The Duran Podcast - Empire in Decline - Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Alexander Mercouris and Glenn Diesen

Episode Date: November 30, 2023

Empire in Decline - Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Alexander Mercouris and Glenn Diesen

Welcome to today's program. My name is Glenn Dyson. And with me is Alexander McCurice from the Duran. And the guest today is Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. Colonel Wilkerson was the former chief of staff to the U.S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell, under the Bush administration, and, well, among many years of experience in the U.S. government. Welcome, Colonel. It's a great privilege to have your own. Good to be with you. So, well, we're excited to speak with you today because, well, regarding the direction of U.S. foreign policy,

because you've previously expressed concerns about excessive militarization of U.S. foreign policy. And you also argued that NATO could fragment as a result of its failure in Ukraine. You've also been pessimistic about the future of Israel, given its current path. So I think there's a lot here to discuss. But before we start this discussion, I just wanted to ask you also briefly about the Iraq war, because you, of course, then were the chief of staff to U.S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell, you know, who had a very key role in building the case for the invasion of Iraq. So I guess our listener wouldn't forgive us if we didn't ask.

How do you reflect on this painful decision in Washington 20 years ago? Interesting, you use the term faithful. That's a term I make sure I use in every seminar with my students. And we define it as a decision that sends young men and young women to die for state purposes and something we often forget to kill other people for state purposes. In that regard, I feel sorry for every single solitary, Marine, soldier, and other individual who went in 2003 to Iraq because, as Kofi Annan said, it was a war crime.

The whole thing was a war crime. The invasion was a war crime. I was late coming to that. I've always been slow, but I finally came to it, realize it, and one of the reasons from 2005 on that I became quite outspoken about it was

not just torture, which became for the first time in American history pre-colonial, colonial, or national, sanctioned by the highest authority in the land. We had tortured people before in the Philippines. We tortured them in Vietnam, but we had never had a president formally sanctioned torture. George W. Bush did.

So it was a terrible time for me, and I regret having served. I wish I'd walked out. I wish I'd walked out the first day. And do you see this time as, well, how do you see the development of the, I guess, U.S. foreign policy ever since? Has it deteriorated or has continued on a specific path? in terms of the role, the central role of the military in defining or making the foreign policy decisions? That's an incredibly complex question, a number of dimensions of which I'm involved in right now.

I'm a member of the All-Voleteer Force Forum, for example, which is trying to bring conscription back and get rid of the All-volunteer force, because what the All-volunteer force has proven itself to be is a force that can get that can get you readily into wars, you cannot possibly win. And were we to get into war where it would be existential and we had to win, they would lose. So we have a real problem right now with our military in the United States being manifested in a polling number that has never showed up before. The propensity to serve amongst 18 to 24 year old Americans is 9%. So the last two years, the Army, the Air Force, critically, U.S. Army Reserve has been woefully short in its recruiting numbers. We now have a military that really, in all practical senses, is smaller than the military of Bangladesh.

It is incredibly incapable of taking on an opponent like China, and yet we have a president who bates the leader of China almost weekly. Well, that's one dimension of it. Another dimension of it was on a webinar I watched yesterday with Richard Sokwa, who's just written his latest book on Russia. And he's right. He's absolutely right. I was there at the time with Colin Powell, with H.W. Bush, with Brent Kovov, with Edward Chibon Nazi, with Mikhail Gorbachev, with Boris Sheltz. We lost the peace. We could have had a much better relationship with Russia.

indeed we were building a much better relationship military to military, capital to capital, leader to leader. They were going to be a member of NATO eventually. And Bill Clinton came along and blew the whole thing out of the water and largely because he had a military industrial complex that he was majorly beholden to for campaign money. And other reasons too, but it's been a disaster since 9-11 in particular. But since the end of the Cold War and the departure from office of the, probably the most experienced president since Dwight Eisenhower, H.W. Bush, we've been in free fall, absolute freefall. Wars, we can't win.

We kill millions of people. We've displaced millions of people. We have put probably 20 million people into internal displacement or external refugee status. we have caused the Levant to be broken from one end to the other, and that is our complicity that did that. That was what the neoconservatives in this country wanted, something I failed to glean until very late in Powell's administration as Secretary of State. They wanted the Levant on fire because they felt if it was on fire from Lebanon to Riyadh and every other country, including Iran, the Persians on the other side of the Gulf, if it was on fire, they couldn't bother Israel. If they were fighting one another and so forth, they couldn't bother Israel. That was their fundamental

reasoning. So I'm going on and on, but it's been a disaster. As Richard said, yesterday in the webinar, I detect not a single diplomat in Washington, D.C. other than Bill Burns, and he is placed in a richly bad place to be a great diplomat. He's right. I know Bill well. He's probably the only diplomat of competence in the administration. That is a hell of a statement for the superpower for the empire, even though we're on our way out with $33 trillion in aggregate debt,

a military that can't even recruit, people who just simply don't understand the state of our physical situation, for example. They don't understand just how desperate we're going to be in another decade. Our Office of Management and Budget put out a report the other day that we are going to be paying interest on the debt that will be close to, if not exceeding, a trillion dollars within the next year or two. And the defense budget, which is already a trillion dollars and more, that'll be the

entire discretionary portion of our federal budget. There'll be no money left. The only good thing about that is it'll probably stop money from going to Israel. Can I ask a question about the intelligence that you were provided in the run-up to the Iraq war? Because decisions are based on the information that you get. You were given information, as I understand it, by the intelligence community, that Saddam Hussein was, did possess weapons of mass destruction. We were provided with the same information in Britain.

I am from Britain. I'm living in Britain. We conducted in Britain, the one thing we did do in Britain, we had a proper investigation. Except it didn't very much. Well, we had an investigation. Yeah, I followed the Chilkat investigation. Exactly. But at least we had that.

We had something. We were given some idea of how that investigation, of how that, information was put together and how it was provided. Have you ever had anything like that in the United States? Because if it has happened, I have never known about it. Has there been a proper review in the United States of how the intelligence got so wrong? Because it seems to me that the intelligence community has been making similar mistakes in other places. We'll get onto Ukraine and Russia as well, but at least has there been a review and understanding, a re-examination of what happened? There has been a highly classified review that I participated in through a stovepipe because they wanted my views by the CIA.

And no one will ever know what that review said, except the inside. and you're one of the people who did the review or one of the people who published the review or you were subject to like the DDO and maybe the director himself actually being briefed on the review. But that goes into a safe and never comes out again. There have been a number of reviews, if that's the right word, on aspects of our crimes, like torture, probably the most reviewed of all, and other aspects of it, like how did we you screw up so badly about the only component of the WMD panoply that really made a difference, nuclear weapons. And that's also in the bowels of classified information. Although if you go to I&R at

state, states, one-seventh of the U.S. intelligence community now, and by the way, the better 117, no question about it, they descended on the October 2002 National Intelligence Assessment with respect to Saddam's having an active nuclear program, you'll find that they did a pretty good review, too, because even though they were right, they wanted to see positively why they were right and why everyone else was wrong, which was probably a good thing to do, but that too is classified. So I don't know where you would find. I don't know of an existing review like the Chilkid Inquiry, where you actually had a report that was published, and we have reports that are published.

