The Duran Podcast - US Elections & Imperial Overstretch - Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen

Episode Date: October 24, 2024

US Elections & Imperial Overstretch - Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen

Hi, everyone, and welcome. My name is Glenn Dyson, and I'm joined today by Alexander McCurris and Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. Welcome. Good to be with you. Great to be with you, and a great pleasure to be talking to Colonel Wilkerson again. Yes, really great to see you. I wanted to ask, I thought we could start off by looking at some of the conflicts or problems we have now in the world through the lens of the U.S. presidential. election. I know at least in the US media, everything tends to be seen through this prism, but I think it's also worth being honest that who sits at the throne probably has some significance in terms of the policies. Now, it's often pointed out that foreign policy tends to be very, very similar, irrespective of the Democrats or Republicans being in power.

However, I guess Ukraine would be the main difference in terms of what divides. But in terms of Trump or Harris presidency, one would also think that some of the approach to the wider world, both allies as well as adversaries, seems to be very different and also how diplomacy is conducted. So I thought maybe a good point to start would be to look at what we might expect of Trump, especially his position towards NATO. He seems to challenge some of the decisions in the security architecture developed over the past 30 years. How do you see his possible stance towards allies and then specifically, if he resumes the presidency? Let me preface my specific answer to that question with some comments, your comments, just big.

I taught for 16 years at William and Mary in six years in George Washington University using as one of my principal textbooks, David Rothkoff's book, Running the World. And if you look on if memory doesn't fail me about page 12 of the hardback copy of that book, you'll find his five circumstances that influenced national security decision-making, thus the NSC. Two of them that are prominent, one was absolutely prominent with my boss, Colin Powell, or the people doing the decision-making. The characters, David calls them. The depth of their character, the shallowness of their character, whatever.

Another one, though, is domestic politics. as I taught my classes on both campuses over the years, my students grew more and more strident in their assertion in their case studies using this framework for analysis David offers at saying that the domestic outweighed everything else. And I started paying attention to them. And I started looking at it closely myself, and I think they had a point.

We are now to that point, to your question, where nothing that is rational about national security, foreign policy, international relations, or the associated fields, is accomplished on the basis of national interest. It's accomplished on the basis of these people's view of their chances in the political arena. And that's where we are today, almost without exception.

That's how they make their decisions. You're watching it transpired with regard to both of these very dangerous theaters of war. Whether you're looking at the Levant and Gaza and Esbalah and Lebanon or the access of resistance or Iran in the potential fight with Iran or you're looking at Ukraine. All the decisions right now, the leak, the intelligence leak, that wasn't a leak. That was a formal introduction into the leakage by the government. And it was designed to do what it has done. Nobody leaked that. There will be no whistleblower found, or if he is, it'll be a fake.

And Tim Ray at the FBI would love that because they love fakes at the FBI. Get to your specific question. I see the political difference, the domestic political considerations, and the difference between the two candidates is being more of the same with Kamala, with maybe a little political space having opened up with regard to Ukraine and Gaza, that she can operate in to be a little more positive than Biden. Biden was, brain dead as he is. I interpret Trump, and it's very difficult.

Very difficult to interpret Trump, because he's all over the map. But I interpret him to be saying fundamentally, I don't object to NATO. What I object to is the United States being the first and only power in NATO, with the pocketbook and with the military forces. So you do all the heavy lifting financially and military, and I'll, be over here across the Atlantic in case you need me and I'll have my nukes. That's the only difference between two, whereas Kamala and Joe wanted to be completely hegemonic in their relationship with NATO. I'll express my own view, which is obviously said from outside the United States

without the direct experience of the American political system, which is that in election after election, I've expected or hoped for a change when the new president can't. and fundamentally I haven't seen it and I've basically lost expectation of seeing it. I think that what will change policy in the United States is circumstances, events, just as, you know, it's happened many times before. I mean, the United States went into Vietnam because of the political events in the United States and the world and on the battlefields in Vietnam, no doubt. and it left Vietnam for those same sort of reasons. I don't think that one should place too much weight on, you know, who is going to win an election and who is not.

If there is going to be, for example, some kind of tiptoeing away from the conflict in Ukraine, it will be because of all kinds of different factors that are playing out in the United States amongst public opinion, in Congress, within the military, within all sorts of circles, not just the decision of the president himself. This is my view. The days when the president exercised the kind of control and had the kind of force of personality that could actually change policy, the days of people like JFK and to some extent Nixon,

I just don't think they apply anymore. At least I haven't seen it myself in my time. That's my view from, again, I stress well outside the system. I don't disagree with that view. I think that view fits in what I just said quite nicely. Well, what you describe for political realist, that's often referred to as an irrational actor. That is when a rational actor would be the ones whose decision makers

are responding effectively to the international distribution of power with the optimal balancing. But we often say when there is domestic infighting, ideology, loyalties towards various international institutions or corporate interest or any format where domestic politics is shaping the foreign policy that falls within irrationality. Otherwise, I just would add, I guess, that I agree with your assessment on Trump. I think his concern is, he's often attributed by not starting. new wars. But I think that his main concern is effectively with imperial overstretch that is over time,

simply the strategic commitments and costs are outweighing what the US can carry. So, whenever since the 1980s, he's always been speaking of how allies should pay their fair share, they should pay it to be secured. So in crude terms, it sounds as if he wants a return on investment to make it more sustainable to have the hegemont as opposed to pursuing any radical alternatives. But if there's one adjective, I think, and it's hard to say just one, but one that fits him and doesn't have all the negative overtones or positive overtones. It's just neutral. It's transactional. That's what he is.

