On Monday, Aug. 18, President Donald Trump hosted acting Ukrainian President Zelenskyy and seven European leaders at the White House for a series of meetings on ending the conflict in Ukraine, following up on his Alaska summit last Friday with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In a statement following the discussions, Trump reported two primary outcomes of those meetings: 1) moving toward a bilateral meeting between President Putin and President Zelenskyy, followed by a trilateral meeting including President Trump; and 2) discussions of security guarantees for Ukraine, “provided by the various European Countries, with a coordination with the United States of America.”

Prior to and during the meeting, those security guarantees were the obsession of the European leaders who had scrambled to Washington to back Ukraine as the last bastion against “the evil Russian invader.” It isn’t known exactly what kind of security guarantees were discussed behind closed doors, and, as with many things, the devil is in the details. While Russia will never accept European and NATO boots on the ground in Ukraine—especially with long-range missile capability—that is exactly what the British have been calling for, and it is quite unlikely that the Coalition of the Willing has so quickly suffered a change of heart.

What is needed for the world is true security, which comes not in preparing for war and deterring the enemy through military might, as heard in the hyperventilating proclamations of the geopolitically minded, warmongering European leaders; the true content of security, and of peace, is development.

This indisputable fact rests upon the authority of natural law: Mankind is a one—a unified species whose fundamental characteristic is creative discovery. The maximum development of the creative capacity of our species across the entire planet is in the best interest of every person in every nation. This principle is enshrined in the American Declaration of Independence as the Leibnizian “pursuit of happiness.”

The shift in the world that began in the Aug. 15 Alaska summit between President Trump and President Putin, away from the precipice of confrontation between nuclear powers, must be seen against the backdrop of the larger, tectonic shift occurring in the world order. The geopolitical, unipolar system is over, and more and more nations of the world, such as the BRICS+ nations, are reorganizing themselves into new modes of cooperation and collaboration for long-overdue development.

This was expressed in a statement by President Putin on the website of the Vladivostok Eastern Economic Forum, whose upcoming meeting begins September 3: “We have identified the development of the Far East as a national priority for the entire 21st century. The importance and correctness of this decision has been confirmed by life itself, by the challenges we have faced recently, and, most importantly, by the real trends that are gaining momentum in the global economy, where the key business ties, trade routes, and in general, the entire vector of development are increasingly reorienting toward the East and the Global South.”

Helga Zepp-LaRouche has called for the crucial next steps to be taken coming out of the Trump-Putin summit: President Trump must go to Beijing for the September 3rd 80th anniversary commemoration of the end of World War II and there meet with Presidents Xi Jinping and Putin; to cement a new direction for the world, away from the forever wars of the British Empire, those three Presidents must agree to lead a new mode of economic development among nations, spearheaded by the Bering Strait tunnel project.

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