Indeed, our Senate Select Committee on Intelligence published a 5,000, 6,000 page report on the rendition, detention, and interrogation program of the CIA, condemning it outright because I saw it. Not just the executive summary. I actually participated in some of the information being collected. But Richard Burr, then the chairman of the committee of good stalwart Republican or bad that report to go anywhere. I think President Obama managed to get one put in a 25-year-more. moratorium so the American people will be able to read it in 25 years. But it was hellaciously condemning of the CIA, of the FBI, and of others who participated in the RDI program, as well as the program writ larger, although they didn't look into that. There's a lot of

implication how the military got drawn into it and such. But the answer to your question is we haven't had anything like the Chilcott Inc. I doubt we will because we don't do that. We don't do accountability in America. Which is very, very bad because it means that in Britain, we saw that the intelligence got contaminated by political desires and objectives. And of course, if we, if there isn't accountability, proper accountability, or even knowledge about this process in the United States, there is clearly no reason why. that cannot happen again. And incidentally, it would also, it also means that we don't know

the people who acted in good faith. And I should say, I absolutely believe the Secretary Powell acted in complete good faith. I remember him very well. The people who acted in good faith have never really been cleared and vindicated as they deserve to be. You're right. And with regard to, torture, which is the issue I know the most about because I became very passionate about that after 2005 when I realized what had been happening and the contamination of armed forces in that regard. With regard to that, we asked for accountability over and over again, and by we, I mean everything from the Constitution Project to formal committees within the Congress that had members who had the

moral courage to stand up and be counted, but weren't in the majority. majority or in the majority party or in a position where they could make something happen at that time. Because we felt torture will happen again. If you don't hold people accountable, really hold them accountable. It'll happen again. And when you have 51% of the Americans still in polling saying they support torture, you understand, they don't understand. They don't know what they're talking about.

Or they are that portion of America, which is always with us. I like to call them brain dead. Donald Trump is a perfect example of that bunch. But the brain dead people can sometimes, as Donald Trump did, create a real turmoil and a real disconcertation, if you will, of our democracy, even a threat to it. But that's the only thing I saw with the concrete evidence to go to trial, as it were. And yet we didn't.

We didn't. In fact, the one seminal moment in January of, 2005 when we were meeting in the Ritz Carlton and Pentagon City with all manner of former secretaries of services, former chairman, former senators, former secretary of the Navy who was very outspoken. And we were saying torture can't happen in the armed forces anymore. And we got John McCain to come on our side and say, give me the writing and I'll put it in legislation. And Powell put a letter on every senator's desk the morning they voted. on that legislation.

He put 100 letters in the Senate. And what did John McCain do at the end of the day? He made sure the legislation, when it passed, did what we wanted to do. It said the armed forces will never do this again, et cetera, et cetera. It gave a get out of jail freak guard to everyone who participated in the program, meaning it protected mostly the CIA, but a lot of special forces and others in the military, too. So even McCain at the end gave up and gave him a get out of jail, free card, a blessing, if you will, and no accountability.

So we just don't do it in this country. We don't learn lessons. If we learn lessons, we wouldn't have done Afghanistan like we did Vietnam. We wouldn't have done Iraq like we did Vietnam. We wouldn't have done Libya at all. We told Hillary Clinton to go to hell. We'd never done Libya. By the way, I met with Barack Obama in the Roosevelt room

and the one thing he did there was essentially say in front of John Kerry, his secretary state who was sitting right beside him, I probably shouldn't have done that. And I knew who had gotten him into it, Hillary and Samantha Power. They snookered him into doing Libya and what, we got a mess. We got a total mess in Libya now. So we just don't learn. We don't learn lessons. We don't take lessons in hand. We don't do accountability. That's not. not necessarily unusual for empires, especially empires like we are. I dare say Rome didn't do a lot of accountability either. Not at the end, but.

It's a curse of empires in general, though, when there is such a concentration of power, one has the ability to, well, forego the ideas of priorities, but also the ability is to make mistakes and absorb the costs. It makes often, yes, sets the condition for foolish policies, which can, of course, accrue problems over time. But I was curious on the topic of accountability because it seems the policies towards Russia should perhaps go down as a key mistake in history because in the early 1990s or throughout the 1990s, it seemed like the main or only foreign policy objective of Moscow was to get as close to the U.S. and the West as possible. This was, you know, they even started ignoring their partners in the East, the former Soviet republics, the Chinese,

because they were afraid they would slow them down on their, you know, rush to the West. And, of course, we go now 30 years into the future. And we now see their main objective now is to balance the United States and seeking almost any partnership they can in order to, collectively put a constraint on the United States. So it's really, yeah, been turned on his head. So, and of course, for some, you know, they seem to have predicted it from William Perry to George Kennan. But I was curious, though, in terms of on the topic of losing Russia, how do you see the,

what were the main mistakes being done, you know, leading us to this terrible point where we at the moment. I think there were a series of mistakes. The overriding reason, though, was not a mistake. There are people in this country, they are still with us, most of them, who, unlike Powell, Kenan, Perry, I can name a number of scholars, believe that H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev in the beginning were sincere. And then there's others who say that no HW was backing away at the end.

He was quitting. He was giving up. He was, you know, riding Russia off. And so I was there. I was in the chairman's office for the first year of the Clinton administration when that idiot turned to Powell and said, gays will serve openly in the armed forces. And Senator Nunn, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee,

found out about it, called Powell and said, oh, my, did. body colon, and all of a sudden the president was calling colon and saying, oh, please get me out of this. Please get me out of this. Come up with some solution because he was so stupid to do that. And that stupidity just reigned in that first four years in terms of, for example, when he wanted to expand NATO, who did he put together as a committee to decide if it were a good idea or not? the heads of the defense contractors. Lockheed Martin, they came back and said, oh, this is a wonderful idea, Mr. President. There were other reasons, too.

My students have gone deeply into that case study. But it got fouled in that first administration of Bill Clinton. We even had Vladimir Putin at that time looking like he was going to pick up the pieces from Mikhail Korbachev and give a lot more pragmatism and practicality. and less cloud looking at being exactly what you just described, eventually a member of NATO, and switching it from being an defensive alliance against another entity into being an alliance that was more political than military and would keep, what, 740 million Europeans in a group allied with the United States, and in that 740 million Europeans would be 140-some-odd million Russians,

where they should be, at least from the Ural's inward. They are European. Look at any outlets. It just went to hell because of a number of things. First was Anatoly Chubai and Larry Summers and others liked them, conducting fire sales in Moscow of all the old communist assets and selling them to the oligarchs and reaping huge fees from those sales. Larry Summers increased the endowment of Harvard so astronomically that they made him president.

And then later, when they found out what Summers had done, they fired him under the rubric of saying bad things about women and science. Well, they fired him because they found out what he'd done. But they didn't get rid of the endowment. That was one of the problems. And Putin saw this. He saw what was going on. another one of the problems. I wish I'd read Sokwa's book.

