Judging Freedom - COL. Lawrence Wilkerson : America’s Global Power Is Slipping Fast

Episode Date: February 5, 2026

COL. Lawrence Wilkerson : America’s Global Power Is Slipping FastSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Undeclared wars are commonplace. Pragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression, with no complaints from the American people. Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government. To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected. What if sometimes to love your country you had to alter or abolish the government? the government? What if Jefferson was right? What if that government is best, which governs least?

What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong? What if it is better to perish fighting for freedom than to live as a slave? What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now? Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for judging freedom. Today is Thursday, February 5th, 2006. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson will be with us in just a moment on United States' influence and power slipping fast. But first this. Don't you just cringe when people say, I told you so. Sorry, I told you gold and silver would reap the benefits due to excessive money printing, inflation, and global uncertainty. It's here. It's happened. Gold and silver have reached all-time highs. Did you call Lear Capital and buy some?

It's not too late. Experts are predicting higher prices ahead. Why? Nothing has changed. Geopolitical chaos, cost of living crises, and a weaker dollar are driving central banks to boost their gold reserves. Forecast suggests gold could hit $6,000 an ounce and silver $200 in ounce. Even Morgan Stanley ditched the 60-40 rule for 60-20, putting 20-20, putting 20 percent,

sent into precious metals. They're getting educated and you should too. Call the best in the business and the people I trust, Lear Capital, get their reports, get the facts, get some gold and silver. Tell them the judge sent you and get up to $20,000 in bonus gold or silver. Call 800, 511, 4620 or go to Learjudge Nap.com. Colonel, the President of the United States says he's not constrained by international law. And today, February 5, 26th, it's the first time in 62 years. The world awoke to no formal infrastructure restraining the development of nuclear weapons. What remains of international law, Colonel Wilkerson?

I think I would use John Meersheimer's favorite term. I just heard him call himself a Hobbesian on another product, another podcast. Hobbs, I would say that is what it is. It's a Hobbesian world, John Meersheimer's gravest intellectual, international relations dream is true. It is indeed a Hobbesian world, and there is nothing now, apparently, that man has manufactured over the last century. or so to restrain that. How reckless has it been for the United States not even to respond to President Putin's offer to extend the New START treaty, which would retain the cap of 1,550 nuclear weapons?

And before you answer, our mutual friend, Scott Ritter, says, three of these are enough to destroy the world. and now we know there's about 4,500 out there between the United States, Russia, and China. They have the capacity. I was reading it the other day. I was stunned. I've been reading this for the last 35 years or so, but especially about ballistic missile submarines. But they have a capacity that exceeds 200,000 Hiroshima and Agassaki bombs. And some of these are, of course, on our ballistic missile submarines. as they are on Soviet submarines, which are virtually invulnerable. And to just be this cavalier about the last vestige of 45, 50 years of hard work to forge these treaties, everything from start to the INF, probably that latter, the most important one of all, is just insanity.

Where do you see this going? I mean, we can't just live in a world of might makes right. It'll be Russia, China, and the United States, and everybody else better form an alliance with one of the three. Trump doesn't honor alliances. He picks on anybody that he can who's smaller than the United States is, whether it's Venezuela or guys in speedboats on the high seas or innocent people demonstrating in the streets of Minneapolis or the Ayatollah. There's really only two fundamental places that can go, Judge, I'm sad to say, or variations on a theme on one or the other of these. One is into a nuclear arms race, the nature of which the world has never seen, even when the Soviets were building out trying to catch us and we doing the same thing in response to them. or we go rather swiftly back into sanity and very, very serious arms control negotiations

with an aim not only of going for the Russian stockpile and the American stockpile, the two biggest ones, but also bringing others in ultimately the nine nuclear weapons owning states because that's the only thing that makes sense. Oh, what are the chances of bringing the Israelis in, Colonel? Wilkerson. How would you go about you, how would you Lawrence Wilkerson go about that? Don't think it would be that hard if we taught Putin into bringing DPRK, North Korea in. I think, you know my theory. Israel works for us. We don't work for them. I believe a president with the gall to do it could bring Israel in. We've had presidents who dealt with Israel's

nuclear capacity, H.W. Bush comes to mind at once in a very serious way. And there have been others, too. LBJ was the wild card in the deck, if you will. But most American presidents have been very circumspect about what Israel does. Even those who oppose their getting a bomb like John Kennedy, who later had to accept a fait accompli, I think mostly engineered by LBJ and by people like Pollard. Wouldn't you be skeptical of Benjamin Netanyahu's signature on a document? I have to think that Benjamin Netanyahu, thank God in heaven, will die one day. Well, would you be skeptical of an Israeli agreement to comply with any document, no matter how universally accepted?

