Is a New “Peace of Westphalia” Possible?
Schiller Institute: Investigate Nord Stream Revelations: Stop World War III
The date was October 24, 1648. A group of men gathered together in Münster to sign a treaty, ending the Thirty-Years War between France and Sweden and the Holy Roman Empire, and a civil war within the Holy Roman Empire itself. This treaty was known as the Peace of Westphalia, which also includes a treaty signed in January, 1648, ending the Eighty-Years War between Spain and the Dutch Republic.
These wars had gone on for generations, with sons fighting in the same wars that their fathers and grandfathers had fought in, as powerful ruling families struggled for supremacy and power. You can watch a five-minute historical synopsis here, or you can just enjoy this British comedy skit which is very similar to Monty Python.
The point of this history lesson is that the people in the 17th century, like people in the 21st century, were fed up with war and wanted to solve their differences with no further bloodshed. In those days, men hacked each other to pieces with swords and axes, rained arrows down upon one-another, crushed each other with catapults and trebuchets, or burned one-another alive.
But those fighting men, as familiar as they were with battlefields and butchery, could scarcely have imagined the weapons in use today: Artillery which can strike targets many miles away, exploding bombs which fall from the sky, laying waste to entire cities, chemical weapons which make men cough up their own lungs, bullets designed to rip people apart from within, and most terrifying of all, nuclear warheads capable of wiping out civilization as we know it and destroying most living things larger than cockroaches.
Today, the most powerful empire in the world is fighting a proxy war with Russia, using Ukraine as a chess-board and Ukrainians as pawns. NATO insanely pushes for the defeat of Russia, while the people of the US and the EU suffer greater and greater privations for the sake of this great bloodletting. But in NATO countries, no one bothered to ask the people if they wanted to go to war.
How can we, in the 21st century, bring about our own Peace of Westphalia? This question and others were tackled by panelists at a conference last week put on by the Schiller Institute which you can watch here:
Panelists at the February 23 conference also discussed Seymore Hersh’s revelations about the destruction of the Russian Nord Stream pipelines which were engineered to provide the EU with natural gas. Hersh’s article relies on an unnamed source deep within the matrix of the MICIMATT who alleges that the US, with assistance from Norway, planted explosives on the two pipelines beneath the Baltic Sea during the Baltic Operations (BALTOPS 22) Naval Exercises in June, 2022. According to his article, the explosives were remotely detonated three months later, in September of 2022. Now Norway is making record profits from its natural gas exports to the EU.
The panel of speakers at the conference included German political activist Helga Zepp-LaRouche; retired Swiss Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Bosshard; veteran former CIA analyst and co-founder of VIPS Ray McGovern; retired French Army General Dominique Delawarde; human rights lawyer and international law Professor Francis Boyle (University of Illinois College of Law); and American author and political analyst Graham Fuller, who is also a former member, and a veteran, of the CIA.
“Now, Hersh,” Helga Zepp-LaRouche said, “is probably the most decorated investigative journalist of the entire trans-Atlantic world. He is famous for having uncovered scandals like the Mai Lai massacre, the Abu Ghraib torture, and many other such stories. He received the Pulitzer Prize.”
Despite Hersh’s remarkable credentials, however, his most recent exposé was not published in such “bastions of credibility” as The Washington Post or The New York Times, where he worked in decades past, but rather, self-published just like one of my articles, on Substack. Major “news” outlets ignored the article or mocked it. And a few weeks ago in the German Parliament, Zepp-LaRouche recalled, “a young, totally uneducated, naughty, cocky parliamentarian with the name of Philipp Amthor, said, ‘Why should we pay attention to Hersh? He’s 85 years old, he got a prize 50 years ago.’”
The smirk on Amthor’s face, which practically begs to be slapped off, is perhaps the perfect expression to sum up the reaction worldwide to what should have been the news story of the decade. But Hersh’s article, which does a masterful job of connecting the dots, is not really a surprise revelation to anyone who’s been paying attention.
After all, at a press conference on February 7, 2022, and in the presence of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, US President Biden openly stated that if Russia invaded Ukraine, “there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” And when reporters questioned that, Biden added, “I promise you, we’ll be able to do it.”
And Scholz, standing right there, didn’t say a word.
Perhaps former UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter’s commentary summed this up best of all. It’s certainly got to be the most graphic commentary so far, as well as accurate.
The operation was originally supposed to be covert, according to Hersh’s source. “But that would have implied that the government had to inform the Congress, because it’s the Congress that at least officially decides if there is war or not,” Zepp-LaRouche said. Which may explain why Biden used Navy divers instead of America’s Special Operations Command, “whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership,” according to Hersh.