Sometimes he's a very bad businessman, if you will. But I think that defines him. Yeah, I guess that's some of the attraction as well in these days where people feel politics is dictated too much by ideology. They like the pragmatism, even if it isn't always making him a good deal maker, of course. But those are the other three things in David's framework for analysis. Ideology slash governing philosophy, and he differentiates those two things. sometimes they blend, of course almost always they blend, but he differentiates them. And then the next one is the structure or process in which decisions made because he was a member of the NSA staff and he saw often, as did I, the statutory system isn't even used.

Dick Cheney just totally ignored the statutory system and made his own decisions in his own office and communicated them to New York Times so they could be on the front page above the pole right side the next morning. and then we added one. We added one called budget. And I showed him that Dwight Eisenhower was the very last president to require his, then it was called the Office of the Budget, OMB now. But he required his budget director to give him an assessment of every national security decision he formerly made if it incurred cost. And most often it did. We haven't had that since Eisenhower.

Nobody cares anymore. The latest one to be asked that by the budget. budget director, by the director of the Office of Manager budget, in a formal meeting of the principals, Dick Cheney said, Ronald Reagan proved deficits don't matter. And we went on from there. Because the OMB director was saying, Mr. Vice President, this is going to cost a fortune. Didn't care. One thing I would say is specifically during elections, though perhaps less so in some ways in this election. I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong about that. But foreign policy becomes a kind of talking

point in an election campaign, in that people just sort of take positions, which sometimes one senses they do very lightly. But perhaps that does have a carryover if they do get elected, in that they seem to feel a certain obligation, at least for a while, to be consistent with their talking points. And that might have an effect. I suppose, for a certain period of time. But I don't know that that is determinative or decisive. I suspect that an awful lot of, you know, the churn of events that goes on is,

what Colonel Wilkerson was talking about. I'm sure that is much, much more important. Just saying. Well, in light of what you said, proxy wars are best. Because in proxy wars, you don't have citizens, you know, like you had in Vietnam, eventually saying, bring my boy home

or get the hell out of the White House. But that was curious, because you had the prominent position in the U.S. government. How do you see any big differences in terms of how the different political factions view the role of the military, to what extent it should be used, how it should be used, and in general how to engage, I guess, with the world beyond military and economics? When I entered the realms of the ether, if you will, with Admiral Crowe in the Pacific, who moved from there to be chairman, with Ron Hayes, his successor, who was a very, very astute Navy Forest Army Admiral with the biggest responsibility at that time in America's war repertoire,

if you will, 35 nations, 35 ambassadors, a vast stretch of water, you know, we've even increased that now, Indo-PAC. We've added the Indian Ocean to that responsibility. An absolutely absurd geographic fiefdom, but we did it. And then moved on into Powell's orbit, I guess you would say. And as chairman, and then as a Secretary of Defense, or Secretary of State, Freudian slipped there. I thought he should have been Secretary of Defense, most powerful position in the American government. And I asked him why the hell he wanted the weak position of Secretary of State when he could have the powerful one.

of Secretary of Defense. He asked me what I meant, and I said, at that time, I said, well, about 500 billion versus about 20 billion. But in that realm, in that world, I discovered, I think, that there isn't a whit bit of difference between either political party,

not in the street, not in the outcomes, not in what happens, not in social policy, not in foreign policy, not in whatever you want to name, unless it's just esoteric and a social issue, for example, like abortion, there might be some difference on that. And increasingly now, there's a difference on the MAGA 40 million, that's what I call them, and the rest of the country. And we have an electoral system that really magnifies that.

We haven't had a Republican president elected with a popular vote majority since H.W. Bush. And I don't think we ever will have one again, unless they, as Powell told them, to their face at the R&C, If you don't open your tent, you're going to have to cheat or you're going to have to really, really use the electoral college system in a very divisive way. And either way, you're going to program yourself for death. And they didn't want to talk to it. They didn't want to hear about it anymore because one of the things he was talking about was opening the tent to African Americans at that time. So, yeah, I don't disagree with anything that you've said about our system. But I do agree that our power residual now, beginning in 14, 1945, of course, when we became an empire, our power residual is low.

It's very low. So if you are sitting on top of 51% of the world's GDP and everyone else who could compete with you is bombed out and such, you can do a lot. And you can make a lot of errors. And we did. We made some tremendous errors between 45 and the present. But when your power has eroded like ours has now, you can't afford to be so reckless. And it's telling. It's telling right now. Can I just ask a question, which is, do you sometimes find that a lot of the people in the civilian part of the government, the foreign policy part of the government, not only don't understand the military very well

or military matters very well, but that they have a kind of condescending attitude to the military. That, you know, they see the military is something that they can use and a kind of instrument, but that they don't really have any very deep sense of obligation to it.

I'll tell you why. Again, I asked this question because there was that famous question that Madeline Albright, I say famous has been talked about in many places, Madeline Albright supposedly made to Colin Powell, what is the point of this wonderful military, we're never going to use it? That seems to me such a ridiculous question. I'm amazed that people have never said what an absurd question

that is to ask of a soldier, of the leading soldier, of the leading soldier of the army that is defending and tasked with defending the United States. Now, what kind of a person asks a question like that? Not a person who I think takes the military ethos, who understands war, who understands armies very seriously. So I just ask this, Can you perhaps discuss this and maybe tell us a little about what Colin Powell might have said in reply.