I'll quote you Ronald Reagan. Trust but verify. You have to have a pretty solid verification regime. All right. Well, that's where Scott Ritter agrees with you 100% who maintains that the value of these treaties is not the cap. The value of these treaties is the ability to inspect. Yes. And to be on the other person's turf and amongst its jewels. Correct. Correct. Correct. All right. Do you think Netanyahu wants the U.S. to attack Iran? I do not. I do not. I think he's probably the biggest inhibition to it right now. I know I'm going against the weight of the people with whom I usually agree, but I do not think that Don— I wish Max were just—we're still with us. He was just with us, but I'm busting your chops. Go ahead,

Colonel. I just think that both ends of the bargain, if you will, certainly the Iranians, but the Israelis and the Americans are reluctant for different reasons to finish this off, as or I think it would be finishing Israel off in one respect. And I think the IDF is so advised Netanyahu, the cooler heads in the IDF, the ones that will speak truth to power. And there's still a few of those left. And I think Donald Trump doesn't want it, period. I think he wants to use what he's, he's put this armada in place to put as much pressure on Iran as he can to achieve some sort of diplomatic result. Do you think that these negotiations with Iran are serious or a farcical or something else,

Colonel, because the demands that the U.S. has made on Iran simply cannot be complied with if Iran expects to remain as a sovereign state in the crosshairs of Israel? I agree. And I think the negotiations are going to have to deal with that. And as I said, I think Trump is willing at the end of the day to accept something that here's what I've characterized it. I think he's going to get the JCPOA with a few more goodies. And he's going to praise it and extol it to the high heavens and say he should be indeed given the Nobel Peace Prize. And what will Netanyahu and company say or do about that?

If the bat that Trump uses on Netanyahu is sufficiently strong and powerful, I don't think Netanyahu is going to say anything. He may try to undermine immediately. In fact, I almost promise you who will. But I don't think he'll say anything, not publicly. What is Netanyahu's master plan for Gaza? Is it Jared Kushner developing into Trump Gaza and allowing the Palestinians to live there? Or is it the slow eradication of human beings from there? It's the remains of their ancestral lands.

The latter. Absolutely the latter. And he's doing it forthwith. The people who are dying during this so-called ceasefire are anywhere from 20 to 50 as high as 70 a day. They're still dying. They're dying in the West Bank. He's finishing that off, if you will. And he's finishing Gaza off at a much slower rate,

but nonetheless, he's doing the same thing. And you notice what he did with the Rafa Crossing. Ain't nobody much getting out across the Rafa Crossing. Right, right, right. The West Bank just suffered the loss of three Arabs murdered by Israeli police. And Netanyahu has now transferred the police in the West Bank from his own office to the tender mercies of Israel. Gidemore, Ben-Gavir.

Yes. So I guess things will only get worse there, not better. Netanyahu doesn't want responsibility for the police in the West Bank. He couldn't care less what Ben-Gavir does. I think what he's using is Gaza and the Brujah-Ha still existing over Gaza, into a certain extent Lebanon and Syria, to mask what he's doing in the West Bank. If I had to say where he's moving the most rapidly and deadly right now, it would be the West Bank.

Wow. Wow. What is Netanyahu's master plan for the United States? To replace it with China or some other power that, if you've read Xi Jinping's recent declaration, this is the second or third since he took power. I sent it by Chas Freeman to make sure I was reading what I thought I was reading. But in this judge, he essentially said. says we need now to be we are the number two industrial economic power in the world he says that we need

now and the implication is to be the number one to be the same thing in terms of finance and currencies and he says in this declaration that he is going to now he's not wanted to do this before create a global reserve currency it's going to be his own This is a huge step for China. And he also says that they are going to be fundamentally number one period once they have developed this massive financial business to go along with their industrial market. He's probably right. And what triggered this? Might it be Trump's bizarre unconstitutional infatuation with tariffs?

No, no, but I'll tell you what. they just supposedly spent two hours on the phone together. Xi Jinping and President Trump. Right. I don't know if it had to do with this declaration, but I'm sure Trump has people we can read Mandarin too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No question about it. What is the value of the Russians negotiating with Ukraine?

