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00:04Colonel Wilkerson, thank you so much for doing this.
00:07I think most Americans understand this as a war between the United States in partnership with Israel against Iran.
00:12But there are, of course, a lot of other players acting on this drama, maybe in ways that we don't
00:18perceive.
00:19China would be the biggest and potentially most threatening to our interests.
00:24What is China's role in this conflict?
00:26It's a role, I think, forced upon them at the moment.
00:30Not that they can't handle it.
00:32They seem to be quite adaptable with regard to this very frenetic and indeterminate presidency and empire.
00:41But it's forced on them because they didn't think that this was going to happen in the way that it's
00:46happened, I think.
00:47That is, say, this being the war of choice with Iran.
00:52And some things are happening in the war that are probably disturbing to them.
00:56For example, the latest completed railroad in their five base road initiative railroads was probably the most strategic one in
01:06many ways.
01:07It brings China's Pacific ports all the way around on land and then intended was up the Persian Gulf along
01:18the old route that we used to resupply the Soviet Union during World War II.
01:22And eventually into the Caucasus and beyond.
01:27And now we're bombing it.
01:30Israel and we are bombing that railroad.
01:32Now, of course, railroads don't get bombed very well.
01:35You could drop all the ordnance in the world on them and they will get a bunch of people out
01:38there and repair them pretty quickly.
01:40But nonetheless, it shows that there's something more to this war of choice than perhaps even Trump knows about.
01:48I'm sure there are people in the Pentagon who know about it that are happening and the world is basically
01:55ignorant of it.
01:57Well, can you expand on that?
01:59There are things happening the president doesn't know about, but that some planners at the Pentagon doubtless do.
02:04What would those things be?
02:06Well, one of them is bombing that railroad.
02:08It just started recently with both Israel and the United States making it a principal target.
02:14And one of the things they're trying to do, of course, and this is a hugely geostrategic issue that most
02:21people don't.
02:23I'm not sure I understand it completely.
02:25But if you go back in time to earlier empires when the real power, cultural, technological, economic, military, and otherwise
02:33was in the East, you see one of the ways that those empires roughly defeated other empires by shifting maritime
02:44commerce to the land.
02:46Because maritime commerce was simply becoming too expensive for them.
02:50They put the Portuguese empire out of business, for example.
02:53And what they did was they shifted along one of their routes, primary routes, was this route China is now
02:59using to eventually go up the Persian Gulf and into Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia, the Caucasus along northward.
03:05And marrying up with the other three base road initiative railroads, which incidentally have been adumbrated seriously by the war
03:13in Ukraine.
03:13Does that ring a bell with anybody geostrategically?
03:17They're not emptying into Europe as they were intended to do.
03:21They've stopped pretty much.
03:22And what does that do?
03:24Well, basically, those railroads mean that instead of two and a half to three days and very expensive maritime shipping
03:32for China's Pacific port produce, it's 16 hours into the heart of Europe.
03:38That's a huge change, one that will drive a lot of commerce off the seas and will, to a certain
03:45extent, negate the Babel-Mandeb, the Strait of Hormuz, the Suez Canal, maybe even the Panama Canal.
03:50Now, although China's built that very, very luxurious, state-of-the-art port on the west coast of Peru, but
03:59that's looking toward the Pacific and looking toward that aspect of commerce.
04:04So don't expect a lot of that to be going through the canal even.
04:08These railroads are a game changer in terms of commerce.
04:12And think about this for a moment, in terms of one of the United States' supposedly great strengths, it's maritime
04:19power.
04:19Because we won't need to police the seas anymore.
04:23It'll all be going over land.
04:26I think a lot of Americans are at a great disadvantage in understanding this because they lack a sense of
04:32the mechanics of commerce.
04:34Products just appear.
04:35It's not clear how.
04:37And they lack a sense of geography.
04:39The idea that, you know, Iran, you could reach China from Iran over land.
04:43And people, I think, lack the perspective of how exactly that would happen.
04:49But clearly the Pentagon understands these questions, right?
04:53So they're bombing that railroad for a reason, which would be what, do you think?
04:58Well, to set it back and to tell China we know what they're doing and we don't like it.