Within minutes of the explosion, the former Foreign Minister of Poland, Radoslaw Sikorski, tweeted “Thank you, America!” And then-Prime Minister of Great Britain Liz Truss allegedly texted “It’s done!” to U.S Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Former US Undersecretary Victoria Nuland, who in January, 2022, threatened, “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward,” could barely contain her glee as she bragged about this act of terrorism at a Senate hearing after the blast, stating that she was “very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now…a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”
The impact of the attack on Nord Stream is immeasurable. Germany is faced with price inflation “in the two-digit dimension,” according to Zepp-LaRouche, and many small and medium-sized industries are going bankrupt. “We are faced with the total danger of a de-industrialization in Germany, and a social collapse which will follow. The existence of Germany as an industrial and social state is at stake,” she observed.
Zepp-LaRouche believes that Germany has become a pawn of NATO and the US and that the German government no longer serves its own people. “The German government has become the laughingstock around the world, because everything is taken away from Germany, and the German government does not defend the interests of the German people for which they have sworn an oath when they took office that they would prevent damage to the German people. The livelihood of the German people is destroyed. Life savings, jobs, everything is going,” she said.
Like many in Germany, Zepp-LaRouche feels as though she is being dragged helplessly into an inevitable nuclear confrontation with Russia. Chancellor Scholz, she recalls, made a promise shortly after Russia began its Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine: “Scholz said at the end of February [2022], ‘We will not send any heavy weapons to Ukraine, because this could mean an escalation to a Third World War.’ But now, just a year later, Germany is sending tanks into Ukraine, training Ukrainian soldiers, and providing additional military support.”
“That makes Germany a prime target if there is any more escalation,” Zepp-LaRouche said. “The result is that the relation with Russia is cut politically, economically, any trust has been destroyed. And Germany and the entire EU, rather than getting cheap gas from Russia, have now a very far-reaching energy dependency from the United States. They are importing LNG gas that is four times more expensive, which comes from the environmentally unfriendly fracking.”
Zepp-LaRouche believes there must be an international investigation into the pipeline explosion, and that Russia must be included.
Ray McGovern, who testified before the UN Security Council along with economics professor Jeffrey Sachs a week ago, believes that after a decade or longer, “the Europeans will come to their senses and realize that they have been misled, by the likes of Senator McCain and President Obama, that Russia is not really just a ‘gas station posing as a country’ — Russia is a country without which the rest of Europe is impoverished.”
Of course, if the neo-cons and warmongers in Washington, DC, continue to escalate their game of “chicken” with Russia, we may not have a decade to wait for people to wake up. It’s fortunate, then, that Ray’s former colleague at the CIA, Graham Fuller — who joined the organization in the spring of 1963 alongside McGovern — believes Europeans are already beginning to come out of their stupor. “I think Europeans have now begun to see that by joining through NATO, joining the US in this proxy war against Russia, that they have really bought into a very dangerous and long-term project with huge long-term implications.”
Though the top leadership of the EU may be unwilling to defy their US overlords, working class Europeans are experiencing the deprivations resulting from that alliance “at the popular level, as the implications of all of this sinks in — cold winters, lack of fuel, huge price rises in the cost of fuel,” Fuller said. “These are profound consequences, and we see the domestic growth rate of almost all European countries now dropping down to below 1%.”
Fuller, whose work at the CIA included long term forecasting, envisions dramatic changes in the geopolitical landscape in the years ahead, not the least of which may be a new Iron Curtain between East and West — a metaphorical Berlin Wall between Europe and Russia. “I might even be inclined to want to call this a Great Wall,” Fuller said, “because I think we’re getting into territory here which is no longer limited even to Russia and Europe, but involves China increasingly in the process.”
With the vilification of everything Russian in the West— from Russian art, music and literature banned at universities, to Russian cats and dogs banned from international shows — Russia has no choice but to strengthen its ties with countries in Asia such as Iran, India and China.
“China is not participating in this in any military way, but clearly China has an understanding with Russia that it understands Russia’s security needs,” Fuller said. “I would add that both of these countries share a view that they no longer accept a world in which the United States or even NATO or even the West is able to dictate what the security arrangements of the world should be. They don’t want any more color revolutions or American interventions around the world. That era seemingly has passed.”
Gen. Dominique Delawarde (ret.), a Frenchman who served as a liaison officer with the United States Army, is wide awake and ready to name names: “Today, I have no doubts that the most extreme US neo-conservatives are still leading the NATO action aimed at the dismemberment of Russia. These people are clearly identified and can be named: Blinken; Nuland; Sullivan; Merrick Garland; Mayorkas; Janet Yellen. They are among the best known.”
Delawarde believes that in addition to an independent and thorough investigation of the Nord Stream explosion, “we must also and above all, destabilize the gang of war mongers by denouncing them by their names in front of the whole world. We cannot let these few influential but berserk neo-cons play with the lives of our fellow citizens and our children. The planet is not a liar’s poker table for small neo-conservatives and globalist elites where the stakes could be the dismemberment of Russia at any cost. This can go as far as the destruction of all or part of humanity. We must stop these madmen by destabilizing them and denouncing them by name in the face of the world.”
Professor Francis Boyle, a professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law, weighed in on the legalities of the attack against Nord Stream, which he said “was clearly an act of war, and a war crime.”
