Lawrence Wilkerson on Iran negotiations, Russia's backing of Tehran, and the decline of US global power
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, speaks with Glenn Diesen about the Iran conflict, US strategic overreach, and the emerging multipolar world.
Summary
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson joins Glenn Diesen to discuss Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi's meeting with Vladimir Putin, which Wilkerson reads as a clear signal that Russia is backing Iran against US military pressure. He argues that the US is engaged in a global proxy struggle against China — with Ukraine, Iran, the Arctic, and the Baltic all representing different theaters of the same conflict — and that the Trump administration is pursuing this strategy with sanctions and military force while lacking the strategic intelligence to execute it effectively. Wilkerson contends that the US is now searching for a face-saving nuclear agreement it can present as superior to the JCPOA, having quietly abandoned its earlier maximalist demands around ballistic missiles and regime change. He also warns that Israel's continued military operations in Lebanon are self-destructive, that the Baltic states risk suicidal escalation with Russia, and that the Republican Party faces catastrophic losses in the midterms as domestic crises compound foreign policy failures.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and Araghchi's Meeting with Putin
Glenn Diesen: Welcome back. We are joined today by Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who spent decades in the US military, from serving in the mid-1960s during the Vietnam War to becoming the Chief of Staff to the US Secretary of State. Thank you very much for taking the time.
Lawrence Wilkerson: Secretary of State, Secretary of State.
Glenn Diesen: Oh, I —
Lawrence Wilkerson: You made this mistake once before. Sorry.
Glenn Diesen: US Secretary of State, not Defense. I apologize, and thank you for the correction. Colin Powell, I should add, which was of course quite a troubling time in the United States as well, with the invasion of Iraq. I guess there are a lot of parallels to our present era. I wanted to start off with what's been happening very recently — Iran's Foreign Minister went to Russia and has now met with President Putin. Both their countries see themselves as fighting an existential war in which the US is a common adversary. What do you think is the significance of this meeting?
Lawrence Wilkerson: Well, what he needs to do now is drop by Beijing and see Xi Jinping. I think the significance of the meeting is pretty much summed up by the words that Putin uttered following it. It was sort of, to me, like "in your face, empire." You may think that you're going to pursue this to the nth degree, but this country that you're pursuing it against has allies. One of its allies is fairly formidable — it's me. And if you want to talk, I'm willing to talk, but you aren't going to make much headway with this particular war. So why are you waging it? That's kind of the way I read it.
But what I'm really impressed with — I had this conversation yesterday with another individual who was somewhat skeptical. I said there are three true diplomats in the world: Wang Yi, Sergey Lavrov, and Araghchi. They are proving their mettle. He actually came back with a counter: well, he's doing whatever the IRGC says because they're in control. There's no one else in the Islamic Republic of Iran in control but the IRGC. So he's doing whatever they want.
I said, "Bingo." That's what a really good diplomat does. He does what his leadership tells him to do, and he does it with finesse. He does it with, dare I say, diplomacy. He does it with quintessential skill. He doesn't deviate. Not a Witco, not a Kushner, not there to make billions of dollars off contracts they can affect on the sides of the talks. He's there for the government, such as it is and what it is, and he's doing their bidding — and he's doing it well. This meeting with Putin was a quintessential example of that.
The Escalation Pattern: Iran and Russia's Reasonable Demands Ignored
Glenn Diesen: I was also thinking that the two countries have other things in common — that is, the absence of diplomatic solutions has resulted in what were initially quite reasonable demands being escalated to some extent. Russia initially had some demands around restoring Ukraine's neutrality. NATO's incursion into Ukraine was considered an existential threat, but in the absence of any political will or solution, this manifested itself into a territorial dispute where the Russians are now seeking to control territory they can't afford ending up in NATO's hands. With the Iranians, it looks like they also had quite reasonable security concerns — they can't live under crippling sanctions for decades more, they don't want perpetual military threats on their borders. This essentially manifested itself into the crisis over the Strait of Hormuz, as controlling it allows them leverage to pressure countries hosting US bases. If there were serious negotiations, some of these things could be solved. But for the Russians, they saw seven years of sabotaging the Minsk Agreement and sabotaging Istanbul. Iran had two initial negotiations ending in surprise attacks. And now these negotiations don't seem serious either. So how do you see us going from here? Is this going to essentially be a war in Iran and Russia, ending in one side capitulating, or do you think there is common ground?