Does Ukraine realize it's on its last leg, or does it's a last leg? still maintain that it won't surrender a real estate and it can join NATO or have foreign troops on its ground as it sees fit? I think what we've seen if Anatol Levin's piece is right about what Russia's willing to concede now, which includes such things as Ukrainians maintaining their hegemony, if you will, in those portions of the Donmos where they still exist or maybe shared hegem. and also they can have a fairly sizable military complement, and there can be some security guarantees as long as not NATO troops on Ukraine.

So all those things, I think, if it's true that Putin has come to that conclusion in the negotiations, indicate to me that Putin has other reasons to want to escape what he's in in Ukraine. And those other reasons are other possibilities in the world for which his military is tied down in Ukraine, not the least of which is a defense agreement with Iran. People forget how close Iran is to Russia. They forget the geographic realities of Russia and Iran combined and what they want to do with that area in terms of commerce and trade. And I think Putin is a little bit trouble.

He's a master strategist, as far as I'm concerned. He's troubled by his military being so entirely consumed almost by this conflict in Ukraine. Well, what do you think the Russians would do if we wake up tomorrow morning and Pete Higgs-Seth's sending bombers over Tehran? That's a big concern, I think. I think that's a part of it. He's worried that something like that might happen, and he won't be able to respond as robustly as he would like to. And that means probably at this juncture, Xi Jinping won't respond in response to his response as a robustly. Leslie as he wants Xi Jinping to. Given another three or four years, and Xi Jinping will probably be willing to stand up too

because it's so important to them to have a steady oil flow. People don't understand that the oil flow really impacts everyone. Not a single solitary nation on this planet is not impacted by oil flows. And when you mess with those, it's not just really bad for some people in terms of their pocketbook. it's bad in terms of their existential existence, their economies and everything else. So we learned this in Beijing in 2009 when we did the petroleum disruption that exercise with everybody there. So they're watching this really closely.

Lots of people are watching it. And you can just throw OPEC out the window pretty much now. It's the United States, Russia, Iran, Iraq, some other powers that play in this. not clandestinely, but not so much in the limelight, that's running the oil business now. And any one of those deviating in a significant way really changes the picture. Colonel, isn't the United States self-sufficient with respect to oil? It is, but our oil is very expensive to get in the market. So if you don't have pretty high oil prices, you aren't in the Permian Basin making any money

because it takes about $49.50 just to give. one of those fracked barrels out of the ground, whereas compared with Saudi Arabia, it's only eight to ten dollars to get it out of their ground. But they're running out, not running out in terms of tomorrow they aren't going to have any, but their fields are not as abundant as they were. The real future, in my view, is Central Asia under the Caspian. There's huge amounts of war. And then in Iraq, in the Western deserts, if Iraq ever got its act together, politically and otherwise, and could let the nationals in and let them explore that Western desert, they'd probably top Saudi Arabia in a minute.

They're already pushing Saudi Arabia, but they've got more, lots more, I think. What happens if the United States attacks Iran, and in addition to attacking severely Israel, the Iranians close the Strait of Hormuz. Does that affect the price of gasoline at the pump in the United States? I think you would have an impact immediately. When we took down Rastanura in that simulation exercise I was telling you about, we had a simulated terrorist attack on Rastanur, Saudi Arabia's then most productive court about six or seven million barrels a day.

Oil went to $300. Wow. Colonel, I'm going to play a clip for you and ask you what you think of it. It's a brief interview of Vice President Vance by my friend and former Fox colleague, the very lovely Megan Kelly. And then it's a Fox interview from 11 years ago of a now deceased senior CIA official who makes a rather starting statement. You may know the gentleman. Chris, cut number 17. What happens when the same people who are shooting up a mall or driving airplanes into buildings have a nuclear weapon? That is unacceptable. And it's not just them. Because if the Iranians get a nuclear weapon, you know who gets a nuclear weapon like the next day? The Saudi Arabians. People, Mr. Clarej, have talked about Saudi Arabia.

They certainly have more money than anybody in the Middle East. Are you concerned about the possibility they may get a nuclear bomb? Saudis already have the bomb. but people failed to remember. Hold on a second, Mr. Clair. Let me just emphasize that point, because that's an important point. You say Saudi Arabia already has a nuclear bomb? Several.

People forget that it was the Saudis who financed the Pakistani bomb. They put billions of dollars into that effort to create that nuclear capability. And in return, of course, they got something. Now, people can argue whether it was dibs on four nuclear devices or seven. That's the argument. But no one really in the know argues that they do have access to nuclear weapons. The Clarege credible. And does J.D. Vance know what he's talking about?

