Lawrence Wilkerson on US imperial decline, the Iran war failure, and the rise of a multipolar world
Glenn Diesen interviews retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to US Secretary of State Colin Powell, on the failed US military campaign against Iran, the decay of American diplomacy, and the trajectory of the empire.
Summary
Glenn Diesen interviews Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson about the US military campaign against Iran, which Wilkerson describes as an objective failure that the Trump administration is now trying to walk back through face-saving rhetoric. Wilkerson argues that Secretary of State Marco Rubio's claim that "a blockade is not an act of war" is a fundamental violation of a thousand years of international law and practice — and contrasts it with Kennedy's deliberate rebranding of his Cuba action as a "quarantine" in 1962 for exactly that reason.
Wilkerson draws an extended comparison between the current US-Israeli posture and the Axis powers of World War II, arguing that the US now finds itself on the wrong side of what a future Nuremberg-style tribunal might judge, with Hegseth publicly stating policies Wilkerson characterises as war crimes. He warns that if the US does not change course, the combination of China dismantling the Bretton Woods financial system (including replacing SWIFT and nullifying OFAC sanctions), Russia and China finding common cause against Washington, and the continued erosion of American credibility will accelerate imperial collapse.
A recurring theme is the contrast between US bellicosity and the agenda of the 18th BRICS summit scheduled for September in Delhi, presided over by Modi, whose stated theme — "Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation, and Sustainability" — Wilkerson holds up as precisely the posture the US abandoned after 1991. He argues that China and the BRICS bloc are positioning themselves as the heirs to the post-WWII international order that the US is actively dismantling.
Wilkerson also addresses the nuclear dimension at length: he warns that the US is rebuilding toward 30,000 warheads with an explicit first-strike doctrine, and notes that India's deployment of the Agni V — a road-mobile ICBM carrying MIRV warheads with a 7,000-kilometre range — signals that other powers are responding in kind. He regards the return to Cold War-era nuclear danger levels as one of the most alarming features of the present moment, made categorically more dangerous than any previous imperial decline in history because no prior empire — Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus, Genghis Khan — possessed the means to destroy the world.
Other key threads include: the obsolescence of aircraft carriers in first-tier warfare; Israel's long-term non-viability as an apartheid state; the Report from Iron Mountain and Kennan's argument that the military-industrial complex requires enemies to sustain itself; the possibility that climate change could serve as a cohesive existential challenge replacing military rivalry; and the point — raised at an Eisenhower Media Network meeting — that Americans have not seen war on their own soil since 1865, producing a public with no comprehension of what the wars waged in their name actually look like.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and the Iran operation
Glenn Diesen: Welcome back. We are joined today by Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who used to be the Chief of Staff to the US Secretary of State. Thank you as always for coming back on the program.
Lawrence Wilkerson: Thank you for having me, and thank you for that introduction. It signals the fact that we did once upon a time have diplomacy.
Glenn Diesen: I'm missing the diplomacy as well. Again with Iran, it seems to have been fraudulent from day one. With Russia it's been either absent or fraudulent. Overall, I miss the days of diplomacy — when diplomats considered it part of their job description.
I wanted to start off with what's happening now with Iran, because I see that Donald Trump has put his "Project Freedom" on pause — that is, he was supposed to open up the Strait of Hormuz by force, and it didn't go as planned. So again, it's on pause. Meanwhile, Marco Rubio said that Operation Epic Fury, as the war is called, has already met all objectives and has therefore been concluded. What do you make of these statements? Are they trying to walk back a disaster in terms of returning to war, or do you think this is just a temporary retreat before they ramp up again?
Lawrence Wilkerson: The latter would come to mind as a matter of practice of the Trump administration, including the Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio. The statements he made yesterday were just egregiously wrong. The Secretary of State of the United States of America says categorically, "A blockade is not an act of war." What the hell book is he reading? A blockade has been an act of war for about a thousand years, codified as such post-World War II in international law.
That's the reason John Kennedy in 1962 was instructive to the ExComm committee — the group that helped him figure out the Cuban missile crisis, particularly Bobby. In that case, as memory serves, McNamara actually offered him the alternative. Kennedy ruled out the blockade of Cuba and was searching for some other mechanism. I think it was McNamara — it might have been Bobby, might have been both of them — but if memory serves, it was McNamara who said, "How about quarantine?" A good medical term. And Kennedy liked it. So it was a quarantine, not a blockade, because a blockade again is an act of war, Mr. Secretary of State.