Lawrence Wilkerson: Let me back up, if I may, to my original conception. I think what we're looking at — as I've said many times before — is that we are engaged in a global struggle. Call it the great game renewed, if you will. I see it developing majorly in the Arctic right now, because Russia has invited China — at China's request, something we denied China when they asked to be a member of the Arctic Council — up to the Arctic, essentially saying: you can share with me my coastline on the Arctic, which happens to be the longest and most effective. Canada may have a few more kilometres, but Russia's got the most effective coastline on what is going to be a new passage for commerce and other things.
So that's the top of the theater. The middle, if you will, is the Baltic and the Baltic states, who are trying their best to start a war with Russia. The center of the theater is Ukraine. And next to that is Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and the Caucasus in general, and Central Asia even more broadly. And then the bottom is Iran.
It's all about — and I don't know if Donald Trump knows this, I don't think he does, he's too uninformed to know this — but there are people behind Donald Trump who know this. There are people in the Pentagon who know this, and I don't mean Pete Hegseth. We are waging a global conflict with China through proxies. That's what this is all about at the top of the strategic spectrum. And if you don't follow that from the perspective of the mistakes we're making, then you're missing what is really going to eliminate this empire in a far shorter time than I thought it would take. And by eliminated, I don't mean 340 million people are going away — I mean the power of the empire is dwindling rapidly. And it's all under Donald Trump's leadership, all under Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio's leadership.
So I have to think that they do know a little bit of what they're doing. And what they're doing, of course, is what Clausewitz describes — when they're losing, they double down on whatever it was they were doing. In our case, it's two things and two things only: sanctions and military power. Military power and sanctions.
That's the landscape you have to look at. We are going after China through various proxies. That's the reason, for example, this morning I had a long conversation with a person from Ukraine who wants Zelensky gone — and cited polls to me, which I don't doubt, showing that 60 to 80% of Ukrainians want him gone too. But he's managing the polls, managing the word that comes out of Ukraine, and most people aren't getting this. The Ukrainians want this to stop. They want it over. They want the squads that come and steal their children to put them in the front lines to stop. They want the killing to stop. They want the dying to stop. And yet Zelensky persists, because the Europeans to an extent, and America to a larger extent than I thought from something I heard yesterday, are still backing Zelensky 100%. Still smuggling things in, still sending things openly.
So you're at war with China, but are you prepared to accept all these casualties in this pseudo-war with China, this prior-to-the-big-war-with-China phase? The apparent answer is yes.
I think other leaders — Putin and Xi Jinping in particular, but also Modi in India, who is hosting the next BRICS conference in India next month as I understand it — I just stumbled on some really interesting information. They've just developed the Agni V, which is a 30,000 — yes, you heard me right — 30,000 kilometre-per-hour missile. It's road-transportable, erectable on the road, fireable on the road. It has a 5,000-mile range with a 7,000-mile capability if extended. This is an incredible missile that no Golden Dome could ever even dream of stopping. And it has nuclear warheads, of course.
So BRICS is coming up as an alternative — slowly, but maybe this is going to speed it up and accelerate it. It is coming up as an alternative to individual countries, regardless of their alliances, like Russia and China disputing all this. It's going to be 60% or better of the world disputing all this.
Into this comes the Iran conflict, which has its own exigencies below that level of geopolitical discussion. Things like: we might be in recession by June. We might be in global depression by September if we keep this up. So the big question to me is how much longer will the people in charge — Rubio, Hegseth, and Trump — go on with this at the behest of the people behind the curtains, if those people behind the curtains are going to start tweaking them because they understand this is going to be a disaster. Unless they're all queued up to jump ship, to go elsewhere, as it were. I don't know what the answer to that question is, but I'm watching it happen and thinking to myself: this is a disaster.