I've got it, but I haven't read it yet. I just got it yesterday. He apparently does a really good job of outlining some of these things that happen and what Putin's reactions were to each one of them and how he gradually came to believe that what you described earlier, Russia's focus was going to be westward, was the bad one. We were simply not trust. that ultimately we wanted his downfall or we wanted to keep, we wanted Russia's downfall,

or at a minimum, we wanted to keep Russia down and out for as long as possible. And of course, he objected to that. Understandably so, just as I would say, I don't condone his invasion of the Ukraine, but I certainly understood why he did it. Still, I understand why he did it. because we polluted the water so badly. And the expansion of NATO was so insane. If you look at the criteria for being a member of NATO,

they're stricter in some regards than the criteria of being a member of the EU. And yet we let countries like Albania, the criminal capital of Europe into NATO. We let countries like Montenegro, the automobile theft capital of Europe, into NATO. How insane is that? And my president, George W. Bush, goes to Tbilisi, and with Sakisvili by his side, pronounces in public that Georgia will be a member for NATO. We all know what Russia did after that. You can't read the sides, empire? You can't read the signs that Putin is not

going to tolerate this. And so you go after Ukraine. And the duplicity there was horrible. what we did through the years from, well, really from 2014 forward, but even before that, when I was managing some parts of the Ukraine account when I was at the State Department, because Powell turned to me and said, look into this and tell me what you're fine. And I said, I found a kleptocracy. I found a criminal state. I found a bunch of people who, whether it's Yulia Tamashenko or Yanukovych or whomever, they're all criminals, whether they're Russian, Ukrainian, or whatever.

They're all criminals. They don't have an honest person in their government. and we turned them into a Jeffersonian democracy and sent them billions of dollars to fight Russia in a fight that we cause. Okay, that's just a little bit of it. But bad stuff, and it's mostly our fault, just as the situation in Gaza today is our fault. As Gideon Levy has said, time and time again, a heretz, every 250-pound bomb that comes off that F-16 pile on and kills those children in the streets of Gaza. is a U.S. bomb out of a U.S. plane. He's right.

And you are complicit, he says. Is this thing about NATO expansion, which it is now, I think, generally acknowledged, is, I mean, even Stoltenberg is now saying it, that it is the source of the war. Our man, by the way. Our man, our man. We engineered him being Secretary General,

just so he could do our wishes. Why did the United States? I mean, this is, I've never really understood why the United States did it. All right, there were some contractors who were happy. There were some people in the, you know, who saw electoral benefits, the political leaders who wanted electoral benefits from it. It's never seen to me like these are sufficient explanations for such a tremendous thing to do. Was it bureaucratic inertia?

was it, I mean, you spoke about a group of people who wanted to set the Levant on fire, which I'd like to return to that because that's an astonishing statement. Is it the same sort of people who wanted to push things in towards Russia because they had some similar plans there? Why in the end did it happen? There was that chance of peace. There was a chance of partnership. Russia is the biggest country in Europe.

It has the biggest resources at Europe. It was the former adversary. Surely that was the peace and the victory, if you like, to be grasped. Why was it so heedlessly thrown away? One of my students that William and Mary said at the close of a case study on a similar situation, it was an accretion of a whole lot of little things that turned into a big, big mistake. you would have to go through it and pick out all the little pieces that were cluged together by the circumstances and by the people on the outside and inside

who wanted them to be cluges together. But it ranges across, why did Tony Blair, knowing full well that he was lying through his teeth, say that Saddam Hussein could hit London with weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes? And why did I then see the unclassified document, that he immediately forwarded it to us because we want the president, wanted to see it, and say, this wouldn't pass a sophomoric exam of a term paper. Why is Tony Blair speaking? I still, that's a mystery to me when Blair would make that kind of statement

and then send the evidence of that statement, which was clearly not a polished intelligence product. It wasn't even a product of analytical rigor. But that's the kinds of things you have going on. empire every day. You have bad leadership. You have lousy legislative process. You have a broken democracy. You have people who want to exploit every niche and corner of that break. You have people who are contestant. You have a president who gives an address from the Oval Office. I was in New York at the time, in a hotel room listening to him. I couldn't believe what I heard. You have a president who says he's going to use the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza to put the American

people back together again. The only astute observation was a CNN guy who afterwards said, that was a very political speech. No crap. And it was a very stupid speech. You know, you're going to use two wars, neither of which the United States should be involved in, because our focus should be, if you're looking at threats, on China. It should be on Asia. It should not be on Russia. It should not be on Central Europe. It should not be in the Levant. It should be on China. We don't have enough focus to go all the rest of the places, nor do we have enough military, hard power. So it's an accretion of all these little things. We haven't had a good president since HW. Bush. We have not had an experienced good president since H.S. Obama did have some

diplomatic talents. There's no question about that. His getting to JCPOA was APAC, the most insidious, pernicious, deadly, foreign agent operating on U.S. soil has been ever since its founding, buys politicians by the barrel. It was their first real defeat, but were they defeated? Trump comes in and negates the agreement. It doesn't look like we're going to resurrect anything there anytime soon. So it's an accretion of all these little failures and an overarching failure of our democracy, because it's not operating anymore. It's not governing. It's not legislating.

It's not enforcing the rule of law and the way it should. The states are becoming more prominent in our political structure right now than Washington. The states are doing more on climate change. The states are doing more to take care of the physical problems because they see what's looming on the horizon for Washington. States like Alabama, which wouldn't survive without the productivity of states like California and New York are beginning to understand some of that formula. And what's going to happen when the federal government is, you know, essentially its treasury

notes are shunned. They're not bought anymore. There's a reason that Chinese are dumping them at certain levels and certain intervals. they just paid Sri Lanka, for example, 200 million U.S. for the lease, 99-year lease, I think it is, on the port. And the Chinese were very straightforward about that was their interest payments on the notes they turned in at that particular time from the United States Treasury. So we paid for the Chinese having a subpin facility in Sri Lanka. That's how crazy this is.

Meanwhile, instead of focusing on things that really are serious for the country, nuclear weapons, for example, which we've helped mightily to abrogate every single treaty regarding, we're focused on these silly-ass things that don't make a with a difference, and in many cases are in our disinterest to pursue rather than our interests. And at the same time, and this is from Daniel Levy, I just heard him this morning. The outside world must walk Israel back from the abyss. It cannot be part of the choir of incitement.

Well, we're not a part of the choir of incitement. We are the reason they can do it. And the rest of the world, I told David, the rest of the world, or Daniel, the rest of the world is not a part of that choir. Every day, more of them are depart that. if they ever were a member of it. And that's,

Israel's not the only state becoming a pariah. We are too. I thought it was interesting what you said before about the mistakes with Russia possibly not being a mistake because I'm, I think back at 2008 when this, in Bucharest, when this future NATO membership was promised to the Ukrainians and Georgians, because the people are warning against it,

such as William Burns, which I think both of you correctly pointed out, Niette, Niette, Niette, where he predicted this will, of course, start a civil war and then possibly a Russian invasion because it is too provocative. But even people who are very for this, people like Tony Blair, you know, a weekly cable came out a month in which he talked to American diplomats a month before this membership was promised to Ukraine, in which he argued. that our main policies towards the Russians should be, when we operate in their neighborhood,

to make them a little bit nervous along their borders. So this is to rattle them and never make them feel safe. Again, it didn't explain why this sounds like a great policy. But again, it seemed to be a very deliberate approach. And the same goes with once the Russians actually invaded, once they gave up on finding a settlement, that they, you know, on the first day after the invasion, the Russians tried to reach out to the Ukrainians to negotiate a peace, you know, effectively pressure through what they couldn't

get seven years with Minsk. And on that first day after the invasion, the Ukrainians said, of course, we'll meet you, no, no conditions, we'll sit on a talk. And at the same day, on the day after the invasion, Ned Price, the spokesperson of the United States, said, no, no, we will not talk to Russia without preconditions. They have to withdraw everything before we even talk to them. And of course, now,

since that time, you know, the Turks, the Israelis, now even one of the top diplomats in Kiev has acknowledged that, yes, you know,

the Americans and the British, you know, under Boris Johnson came and effectively convinced them not to make a peace with the Russians instead fight. But I'm just one of wondering if as all of this becomes more and more available to the public, what do you think the

consequences, or will there be an accountability or will there be any consequences? Because it seems to, it seems that a lot of the mistakes, which has been done, which contributed to this war, weren't mistakes at all. They were quite deliberate efforts of provoking a conflict. And once the conflict was there, actually make a war out of it. Again, that's not even my words. that's the Israeli former prime minister and, you know, the foreign minister of Turkey. It's, you know, seeking a position where they can effectively kill Russians. I mean, this is very extreme. And this could all be brushed under the carpet if we actually won this war.

