The Whole Body Is Sick’—Why a Band-Aid Won’t Fix Today’s World Crisis
Trilateral talks between Russia, Ukraine, and the U.S. took place in Abu Dhabi on Nov. 10-11. Credit: UAE MOFA
Nov. 11, 2026 (EIRNS)—The talks among Russia, Ukraine, and the U.S. in Abu Dhabi this week left no doubt about what Russia considers the central question on the table. What is required is not an end to a conflict or even “security guarantees,” but rather the establishment of a new security architecture for Europe and implicitly the world as a whole. “Essentially, the whole body is sick, and Ukraine is simply where the abscess burst,” the leader of Russia’s delegation, Vladimir Medinsky, said following the talks on Nov. 11. “A simple band-aid won’t do.”
The two days of talks ended with all sides expressing the sentiment that a certain amount of progress was made. U.S. envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff will now travel to Moscow to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and then on to Dublin, where they will meet with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky, who has been traveling abroad. Whether or not any real outcome will result from this process, and whether the impressionable American side has the ability to deliver a real agreement, remains to be seen; the Russians certainly know that they can’t control what the other parties will do. However, the Russians have clearly added emphasis on the deeper principles far more bluntly than at any time previously, well aware of the pitfalls that occurred in negotiations following the hopeful process initiated by the Trump-Putin summit in Anchorage, Alaska, last year.
Medinsky told reporters that European security had been the “central theme” of the talks, and that “the world needs a new, modern, updated security system—a fair one, not to the detriment of any individual countries.” Russia proposed such changes in 2008 and again in 2021, he noted, and the Ukraine conflict exposed the failure of the entire existing system. A source in the negotiating team told TASS that the Ukrainian settlement is just one element of a larger discussion, that of “creating a comprehensive and indivisible security architecture for the entire continent.”
The message couldn’t be clearer, and it forces a higher question: What does lasting peace actually look like?
China is taking a similar approach, in particular to the crisis in Southwest Asia. In Tehran on Nov. 8, Chinese special envoy Zhai Jun met with Iranian officials, where he warned that force cannot solve problems and pledged that China was committed to help “build a new regional security architecture.” This is a concept China has repeatedly referred to, which pairs diplomacy with long-term economic development as a stabilizing force. Zhai continued his diplomatic tour through the Persian Gulf region, meeting with Oman’s Ambassador-at-Large for Foreign Affairs, Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Abdullah Al Hinai, on Nov. 10.
Iran is leaning into the valuable role played by China. Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf wrote on Nov. 10 that China’s role “in ending the war and the situation of ‘neither war nor peace’ is significant.”
Whether Washington will be receptive remains to be seen, but it is beyond obvious that its current policy is at a dead end. On the sidelines of the G7 Foreign Ministers meeting in Paris on Nov. 10, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that there is “really no need for major combat operations any longer” against Iran, “because the blockade and the economic sanctions are doing devastation [sic] to their economy.” Rubio tried to inflate the new policy as a sort of carefully crafted decision rather than the complete and abject failure that the world knows it is. The sanctions will “get more painful as time goes on,” he said, adding that, “eventually you have to eat.”
Not only is this a barbaric policy, but it is incredibly dangerous as well. The U.S.’s new Iron Gate task force aims to block what it considers to be “illegal revenue streams” from flowing across Iran’s land borders, and even across the Caspian Sea. On Nov. 11, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova warned that the area of responsibility of this new policy includes Caspian transport routes, the security of which “is an internal matter for the Caspian Five”—of which Russia is one. “This poses an open threat to the rights and interests of sovereign Caspian littoral states,” she said, adding that it is essentially an admission by the U.S. that its policy of economic strangulation is equivalent to “direct military action.”
The world is in upheaval; old assumptions about geopolitical spheres of influence, blocs, and the alleged power of sanctions are failing in plain view. The question is what will replace them. The Russian and Chinese proposals point in the direction of the kind of new architecture that is so clearly needed to get out of this crisis. However, Helga Zepp-LaRouche has put the most far-reaching proposal on the table in her call for a new international security and development architecture for the whole planet. Now is the moment to use it and organize up a storm for a real breakthrough.