05:04That route is such a serious threat in and of itself because of what you look at in terms of
05:15commerce during the period immediately prior to World War II,
05:20when Britain and the United States sneaked into Iran, and I mean that, we sneaked in there.
05:25They were Nazi sympathizers at the time.
05:28And we built a road and we flanked it with security.
05:31And at that time, the Iranians couldn't challenge it very much.
05:34And we shipped all manner of goods up that road into the belly of the Soviet Union.
05:39Stalingrad would have never held out without that supply route.
05:42Hundreds of thousands of trucks and wheel vehicles and other implements of war went up that route.
05:49It was second only to Murmansk.
05:51And in terms of strategic effect, it was more important than Murmansk.
05:56How many Americans even know that?
05:57How many Americans even knew that at the time?
06:00So it's a real game changer in terms of the United States.
06:05If it has to do anything about China viscerally, if it has to go to war with China, if it
06:11has to fight them,
06:13it's essential that we control these lines of communication.
06:17And we're not.
06:19So what's the Chinese perspective on this?
06:23As it has been ever since Deng Xiaoping started capitalism with Chinese characteristics.
06:29We do not want a war.
06:31We will beat you without a war.
06:34We are going to beat you technologically.
06:36We're going to beat you culturally.
06:37We're going to beat you militarily.
06:39We're going to beat you every dimension of power that you can imagine.
06:42And this latest edict by Xi Jinping, which the American press has completely missed as far as I can tell,
06:49he put out the latest in a series of edicts that have come from Chinese premiers from Deng Xiaoping on,
06:57who Xintao was a little bit of an aberration.
07:00That's one reason they got rid of him.
07:02But Xi Jinping has been right in there.
07:04And this latest one says, we are essentially triumphant in every element of global power but one.
07:12Now we're going to take on that one.
07:15And that one is financial control.
07:18And that means the renminbi being substituted for the dollar and everything from oil sales to you name it,
07:24it will become the transactional and reserve currency.
07:27Already is to a great extent for about 40% of the world.
07:32They're going to shoot for 60% to 70% of the world.
07:35They're going to drive the Bretton Woods system back where it came from.
07:38They're going to eliminate SWIFT.
07:40They're going to eliminate our ability to sanction countries.
07:43That's one of their major purposes.
07:45And that's an altruistic purpose for them.
07:48They think eliminating our ability to put sanctions on other countries in the world,
07:52through which since the turn of this century, we have killed 38 million people,
07:59mostly men, women, and children.
08:0138 million people.
08:02That rivals Stalin's purges, Mao Zedong's cultural revolution.
08:06It almost rivals Hitler in terms of the people that he killed directly in World War II.
08:13Not the whole war with 100 million casualties, but certainly the people he killed directly.
08:18So we're looking at the United States, and China looks at us this way,
08:23as having done that damage in the world with our financial system,
08:27which allowed us to put primary and secondary sanctions on 30% of the world.
08:33Go to OFAC and see how many countries we have under sanction.
08:37It's incredible.
08:38And these sanctions kill men, women, and children over time.
08:42We killed 500,000 in Saddam Hussein's Iraq when we had the sanctions on him.
08:48Madeleine Albright said when she was confronted with that statistic, so what?
08:52It was worth it.
08:54Madeleine want to join Hillary in the world of cretins?
08:57She did.
08:59This is a serious issue for China, and they want to stop it.
09:02It's also a moral stand in the United States.
09:04And just jumping ahead, it strikes me that once the U.S. government, OFAC,
09:09loses the ability to sanction other countries,
09:12it will have only the power to sanction American citizens for disobedience
09:15with programmable digital currency, and it will do something very similar to us.
09:19Bingo.
09:20Yeah.
09:21I mean, that does seem like, you know.
09:24A natural follow-on.
09:25Well, it does seem like the things you do to your opponents abroad
09:29will be done to your own citizens by the same government.
09:32Yes.
09:32I mean, that seems like a pretty consistent lesson of history.
09:35So that's why empires are bad, because they're bad for your own population.
09:38But I wonder, like, China, we see our competition with China
09:44in primarily military terms, I think.
09:46That's what we talk about in public.
09:47No one ever talks about the relative size of the economies.
09:49It's like, how many aircraft carriers do they have?
09:52But that's new.
09:53That's new.