But now that it seems that the Ukrainians will lose, surely there has to be some kind of accountability or consequences. Well, you're talking to a military professional, first and foremost, when you're talking to me, and I told everyone before the invasion, on the day of the invasion and after the invasion, you are full of proverbial, you know what? There is no way that country back to the hilt by every single NATO country, including the United States of America, is going to be Russia. No way they're going to do it. It may take some time. It probably will.

The Russians have to be bloodied and find. out that what Colin Powell told them after the Warsaw Pact came apart was true, and they didn't do a lot of the things he told them they should do to improve their armed forces. One of the most important things was put NCOs in it. Americans don't understand that. Worldwide people don't understand that. If you don't have non-commissioned officers, you do not have an effect functioning military because you've got officers on the field doing what NCOs should do. Anyway, there's no way Ukraine is going to be Russia. It'll take some time, but Russia is going to beat them. And Klausowitz was right, war has a daily dynamic. And when that dynamic shifts, you are going to be in deep Kempshe.

It may even shift so dramatically that Putin forgets his statement that it's not about territory. It's about security. And say it's about territory and finish off Ukraine. What are you going to do then? So these people are stupid. I don't mean unwise or dumb. I mean they're stupid. The Latin base of that is seeking after that, which is unwise. Biden is stupid. I've known Joe Biden for a long time. He's stupid. Blinking is stupid. Sullivan is stupid. My nickname for them is blinking, blinking nod and nudge. A nudge is Victoria Newland. Now, when you come to Victoria, she's not stupid. She's one of these crews. She's one of these types who want to keep the world in turmoil so the empire has no threat to it, where anything raises its head to say no to the

United States, you bash it. You bash it with hard power. We've had a lot of these people. Madeline Albright in certain incarnations was that way. Hillary Clinton was certainly that way. So you put all these factors together. Terrible leadership, delinquent leadership, no diplomats. Bill Burns, as Sakaa said, is the only diplomat in the U.S. government, and he's the old place to practice that diplomacy, although you'll note they're using him. They're using him every time they turn around. I know, Bill. He is a prima donna. He's a, sir, he's a Vieira de Mello type diplomat. He is quintessentially good at diplomacy. I expected to see him even as the director of the CIA all over Ukraine, and he may have been in secret.

Putin's been sending signals. When he made that statement about it's not about territory, it's about security. We should have picked up on that and said, let's sit down and talk about security. Screw this territory. We know you don't covet Ukraine. We know why you did this. Mayaculpa, eat some crow, sit down and get this thing stop. But we won't do that because we have what is called in history, the hubris of

empire. And that hubris is amplified by the fact that we have idiots in our leadership positions, in the House, in the Senate, in the White House, and in the Supreme Court, where we have turned three or four of the positions over to Opus Day like Catholics. I was alive when John Kennedy thought he'd have a problem being President of the United States because he was Catholic. Well, we've turned a Supreme Court over to hardcore Roman Catholics. Now, no. That's nothing. My wife was a Catholic before she passed away. She was a white Catholic. She wasn't an Opus Day Catholic. We got some people on this. We have really messed things up in this country. And that mess clues us together to produce the last 20 years, which have been incredibly

bad for the United States. We have lost more reputational power, more prestige, more actual power in the world and in our own country than ever before. our history with a possible exception of 1850 to 1865. I'd like to come back to that comment that you made about setting people who actually wanted to set the Levant on fire, because that seems to me, I mean, I'm, I mean, it's almost as lunatic to my understanding as setting, you know, Eastern Europe on fire by taking on the Russians in that kind of way. The United States stands at the center of the international system. It stands at the center of the world trade system. Logically, I would have

thought what it ought to be doing is preserving stability and peace, not setting whole regions on fire. How, if you set a region on fire, can you possibly control it? who were these people? What kind of people were you dealing with who would want something like this? It seems, as I said, I mean, that a government should be taken over by people like that, especially a government like the United States. I find it astonishing. Well, we have a cord running through our history that vibrates every now and then, and it's vibrating badly right now. As I said before, it vibrated very badly from 1835 to 1860.

Its own unique flavor, as Jefferson and Adams admitted in their reconcile period, they constitutionalized a sin, a crime, and we were going to pay for it. Most people don't realize that right after they said that when they reconcile, they said both of them agreeing that they didn't think we'd last more than a hundred years. Very prophetic looking at what was happening to us. But your question goes to the heart of many of the discussions I had with students are perplexed over living in a country that seems to have no idea of and previously expressed a brilliant idea of posterity.

they have no a CEO summed it up for me the other day he said well I won't be alive I don't care it's all about climate crisis we were talking about I won't be alive so I don't care your children will be alive well they can take care of themselves

I'm going to leave enough money to that's a very prevalent attitude in the United States especially amongst the cognoscenti that's rich that's a wrong term to use for them most of the time that are rich the other aspect of it is you have

Dick Cheney Condoleezza Rice probably the most inexperienced since World War II President George W. Bush who as Colin Powell said Dick Cheney could get him to pull his 45 anytime he wanted to and start shooting at whatever target Dick Cheney wanted

and Powell couldn't figure out how to get him to put it back in its holster. A very apt metaphor. and you had all the people who were right around Rumswell. Concrete point in case. I'm older at the Pentagon in the very first days of the Bush administration because Richard Haas, the ambassador who had taken over policy planning and was very versed in George Marshall's policy planning staff and turned to me and said, you've got military experience, you're the

oldest person on the policy planning staff. form a joint staff Pentagon set of talks and do it a couple of times a month. Oh, so I went to the Pentagon, met General Casey, who was then the J5, later a four-star chief staff of the Army and commander in Iraq.