Maybe you don't want to say that, but we never hear what Colin Powell said in response to that. Well, in his book, I think he says he was apoplectic or something like that. I bet he was. My American Journey. The few times that we talked about such things, and it wasn't just Madeline, it was others. I have to say honestly, as a soldier, putting on my soldier hat exclusively. We, in the Pentagon and in the Unified Commands

and other places where the rubber met the road, we had a greater dislike for, I want to say hatred, dislike for people like Hillary and Madeline and Samantha Power, who is all for all this humanitarian stuff, and you get in the way of that humanitarian stuff. Give me that military. I'll bash you. Think Libya.

We had a distaste and even a hatred for those kind of people more than anything else. They were in both parties, but they seemed to predominate in the Democratic Party. John Kerry was another case in point. I remember being in the Roosevelt room with Obama and he sitting right across the table from me, and Obama was going on, started out his conversation with these words, which I then wrote down and put at the head of my syllabus from that moment on, there's a bias

in this town toward war. President of the United States, four feet away from me, telling me that he knows there's a bias. Secretary of State sitting right beside him who had been advocating for ground forces in Syria, so Obama was talking not just to me and General Eaton

beside me, he was also talking to his Secretary of State. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about, that he learned and took him eight years almost. This was seven years into his two-term presidency to learn that lesson, I think. And he was very adamant about it and very adamant about his instructions to his secretary of state. He was telling John to shut his mouth in a very direct way that wouldn't have been available to him in a meeting or whatever. We were just lackeys on the other side of the

table. Yes, we did not like in the military the people that we thought predominated in the Democratic Party, but certainly we're president and the other party, too, who wanted to use us for other than what we thought were valid reasons. Now, that's a violation of the principle of civil military control. You know, civil control of the military

because you're not supposed to think that way. But there is also a reciprocal aspect to the point about civil military control, which is that the civilians are supposed to have a sense of responsibility towards the

Military. Can I say something? I mean, I come with a political family in Greece, not a country like the United States, but we have a complicated relationship with the military in Greece. I was at the receiving, when as a child, I was on the receiving end of a military coup. So, I mean, there was a military coup. They came to arrest my father. He fortunately was out of the country, the United States, as it happens. I was kept in detention. I was a small boy, but all of that. But we've had a long his. But we understand very well in Greece because we have had complicated his relationship with our military, but also a complicated foreign policy. We have many enemies. We fought many wars. That you do not waste the lives of your soldiers. It's almost a betrayal to use them irresponsibly. They're there to defend your country. You should value. and respect them and treat them properly as well. And when that breaks down, which it did in Greece, by the way, that was one of the reasons why relations between the military and the civilians in Greece became so bad. Now, I'm not suggesting that will ever happen in the United States. Greece obviously doesn't have a constitution or anything like that that the United States does. But the point I'm sure about the fact that the civilians have a responsibility to the soldiers, soldiers who are putting their lives at risk, something one should never forget. That surely is there.

And I get the sense that isn't being respected anymore. Just asking. No, I think it was Demosthenes who said, old men send young men to die with some cynicism. And he's right. and those old men and old women now increasingly don't give a damn about the people who are out there dying. They just don't. And I think that was true in Athens.

It might not have been so true in Sparta for a time. It's true in most societies where the people who wear the uniform, the people who carry the guns, defend the society if they have to, are of lesser caliber than the people who are ruling. and that breeds contempt. And there is great contempt in our government right now for the all-volunteer force. I can tell you that.

And, of course, the mouth is saying the exact opposite. You know, the mouth is going to veterans ceremonies, expressing a pain over veterans' suicide and doing absolutely nothing about it. Totally disconnect there between the disdain in which soldiers, that general, when I say soldiers, I mean Marines, airmen, are held and the way they actually are felt about.

If we had a draft in this country today, if we had conscription, I and the Major General who founded the All-Volunteer Force Forum with me several years ago, believes this too, and as do all of our members, Marines, sailors, all of them.

If we had a draft today, 50% of the American youth would disappear into Canada or Mexico, almost immediately. And that's one of the fears that, for example, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, when we suggested that we ought to start thinking about it, even just a minor thought like drafting the shortfall

in recruiting each year, which is becoming prominent, even when we said that, the response was politically impossible, politically impossible. Next issue. It is interesting, though, that, whenever you hear this phrase is like support the troops. It's usually in the context of keeping,

for example, in Iraq, John McCain used this phrase all the time to keep the troops there to, you know, he said we have to let them win the war, but, you know, typically or historically when you talk about supporting the troops, it was the assumption that the military

would offer to, you know, put its life at risk when it was necessary, while the government would only do it when required, not. So we seem to switch some of these words. But before, you did mention this idea that the United States could afford to do many foolish things and make mistakes. And for the United States and Britain before them as maritime powers, they always had the benefit of not having land borders with rivals. So in major wars, their position or strategy has often been defined as an offshore strategy in which they,

an offshore balancer in which one would enter war very late when all the other countries have been bled out and just impose a balance of power and then withdraw quickly. So one would save the military and not exhausted. And this was kind of the competitive advantage of maritime powers, which is why Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan, or Afghanistan, this prolonged land wars were usually seen as being, go against this strategic advantage of the maritime powers. But this was all over the past 30 years. We could afford to do, especially a lot of foolish mistakes, given that there were no contenders. But now that we're returning to great power politics,

do you see any focus being forced upon Washington? That is, you know, you have to start prioritizing again if you have now actual great power rivals, and you can't afford to make these huge mistakes, which continue to accrue. more and more problems and costs. It's a point that the military leadership has been subterraneously