And then we get Hegseth discussing kamikaze dolphins. How absurd can you be? I just don't understand this leadership at all. I can't crawl inside their heads because their heads are not like mine. Their heads are not like yours either. They're not like anything I've ever encountered.
But to your question — it failed abjectly. And what Rubio has suggested, and what I think Trump is suggesting more and more, though feebly and often incoherently, is: I want out. I need a way out. I've got to find a way out. And if you won't give me a way out, I'll carve myself a way out and I'll make it look like it was a successful way out in terms of what I did to Iran. That's all I can judge this by, because on the surface of the sea it is not successful.
The only way the Strait is going to be successfully opened — if there is a potential for that — is if the Omani-Iranian consortium, I'll call it, is allowed to control the strait and do what they want to do, which is to charge a modest fee for commerce passing through. That's the only way they're going to get the strait open.
I was marveling at the fact that they were talking about the strait being open and people could go places, and there are 2,000 ships in the North Arabian Sea. What are you going to do — peel them off one at a time with an escort? You don't have that many ships, do you? No, you certainly don't. So the whole thing, Glenn, was cooked up in some place where they don't think very much. I've got to figure it was in the Pentagon with Pete Hegseth supervising. Now we see glaring proof of the fact that neither General Caine — I'm increasingly of that mind — nor Hegseth, which we all thought all along and which has now been confirmed, know what they're doing.
The Strait of Hormuz and the failure of diplomacy
Glenn Diesen: I think the Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz will probably be the only possible outcome. It's a shame because it didn't have to be this way. The ultimate goal of the Strait of Hormuz — for the Iranians, I think it's a means to an end, because they've been asking for a proper security architecture in the region which gives them security as well. They can't live another 47 years under crippling sanctions and perpetual threats from the bases that surround them. The Strait of Hormuz, given that there is no diplomatic path towards a sustainable peace with the US and Israel, is just a means to an end. It's a way of putting higher tolls on countries that sanction them, threaten them, possibly by hosting bases or actually attacking them. So I think it will be a way of reasserting Iranian security in the region, and it will probably be successful.
But again, it's a bit like the war in Ukraine. The Russians didn't have to take the territories. If there was a security architecture to restore Ukraine's neutrality and take into account Russia's security concerns, this could have been done through diplomacy, not by taking territory. But again, as you started off saying, we don't have diplomacy anymore. So it's very difficult to achieve anything through talk, and instead everything has to take this very hard format.
At the same time as the US is indicating it wants to walk this back — if this is genuine — we also see that the French are sending the Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier strike group. I think it's currently in the Red Sea. How do you assess this? Are they planning an operation? I'm not sure what the Europeans can do if the Americans couldn't pull it off. Or is this just a show of strength — a last-hour effort to prove to Trump that the Europeans are a force multiplier and not dead weight?
Lawrence Wilkerson: A brave and meaningless display of Gallic fervor. It won't add anything to the combat power. In fact, it may detract from the combat power to a certain extent.
Let me back up and give you some facts. We have two aircraft carriers on the ways right now. One of them getting ready for completion and testing, and the other one getting ready to start up. I suspect the first is going to come in somewhere between 20 and 21 billion dollars when all the cost overruns are calculated, and probably be delayed at least a year — maybe two, if history proves anything — beyond its acceptance date. The second one, the Kennedy, I believe she is, is going to come out and probably cost 22 or 23 billion dollars and be suitably delayed as well. Both are obsolete as they sit right now in the ways.
Every carrier on the high seas is obsolete with regard to really first-tier warfare. We have not had that demonstrated by Iran — which they could do. I think they could do it, but they don't want to, because on their side of the coin, being better thinkers than we are, they know that if they were to do that and put 5,000 Americans in Davy Jones' locker along with a $16 billion aircraft carrier, that would probably get the American people thinking a little differently about the Iran war. They're very comfortable with the way American people are despising the Iran war right now. So they're obsolete, and the French carrier is obsolete too. This is no addition to combat. It's a French — as I said — a Gallic display. It doesn't add anything to the material at sea that could do anything other than sink.