And he said, yeah, great idea. I'll point some people to run it from my end and you run it from your end. Well, three months, we did it. And then Runstrel said, get out. Leave the Pentagon. Didn't want any spies in the Pentagon. He also withdrew every military officer who was functioning in any other part of the bureaucracy,

from political military affairs at the State Department to the Congress. They gave him hell for it, so he had to put them back there. But he pulled in everybody. He didn't want anybody spying on. Before I left the Pentagon, though, under duress, I got a briefing. The briefing was from Douglas Fice office, the number three man in the Pentagon, who later would be surrounded by by Saddé, agents the entire time he was in the Pentagon, number three man in the Pentagon, surrounded by

Mossad agents 24-7, didn't have to go through the security of the Pentagon, didn't have to go through any kind of check they just came and lived in his office. Book coming out called deadly betrayal that's going to talk about this, individual that worked in that office at the time. I was briefed on, now you're ready for this? I was briefed on we were going to war with North Korea. We were going to war with Iraq. That'd be followed by Syria. That'd be followed by Iran. Although we wouldn't have to do probably Syria and Iran because they'd quake in their boots after we did Iraq. This was the way we were going to destabilize the region, but we're going to do it in a way that made us the hegeman of all by the time we came to the end. And Israel, of course,

would orchestrate it for us. These were war plans. I went to a colonel and I said, are these concept plans or are these tip-fitted? Time-place forcing deployment down. That means they're probably going to be executed. Oh, they're fully tip-fitted. This is crazy. Later, I would come back and find out that the Air Force General, who'd briefed me on the North Korean plan, had seen the light, if you will, and said, 100,000 casualties, 30,000 of them in the first 30 days. A lot of them Americans are a quarter of a million American non-combatants in the Seoul region. Maybe we shouldn't do this one. Maybe we should put this one on a burner and do the easy ones.

He called it the low-hanging fruit in the Middle East. This is the authority in the Pentagon talking at that time to a State Department rep who was absolutely floored by what they were doing. I couldn't believe it. I simply couldn't believe it. And I understood why he kicked me out. Now, the colonel, he said to me, I think it's crazy that we're kicking you out. You come back to Crystal City and we'll meet sort of under the wraps. And the first thing we did was go review the national military strategy

before the national strategy came out of the NSC because Condi was slow on it. Well, okay, the military shouldn't be leading the nation in developing the strategy, but I understood they were behind the power curve they wanted to do. So we met for two days and we helped them work the national military strategy, which is the next under the national security strategy. At the end of that, the colonel came to me and said, I came out on the brigade command list. I can't risk this anymore.

I've got to go. But I got to tell you something before I go. We're going to go to war. Ding, ding, ding, ding. I said, I saw the planning. He said, yeah, I know you did. Okay. So I was just waiting.

When Richard Haas came into the policy planning staff in the summer of 2002 and said to me, I think we're going to war with Iraq, Where'd you get that? Well, I was on the phone with Condi, and we're probably going to war with Iraq. Okay, starting, they're putting their plan into execution. Don't ask me what genius conceived all this. I've got to assume that Richard Cheney, who was tied to Donald Rumsfeld at the hip. Sometimes you didn't know who was vice president and who was sack death and vice versa.

Dick Cheney knew all about it. Was it the steroids he was on for his heart condition? Was he just a nut? I knew him as Secretary of Defense. I would have said he was one of the best Secretary of Defense we'd ever had. Not much to compare with there, but he was a good Secretary of Defense. But he was a different man 12 years later when he came by his president. Totally different man.

Had once said going to Baghdad after the Gulf War, first Gulf War, going to Baghdad is not worth a single Marine or a single soldier. That's what he told George Bush, George H.W. Bush. And that's what my boss, Colin Powell, was telling H.W. Bush, too. So they were in sync on that. And Bush said, right, we're not. We're going to fulfill the UN mandate and we're coming out. A very smart decision. The last smart decision, an American president,

is made for the use of military power. But don't ask me to explain these people. I can give you little pieces of it. I can tell you what they wanted to do in the Levant. I can tell you what they wanted to do in Korea. And so end all challenges, as Paul Wolfowitz said, the deficit sector defense. want to end all challenges, no matter how indistinct they might be to American power.

We've always had these people, but we have never, in my knowledge of our history, had them ascendant in the way they were under these very inexperienced presidents, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and George Bush, very inexperienced in the use of military force, and had military force at their beck and call, and had people within their administrations who liked to beck and call. Wolfowitz was quite well known for having stated in, I think it was 92 already, that just as the peace has been made and also the Soviet Union had dissolved, saying that, okay, if we want a sustainable peace,

then now is the time to clean up. Sorry, that was before 91. It was in 1990 when they had peace with the Soviet Union. Let's clean out because now the Soviets won't interrupt, so let's just clean out, take out all our enemies. When he sent his draft national security strategy over to the White House, H.W. Bush wrote on it. Send this back to the crazies in the basement of the Pentagon. In 2002, George Bush got that approved.

Really? What was referred to all these wars which were planned? I heard something similar from a speech of General Wesley Clark when he made this argument that after September 11 attacks that they made this plan to attack it was a seven countries in five years and he reflected on much like you that this

seemed like lunacy but again I can almost understand it back in those days when there was such a concentration of power because even this game of you know divide and rule could make sense but I'm thinking

at the moment now that the relative power is weakening we see this tendency to divide countries into allies or weakened adversaries that this could have made more sense before. But at the moment, it seems the United States is walking in a dangerous direction because with this conflict between the Europeans and the Russians, instead of Europeans becoming dependent on the U.S. and the Russians getting weakened, we see now that the Europeans are getting a lot more weaker as an ally. Meanwhile, the Russians are aligning with the Chinese. And again, you see the same in Asia.

That is, countries like Taiwan would be worried what countries are this. Well, islands like Taiwan are concerned about, you know, what will be the consequences of this partnership with the United States. Meanwhile, the Chinese see this as a threat and allied themselves with others. I guess my only point is... Let me give you some... Let me give you just some food for thought there. And think about what you just said in terms of this. When Chen Shui Bion was threatening to hold an independence referendum in Taiwan,

which we were talking to the China, we, Paul, Richard Haas, we did policy planning talks in Beijing with Wang Yi. Wang Yi was the guy, was our interlocutor, now the potentially foreign minister who's between the Politburo and the foreign ministry, actually a very powerful position. when we were holding those talks, we were telling the Chinese don't listen to CSB.

Don't listen to him at all because he is not going to be allowed to do that. We will prevent him from doing that. Donald Ronssel and Dick Cheney sent an emissary to Taipei almost weekly to tell CSB to keep on, to keep doing it. They wanted to cross that red line, which they knew was a red line China would honor. that in fact they would do something if he declared a independence referendum. And clearly the polls were showing by a slight margin, they probably would have voted for independence.

And that was a complete abrogation of what Kissinger and Mal Satung and, you know, Joe and Lai had put together in the beginning in the agreement we have with China. So we would take Doug Powell, our representative in Taipei, ambassador really, but we had to call him a representative. And our ambassador, for mostly commercial reasons, in Arlington, we had to take them aside almost weekly and tell them this is not the right message. And Powell was taking a real chance here because he was going against the vice president and the secretary of defense. Condi knew about it, but she wouldn't tell the president. When she did finally tell the president, the president publicly, I think it was 2004,

publicly rebuked Chin Shreveon, put him back in his house, if you will. the rep in Taipei, who was Larry Dorita, the chief of staff or Donald Roosevelt, was Larry Dorita's wife at that time. She came out, damn me her piece, she came out and essentially said the president didn't mean what he said because she was in this, you know, group too. We fired her. We let it out that she was having, you know, problems, medical problems or something like that, But we fired her right off the bat.

But that was, we had to fight tooth and nail against the vice president and the Secretary of Defense from developing a new Cold War with China. That's what they wanted. They wanted a new Cold War with China. They both saw that coal wars were very, very advantageous for the United States of America, the defense complex and everything else from when Cheney came. And therefore, we needed a new Cold War. They didn't want a hot war.