making for some time now, ever since Obama promised his famous pivot to Asia and didn't pivot. And it's grown exacerbating and exacerbated in military minds because they see not only

us spreading away a lot of our remaining power and that's everything from our artillery rounds to cruise missiles. into proxy wars that are not really doing all that much for our security. In fact, many would argue are degrading it in both theaters. So, yeah, there's a lot of angst in the military leadership, which thinks, and that's another problem we could get into,

we don't have a whole lot of military leadership anymore that thinks. Have a lot of lieutenant colonels and colonels that do, but something happens when they pin on a star. you remember the story Liddell Hart used to talk about with the guy who rose up through the ranks I'm going to be different I'm going to be different I mean each rank he was going to be different then he got to be a brigadier and he said what was it I was going to do that's kind of what we have in our military today with very little affection but you talk to the colonels and lieutenant colonels who are really doing the brain work they'll tell you and

they are voting with their feet in many respects too because it's not worth it not worth it to hang around and try to get one of those stars when they've made so many enemies they know they're probably not going to. They haven't toad the line. You have to towed to become a star. Look at what we got right now with the Desferr. Three star army general. And his wife's a member of this ribal, rabid Christian group that speaks in tongues and rolls in the aisles. And recently he was in uniform photographed at one of these ceremonies where his wife was doing just that. you would just go to sort of specific issues we've had last week President Zelensky

of Ukraine coming up with a victory plan I'm going to say straightforward I mean I know you've expressed views about this but I don't know what they are because there's a limit to have to everything but I thought the plan was borderline crazy actually of fact, maybe not borderline. I thought it was crazy. I mean, remember, he was a comedian. He was a comedian, exactly.

How does the United States get itself into an alliance with a person like this? And how does the United States say, well, we are not going to move in terms of negotiations with the Russians, unless this man agrees that it's entirely up to him whether we negotiate. Surely, after hearing a speech like that, people in the military, and not just the military, but I'm specifically asking about the military, but other places to be saying, this person is, has taken leave of his senses. He's incredibly dangerous. We want to put as much distance from him as we possibly can. We've got to try and find some way out because he's talking about incredibly dangerous things. He's floating possibilities. about nuclear weapons, which we should never be hearing from an ally, an ally like Ukraine. But what I see, what I hear, the president goes to Europe, he goes to Berlin, he's putting together more arms packages for Ukraine, he's talking about providing Ukraine with more funding, there's no talk about negotiations.

I mean, this seems to me a very astonishing situation. And you were talking about how people in the Pentagon, some people in the military, are trying to say, you know, that we've got to start thinking in a more strategic way. What must they be thinking? I just ask these questions. I said, I don't know what your views on any of these points are about Zelensky's victory plan. But anyway, that's how it seemed to me. Well, your initial question in there that I detected was that how did we get into it?

I know how we got into it. venality, corruption, neo-conservative control of certain key sectors of decision-making, like Victoria Nulam, Philip Reedloff, the NATO commander at the time, the U.S. commander wears two hats on a motorbike down there, coordinating with the Azov Battalion. I mean, all manner of flood got us into this while the president was asleep at the switch. And then you had all the cognizente convincing him that while he was a

sleep at the switch. People were doing the right thing for him and he should back it. That's oversimplification, but it's really kind of what happened. I was there in 02, 03, 04, 05. I saw how corrupt Ukraine was. I saw people trying to disfigure a man. He had to come to the United

States and I had to baby him around for a while while he was going through treatment to keep him from being disfigured. Just nothing but a bunch of criminals. Julia Temashenko came along and she was supposed to be a relief and she was a bigger criminal than the rest of them from the telecommunications industry.

Bordered the market. That's what we have there. That's what we have in Ukraine, and we're backing it now. So your description of how idiotic this is, how insane it is, absolutely spot on. How do you stay with it? It's my fundamental question today. Why haven't you cut yourself?

Go tell David Petraeus to blow it out his rear end. He doesn't know what he's talking about when he says Ukraine. Go back and look at some of his comments. And these other generals and other people who were, you know, experts saying that Ukraine was going to win, there was no way he could lose and all. And you still got a few of them saying that, Zelensky, amongst them. And we're still holding on. It makes no sense except in terms of domestic politics and their determination that if they cut and run before the election, they will surely lose. And we'll see if there's any proof in that pudding afterwards if they win.

but I think that's a big issue with it right now. I think there is a permeation of the few brain cells there that says, this isn't good. This isn't good. We're losing, and Putin is gaining a step on us almost every day to include the recent BRICS conference and other things that he's doing. I actually think that now we're looking at possibly an ultimate supplier for Hezbo of being through Iran, Russia.

and that means we're going to see a real improvement in the weaponry and we're going to see a lot more IDF deaths we're seeing enough already. So this is really, you're right, this is an absolutely absurd situation that we need to get out of as fast as we possibly can. And this idea, like the German foreign minister, I think it was, a couple of others, the EU parliament, this idea that if you get out, we'll be dead.

we'll be my I want to say then die especially the European Parliament well this is the problem of waiting further because as you mentioned

not only I guess would if we make a deal today we perhaps can get a better deal if we wait until after the election and yeah follow this domestic requirements that

you know we don't make peace before the election the situation is just day by day becoming more and more in Russia's favor not just territory but also the distribution of military power so it just seems as if way too long that the possible deals can get for the Ukrainians

but also well let's be honest this is our war as well but we don't want the Russians to get too strong position for example in the Black Sea then we're going to have no hand to negotiate with if we're going to really bleed the Ukrainians down to the last drop. So it seems not just cruel from

a humanitarian perspective, not to negotiate before, when the war is obviously over, but strategically it seems very unsound, given that we see the direction this is going, and the logic is still that we're going to push this back a few more months,

and it's just for domestic the election. Again, we're going back today, it's not great for a rational actor. You actually could materialize the monster you've been talking about all along when you were like Joe Biden say, oh, he'll go into Latvia and Estonia and Lithuania and all this.

