we are heading towards an explosion like few can imagine. We remain at a hair-trigger in the Ukraine theater, and we are also on the cusp of the worst wave of famine in centuries. The most elementary means of human sustenance—energy, food, and the means to produce it, such as fertilizer and transportation—are being priced out of reach of most nations and people, at the same time that their physical production plummets. Under such conditions it is criminally irresponsible to promote the green “set-aside” and “30 by 30” policies that will only further wipe out food production and drive additional millions into hunger and starvation, Zepp-LaRouche emphasized.

The breakdown and the backlash open up a brief window of opportunity to pull Mankind back from the brink. Our job is to catch people as they wake up to the reality, Zepp-LaRouche noted, and prevent them from becoming pessimistic about the difficulty of the battle, by catalyzing them into a solution-oriented approach. That means helping to organize the widest possible circulation of, and signatures on the Schiller Institute call for a new international security and development architecture—a call which presents the only viable programmatic solution to the crisis.