From Russia breaking the Monroe Doctrine again and sending another ship to Cuba, to Turkey — Erdoğan deciding to send help to Cuba — to what's going on in Iran, what's going on elsewhere. Washington seems to be oblivious to all this at the superficial level of Donald Trump. So how do we even arrest this momentum towards our own demise, which is really accelerating? At the same time, we deal with our domestic problems, which are deepening, and get rid of this administration so we can get some sense into what we're doing.
If you want to continue to pursue this strategy, fine — it's a strategy, you can do it. But you've got to be smarter. The other side is not stupid, and the other side is winning, including in Southwest Asia. All Iran has to do to win is not lose. All we have to do to win is achieve a spectacular victory.
Netanyahu is proving in Lebanon right now that he is an idiot — suddenly. I always thought he was smart. Devious, demented, homicidal, maniacal, genocidal — all those things. But I thought he was smart enough to realize not to take on something that would destroy him almost in his face. And he's doing that in Lebanon. And we're aiding and abetting it — ammunition, things like that.
So that's a phonetic summary, but we're in trouble. We're in deep trouble in the empire, and we have no leadership whatsoever. No leadership that knows what's going on, understands it, and can deal with it in at least a halfway smart way.
US Misjudgment of Iran's Resilience and the Search for a Face-Saving Exit
Glenn Diesen: It seems like this crisis works on so many levels — the Trump administration is now in a crisis, you can argue even the US republic, definitely the US empire, but also the wider international system, and everything appears to be cracking at the moment. I was wondering, with the war now against Iran — not just the initial attack and the assumption that it could be defeated, but also the assumed exit strategy, the failure to accept what kind of peace they would have to accommodate — how do you see the US misjudging Iran's resilience as well as its willingness to absorb economic and military pain? Based on what seemed to be an initial assumption about a weekend victory, it seems it was so predictable that this would go so terribly wrong. How do you think they ended up in this situation?
Lawrence Wilkerson: They didn't recognize, as I've said many times before, the nature of the conflict. They thought it was just another deal where they go out and bomb people, and after a few bombs fell — or a lot of bombs fell — those people would be compliant. That's not happening. So they don't know what to do. And with the Air Force officers as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, I feel that is actually feeding it, because the Air Force is the service in the empire that thinks bombs solve all problems. They don't. They never have. They never will.
I think we're at a point now, if you parse some of the tactical language around Trump right now, where they are desperately searching for what I will call something as good as the JCPOA, but with attached to it an aura of Trumpian victory. That's how they boil this down to a way to escape. It doesn't account for Netanyahu or Naftali Bennett and Lapid screwing it up, which they probably will try to do. But what they want to do is achieve some kind of JCPOA-like agreement that looks like it's much better than the JCPOA — has a longer timeline, has more things included in it that the IAEA can check up on — and come out of the war with this triumph that they got something better than Obama got. Look what Trump got you. Look what we did in terms of the nuclear program.
I think they've boiled it down pretty much to that. They're prepared to forget the ballistic missiles. They're prepared to forget all the other things that we once said were absolutely adamant in terms of determining whether or not we quit this war. They're just looking for a nuclear agreement that they can hold up and say we've achieved what we wanted to achieve. That probably includes someone like Russia taking the highly enriched uranium for an interim period of time, or forever in practice. I don't know. But I think that's where they are now with regard to an end to this conflict.
I don't know if they're going to get that or not. The Iranians, if they're smart, will detect that — and they are smart — and they will probably go along with it and work out a deal, and that'll stop the bombing at least, and maybe the strait will go back to some kind of normal practice.
I made a comment on Turkish radio the other day about how we ought to — Vali Nasr was on there, and an Iranian living in London, and they kind of pooh-poohed this — but I said: if you went back to the Law of the Sea Treaty, you would not only be returning to international law in an almost total absence of it, created mostly by the empire, but you would have some practical solutions. You could have a framework within the Law of the Sea Treaty about archipelagos and straits — certain straits like the Strait of Malacca, the Bab-el-Mandeb, and the Strait of Hormuz, and a few others in the world that are critical for economic travel and global commerce — and you could forge a treaty-compliant reinvigoration of the Law of the Sea Treaty regime that Iran would accept and that we would accept. Why don't we do that?