I don't think they wanted a hot war, but they wanted a Cold War with China. And Powell spent his entire. higher four years, the principal purpose was keeping us out of war with China because the vice president and the secretary of defense did want a cold war. Now, what did that mean for Bush? Finally, Bush came out and did what he did because I'm convinced, I've never talked to the president about this and he didn't put it in his book, but I'm convinced he knew the importance to the United States and to our economic structure at that time of China. And I put it this way, he knew the importance of China to Walmart. And so he sided with Powell. Americans don't know this.

No one's written about it. He was with Powell every time Powell came down hard with regard to China. And that's the only reason Powell was ultimately successful because Secretary of State operating without the imprimatur of the president eventually is going to get shot down as he did on Israel, for example. But that was how crazy that administration was. They're trying to do all these things at the same time they're baiting China. Insanity. I don't know any better word for it. Insanity. The hubris of power produced an incredible amount of insanity. Walmart keeping the U.S. away from war with China. That is crazy. But I guess what I wanted to get towards before was, you know, much like Israel has always able to isolate its neighbors when

it goes after one. Similarly, that's what the United States had objectives with before. But it seems now this approach of going after the Russians, but also at the same time going after the Chinese, also going after the Iranians increasingly. Surely even the hawks in Washington must see that this would be a very dangerous path to take as effectively doing the opposite of what they should, which would be to divide the adversaries and pick out one at a time instead of going after all at the same time. I was just curious what your thoughts were about this. Strategic nonsense.

John Meersheimer is absolutely right. Every time he goes out and talks about how the focus of the United States should be on Asia, it's not, it's stupid, it's ridiculous, it's very horrible. We're going to wind up paying for it big time. We have people writing papers in military journals, prestigious journals, saying things like, when we do go to war with China, they're going to beat the hell out of us in the first 30 days. We're going to take casualties the American people have never seen before, not since the Civil War. Have they seen casualties like this?

We're going to have aircraft carriers sunk. All kinds of things are going to happen like that. We're going to be losing. We're going to perceive it as a loss, and we're going to go nuclear. Because we're not going to accept the loss. we're going to go to nuclear. By the way, every simulation and war game I've played in the last years in the military where I was in the joint community and orchestrating these big games,

that's what we did. We went nuclear because neither one of us can get it the other one, not by sea, not by air, and certainly not by land. The United States would be swallowed in Fujian province alone with the military it has. It wouldn't even be able to stand up and fight. It's so small. This disconnect that John keeps talking, about in ethereal terms because John's John was a military guy but he he I don't think he gets just

how bad we are positioned with regard to hard power right now. I wish he'd get it a little more. I've talked to him, but it's it's not his bailiwick. So he's looking in the ether and that's down in the dirt but the dirt's going to eat our lunch. As I said, our army's not as big as Bangladesh's. And yet we've got a president who's making bellicose remarks about calling Xi Jinping a dictator and saying that's really fine diplomacy, Mr. President. It's hard not to say that we aren't getting ready for a very, very hard fall and how we handle that. we're, I think, deeper. Our governmental system is, despite its imperfections being shown so glaringly now, we are probably more solid in that regard.

We've got 50 states. We've got lots of potential depth, strategic depth. We have industrial depth. We're not using it. China's industrial depth now scares the be Jesus out of me. We can't build one ship a year. They can build one ship a week. It's just ridiculous that we're doing this.

But I think we could ride this 30 days, this 45 days, two months, whatever it might turn out to be, of heavy attrition out, and ultimately respond and be the winner if you really had to get to it and fight a real war with China. But we won't. We'll take that depth of defeat initially. and the American people will be screaming and hollering and everything and won't want to serve, but they'll be screaming and hollered and everything else. We'll use nukes.

That is a scenario that's becoming more believable to me almost every day, much more so than the possible nuclear threat from Ukraine or from anywhere. Russia's too smart to do that. The Russian ambassador asked me over to his residence before he left, and he said, I know that we're not going to use a nuclear weapon. What do I have to convince you of that? I said, you've convinced me. I believe it would be

insanity for you to know he's in nuclear life. I think he was being honest with him. It's us I'm worried about. It's us that has dismantled all the nuclear arms control in the world. It's us that have got Putin now talking about abandoning the CTBT. Why is he talking about that? Is he talking about that? Because he knows he's going to give plutonium to Xi Jinping

so he can build out his nuclear complex quicker. And maybe Xi Jinping thinks and is being advised that he will need to test. Maybe you'll need to test underground in Russia or somewhere in China. I don't know. Where would he test? But why would Putin be talking? He's very rational, pragmatic man. Why would he be talking about abandoning the CTBT,

unless there's a reason for it? Not just stick another finger in our eyes. Because we've been the one sticking our fingers in his eyes with everything from the ABM Treaty to the CF, you name it. We have been responsible in large part for abandoning that particular nuclear weapons treaty. And now, even President Obama approved a nuclear posture review that's going to spend a trillion plus dollars on modernization, securitization, and all the other fancy buzzwords for building better nuclear weapons. Insanity. It's insanity. I can't think of a better word.

I have to see one thing that comes across from a lot of what you've just been saying is that all of these incredible insane plans. I mean, they've talked about, they're spoken about in secret because they can only come up with, people can only come up with plans like this in secret. There's no wider public discussion, as far as I can see, no calling in of experts, no attempts to discuss this with the wider American public. And yet, America is a democracy. That's what its constitution essentially promises. It starts with the words, we the people. It's the country where they're supposed to be free debate. This is, you know, what the First Amendment of the Constitution is about. Is that ultimately perhaps the problem that it's a republic, a democratic republic, the conception of the United States, is that of a democratic republic. Republic, but it's trying to be an empire at the same time, and that the two are somehow discordant with each other. You're very straightforward. We just were an empire.

You're reading my syllabus. You're reading my syllabus. The whole, the grandiose scheme of my syllabus, which is now prefaced at the head by a statement to me in the Roosevelt room in the last year of President Obama's administration, quote, there's a bias in this town toward war, end of quote. That's what prefaces my syllabus. But the syllabus says we went from British protectorate, British territory, to a nation, to World War II. End of World War II.

We became an empire. In the National Security Act of 1947, please read it, students. We'll tell you how we drafted the sinews and muscles. of that empire. And ever since, using the Cold War as the provocateur, if you will, we have been building that empire. And when the Cold War ended, we went nuts. After 9-11, we were so paranoid and so nuts that we haven't done anything right since. Can you give me some kind of analysis of the progression of events that led to where we are today? That's in a nutshell what my 58-page syllabus talks about. them read the 1947 National Security Act. Some of that language is pretty Baptist.

Some of that language is pretty fundamentalist Christian. We are going to destroy the beast that's threatening us. It's there. It's always been there. But we never let it out of its cage for any extended period of time, whether it was headed by Barry Goldwater or Donald Trump. Now we have led it out of its cage big time, and the tiger is devouring us. I was struck by comment you made earlier. Well, not today. but previously in which you argued that you think the NATO might fragment and collapse, not a certainty, but as a possibility. I was wondering if you can expand on this.

So why do you see this happening? It starts with a conversation that Colin Powell and I had in April of 1989. When I had first joined him, I was a lieutenant colonel, and I was a little reluctant to bait the bear in his den, if you will, at that early date, but I quickly learned that he was a different kind of Army General. He tolerated all manner and indeed wanted all manner of analytical dissent, if you will. And he would listen, and he often changed his mind based on his listening, whether it's me or lots of other people that accumulated over time.