The BRICS summit and the contrast with US policy
Lawrence Wilkerson: Now let's look at something else that's happening right now that is in stark contrast to all of this — the French effort, Ukraine, you name it. The 18th BRICS summit is going to be in September in Delhi. Modi will be the presiding person; he's president of the group now. Listen to their subject matter title: "Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation, and Sustainability." That's their announced purpose. That's the announced purpose I would have given in 1991 or 1992 to what George H.W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft and Colin Powell were talking about — not primacy, not "we're the number one power in the world, bar none, or we'll sanction or bomb you," but cooperation and comity. That's what they're doing.
Incidentally, it happens to include the number one economic power in the world, China — soon to be the number one financial power in the world if they do what Xi Jinping just mandated. It's them doing it instead of us. We are the ones fighting that. We are the recalcitrance in the world.
And while I'm at it, let's define the empire properly right now. If you want to define the empire properly, you have to go back to some examples of previous types of organizations. Take Hitler's Third Reich. Take Tojo's Japan. Take the Rape of Nanjing and the Japanese invasion of China. Take all of those things together and what you have is a historical example of what you have now in the empire.
Where else could you hear a Secretary of War stand up before a podium and utter war crimes? Say war crimes. Say that they are his policy. Say that they are the way he is going to confront the world. He's going to send Iran back to the dark ages. He's going to destroy the entire place. He gives no quarter. These are all war crimes. Dwight Eisenhower isn't rolling in his grave — he's spinning in his grave. These are war crimes, let alone what our founding fathers would think. Everything that rolls out of Hegseth's mouth virtually, and much of what comes out of Trump's mouth, is a war crime.
So look at the contrast here. We are setting ourselves up as the next victim of whatever Nuremberg tribunal these countries want to hold eventually. And they're setting themselves up to be our counterpart in terms of what we did post-World War II — for international law, for human rights, for human dignity. However imperfect it was, we did it. One of the main instruments in doing it was one of the main instruments in waging the war: Dwight Eisenhower. And he said one of the reasons he moved the way he did — very much in favor of the United Nations, very instrumental in helping the United Nations get going — was because he had seen war for what it really was: 100 million casualties.
We're on the other side of the coin now, Glenn. Americans have to wake up and confront that. We are the bad guy in the world. The other side are the good guys. If we don't figure that out and somehow change what we're doing, we're going down. There's no question in my mind about it, because they are dedicated to what they just said. They're dedicated to this comity and cooperation and innovation and resilience. And by golly, they're good at it. All of them.
So what are we doing? That's my question to Donald Trump this morning. What are you doing? What is your government doing? What is the Congress doing? What is the Supreme Court doing? What are all the sinews of power of the empire doing? Because you're driving us over a cliff.
Trump, the empire, and the fate of Israel
Glenn Diesen: The great irony — and you and I discussed this a bit before we started recording — is that Trump initially appeared to be the candidate who, without stating those words, was making the case for why the US should walk back the empire in order to shore up and save the republic. And instead it appears to be going the other direction — gambling the republic in order to perpetuate the empire.
I was wondering what happens when the United States will have to roll back. What does it mean for the wider region and the future of Israel and Iran? Because when I read the Israeli media — be it the Jerusalem Post or Haaretz — they're quite pessimistic themselves on many levels: the war with Iran, the stability of Netanyahu's political position, and the media reveals a lot of infighting, with suggestions that Netanyahu risks the survival of the state itself. So I think everyone recognizes what's being gambled here. But given that the US looks like it has to walk this back at some point, as you said — just carve a way out — what does this mean for the region, for Iran, for Israel?
Lawrence Wilkerson: One of the unique things about the description I just gave, however briefly, of how we resemble the powers that we fought in World War II, is the fact that we have Israel. The fact that Israel is sort of the Reinhard Heydrich to Trump's Hitler. And that, as you just indicated in the nature of your question, is a true problem and challenge.
Picking up Haaretz this morning online and reading down the headlines was like reading an indictment of Israel from one of its series of editorial writers and other journalists who have a brain and who feel like they have some freedom. But at the same time, when you go into the articles, you find out that there is hardly an iota of deviation in support of the Israeli people for what Netanyahu has done and what he might do. And instead of being called off because you're destroying the state of Israel, it's "do more, because if you don't do more you will destroy the state of Israel as we conceive it." And that's the real secret here — as Jews in Israel conceive it — because the other citizens, almost 50% plus of Israel's population, don't feel this way, or if they do, they're too scared to say it.