Ayrton has no intention of doing that. He doesn't want anything to do with that. But if you keep on the way you're going now and you let him go further and further and further, you may breed that attitude. You may breed the attitude that I can't trust NATO, I can't trust any of them. Can't trust Washington, London, Berlin, any of them.

So I better get as much as I possibly can while I can get it. I don't think that's going to happen, but that is a possibility that we're breeding now with this stupidity of hanging on in a losing situation. But, as I've said before, the most common phenomenon throughout 3,000 years of history that we know most about, of military failure, strategic failure,

is to reinforce that failure. not to say it's a failure and back up from it, whether you're the Eastern Roman Empire, the Western Roman Empire, you want to keep going and just throw some more troops in there. If you're at Cannes, you lose 70,000, you just wait a few years and then you go to Africa. And they had a lot of power, and so they could do that kind of stupid stuff.

It's not quite the same situation with America today, and we have two empires out there, one, a breeding, led by Moscow, and the other one very much intact and ready to go, and very much not willing to use military power to do so yet, but building out its nuclear complex to the tune of probably matching ours and Russia's. This is not a good situation that we bred, and all of that happening, of course, under absolutely no treaty regime whatsoever. I personally think, if you follow what the Russians say, what Putin says, that he would welcome a dialogue with the United States. It would be incredibly difficult to come to an agreement to try and sort out guardrails for how to conduct relations in Europe. But I think from a Russian perspective, looking at the situation as it is playing out in Europe,

either the optimal outcome would be one where they could agree some kind of understanding or modus vivendi about the security situation in Europe with the United States. I cannot understand why it is so difficult for people in the United States to see that. If you look at this from perspective of Russian national interests, which is I'm convinced what Putin is all about. It should be obvious. Very much so. And, you know, I go back, people think I'm,

they think I'm mythologizing when I tell them about 92 and 93, when we were destroying Russia warheads, destroying our own warheads, talking about Russia being back. And so many times Russia had tried, made overtures to Europe to be a real member besides on a Rand McNally map. and been rebuffed, partly their own eras, but mostly Europe's eras. And here they were, and we were in a situation where Gorbachev was very amenable, coal was amenable, mean Tehran was amenable.

Russia should be a member of Europe. My God, we were talking about making them an observer at the NATO political meetings, and then the military meetings, and then we were talking about making them possibly a member in seven to ten years. All of that just went with William Jefferson Clinton. So the discussions to find possibly a different deal include Russia in a pan-European security architecture. It was genuine discussions about this prior to Clinton. I wanted to ask because sometimes one gets the impression that political leaders would overplay external threats. So I was curious because you spent a lot of time with this leader.

So I'm just curious when they referred to Milosevic as being the new Hitler, planning to exterminate Albanians and the famous Iraqi or infamous Iraqi mushroom cloud that was going to come, which necessitated the invasion of Iraq, allegedly. Or this idea that when Russia is done with Ukraine, they're going to take Baltic states and Poland unless we stopped them. Do the people in Washington, do they genuinely believe this? Or is it simply fed to the public to build a case for war or to mobilize public support for containing or weakening this adversary?

Because sometimes even when these stories are exaggerated, we end up buying into our own propaganda, it seems. It's all of the above, I think. You have to look at the niche you're talking about, and some of the niches are acting under subterfuge. They're not. Just like this leak, as I said, I think I said. I think this leak was orchestrated by the government this recently. But you've got different factions that are pushing for different things at different times.

The wars, though, have become our forte. That's what we do post-9-11 is we do wars. preferably, we like to kill people with drones. We like to kill people from a distance. We like other people to kill the people for us. We don't like to do it ourselves, particularly after getting burned in Iraq and Afghanistan. How did we do Libya? Norwegian pilots.

I was stunned when I found this out. Norwegian pilots led the first strike, and I'm told that they were on the radio going back and forth to each other. Like, oh, man, we're going to drop real bombs. on real people that's what we did in Norway that's what we did to Norway and now they're a full-fledged member of NATO wonderful accomplishment

a wonderful accomplishment but that's our that's what we do today and I think increasingly you're going to see us do it through proxies what worries me is we've let our conventional capabilities deteriorate to the point where

if we do have to confront a major peer power And I would say in the case of China in terms of military strength, it's a power greater than ours. Certainly in theater it is, naval, air, or on the ground by volumes. If we have to confront them, we'll go nuclear because we will lose in the first 45 days. And the American people will not accept that. They will not accept 100,000 casualties in the first 45 days and not a repost that looks like it might be reversing the situation. and that repost will be nuclear.