Prof. Boyle pointed out that in the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court, a war crime is defined as “intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population as such, or against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities; or intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects — that is, objects which are not military objectives.” Clearly, the Nord Stream pipelines were not engaged in any military activity and were constructed for the purpose of delivering natural gas to the people of Germany and Europe.
Additionally, Prof. Boyle said that the attack on the pipelines “was an act of war which, if the Russian Federation had wanted to, it could have treated as a casus belli and declared war against the United States over this. Now, I’m not saying they would; President Putin is too sharp and smart and shrewd to do anything like that. But I’m saying this to emphasize the severity of what happened here.”
Although the US is not a Rome Statute country, the legal consequences of the attack, as it was laid out in Seymore Hersh’s article, are virtually inescapable because “US government officials were responsible for planning, preparing, conspiring, and actually committing a Rome Statute war crime in a Rome Statute state. In this case, Norway,” Prof. Boyle observed. “So, it could be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court, and the ICC only deals with high-level officials, so in this case it would be President Biden, Secretary of State Blinken, National Security Advisor Sullivan, Undersecretary of State Nuland, and Secretary of Defense Austin — these were Navy divers under his control and supervision; his chain of command. So, that is very clear.”
As for mainstream media and “fact checkers” that dismiss Hersh’s revelations as “Russian disinformation,” Swiss Army Lt. Col. Ralph Bosshard (ret.), believes their attempts to discredit Hersh only succeed in further discrediting themselves: “Whatever one’s opinion of Seymour Hersh is, he can hardly be described as a Russian agent of influence…”
Bosshard, who was a senior planning officer for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Special Monitoring Mission (OSCE SMM), took part in an analysis of the pipeline explosion and says that Hersh’s article came as no surprise to him: “Furthermore, his article is consistent with our findings that there was a thorough preparation required, that the installation of a large quantity of explosives on the pipelines was necessary, and required hours of strenuous work under very difficult circumstances.”
“The question that I’m asking myself now,” Bosshard continued, “is whether Ukraine is using US support for its own war against Russia, or whether the United States is using Ukrainian hatred against Russia for their own purposes?”
The answer to that question is unlikely to come from the White House or from the media, where Bosshard sees “a certain deficit of credibility, especially in those press products which try to discredit, from the outset any account deviating from the official line, as Russian propaganda and conspiracy theories.”
However, Norway’s alleged participation in the attack on the Russian pipelines could bode badly for that country in the future. “Norway,” Bosshard contends, “which openly and so readily supported the act of sabotage, is heavily exposed now, and could become, of course, the target of Russia’s next strike. This is not going to happen tomorrow or next weekend. I’m sure that Russia will take its time with its reaction.”
Russia’s suspension of the New START treaty, the last remaining nuclear treaty between Russia and the US, is yet another threat to world peace. “And I don’t even want to think about the next step,” Bosshard said, “which could initially set the Middle East on fire if, for example, it should filter through that Russia is prepared to provide Iran with nuclear weapons, if necessary, as the USA are doing with several NATO countries within the framework of nuclear sharing.”
“Suffice it to say, we’re about to see the dénouement, here,” Ray McGovern intoned. “And what really worries me is that the American people are hardly prepared for what’s to come. And in my view, what’s to come is a Russian offensive, that within the next several weeks, has the ability to reach the Dniepr River, at which time it will be time — clearly time! — to negotiate. I don’t think Putin wants to take over the whole of Ukraine. That would be stupid! That would be the kind of thing Dick Cheney or Don Rumsfeld or one of these ‘exceptional people’ would try to do. I think, he’d be ready to deal — the question is, when? And when you see General Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, saying, ‘well, maybe we ought to negotiate now,’ and then two weeks later he says, ‘no, no, Russia is losing, Russia has lost.’ You know, there’s an air of illusion, there’s an air of delusion in Washington.”
If our so-called “representatives” and “leaders” are unwilling, unable, or simply lack the competency to negotiate peace and dial down the escalation to WW3, then it appears that We, The People — not just of the United States but of the world — must do all we can to educate everyone around us until the truth reaches critical mass.
“What we need to do is get out and agitate,” McGovern concluded. “We have to educate our fellow citizens, because the press is not doing this. We have to get off our rear ends, and we have to say, ‘Look, here are the facts, here.’ Seymour Hersh has exposed the fact that we did this horrendous terrorist act, ‘act of war,’ as Professor Boyle said, and educate our people. Say, ‘Do we really want to risk nuclear war for this kind of thing? I don’t think we do.’ But what we need to do is make sure that our co-citizens know this. Now, can we do this, this week, or next week? Probably not, but we have to keep trying.”
In the words of I.F. Stone: “The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you’re going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins.”
For additional information about the Schiller Institute and Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s Ten Principles of a New International Security and Development Architecture, please click here.
About the author:
Deborah Armstrong currently writes about geopolitics with an emphasis on Russia. She previously worked in local TV news in the United States where she won two regional Emmy Awards. In the early 1990’s, Deborah lived in the Soviet Union during its final days and worked as a television consultant at Leningrad Television.