So we've got this unique ingredient in this reprise, if you will, of a Hitlerian-Tojo-ist world in the role that Israel is playing. And right now they're playing it really violently and blatantly in Lebanon. So much so that the president of Lebanon has said he's not sure he wants to meet with Netanyahu as long as Netanyahu is still doing what he's doing in his country. I don't blame him. I suspect he probably will, because we'll bend his arm behind his back. But I don't blame him for not wanting to meet with the man who's raping his country — and not going after Hezbollah so much as going after every single person or thing he can find in Lebanon to rape, pillage, and plunder.
So that's an additional ingredient to this ignominy, this awful situation the empire has gotten itself into, that it seems to have no wherewithal, no courage to extricate itself from. And that's the reason I'm so pessimistic. I don't think we're going to get out of this. I don't think Trump's going to get out of it. I don't think Israel's going to get out of it.
I've said many times, and I'll say it again: Israel will not be a state in the Levant in its present configuration. It will not be an apartheid state like it is now. It is not a democracy. Were it to return to being a genuine democracy — with all the flaws that democracies have, nonetheless — it could exist and persist and maybe survive. I don't know. It's created a lot of enemies now that aren't going to forget very quickly. But it could make its way into the future were it to be a genuine democracy and accept all comers: Christians, Arabs, Jews, others.
So that's a special ingredient here that you can't find an analogy for in the period I was describing. We have returned to — only we're on the other side of the Nuremberg tribunal now. We're in the dock. We're being accused, and we will be accused in the future. I don't know who's going to do it. I don't know how they're going to do it. But somehow retribution will be obtained. It's as sure as when Lot turned around and looked at Sodom and Gomorrah and turned to a pillar of salt. But I don't know how we're going to extricate ourselves from the immediate circumstances in any way that affords a platform from which we can begin to alter this situation. We're not even giving a new commander-in-chief, a new president if we have one, a platform to stand on to do this. We're leaving him with such horrendous debt, such horrendous situations in the world with allies who must think we've lost it, and such a horrendous situation with regard to those in the world who through our own perfidy are having to oppose us now and hold summits in India.
European complicity and the legacy of hegemony
Glenn Diesen: I wonder — you mentioned that the allies are horrified, but to some extent they do toe the line. I saw just today that the German foreign minister said that Israel has every right to be in South Lebanon. And of course this is the same Germany that backed the atrocities in Gaza, the same Germany that said Israel is doing "our dirty work" for us in Iran. So they might complain a lot about Trump, but they seem to be on board with many of the worst impulses of Trump.
I'm wondering if this is part of the legacy of the hegemonic era after the Cold War. Because some key problems when you have a hegemon seem to be not only hubris, but also that when you can absorb a lot of cost from doing stupid things, you end up doing a lot of stupid things. Also the death of diplomacy — why talk to your opponent when you can dictate the terms? And that tendency to overextend, the arrogance. It's easy to point to the US, but if you look at the Europeans — the way they ignored, for example, the security of the largest European country, Russia, for 30-plus years — this makes no sense unless there's some hegemonic hubris. And I'm wondering the same with Israel, because in the past 30-plus years they pursued what I would argue is the Clean Break doctrine — that is, let's stop doing diplomacy and making compromises, let's just impose our will by force. We have the world hegemon standing behind us ensuring that no one will go against us. It possibly hasn't been good for America's allies either to have the big bad US standing behind them, because then you don't have to make any compromises and the arrogance just reaches ridiculous levels.
Lawrence Wilkerson: Let me give you my feelings on that. I've stated them before, but let me restate them. I do not think a single one of the European leaders in power right now — even some of those that might have been just freshly elected — is going to be around very long. Certainly not Merz, and certainly not Macron, and certainly not Starmer, and the ones we throw out each day. But I think a lot of other leaders too are going to be gone.