Well, nobody wants to. This is characteristic of what I deal with. Nobody wants to return to international law. International law is dead. Well, if you want to go there, then you want to be purely Hobbesian. You want to join John Mearsheimer, you want to say the world is back according to Hobbes and we aren't going to have any international law — no International Criminal Court, no Law of the Sea Treaty, nothing. We're just going back to rape, pillage, and plunder, and he with the biggest gun wins.
That's where we're going. I don't understand why we don't want to resurrect at least one aspect of it and give it some oomph, give it some success. I know the United Nations is feckless right now, particularly with this Secretary-General and this Security Council, but let's try it. Let's go back and say: okay, we're going to apply the Law of the Sea Treaty with regard to this strait. It's a very important strait. Interestingly, the way I read the treaty, you would comply with about 75% of what Iran apparently wants, and you would comply with about 50% of what we want. But most of all, you would comply with the world's need to have the strait open and functioning. You could get all these ships out of the way, get people going again.
But we're not going to do that, probably, because one — we don't understand international law; two — we're not signatory to the Law of the Sea Treaty, although we have said we will comply with it and do largely; and we're the largest enforcer of it. What are freedom of navigation operations by the empire, what are they about, except the Law of the Sea Treaty and enforcement thereof?
Glenn, I don't understand these people. I do not understand them, except that I go back to my original comments: they're all so frightened of losing — and losing big time to China, and maybe a consortium of China, India, Russia, the BRICS in general — that they'll do anything to stop that. They'll kill anybody. They'll bomb anybody. They'll sanction anybody. They'll do anything to stop that.
International Law, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Collapse of the Rules-Based Order
Glenn Diesen: I think I saw Hegseth — no, sorry, it was Marco Rubio — refer to the Strait of Hormuz as international waters. Technically it's not international waters, but as you suggested, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea permits transit passage for the purpose of passage. The problem is that neither the United States nor Iran has actually ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and as you suggest, this is exactly what they both should do. I think this is the role of international law — that's one of the problems of our time. International law in accordance with the UN Charter, established after World War II, was built when there was a balance of power. Both sides had an incentive to accept some restraints on themselves in return for reciprocity from the other side. After the Cold War, if states don't balance themselves, you would assume that the political West would begin to shed constraint on itself, embrace new concepts like humanitarian interventionism and democracy promotion — anything that removes constraints for us but keeps them on others. That was predictable in a unipolar world. But now that we're pivoting back into a multipolar world, it doesn't make much sense to assume that other countries will abide by rules from which we're seeking exemption.
Lawrence Wilkerson: What better way to give some oomph back to the UN, and particularly to UNCLOS. You have Iran claiming that because they are signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, as well as the Additional Protocol, and even beyond that — my understanding when I was at State is that they have gone further in terms of their promises and written promises to the United Nations with regard to their nuclear program — and they're not signatory to the Law of the Sea Treaty. Come on. You can't pick and choose like that. You're looking more like the empire. You can't do that.
And I know why that is, because Ahmadinejad told me in New York at the UN General Assembly why. You're looking at the strait over there and you're saying you don't want it to be ruled by UNCLOS. Sorry — you don't get to pick and choose like that.
Now, if we had a decent Secretary-General — if we had a Secretary-General like Helen Clark would have been, had we not stopped her from becoming Secretary-General — you'd have someone on the world stage standing up and saying: "You people, get in there and get this straightened out. I'll help you. I'll bring a hammer with me." That's the way they ought to be operating. But they're not, because Guterres has no guts. He has no courage. When we picked him, we picked him for that very reason.