You know what we've done with our weapons? We have embarked on a technological feat, and we have accomplished it, I'm told. That feat is that all of those independently targetable warheads inside the nose cone of our ballistic missiles are now going to have a circular era of probability that is so minuscule that fractal, that fratricide will be eliminated and every single warhead, each of which has a hundred times the power, a thousand times the power of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

each one of those will strike within 30 centimeters of aim point. That gives you a first strike capability because you can be assured of taking out every single nuclear weapon you aim at in Russia. for example, or for that matter in China too. And that's why we're building out the weapons in terms of numbers because now we've got to add the two

stockpiles together. And China's going probably three or four thousand itself. So we've got to do this quicker rather than later. And I will tell you right now, the conversations at Strategic Command are like that. We can't let them build out. I mean, that is

terrifying. That is terrifying. Absolutely. terrifying, especially when you realize there aren't five people in America who understand what I just said outside of, you know, nuclear physicists and Bechtel engineers who are working with the nuclear program and others like that. Gosh, we had a discussion a few weeks ago with Theodore Postal. I did it with you know him. You'll tell you all about this. Absolutely, he was. He was telling us a lot about this. And I found that pretty terrifying. I have to say. in fact

I was so upset I felt ill off I fell a lot afterwards but listening to it from you well it's good to know anyway that these things are being discussed even

arguably it's to enhance deterrence that's what we're putting out that's what the nuclear posture statement in the wings right now will say but it's still you know, you just go back to Dan Ellsberg's

conversations about the doomsday machine and say, well, we're moving the clock right there to midnight, you know, it's not two minutes to midnight anymore, it's two seconds to midnight. And that's a very dangerous two seconds. It was a really dangerous two minutes,

but it's a very dangerous two seconds because now your margin of error is almost nothing. Well, if you take together all the various things that you've been saying, the fact that there is basically a very callous regard now about the consequences of war,

the fact that if there is a confrontation, a military confrontation with, say, China, the United States might not win it, and there might be thousands of deaths and a demand for action. And if there is the ability or the temptation, the ability to do this thing, carry out a first strike. Well, that then ceases to be a deterrent and it becomes a temptation, just to say.

I mean, I can't explain to you why I can go into character analysis maybe on Xi Jinping, as opposed to say Hu Jintao or one of the previous rulers. But I can't explain to you why he would so dramatically reverse mouse, disdain for nuclear weapons, which I thought was pretty smart. Amongst all the nuclear weapons states, I thought Mao was the smartest leader. Cruel, son of a bitch, killed 40 million people in the cultural revolution. But nonetheless, he said, nuclear weapons, I abominate them. I'll only have as many as I need to deter the other peckers in the world who might use them on me.

And then he gave his famous talk about how if you do my city of Shanghai, I'll do Los Angeles, New York, Houston, Chicago. got everybody's attention but he didn't need but two, three hundred weapons to do that and good delivery vehicles. Now they're going to build out. They're going to build out until they match us.

Who knows, they might think, and they've got to wear with all to do it to build out to match both of us combined. It's very scary. We're back in a world of not mutual assured destruction. That doesn't even make sense anymore. We're back in a world, as the Russians

call it, nuclear escalation. or escalation to de-escalate. I think that probably, that phrase probably came more from the English speakers in the world than it did from the Russian speakers. But, I mean, we're dangerous ground, and who knows it? I guarantee the average American doesn't know it. But at least during the Cold War, there was some recognition and respect for the concept of security competition. So, you know, often producing arms agreement, we recognize that there was a, When you looked at weaponry, especially nuclear weapons, you had to consider the offense-defense balance in which you don't want to have an offensive posture on your nuclear weapons if the objective is to prevent nuclear war.

But these days, I don't see it at all. We scrapped pretty much all of the major deals, arms agreements, as if we were doing a favor to the Russians by having this. arms control. And I think part of this could be, again, this period after the Cold War. That is, our wars these over the past three decades have been bombing small, medium-sized countries far away. Again, this excited Norwegian pilots, this kind of reflects what wars become, something that happens in other places far, far away, always framed as a moral struggle of good

versus evil. And the whole concept of an offense, defense balance isn't really there. Indeed, we can drop bombs every now and then on some rebels in Iraq or in Syria, and we assume simply there's not going to be any retaliation. And as you said, with a war between, with Russia or China, if they're losing, they will probably set off a nuclear weapon. If America's losing, they will set up a nuclear weapon. You would think this whole mindset would have to be changed now, in which we avoid going down the path of war to begin with, or especially overstepping the unofficial rules of proxy wars as we have done in Ukraine. It just feels absurd that there's not more adjustment to these new realities.

And I might even put Iran into the same category as Russia and China, because they have also demonstrated they're not going to be another Iraq or another Syria where we can give them a bloody nose by not we, but the Israelis are bombing them a little bit, and then Iran not retaliating out of fear that it would come a larger attack. So they are also asserting a deterrent. So the learning process seems to be way too slow, considering all the things that are at stake.

I haven't even mentioned what we found in 92 and 93 that was astonishing. And that was a pushback from what I call the richest, wealthiest, niche in the military industrial complex, and that's the nuclear niche. It's everything from nose cone technology to ballistic missiles themselves, which are just exorbitantly expensive, and bring a lot of profit to the companies making them, to tritium production and the labs. They rose up in righteous anger against our program to destroy ours in the Soviet's warheads. it took hw brent and powell and baker and cheney and a lot of forceful talk with them to shut them up and i'm talking when i say them i mean they're senators their representatives and their state governors because they're all

looking at this cash cow going away it reminded me of what sig hecker a physicist we sent over to look at young beyond in north korea said when he came back one of the most trenchant things he said was I was walking down the middle of the reprocessing facility, and all of a sudden, the man who is in charge turned and let the party get on a ways from us. And in English, he said to me, what will I do with all these people? And I said, Sig, I don't understand your question. And he said, these people have the best jobs in North Korea. These people are, they live in nice homes and have three meals a day and I'll have to let them all go if we shut this down. Multiply that times a thousand and you got what happened to us, but we beat it back.