My concern is: why are they going to be gone? Are they going to be gone because of a legitimate populace that says, "Wait a minute. This has really been bad for us, and you have been the leader during this bad-for-us period. Therefore, we're throwing you out and we're going to try to find someone else"? Whether they find someone else who is more interested in some comity and cooperation amongst European countries including Russia, or someone who wants to create a Europe that's very much like the 1930s Europe — constantly in turmoil, economic and otherwise — is a matter of history determining it. I can't predict that.
I've not got my feet deep enough in Europe to predict that, and I'm not sure I could even if I did, because I'm not European. I think it was Maggie Thatcher who said the problem with Europeans is: we visit, they live there. That's a real good way of summing it up.
So I don't know how Europe is going to come through this, but I know damn well they're not going to come through it if they keep hanging on to the tail of the United States' shirt. No way. Because one, we're going to withdraw that tail, and two, it's not very formidable anymore — other than its nuclear stockpile. And that brings me to my favorite subject.
Nuclear weapons and the existential difference
Lawrence Wilkerson: The only thing that makes this situation remarkably different — existentially different — from that previous period I was describing and comparing it to in the 1930s, and all other previous periods in the last 5,000 years of human history, is nuclear weapons. And that's frightening when you think about it, because the empire is not going out without using everything in its arsenal to try and prevent it.
So you look at this summit taking place in India. You think about the genuine nature of their subject matter in terms of what the world needs. Whether they're going to go that way or not, at least they've said they are. And when you say something like that and you have powers behind you like China and increasingly like India, then you have some weight, you have some gravitas. Much the same way — and again I'm going back to that analogy, which I think is a pretty good one — we had gravitas in 1945, '46, '47, and so on. Not just because we had the nuclear weapon and nobody else did until the Soviets stole their bomb, but because we were actually acting as if we cared about what happened to those 100 million people who died, and we cared about all the other things that we supposedly put much effort into defending.
We cared enough to go to the tribunals. We cared enough to go to the conventions, to the Geneva business, to all the things that we did with regard to diplomacy that, as Eisenhower said multiple times, would keep this from happening again. He lamented the League of Nations and its lack of success. And one of the reasons he was very powerful behind the scenes with regard to the UN was because he knew the League had failed so miserably, and that was part of why we got into the second iteration of the World War.
All those people are gone. I take you back to what Powell told me in 1989 when I first joined him. "Larry, Europe is not going to be the same much longer. They're gone. Meet Thatcher, Kohl, Major. They're all going to be gone. There's no one going to be left who has his feet in the turmoil and the dye and the blood of World War II — even as a 12-year-old or a 13-year-old. No one. When that happens, Larry, Europe's going to be a different place. We can only pray that it's a better different place. It could be a much worse different place."
I think we're seeing that come to fruition. But to repeat — I think the Europeans are smart enough to throw most of these people out. The question becomes how their particular political processes, which are very different from ours in many cases if not all cases, and very different from one another in most cases — how do those processes, democratic as they pretend to be just like we do, produce the kind of leadership that Powell was saying would be necessary if Europe were to get through this post-Cold War period without too much damage?
I don't think he ever entertained the idea of the transatlantic link being utterly severed — mainly because, and here we come back to those horrible weapons again, the nuclear weapons and the need for Europe to have that cushion to lie back on in case something were to happen, or to provide a deterrent for them against whomever.
Because there are a lot of these things in the world. China and Russia combined, India, Pakistan — we're building back out again to where our program is as robust and dangerous as anyone's. We're building back out to those 30,000 warheads we had when the Cold War came to a close, and we went down almost to 2,000. That's a pipe dream now. We're going to build twice the number of weapons we have right now, with three or four times the lethality, so we can have a first-strike capability and ride out any retaliation and come out the winner. That's what we're looking for. So this is a very dangerous world, and I'm happy to see what's happening in India and I wish them every success.
First-strike doctrine and the Agni V missile
Glenn Diesen: With all this talk of gaining first-strike capabilities — not just the capabilities being built, but also what has been done to Russian early warning radars and their nuclear triad — it's as if we forget that any successful first strike still can't ignore that we all reside on this same planet. It's very hard to bomb a planet over and over again without affecting all of us.
Lawrence Wilkerson: What would the Indians be building the Agni V for? It's deployed now. A 30,000-kilometer-per-hour missile — no Golden Dome is going to get this thing. And it carries MIRV warheads. I just found that out yesterday. It carries MIRV warheads, so it can carry multiple nuclear warheads in its nose cone and deploy them — I'm assuming the same way we deploy our MIRVs, with pinpoint accuracy over a ballistic missile silo or whatever.
