Dennis Small- Pentagon Policy Chief Elbridge Colby at the NATO Defense Ministers meeting. Credit: NATO
Scarcely six weeks into 2026, a profound shift in the global
military-strategic situation is fully underway and is being openly
discussed as such in Washington, Moscow, and other world capitals. The
U.S. Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby was blunt in his
Feb. 12 speech to NATO defense ministers meeting in Brussels: “We are
now living through a period of profound strategic change,” he said;
“power politics has returned, and military force is again being employed
at a large scale.”
High-level Russian officials have been
clear-eyed about what is underway. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey
Ryabkov warned earlier this week that the global strategic situation is
undergoing “severe turbulence,” and that “force has become” the main
instrument of Washington’s foreign policy, with the Trump administration
doing “what seemed unthinkable a year ago.” Political analyst Alexander
Asafov, a member of the Russian Public Chamber, commented to Sputnik on
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s recent stern remarks in the State
Duma, noting that the old architecture of international security “has
effectively become a thing of the past,” and that U.S. plans to expand
its nuclear arsenal “could be viewed as a direct threat to both Russia’s
security and global stability.”
In her remarks to the 141st
consecutive weekly meeting of the International Peace Coalition on Feb.
13, Helga Zepp-LaRouche summarized recent developments leading up to
this crisis:
“What one can expect is a huge rearmament worldwide,
and there are signs that the U.S. Air Force Global Strike Command is
intending to add additional warheads to the Minuteman ICBMs. They want
to re-nuclearize the entire B-52 bomber fleet, which had been
de-nuclearized during the New START Treaty. They also want to
MIRV—putting many warheads on—the 400 Minuteman III ICBM force. So, they
want to convert the entire B-52 fleet into a dual-capable long-range
strike platform.”
Furthermore, she added, “an article in the New York Times
by David Sanger [warns] that the United States wants to deploy many
more nuclear weapons, modernize its entire nuclear fleet, and also
likely go to some kind of nuclear testing. This article insinuates that
the Trump administration wants to abandon the postulate of strategic
nuclear parity.”
The same shift into Schachtian economics of
massive military buildup is also underway in Europe. Zepp-LaRouche
reminded listeners that “still on schedule is the deployment of U.S.
medium-range missiles in Germany this year; it could happen at any
moment. To which, the Russians have already responded very strongly:
Deputy Foreign Minister Grushko said this will lead to similar
counter-deployments by Russia. Given the fact that the Russians have all
these new weapons systems—from the Oreshnik to the Burevestnik and
others—one can only speculate what that will be.”
Meanwhile in the
West, Zepp-LaRouche stated, “the unbelievable scope of the Epstein
scandal” has exposed for the world to see “the moral depravity and
sordidness of this system which tolerates this—the mindset of those who
then condone what’s going on in Gaza, and who are playing risky games
not only potentially involving nuclear weapons, but also allowing a
(financial) bubble to accumulate because of massive speculation which
could blow up the whole Western system, and with it, much of the world
economy, also bringing enormous potential hardships to millions of
people.”
The extreme danger of the crisis, combined with the moral
depravity of the Establishment, cries out for political action by
citizens of all nations. “It’s very clear that when the establishments
are failing in the way they clearly are doing now,” Zepp-LaRouche
asserted, “it does require that citizens of every state not only become
patriots or reinforce their being a patriot, but to also assume the role
of being world citizens to ensure that civilization will not crash
against the wall, but that we establish a New Paradigm which puts
forward an ideal of man as a creative human being, as the creative
species. And that the beauty of the human creative mind is what is put
up front, and in so doing, create a renaissance causing a dialogue of
the best traditions of all civilizations.
“Therefore, we are now working to put together a big conference on March 2.
We want to invite all of you to participate in this, because the idea
of an international movement of world citizens to fight for the dignity
of man and the beauty of the character of man is what is called for by
all of these events.”