He said to me, not knowing me very well yet, he said to me, L. W., Mitterrand, Coal, Major, Thatcher, they're all going to be gone. When they're gone, a new rank of leadership will come to the countries in Europe. They won't have their feet in the war. They won't know that American soldiers are buried out there in Normandy. They won't understand the dynamic that people like Mita Ran and coal, however they interpreted it, understood. We're going to have a different relationship, Larry. Take my word for it.

We're going to have a different relationship. Well, I think that was very prophetic in the sense that he was talking about the dynamics of change over international relations and time. And so it was inevitable that I think the NATO alliance was short-lived, unless you could come up with something like, for example, we were suggesting in 91 and 92, that would bring the former enemy in and turn it into mostly a political alliance for the management, if you will, of whatever might happen within that sphere, but not go abroad. You know, we made, Clinton also made operations outside of NATO something he wanted to do on a routine basis, and he wanted NATO partners to join him, not necessarily as the alliance,

but he wanted them, you know, to be with him and things that he would do outside the confines of NATO, if you will. And Obama picked up on that, too. I'm told either Norwegian or Finnish pilots drop their first bombs and kill people in Libya. Think about that for a minute. And that was that was prated as a major achievement to get an age-old neutral country's fighter pilots to fly. Airplanes with bombs on them and draw them on Libyans. Crazy. Crazy.

But that was rude. That was a plus. We came, we saw, and he died. Probably the most impolitic, diplomatic remark ever made by an American secretary of state. But that's what we did. And I'm looking at this and I'm saying, this can't last. It can't last primarily because Germany's going to change. It's going to change big time.

Ukraine is changing it majorly. And I think we're seeing. the alternative to Deutschland, I think that's the name of the party, that's coming mostly from East Germany, and looking like it might be a little bit dangerous is a manifestation of this. More things, too, but partly that. And Germany's economy is being changed majorly too by the fact that it can't get the cheap energy it was getting. What is that going to mean? That's the engine, in my view. And that engine is going to falter, and it's going to falter big time in the next 12 months or so. And that's probably going to push a whole new political structure up. And it's going to be, like Powell said,

this political structure is not going to give a hang about Washington. In fact, it's going to disdain Washington. And how do you hold an alliance together whose central member outside the southern flanker, Turkey, already gone, for all practical purposes, how do you hold it together? I mean, we've got a southern flank anchor where we have base in Inserlick and elsewhere, base is, I should say, and he's threatening from time to time to march on Israel.

This is not working out good. And NATO's not looking too healthy. If I were Stoltenberg, I'd be doing some fast retreating from a lot of the positions that he's very stalled, warily advocated over the last few years for us. I know, too, that we had a concerted effort to influence elections in Norway, influence elections in Sweden, influence elections in Finland, and elsewhere in attempts to get people who were more in line with our hubristic imperial

designs than we normally had there. I've had Finns tell me, do you believe, Larry, that we abandoned our history of neutrality? I've had Norwegians tell us. I mean, the same thing. And I say, stand by. Stand by. You're going to find out that you probably made a big mistake. Yeah, that's my country. I'm actually in Norwegian.

And then in Libya, that was, if I'm not mistaken, we dropped 10% of all the bombs on Libya, which is quite extraordinary for a small country of 5 million people. And our prime minister then Stoltenberg now is the NATO Secretary General. I'm not sure if that was a reward. But you're correct. That was the policy during the... Bingo. We're going to be a good ally to the United States, but a good neighbor to the Russians.

This was the balance we're supposed to have. But after the Cold War, this was completely abandoned. So now it's ever since it's just been NATO and not being a good neighbor at all. And now we're going to host the U.S. military bases. And again, we have a no-base policy, but we decided to call it not military bases. We call it something else. We're going to be on your base. That's the way I understand it.

We're going to locate, co-locate with you on your base, and it's going to be a Norwegian base flying a Norwegian flag, but we'll be there. Under American jurisdiction. Yeah, I agree, though. I think a backlash might come once people realize that it effectively means outsourcing a large part of the foreign policy. And I think, yeah, it's going a direction.

And the other side, of it, I think, I don't like the term isolationism. I don't think the United States has ever been isolationists. I think it's been less in the world. And if you want to call that isolation, that's fine. But I don't see the inner war years as isolationism. That's just a term that political scientists came up with. But I do see the physical situation in this country causing us to withdraw majorly from a lot of what we're doing now when we finally realize that it's with us and not going away. And little steps are being taken right now.

You watch Mohammed bin Salman in the way he deals with oil sales, for example. Watch the Emir of Qatar in the way he deals with oil sales. Watch how the Chinese are infiltrating this process. I'm not saying the dollar is going to be replaced overnight, but as a transactional currency, it's going to have some major competition. And with our debt and the inflation factors associated with that, we're going to have to withdraw a lot of the things, withdraw from,

a lot of the things we're involved in right now, just because we can't afford it. And I don't know what that's going to do, but I suspect it's going to make people antsy, uneasy, and we'll be back to, as Mir Schimer talks about all the time, we'll be back to a world of multi-poles and maybe back to an alliance here, and alliance here,

as people figure out which poll they want to be associated with, three primary ones being Moscow, Beijing, and still Washington. But the bricks are looking, you know, take Russia out even, and you're still looking at a formidable economic conclave. And, you know, India is a big question mark there. I've been involved in our work with the Indians, and they do not want alliance, a formal alliance. You know, the Indian Navy was just salivating it,

the prospects of sailing the seas, the Pacific, mainly, Indian and Pacific, with the United States and gaining in our upper buildings. Delhi said, no, you're not. You're not doing that. And they prohibited it a lot of, they went along with some of it to get the nuclear agreement they got. But now they're back being very off putting, standing off. We don't want alliance.

So you don't know where India is going to go. But it's going to be a very different world, I think. very difficult world. And the United States is going to have a hard time getting along in it, if it doesn't quickly realize it, adjusts its physical situation and maybe have to retreat for a while as it does that, and then come back as a cooperative, collaborative power rather than a hegeman. I think that's a necessity. And that would be a good sign for Xi Jinping or whomever succeeds him because China, I don't think, has ever wanted to be a hegemonic country. It is the hegemen in the Northeast Asia Pacific region right now.

We've been outed. We're gone. They are the hegemen there. If you talk to any Filipino, you talk to the Singaporeans who bat way above their weight, you talk to the Malaysians, Indonesians, Widodo. They know China is the hegeman there. The only people don't seem to know is Australia. Or maybe they do know and they fear it.

badly that they're making these crazy submarine deals with the United States. I think they'll regret that, and I think they'll probably wind up backing out of it. Maybe not formally, but ultimately it will never come to fruition, not the way we have it planned. So the world's changing. John's right about that. There are three principal polls and lots of things around them. They're going to be like a magnet, you know, they're going to be, okay, we're with Moscow. Okay, we're with Beijing.

Okay, Beijing and Moscow together. So we're all with Beijing and Moscow. Let's hope that that shapes up into a collaborative, cooperative, meet the climate change, meet the nuclear weapons change, nuclear weapon challenge, rather than a war fighting, militaristic grouping.