Glenn Diesen: On international law — the Non-Proliferation Treaty is a good example. International law must mean something. There has to be some interest in abiding by rules. If I look at the proliferation cases: countries like Libya and Iraq who gave up their weapons of mass destruction programs were destroyed, while North Korea and Pakistan, who developed their nuclear weapons, are safe. That's entirely the wrong message to send to the world. And same with Iran — they signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, so they should have the right to a civilian nuclear program, but now they're told they don't. Meanwhile, Israel, which didn't sign it, has acquired nuclear weapons, and there's no consequence. You can only do this for so long before the fabric of international law itself begins to fall apart. I agree — the solution shouldn't be to just walk away and embrace the chaos. There have to be efforts to revive it. But my point is always that we also have to accept it, because the unipolar moment is gone. We can't just demand others follow the rules while we seek exemption.
Lawrence Wilkerson: I agree 100%. In fact, I think it's more important that we — if you're referring to Europe and the United States in particular — follow it than others. It's absolutely important that we do, because we are the enforcers. When it comes time to implement Mao Zedong's dictum that international law comes out of the barrel of a gun — Russia, China, the US, India perhaps — we're the enforcers of it. And if we refuse to enforce it, it's feckless, it's ridiculous.
Sometimes empires in particular need to do things that are against their interest in the immediate term but in their interests in the long term. We've lost that idea. We've lost that concept. I'm not even sure it enters Donald Trump's mind. I'm not sure anything with regard to the relations of nations enters Donald Trump's mind other than money.
The Baltic States and the Risk of Deliberate Escalation with Russia
Glenn Diesen: That's when I hear Hegseth talk about international law as something that constrains the US — then yes, it is. That's what law does. It constrains.
Lawrence Wilkerson: But it also constrains the other guy. The assumption that the other guy will allow himself to be constrained if our side does not is absurd. Again, if there's a unipolar distribution of power, it can go on for some time, but not in any other situation.
I did want to pick up on something you said before — that the Baltic states seem very eager to start a war with Russia. I assume you're referencing the drone attacks on Russia, which I think are more or less confirmed now as originating from the Baltic states. I would even be doubtful if they only transit Poland and the Baltic states, because that's quite a long flight. It seems almost more likely that they're launched from the Baltic states as well. But what do you think this means? Because it's a strange time to pick a war with Russia when the Americans no longer stand behind the Europeans. I understand there's a need to escalate when the war isn't going Europe's way, but it seems suicidal.
Lawrence Wilkerson: I can't explain it except in the terms you just ended with — suicidal. And that is: they think that if they get a real hot war with Russia started involving a NATO member, we'll be back. We'll be back with bells and banjos. We'll have no choice. I've got news for them. This administration at least doesn't think that way, as far as I can tell. If you get into a war with Russia, you're on your own. Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Norway, Sweden — you don't want a war with Russia. You really don't. Especially not a Russia now hardpressed in two theaters: the Southwest Asian theater and the Ukrainian theater.
And with the empire basically succeeding in one aspect of the struggle in Ukraine — that is, defying reality in terms of Ukraine — as I was saying, the woman in Ukraine who's talking about the polls, I think she's being honest. I've followed her for a good while. I don't know what the exact percentage is, but it's well over half of Ukrainians who want this damn war over. They want it over. They want the squads that come and steal their children to put them in the front lines to stop. They want the killing to stop. They want the dying to stop. And yet Zelensky persists, because the Europeans to an extent, and America to a larger extent than I thought from something I heard yesterday, are still backing Zelensky 100%. Still smuggling things in, still sending things openly.
So you're at war with China, but are you prepared to accept all these casualties? The apparent answer is yes. And the apparent answer with regard to the Baltic Sea and the areas impinging thereon is: okay, if you want to strike the bear in his cave, so to speak, go ahead. That's all right with us. And I'll get on the phone and I'll call St. Petersburg or Moscow or wherever Putin happens to be and I'll say, "This isn't me. Handle it on your own." And then I'll go away gleefully and say, "Another problem created for the people most opposed to us — China and Russia."
I don't know, Glenn. I really don't. I cannot ferret out any coherence in this administration — none whatsoever. In any sphere. Not in Venezuela, not in Cuba, and now we've got Turkey helping Cuba. So we've got two countries violating the Monroe Doctrine on Cuba's behalf. I've got another tanker, as I understand it — a Russian tanker headed for Cuba, also full of oil. And we don't seem to have anything but tactics to display against this wider tapestry of strategy that aims at us.