No one's trying to beat it back now. They're in there full-fledged with their senators, their representatives, and everyone else. Cosros Semnani lives in Salt Lake City. He is a multi-billionaire from handling nuclear waste. these are powerful people when it comes to influencing the Congress and influencing the nuclear weapons program that's as much a reason as to why

we reversed ourselves and are now trying to spend a trillion plus on modernization and securitization and surety and all the other things we use as buzzwords instead of staying where we were and maybe even cutting back a little more

we were talking on the joint staff we were talking seriously about going down to 600 warheads in 1992 and three. Seriously, we were. We had studies to prove it. And, you know, as long as we could get the rest of the world through diplomacy to cut their warheads, you know, then there were eight states, I think, or whatever.

Can I ask a bit about the Middle East? situation there is very difficult, at least it seems so to me. The United States is now directly involved because it's deploying THAAD missile interceptors to Israel. And I understand there are not that many of those. There's talk about missile strikes on Iran, of reciprocal missile strikes by Iran against Israel. This whole thing could get very, very dangerous. And behind it all of the possibility of Iran developing nuclear weapons as well. What do you think is the, can I just say, do you think there's any possibility that the Iranians will go or try to go nuclear? And what is the United States actually doing in this situation? Because every day, every day I read in the newspapers how the president is having these difficult conversations with Minister Netanyahu and is telling him show restraint, slow down, and Prime Minister Netanyahu doesn't seem to listen. And the wars go on and the President authorises more weapons transfers

to Israel and the situation just goes on escalating. And the advice, if it is the advice, of the United States doesn't seem to be heeded. thing looks to me like it's out of control. And again, I think this is a very dangerous situation. Do people in Washington think so? Is there any plan on how to hold it back? I mean, is there a risk that Iran could go nuclear now if it really feels threatened? Is that something we should try to avoid? Go on. Your second question, or the question embedded in there, was, does it think this is serious? I think finally Lloyd Austin and his people think it's serious. And I think they're counseling that way. But the bigger question you ask is, will they go there?

I've worked this for years now. I was very much a part of Track 2 diplomacy on JCPOA with people like Zareef and others. And that was why I was in the Oval Office in the Roosevelt Room, and then the Oval Office was he wanted to thank us for our work. Iran has a philosophical and a theological objection to nuclear weapons. They have put it in, and fought was. I think that's genuine. One of their foreign ministers leaned across the table to me and said in English, do I need to operationalize that by putting it into the UN Security Council resolution signed in blood?

that's how we believe. Now, you know, you get a new foreign minister, maybe they believe differently. I don't know. But I think there is a reason behind they're not having made the decision, as we determined in 2009, in that NIA, I think,

if I remember 2009, somewhere around there. Bill Burns had something to do with that, I think, not at the CIA, but as the State Department guy advising. So there was a predilection not to do it. For strategic reasons, and also for theological reasons. If Israel bombs them and bombs their nuclear facilities,

they will make the decision like that, and they will have a bomb within a year, maybe several. North Koreans taught them how to go underground and how to work underground, deep underground. They also taught them the latest in missile warhead technology, such as that. And the North Koreans got it all from the Russians. We had a meeting at principals, and then we had an NSC meeting in 91, 93,

too about what do we do to keep all these Russian scientists from going places? Well, we kept a few of them, but some of them went to Pyongyang. And that's why North Korea went, made all that progress in about a three, four year period. And surprised the hell of us when we went to Pyongyang, presented them with our economic incentive plan, not to go nuclear, and Kongsac Ju leaned across the table and said, we already have the bomb. Jim Kelly almost fell off his seat. the Secretary for East Asia and Pacific. And a lot of that responsibility lies at Cheney's fee

because he wouldn't let us do diplomacy until the president and Powell finally beat him over the head about it. If you look at all of that and you say what would do it, then I think if the Israelis

hit and hit military targets only, as Netanyahu said they're going to do. And then Iran comes back, which they will, and hits only military targets, but rather devastatingly, then we could have a stop to it, but we won't, because we won't insist on it. Nothing you ever won't stop it. But we could insist on it, and we can insist with some real incentive.

You will not get another penny, another bomb, another bullet if you go ahead. That means the end of his regime. So I don't think he would even buy that, and that's why I go back to Goldham Air, comment when I think it was Al Mard asked her, would you do it? Would you use the doomsday machine if Israel's was at stake?

And the rest of the world would be paying the price for it. And she said, yes. And I think that's what Nathan Yahu was saying. Maybe she was saying it for a fact. She wanted to see it on the BBC program the next day. But I don't doubt for a moment that if Bibi thought that it was existential,

to the point that not only he, but the state of Israel, would go in one big boom, that he would probably resort to a nuke weapon. Only recently did I find they actually uploaded one in the 73 war. Actually uploaded it and put it on an airplane and we're ready to deliver it. That's when Kissinger and his counterpart in Moscow got so energized that they began to act together for the first time in a long time, and they convinced them not to do it. So we're in a dangerous situation there too, especially if Iran does get forced into, and U.S. bombs dropping on them would do it too, making a nuclear weapon. It'll be longer.

It'll be completely underground, but they will have it. Saudi Arabia has a contract with Islamabad for 30. The moment Iran tests or demonstrates it has a nuclear weapon, those 30 will be delivered to Riyadh, probably more. I guess little Sparta, UAE, probably did a little contract too because Malam and Mids Ayyed is about the same way about it. So he's going to handle it. So we got two more nuclear powers, three more nuclear powers amongst the nine. And we're off to the races. We do have a nuclear arms race going on right now, partly, if not largely, due to us and what we've done with the treaty regime.