Why would the Indians want a 7,000-kilometer containerized road-mobile ICBM? Do they smell something in the wind? We just keep doing this, and we're going right back to the point of danger we were at and breathed a deep sigh of relief about being out of at the end of the Cold War. But that's gone. We didn't hold it for more than four years.
The empire's dependency on conflict and the Report from Iron Mountain
Glenn Diesen: Do you see the US, since World War II, having become dependent on threat and conflict in order to preserve its current position? Because Kennan — George Kennan — made this point in 1987, where he argued that if the Soviet Union were to sink into the sea tomorrow, the military-industrial complex would have to invent another enemy, simply because too much of the economy was built into it. But one could also widen the argument further by pointing out that the entire structure of the international system has become too dependent on having enemies. Because if one has an alliance system — such as existed during the Cold War — or a hegemonic system after the Cold War, they only exist if you have a common threat. So once peace begins to break out, the alliance systems begin to fragment.
And essentially, if one maintains power in the world through alliance systems, one has to perpetuate conflicts in some ways. As we saw when the Chinese were pushing peace between the Saudis and Iranians, it created some shock in Washington — because if the Arabs are going to make peace with the Iranians, why would they be obedient to Washington, and who would help weaken the Iranians? Peace is not always a friend of the empire.
Lawrence Wilkerson: You're absolutely right, and Kennan made those points. As old as he was, he visited with Powell — as did Henry Kissinger in a different sort of way — just short of his death. And part of Powell's gentle pushback — it wasn't real pushback; Powell had too much respect for both men to push back hard — was, "We're smarter than that now, and we'll figure out a way to deal with this military-industrial complex." I remember thinking to myself, "Yeah, right. Probably not."
If you're familiar with the Report from Iron Mountain — they actually concluded in that report, and there's a lot of controversy over whether that was an official analysis done at the behest of perhaps the president of the United States, if it was a reaction to John F. Kennedy's speech at American University on June 10th, 1963, right before he was assassinated, or whether it was just a big joke — the New York Times carried all kinds of stories about it. Lewis Lapham and a couple of other people were accused. But it was a very titillating study, and what it said in the end, in no uncertain terms, was that what you just said was absolutely true: that we could not live in an empire — we could not live with coexistent empires — without all of them, but particularly us, having a threat like the Soviets present.
So whom would we construct? And the essence of that report — and I think this is what was so titillating and disturbing about it, and it was a bestseller for a while — their conclusion was: human society, it doesn't matter whether it's Indian, Chinese, Russian, or American, human society requires for political rule a threat that is judged by those who are ruled to be existential. And it went on to say the only way you could relieve that as the foundation of society was to find some force that was equivalent in terms of existential impact. And of course it hinted that for three millennia or so, we found one in religion — people believe that if you sinned, you're going to hell, in a broad sense. Nations believe that under their various guises of religion. So that was one way to do it. But the report concluded that that way was pretty morbid.
So the other thing you need is some kind of existential threat you can put in front of the people and tell them: this will kill you if you do not stay cohesive, if you do not build your society, if you do not have warriors. And what I said when I read that was: pick up the latest UN report on the climate and you have a quintessential potential example of a very lethal, existentially so, threat. But it's not military. It's not the traditional threat. So why don't we all come together — what was it they said in India? "Building resilience, innovation, cooperation, and sustainability" — and fight the climate crisis? Make that the cohesive element of world society that triumphs over man's bestiality, over man's desire for power.
People say it's not a big enough threat. It will be, ladies and gentlemen. It will be. Look at the temperatures in Europe this last year. Look at the newspapers and how they're reporting on those temperatures, especially in places like Spain where they were just off the charts. Give it another 20 years. Give it another 30 years. And if we haven't killed ourselves with the other threat — nuclear weapons — the climate is going to show us that it is ready to kill every man, woman, and child. We need to get together and prevent that. And there's a hundred years of being able to live in reasonable cooperative spirit. But will we do that? I don't know. I'm hoping a big element of this BRICS meeting comes out with that kind of conclusion. I do know that the Central Party School in China has come to that kind of conclusion and is advising the Politburo accordingly.