I wish I were a fly on the wall at this BRICS meeting in India. I would particularly like to hear what Modi has to say, and how that is impacted by and adjusted to by Russia and China, because the three formidable powers in this group are truly formidable. India because of its population and its growing military capability — this Agni V missile, apparently developed by the DRDO in India, is an incredible missile. It's better than anything we have in our arsenal, if the facts being published about it are true. And it's nuclear. So this is a formidable alliance developing, even with Russia and China as the sole partners. But with India in there, and then other Asian countries coming along because they see the handwriting on the wall — this is a formidable alliance. We can take this alliance on all day long. We're going to lose. We're going to lose badly.
The Impossibility of Putting the Bear Back in the Cave
Glenn Diesen: About the Russian situation — I think it was Otto von Bismarck who allegedly said something along those lines: that it's easy to lure the Russian bear out of its cave, but much more difficult to put it back in. That summarizes the situation we're in. If you want to provoke a conflict with Russia, yes — but if it doesn't work, there's no way of putting an end to it. With the Iranians, it was this decapitation strike; with the Russians, it was bleeding them white. But when it doesn't work, there's no way of ending it. And I think this is the same problem we're seeing now with Iran. It was considered a bit of a gamble — if the decapitation strike wouldn't work, okay, we'll just put an end to it and deal with China another day. But it seems as if the Iranians refused to go back to the way things were. That's why I was also wondering: if there is an essential defeat for the US in Iran, what does it actually mean? It's not a military defeat — the US army is not going to be defeated — but it would be a political, geopolitical, and economic defeat, wouldn't it?
Lawrence Wilkerson: Well, I think they're going to lie about it as much as they possibly can, and they still have a MAGA base that believes them. They're going to fashion it as a success. As I said, they're going to haul out whatever agreement Iran makes with them on the nuclear program as an indication of "better than Obama — it's successful." And everyone will forget about all the other things we demanded, because that'll be at the heart of it. Maybe it'll include something really visible and obvious, like uranium going to Russia for five years, or some other provision whereby the Iranians seem to concede something rather than not much at all. I don't know.
But I'm sensing that that's at the heart of what they're talking about right now — declaring victory and getting out. And the way you declare victory is you've achieved some kind of nuclear agreement that you can tout as better than the one Obama achieved. That's it. That's their limited view right now, after all these expansive things they've talked about — from ballistic missiles to "never have any uranium ever again in Iran" to regime change, which of course is what Netanyahu wanted, and what Netanyahu told them in that now highly reported meeting was possible, very easily. And now look — Netanyahu is about to lose his position in Lebanon. They're getting their rear end handed to them in Lebanon. And pretty soon, if they keep on doing what they're doing — killing any Lebanese citizen visible on the horizon at any moment of any day, even though there's a ceasefire — they're going to destroy the one possible ally they have in Lebanon, which is the government.
He's done. He's toast. I think it's really questionable whether he is going to make it through this election period — make it through in terms of being re-elected, and make it through in terms of maybe even being alive. But who knows. And I don't think Lapid and Bennett will be any better than Netanyahu. So we still have the same problem — just a lesser light, in terms of brain power, managing that problem in Israel.
And I still cling to my supposition — my prediction, not a supposition — that Israel won't be here as a Jewish state. It's gone. It's done. It can stay as a democratic state, a real democracy, not the apartheid state it is today, accommodating all the citizens that might be members of it, and eventually of course the Palestinian population topping the Jewish population, which won't be hard now. As I've said before, I think a million, a million and a half have already left. It's not a safe haven anymore. That was the promise to all those European Jews: you need a safe haven, go there, go to Palestine, you'll have a safe haven, it'll be yours. It isn't safe. It isn't safe at all. If they didn't have those bomb shelters, half of Israel would be dead right now.
After these wars are over, the world will look very different.
