Putin Delivers a New ‘Sputnik’ Shock: ‘Now They Will Listen to Us!’
From a future EIR lead article by Helga Zepp-LaRouche:
In a transatlantic atmosphere of hysteria against Russia and China that can only be understood as pre-war propaganda, President Putin dropped a bombshell in his annual State of the Nation address, which has redefined the strategic balance.
He announced that Russian forces had acquired weapons based on new physical principles, including a new “Avangard” intercontinental ballistic missile capable of moving at 20 times the speed of sound and having excellent maneuverability. It can therefore outmaneuver all existing air defense and missile defense systems and render them obsolete.
These new systems, which included nuclear-propulsion cruise missiles, fast submarine drones and laser weapons, were Russia’s answer to the unilateral termination of the ABM Treaty by the U.S. in 2002, and the launch of the global U.S. missile defense system. Since then, all negotiations have fallen on deaf ears. “They did not listen to us. Now they will listen to us!” Putin emphasized.
The response from the Western media and politicians ranged from attempts to ridicule Putin’s new arsenals as technologically impossible — to ridicule them as mere pre-election bluster — to concerns about a new arms race; as if one were not already in progress long ago, thanks to NATO’s eastward expansion.
These responses once again reflect the fact that adherents to neo-liberal dogma can only see the world through their geopolitical, concave glasses. They obviously underestimate Russia’s military science capabilities, just as they underestimated the dynamics of China’s New Silk Road for years….
In fact, we are currently experiencing an epochal change. The period of nearly 600 years since the Italian Renaissance and the emergence of the sovereign nation-state, in which oligarchic forms of government and governments committed to the common good existed side by side, is coming to an end. The new paradigm, a new phase in human evolution, is already visible. The closest approximation to this is Xi Jinping’s vision of a community of common destiny — the concept that the idea of “one humanity” is set forth to all nations. The economic equivalent of this idea is the New Silk Road, in which all sovereign nations work together on the basis of cooperation for mutual benefit.
What we are currently experiencing, with all the unprovable accusations of “Russian hacking,” “interference in democratic elections,” “Chinese hegemony,” “threats to the Western system of democracy and human rights by authoritarian systems,” etc., is nothing more than a last gasp of a failing oligarchic system. The next financial collapse of this system — which has opened the gap between rich and poor, and whose policy of perpetual war has brought us both the refugee crisis and an epidemic of violence among young people and in the so-called entertainment industry — will be worse than it was in 2008.
It is time for rational people to reflect. We should use this new Sputnik shock and do what Putin said in his speech: “Let us sit down at the negotiating table and work together to design a new and relevant system of international security and sustainable development for all of human civilization.”
The human species is the only creative species known to us. What sets us apart from all other beings is the ability of the human mind to continually discover qualitatively new principles of the physical universe and apply them to the production process, thus improving the livelihood, productivity, and life expectancy of humanity. We have arrived at the point in history where we can and must realize our identity as a planetary species, which is collectively capable of guaranteeing its long-term survival.
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