The worst in the treaty regime is the signal we've sent to the world, especially to the world. especially to the world aspirants and the world possessing nuclear weapons. The signal we've sent is all bets are off. Take care of yourself. I'm at a loss for words and probably I should say

because we've kept the colonel for an hour. I think this is probably where I am, stop. Just to say thank you for me for answering my questions so well. That's not a problem to you, Glenn, if you've got other things to say. I guess I just one final question,

because you did talk about the role of the monetary incentives for keeping these nuclear programs and keeping the arms, well, the corrupting effect, if you will, of the arms industry. Now, in the 1980s, George Kennan, he wrote in which he argued that if the Soviet Union would sink into the sea tomorrow, then the American military industrial complex would have to go on in some ways, you know, because find a new adversary, invent another adversary,

because anything else would be in, he called it an unacceptable shock to the American economies, simply because so much of the economy had become reliant on this military industrial complex. Now, since the 80s, we also had the rise of these more powerful think tanks, for example, where they're not only do the research reports, the higher politicians or political figures in administration. They also have very influential writers who contributed to media to shape public opinion. But they're almost completely funded by the arms industry as well. So you see all this really intrusive influence by the arms industry. How do you see this, is this getting worse or is it pushback?

Are we too alarmist or do you see this as something really heavy that's influencing, not just at lower level, but the highest level of the political class? The latter, and it's a unique phenomenon really that we were warned about in 91 and We had a convention of arms contractors that did a billion or more a year business with the Pentagon. It was over 100. We had them all come in. In the second meeting we had, Norm Augustine, who had been CEO of Lockheed Martin, but also Secretary of the Army, as I recall, and a couple of other positions in the government,

and was a fairly honest broker telling us that if you do what you're going to do, if you cut the industrial base and you cut the defense contracting base as significantly as George H.S. Bush wants to cut it. As you're proposing to cut it, colon, you will have monopoly and you will have bad products and major prices. You will have price gouging. That's what we have today. So that's happened. Look at Lockheed. They bought up half the damn dense defense contractors that didn't go out of business. They now have them as subsidiaries, including their number one rival Raytheon, which is now RTX, I think, I'm part of Lockheed. That's part of the problem. They become giants and they build lousy products and charge maximum price for them and the Congress backs

them up because they send so much money back into the Congress. But the thing we demonstrated then was that we could go around and we had a major program for doing this, call it propaganda. I like to call it public good. We were in the country talking to mayors and governors in states like California, which was then getting $90 billion of a three and... billion dollar annual defense budget. New York, other states where there was a lot of GDP and a lot of defense that people didn't know was there, went to the subpins at Grumman, went to Bathironworks,

went all these places. And we told the mayors and the governors, this is going to hurt you. This is going to help you. And we showed him all the facts about how an economic dollar goes to four or five. An education dollar goes to six or seven. A health dollar goes to three or four. defense dollar doubles itself if it does that. That's it. And we convince, some of them really fought us. California fought us big time over closing the 7th Infra Division at Monterey, and the Monterey government fought us too. Within five or six years, we were getting telegrams and letters after we were out of office, as it were, from these people saying, greatest decision we ever made. I remember the one that came from Newport, Rhode Island. The mayor was ecstatic because all this

business had fallen in on what the Navy had owned exclusively before and denied anyone even access to it. So if you could do that, if you could mount that kind of campaign and reduce the complex, you could be successful. Maybe not as much then because now they're so damn concentrated. If you look at Bill Hartung or someone else's has put it together, Pogo project on oversight of government, if you look at their list of congressmen, especially senators and especially the Armed Services Committee members in both houses. And the money they got that they had to declare from Lockheed and others, it's astounding. It's almost as high, if not higher than APAC.

And you don't know the dark money because the Citizens United. I mean, they funneled all kinds of money into them that's dark. You don't have to say who it came from, but you know it came from either APAC or defense contractors or some defarious group. But it's doable, but it's a lot harder now than it was when we did it. 92 and 93. And yes, they have enormous influence on decision-making. It's just, yeah, strange.

It's effectively becomes a foreign policy for sale. Yes. Unsurprisingly, it's the arms industry and APAC and other groups, which are the buyers, I guess. Bernie Sanders, when we were briefing Bernie Sanders on how to cut the defense budget by $100 billion a year for 10 years, total of a trade. he said words to that effect. The government resale. And we didn't disagree,

but he took great notes. He took a whole legal pad full of notes in an hour briefing and everything. And I swear to God, I haven't seen half, I haven't seen one percent of what he took notes on doing that he's done.

Now, maybe he tried and he just failed. Elizabeth Warren, same way to a certain extent. We briefed her and, you know, but she does try, but she usually gets just whooped. Well, Colonel Wilkerson, yeah. Thank you so much. This has been very interesting. It's been absolutely fascinating. Can I just say as a Greek brought up in the old school, I am very, very impressed by your knowledge of classical history and classical literature. Just to say, one quote from Herodotus, just to throw it back, which is that in peace, fathers buried, sorry, in peace, sons bury their fathers,

in war fathers bury their sons. Yeah. He's also one that said man's character as fate. And the end of my preface to the manuscript that I was going to publish, but I am not now. The end of my preface said, if Herodotus was right, then the fate of nations is the fate of their great men. And we have not. Thank you very much for coming on this program. I speak for myself.

Thank you very much, just as saying. Thank you for having me.