China, Russia, and the great power response to US decline
Glenn Diesen: It would be good to find some common purpose — saving this planet, or discovering new planets — something other than tribalism and continuous warfare. I just had one last question though. How do you see China and Russia playing into what is happening now — what looks like a failure in Iran? Because often we address these conflicts as if they are three different ones: the economic war with China, the proxy war against the Russians, and the more direct war with Iran. But as we've seen, the Chinese consider themselves to be a key target in this Iran war. Indeed, you hear from Washington — when they justified what they did to Venezuela, they referenced China: "China shouldn't have this oil." They make similar comments about Iran. So now the Chinese have banned their own companies from abiding by US sanctions. We also see Russia stepping up and giving more forceful support for Iran.
How do you think this will impact whether it ends in victory or failure? Will they essentially find common purpose against the US? Because this would be a disaster — you wouldn't want a multipolar system where the other great powers find common cause in balancing the US. How do you see this group of great powers behaving?
Lawrence Wilkerson: If we don't get out of the Rubio-Hegseth-Trump group leadership, what you just described is where we're headed. I think the councils in both China and Russia — India to a certain extent, Pakistan even, and Pakistan is getting it full in the face with regard to our inability to do diplomacy in any way, fashion, or form that makes sense — a lot of countries have already put themselves on the decision block, if you will, as to where to go with regard to this empire. All we're doing right now, and particularly in reinforcing their view of us with this insane war against Iran — and Hegseth makes it even more insane every day, as does General Caine with his comments about dolphins and such — if we don't get off this, it's not just the Strait of Hormuz and the global economy. It's the entire position of the empire in the world that is going to be, as you just insinuated, the world against us. And it's going to be a disaster for us — an absolute disaster.
And when Xi Jinping fulfills his promise to obliterate the Bretton Woods system, to take SWIFT and trash it in the garbage can, to say to OFAC, "You have 2.6 billion people under sanctions right now — you have no one under sanctions because we have just lifted them" — then we're toast. We're toast. It's just a matter of time before someone puts a stake in our heart.
I hope that doesn't happen. I hope we don't have to come to that pass. But in terms of history and many of the empires who have expired throughout that history, that is certainly a way for it to happen. And I come back again — the one difference in all of that 5,000 years, 3,000 of which we know quite a bit about: in all of that time, there was no technological means that Nebuchadnezzar, that Cyrus, that Genghis Khan had to destroy the world. There is now. And that worries the hell out of me. It should worry the hell out of every sentient human being.
The World War II generation and the loss of institutional memory
Glenn Diesen: That goes back to the initial problem you were discussing — that the World War II generation has passed or is passing away. There's no one left, as Powell told you, with some healthy respect for war, and so silly decisions start to be made. The problem is it's very hard — if it's true that each generation has to learn the horrors of war on their own — we don't have that luxury anymore with the weapons we have. One would hope that diplomacy would —
Lawrence Wilkerson: At the meeting the Eisenhower Media Network had out in Columbus, Iowa, a couple of weeks ago, one of the things we talked about in the margins was how — and General Lech, who's the head of the network right now, made this point vividly — Americans haven't seen bombs since 1865. They have not seen armies walking on their front lawn since 1865. So we have lost all comprehension of what war — like the war we're waging against Iran right now — is actually like.
Glenn Diesen: That's a great point. It's again another cost of hegemony, because often this ideal of security through dominance has a lot of problems built into it.
Lawrence Wilkerson: Yes. Quite a few. As both Kennan and Kissinger wanted to say to Powell at the end of their lives — or at least Kennan at the end of his life. He didn't live much longer after that visit.
Glenn Diesen: Well, I know you've got a busy day ahead of you. So thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me. I'm cautiously optimistic that the recent efforts by the US to try to break open the Strait of Hormuz and restart hostilities could have been a probing mission, and that the US is walking it back. But cautiously optimistic — I suspect I will be disappointed very soon.
Lawrence Wilkerson: There are some people here — one of whom I respect his views — who say that we're just waiting for Friday, and Israel and the US are going to resume the incredible bombing of Iran.
Glenn Diesen: Yeah, that seems more likely, unfortunately. Anyways, thanks again, Colonel Wilkerson.
Lawrence Wilkerson: Take care.