I think it has to be, or we're toast. I'm big into the climate crisis now, been in it for 10 years with DOD. DoD is the leading federal bureaucracy. Every single service has a strategy or two or three with regard to the climate change. No other part of the federal government is as far along as DOD is. That's a problem. That's the kind of thing that leads to Marshall Law when you really have a problem domestically.

And you have hurricanes, fires, floods, and everything else. So I would rather see more civilians getting in on it. But right now, DOD is the lead federal bureaucracy. on meeting the climate crisis. The only ones who really get it in the sense that they know the scientists are right. I'm going to finish with one last comment, which is simply this. I personally think that all these problems that seem so intractable, Ukraine, Taiwan, the Middle East, actually, I think is the great powers.

I think you've identified them correctly. China, Russia, the United States were to be working together and conducting proper diplomacy with each other, I think these are actually containable and even solvable crises. My own view is that there is nothing which, you know, existed before we added in Europe quite successfully for much of the 19th century, you know, great powers working together, sorting out their problems with each other, understanding that there were, you know, let's call them straightforwardly, spheres of influence, spears of interest, whatever you want to call them. And understanding that the overriding priority always is to preserve peace.

If you have peace, then you can build all sorts of other things. I think what we need to do, and not just in the United States, by the way, Britain also has a very bad case of this kind of thing. What we need to do is we need to get past some conceptual problems which are hang-ups from the last period of the Cold War and the post-Cold War period. I think you've identified all of those things. And if we can do that, I think the world will become quite workable. And I personally believe that all three of these great powers, including the United States,

can function and prosper well. That's my statement. I just want one specific question, and it's a small question. I agree with you, by the way. Yeah. Good to hear. Just one very small question,

which is that you've been dealing with, you've obviously had to deal with all of these people, the people who wanted to set the Levant on fire and all of that. Now, I read magazines like we all must do, like foreign affairs and foreign policy, and I read some of the people who I think are the people who you're talking about who want to set the world on fire. And just a personal question, are they as aggressive in private as they are when they're writing? Are they as difficult to deal with personally as they sing?

Because I have to say some of the language, some of the wording they use, seems to me so difficult to contend with. It's so outlandishly strange that I would find it very, very difficult actually to have a conversation with people like that. Yes, they are. Some are more so than others. Some are a little more polished. When they confront opposition, they back up a little. but most of them are like the women I watched on a video the other day, which just absolutely shocked me.

They were women outside, as I recall, they were outside the Israeli embassy in Washington because Medea Benjamin was out there with her women holding signs. The Palestinians are human beings and so forth. Very quiet demonstration, no ruckus. They were just holding signs and sort of marching around the embassy. And these women whom I assume must have been Jewish American women were there to do the opposite, to defend Israel under all circumstances. If you turn the volume up on that occasion and that video, you heard the invective and the hatred coming out of those Jewish American women. That's the way these people are.

You do not reason with them. I guess that's my final question as well is about the crisis in Israel because I think often we artificially divide, you know, either pro-Israel or anti-Israel. But it doesn't seem like these policies which are often supported are actually good for Israel. So in other words, being pro-Israel doesn't mean give it a blank check because it seems to, well, it's operating a different strategic environment now that the U.S. is no longer. the hegemon and his neighbors are more powerful. You have other great powers stepping in. How do you see the path for Israel moving forward? Or how is it's, will the United States seek to put more constraints on Israel or will they simply loosen the constraints? It's hard to see because on one hand, you would think that the U.S. would try to rein in Israel

a bit given that the US doesn't have the same room for maneuver. On the other hand, the language has changed in the past. I think the United States used to put some conditions and demands on Israel. But these days, they just said, listen, we talked to the Israelis. They said, no, what can we do? Even though the U.S. is writing the Czechs effectively. So I'm just wondering, which direction will the United States go with Israel? In 2004, Rick Sharon, Ariel Sharon, made a visit to the Oval Office.

and George Bush essentially said to him, 40 years plus of the roadmap and two states and all that is garbage. It hasn't worked. It won't work. Over to you. Sharon asked for clarification. Bush said, it's yours. Whatever you want to do, we'll back you up.

Sharon went home, and they've been doing it ever since. And Netanyahu came in after being finance minister and establishing a political profile that really, I think led to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. I think Bibi Netanyahu has direct responsibility for the assassination of Rabin. He knew exactly what he was doing when he was stirring up those crowds. Watch the videos. Watch the film that two Israeli filmmakers made of that using a third of the film is actual

footage, actual footage, including the assassination. Netanyahu was helped majorly by the individual who bought, I forget his name, Mark Rich, who bought, broke sanctions with Iraq and bought discounted price oil from Saddam Hussein and shipped it to Israel. That's how Netanyahu got his strength and his power with the Israelis, average Israelis. They don't like him, but boy, did he make the economy hum. More billionaires per capita in Israel than than in the United States. And good Lord, we got a plethora of them.

So all of that happened because we said you got it. We haven't said anything else since. And Joe Biden is the first president. God rest his soul. He's the first president who forced into it by Gaza has begun to put a little pressure on. I don't know if it's going to work. I know right now Ben Gavir is ready with legions, armed legions, to go into northern Gaza. and to begin colonizing Gaza, the same way he's been doing East Jerusalem, the West Bank,

and the Golan Heights. He's probably going to get into East Jerusalem this week, I'm hearing. If we don't do something, what I quoted in the beginning, the outside world must walk Israel back from the abyss. If we don't, if the outside world is increasingly getting totally disenchanted with Israel, I think, the outside world. United States is the key power here because we're enabling all this. That is what we're doing. We are so complicit in this that our guilt, as Gideon Levy has said at Arrest, is palpable. Will we change that and change it in such a forceful way that Israel is compelled to do differently?

I don't think so. So that's why I have said for two years now, I have said Israel will not be a state in 20 years. 18 now. The world will write it off. Worse than South Africa ever thought it was being written off. Israel will get written off. Any final words before we wrap up? Extraordering thought, but I have to say, if you look at the situation in the Middle East,

the Iranians coming together with the Saudis, the two working together, apparently Saudi Arabia and Egypt working for a ceasefire. Apparently, this is the story when he hears, MBS keeping the U.S. Secretary of State waiting a whole night long before he meets him. I have to say, I think the trends are exactly, as you say, I'm looking at this. It's not something I'm happy about either.

I've been going to New York to Temple Emmanuel and Great Neck for about a decade. Rabbi Bob Whittem is the longest serving rabbi probably in America, 55 years at the same temple. The average tour of a rabbi to Jewish temple is about 8 to 12. He's a remarkable fixture in New York. And he said to me, the greatest motivation to anti-Semitism in the world is Bibi Netanyahu. That's a real problem there, too. He is.

And you've got not only Palestinians being murdered in this country, but you've got anti-Semitism on a rise like it probably hasn't been in a long, long time. And he, as the rabbi said, we're very comfortable. We're the largest Jewish community in the world outside Israel until the Russians immigrated in New York. They had more Jews in New York that Israel had. And he said, they're jeopardizing. Those people over there are jeopardizing our life here in the United States. You can't keep doing that. I have to say that.

I think we can finish. Can I thank you for joining us today? this has been a wonderful program, very, very educational, if I would say. I would love to be there in one of your lectures, perhaps. Well, I say the same thing to you. I say to my students, you taught me as much as I taught you.