Iran's Peace Proposal and Trump's Response
Glenn Diesen: Just my last question — perhaps I should have started with this. Iran recently put forth a proposal to the United States, and there are some indications that Trump is at least signaling that he will reject the Iranian offer, if he hasn't already done so. What do you make of this peace proposal?
Lawrence Wilkerson: I think you've got to do that if you're Trump, because you can't seem to be so forthcoming with any offer that seems premature. You've got to fight until the moment comes when you can do the JCPOA over again — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — until you can top that in the vernacular, in the way you present it. You can't accept things that look like they would impact that in a negative way. So you've got to get the Iranians down to the point where they at least are sending things that look like that's the issue, and then you claim victory and you leave.
That's not going to please Netanyahu at all. And it's not going to please those powers that think this is perhaps one of the most important — if not the most important — theater in this campaign against China. Not to say you couldn't — I don't know how much damage we've done to the Southern Railroad, I don't know what China's ability to repair it, and Iran's ability to repair it, is. I doubt it'll be an Iranian top-of-the-list priority to repair it. It probably will be for the Chinese, though, and it will give the Chinese additional access to Iran on the ground in order to help them do that.
But I'm not so sure that's going to make any difference to this administration, which is increasingly going to be captured by the fact that they are going to be absolutely blown away in the midterms, and the Republican Party with them. I think Virginia's recent vote on its redistricting issue is a good indication of that, but it's just one indication. I think there are others all across the country, and I think it's just going to get worse for them. So their focus is going to be increasingly domestic — especially those people who are the most problematic in the administration, in my view, other than Hegseth, whose focus is of course going to be overseas. But I think they're going to be totally consumed as we approach the midterms, either with the chicanery and the downright skullduggery they throw out to try and reverse the situation, or with the situation itself where they're going to lose so badly — or both. Probably both. I think it's going to be a disaster, an utter disaster for the Republican Party.
The Imminent Putin–Trump Phone Call and What Comes Next
Glenn Diesen: Let me squeeze in one last question. With the meeting between the Iranian Foreign Minister and Putin in Russia, it seems to signal that the Russians are now all-in in terms of their backing of Iran. How do you think this will impact the US–Russia relationship? They're trying to solve their own proxy war in Ukraine, and I think the patience is kind of running out a bit in Moscow anyway. I think this will probably be good for Putin to some extent, because he's been seen as weak by essentially playing along with what looks like fake diplomacy while the US is still engaged in a proxy war against Russia. But how do you think it's going to shape relations between the US and Russia?
Lawrence Wilkerson: I think that might depend on what is going to be an inevitable phone call between Putin and Trump. How soon it comes is anybody's guess — my guess would be sooner rather than later. And it's going to be a testy phone call. Both men are going to start out probably with pleasantries, and then it's going to get down to Putin saying: you haven't done what you promised to do, and I'm very, very unhappy with it with regard to Ukraine. And Trump saying: well, you just stood up with the Foreign Minister of the country I'm most violently at war with right now and said you were on his side. And then it'll go from there to wherever it goes.
But the two men have a habit of working something out, however ephemeral it might be — especially on Trump's side. I would expect at least a 50-50 chance that this work-out, this solution, won't be so ephemeral, because of all the things I've just described that even Trump has let out — that he is probably aware of more and more.
Now, I haven't even mentioned Epstein. It keeps raising its ugly head every time I pick something up. And it's still there, still going full bore. Iran has not wiped it out. Maybe it has with the MAGA core, but it hasn't wiped it out with 60% of Americans. So he's got all these problems to deal with domestically, as well as Putin, ultimately Xi Jinping, and maybe Modi and the BRICS in general. I don't know that he has the wherewithal in his brain to deal with all this. So then you have to ask: does his cabinet? And I look at Bessant, I look at Patel, I look at Rubio, I look at Hegseth, and I say no, he doesn't. So how does Putin not come out of this with promises that Trump won't keep, or worse, no promises at all?
But I do think that phone call is imminent.
Glenn Diesen: Well, as always, a great pleasure to speak with you, my friend. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on this.
Lawrence Wilkerson: You too. Take care, and hail Norway.