By Prof. Dr. Ulrike Guérot, Political Scientist, Founder of the European Democracy Lab, Germany
The international conference entitled “The Alliance to Prevent a Great War,” organized by the World Civilizations Initiative Research Center, was held at the Meyra Palace Hotel in Ankara on 18–19 July 2026.
UWI will present the speeches held on the conference during the coming days.
The conference, which featured presentations by speakers from Azerbaijan, Belarus, France, Germany, Greece, Iran, Italy, Japan, Russia, the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), Türkiye, the United Kingdom, and the United States, was attended by approximately 200 distinguished invited guests.
Ministers, members of parliament, ambassadors, retired generals, scholars, politicians, diplomats, military officers, and experts examined the question of the “Alliance to Prevent a Great War” from a wide range of perspectives.
Below, we present the speech of Prof. Dr. Ulrike Guérot. The title was set by UWI.
I’m Ulrike Guérot. I’m speaking from Berlin.
I’m very eager to do this because I’m also leading the European Peace Project, which is www.europeanpeaceproject.eu . And you are all invited to look at this document. We have a huge effort to bind together the peace activists of Europe and to basically lobby for a Europe without NATO. For a neutral Europe and for a Europe that finds its place in a multipolar world, which is no longer the old Atlanticist and NATO world.
So as times are changing, and they are quickly changing and dramatically changing, and everybody understands that now we are discussing basically the move from a Pax Americana, American dominance, NATO ruled world, which is called the rules-based order world, towards a more BRICS-orientated world, BRICS countries, which have been founded in 2009. And then BRICS also taking care of the Global South. We see a huge, major shift in geostrategic, geopolitical and geoeconomic relations all over the place. And I think I do not need to present this to Turkish citizens who are, in a way, sitting in the midst of it, because Türkiye is more than, in a way, more than Western Europe, really… A switch point between East and West. So I think Türkiye has a very important role to play these days.
So just to go on, because we are having this major shift, I think time has come to think about the necessity of NATO at large.
Let’s just recall that in 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. Let’s recall that there were dozens of promises that NATO would not be enlarged beyond united Germany.
And we now understand better than ever…
That nothing had been more prepared than this war on Ukraine. So I think it’s evidence today that it is a NATO proxy war.
And the NATO proxy war basically poses then whether this is the aggression of Russia, this sort of, like we say in German, so the illegal in terms of… In terms of international law, the law-breaking aggression of Russia, or whether we can and perhaps must say in the future that this war was basically largely prepared by the US and was 20 years of strategy, perhaps started already in 2004 with the Orange Revolution, if you remember, in Kyiv. And then, you know, when Putin still was basically trying to shake hands with the West when he appeared at the Munich Security Conference in 2007.
So the question, who is responsible for this war?
I think it’s time to come to go urgently into diplomacy now and now because this war is still going on and Europe is suicidal in what it does because we are not doing diplomacy. We are trying to still conquer Russia and make a military victory, which is totally insane for everybody watching what is going on. But even more… Even more, if I started to talk about a huge paradigm change from Pax Americana to the BRICS world, the real question is, do we need NATO? Do we need NATO any longer? Because the Warsaw Pact resigned. Gorbachev basically held promise in difference to the West. He backed down all the Soviet troops in the former Soviet satellites like Hungary and Poland and all these countries. So, in a way, the Russians held promises, and we didn’t. And the question is, where does NATO now stand alone in Europe? And why is it there? Because, in a way, we are repeating history. We are rebuilding the Berlin Wall. We are just building it 1,000 kilometers far in the east, in Kyiv now. But we build a hard NATO line. We are separating the European continent.
For me, as a European citizen, it cannot work. We had Willy Brandt, we had Egon Bahr, we had Olof Palme, we had Bruno Kreisky, all arguing that we need a security architecture with Russia and not against Russia. Anyway, we need the resources from Russia. We need the gas from Russia. Europe is, especially Germany, totally suicidal in buying fracking gas from the Americas and so on and so forth. So it’s hilarious, the policies of Europe and especially of Germany these days.
The only solution can be that NATO as a security alliance has come to an end.
And that Europe must find ways with Türkiye, yeah? Türkiye being already a little bit in the middle between sort of still NATO member, but also signing up for the BRICS world.
So the must-go for me is that Europe needs to look at Eurasia, must look Orient, Orient and Türkiye. And then become neutral.
Because if we stick with the, say, MAGA, US and the, in a way, criminal politics of the United States, if we look at Cuba, we look at Venezuela, or we look at buying Greenland… We look at deals instead of treaties when it comes now to Ukraine. We look at, you know, Kushner wants to buy Albania and wants to make peace deals instead of peace treaties. All this does not correspond to European culture. So the most important thing for Europe is to rediscover its own culture and out of the rediscovery of its own culture makes a new policy. Towards diplomacy, towards Eurasia, towards the Orient, because Occident and Orient were also always in the centuries looking at each other. And Türkiye, Istanbul is well-placed to be the platform.
So the thing I haven’t talked about is obviously Gaza, Israel and Lebanon, which is sort of the other side of the equation. We have seen, say… Racist regulations in Israel with capital punishment, not only for Palestinians and not for Israeli citizens. We have racist legislation when it comes to the Palestinian population. And clearly now there is a movement, if you have been reading the UN report on 20,000 children killed and… 40,000 further children mutilated and vulnerable that we can talk about a genocide.
What is happening in Gaza is a shame for Europe and that we could not stop the Israel-European Association Agreement. And that we are still in weapons delivery, I feel deeply ashamed. In a more intellectual sense, it is intellectually very, very poor that in Germany now we try to merge anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic in one word. And if you are against Netanyahu and against the policy of the state of Israel, you are told to be anti-Semitic. So these are dangerous tendencies.
Personally, I think that the three big capitals that now need to work together, that is Paris, Moscow and Istanbul, it’s the only towns that you would call real towns in Chinese standards, meaning 25 million citizens. So if we could build this triangular working scheme, which is Moscow, Istanbul, Paris, and we find a peace order that is powerful… Emancipated can play a role in the multipolar world and that creates a non-dependent Europe from the US whilst having obviously a good partnership with the United States. I think that is the ideal world, and you always need to orient yourself on ideals. So I hope I could give you some interesting impulse for your discussions. I’m very sorry that I cannot be present today.