I take exception to a certain extent, and I went through this. what did I go through this when we were looking at everything in the world with regard to nuclear poison, as in a dirty bomb, or nuclear weapon itself being in the hands of al-Qaeda? But Claridge is right. Here's what I think is the deal, though. The Pakistanis keep in their stockpile a certain number of nuclear weapons that upon requests from Riyadh, will be shipped immediately to Riyadh. I think when Mohammed bin Salman recently visited Islamabad, I say recently, about 18 months ago or so. I think he reassured them of the money for that deal.

You remember probably he gave him something like $20 billion U.S. and maybe even got a guarantee that it would be swift and quick. He's right. Clarege is right about that. I don't think it's on Saudi soil, but I think it could be there momentarily. Is the vice president merely ill-informed, or is he...

covering up the truth. Well, I think he's got a valid threat he's talking about there. I mean, the Iranians did not bomb American shopping malls. I mean, he's equating apples and oranges. That's hogwash. The Iranians would no more smuggle one than the Pakistanis would. AQ Khan was the worst proliferator in the world. And when we took that network down, we didn't see anybody else.

God forbid that we should have, because we'd have probably had billions of dollars going towards that one. But we actually eliminated, as far as I could tell, and I can't go into this in too much detail, but we eliminated everyone in the network to include those in nations you would recognize the name of, NATO nations, for example, who were selling everything from magnets to centrifuges to whatever through this network to various unsavory characters. Now, I'm not saying that in all cases these companies knew they were doing that. It was dual-use stuff we used to call it.

And sometimes I don't think they knew they were doing it. But people like Saddam Hussein, people like Gaddafi and others, and North Korea in particular, were buying this stuff up for reserves in the case of North Korea or for a startup program in the case of probably Iran. But I don't think that that was in Iran's case for anything other than that. an insurance policy. I don't think they have ever made a decision to build a nuclear weapon. I think they were crazy here recently when we screwed up on our negotiations and our diplomacy and made a mess of their country with it. We should have, if we were in Iran, we should have expected them to say, okay, we're going to do it now. I would have had I been they.

Well, I want you to watch this clip from the President of the United States. It's yesterday. Tell me if he knows what the hell he's talking about. Number 14, Chris. Should the Supreme Leader in Iran be worried right now? I would say he should be very worried, yeah. He should be. As you know, they're negotiating with us. I know they are, but the protesters have said, you know, where are the Americans?

You promised them we would have their back. Do we still have their back? Well, we've had their back. And look, that country's a mess right now because of us. We went in, we wiped out their nuclear. If we didn't take out that nuclear, we wouldn't have peace in the Middle East, because the Arab countries could have never done that. They were very, very afraid of Iran.

They're not afraid of Iran anymore. Those beautiful B-2 bombers went in, and they hit their target every single bomb and obliterated it. And within one month, they were going to have a nuclear weapon. That was a big threat. They're not going to have it anymore. But if we obliterated, what's the deal about? I mean, if there's no more, are they trying to restart the nuclear program?

Well, I heard that they are. And if they do, and I let them know, if they do, we're going to send them right back. and do their job again. So you're understanding that they tried to restart it, and that's why you're threatening force. They tried to go back to the site. They weren't even able to get near it. There was total obliteration. But they were thinking about starting a new site in a different part of the country.

We found out about it. I said, you do that. We're going to do very bad things to you. Does the man have the slightest understanding of what he's talking about? It's contradicting himself all over the place. If he had done what he said he'd done, It would be a long time. I'm not saying they couldn't recreate it, restart it somewhere else.

But man, I can tell you from studying the AQCon network and doing things underground in North Korea and in Iran and elsewhere, this is not something you do tomorrow morning. And it costs a great deal of money to do these things too. So he's talking out his rear end, essentially. I don't think he destroyed this is what he's right about. And Bibi knows this. I don't think he destroyed their capability. So that's what he's really saying, but he can't say that because, you know, he's hyped it so much.

Correct. Correct. Who knows whether or not you'd be. I asked you earlier if anybody would accept Netanyahu's his signature on a treaty or a promise. Who would accept Trump's? No one in this world with the brain. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, a pleasure, my dear friend, no matter what we're talking about or how dark these days are. for snow coming this weekend, Colonel Larry. Yes, more.

I can't wait. My back is aching. If we don't have enough. Thank you very much, Colonel Wilkerson. Always a pleasure, my dear man. We look forward to seeing you next week. Take care. Stay safe.

Thank you. And warm. Yes, stay warm. Yes, yes. Coming up at 3 o'clock this afternoon, Professor John Mearsheimer, Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.