09:54In my administration, my administration,
09:57in George W. Bush's administration,
10:00Colin Powell was given his head on only one major international issue,
10:05and that was China.
10:06And I was there when George W. Bush said its importance to Walmart
10:11meant Dick needed to stay away from it.
10:14And he meant that.
10:15He meant that we were in strategic economic competition with China.
10:20And he didn't mind that, because he thought we were better than they were at capitalism.
10:25And we should certainly hold our head up in the world in that regard.
10:29So he gave Colin Powell his head.
10:32And Powell was constantly, constantly thwarting the vice president in those terms,
10:38because Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney wanted a hot war or a cold war,
10:45they preferred the latter, with China.
10:48And Bush didn't want it.
10:50So he turned Colin loose on Taiwan in particular,
10:53and wound up at the end of his first term having to repudiate Chen Shui-bian publicly
10:59and tell him to shut up about his independence referendum
11:03and get off that kick, because he knew that was a red line with Beijing.
11:07So that's the last president I think we had who understood fundamentally
11:12this economic relationship and thought that we could wage it with them
11:17and at least tie them, if not win.
11:21The impulse to go to war with China, like an exchange of ballistic missiles, at least,
11:27where does that come from?
11:28Why would you want that?
11:30Why would Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld and so many others be advocating for that?
11:33I don't think they really wanted a hot war,
11:36but the thing that scared me and scared Colin Powell, too,
11:38was that they seemed to be willing to accept it if they couldn't get the Cold War.
11:43But what they really wanted was a replacement for the Cold War
11:46that would put the same pressures on us that the Cold War did,
11:49and that would be good in their sense.
11:54Cheney occasionally would reveal things like a statement,
11:59we don't want people to love us, we want people to fear us.
12:03And that was okay, but it didn't go over that big with, I think, a genuine Christian.
12:10I mean genuine Christian, a Sermon on the Mount type Christian that George W. Bush was.
12:16And so, in that sense, that pushed him over into Powell's camp.
12:22But they wanted that Cold War for sure because they thought,
12:26judging from their experience for their whole lives virtually,
12:31that was the only way to keep the empire in power and in check domestically and internationally,
12:38is to have that huge pressure on them all the time.
12:41And it was also the only way for Halliburton and Lockheed Martin and a host of others,
12:45whom Dick loved and Don loved, to make a lot of money.
12:49But what do you mean when you say a Cold War would be the only way to keep the empire
12:55together internally?
12:56What does that mean?
12:58You need an external enemy.
12:59If you've ever read, maybe you're too young, but there was an argument over whether it was a fanciful parody
13:09from somebody at the New Yorker
13:11or was it a serious study?
13:14It was called the Report from Iron Mountain.
13:17It was a pamphlet.
13:18Lyndon Johnson, when he said it, when he read it, told his staff to get rid of it, you know,
13:24ban it.
13:24It didn't happen.
13:26The New York Times picked up on it.
13:28It went viral.
13:30Two issues were put out.
13:32In that report, which many thought really was a response to Kennedy's June speech at American University,
13:44they said impossible.
13:45In that report, they went through all the Cold War parameters and such,
13:50and they said impossible.
13:51You can never have peace.
13:53The only way an empire like the United States of America can survive is to have a constant threat.
14:01It must have a threat in order to survive.
14:03They did say at the end that if you could dream up some other way of creating the same kind
14:10of pressure that that sort of threat did,
14:12and they even said religion used to do that.
14:15You know, the monarchs, the prince, the prelate, they used to threaten the people with God,
14:20and that pretty much kept them in line.
14:22You're going to burn in hell if you don't do what I tell you to do, that sort of thing.
14:26Torqmada looking at the Muslims and saying, repent, become a Christian, or I'll cut your throat.
14:34And that's what he did if they didn't repent.
14:36Many of them repented.
14:37You could have that, but they thought that was passe,
14:40that that kind of threat wouldn't do the sort of thing that an actual state threat would do.
14:46And so their conclusion was Kennedy was nuts.
14:50You needed that kind of external threat to keep a country as variegated, as diverse, and as ultimately powerful as
14:58America was in check.
15:00You needed that kind of threat.
15:02To keep your own citizens obedient?
15:05Yes, very much so.
15:06That's a part of it, too, to keep them towing the line and to keep them paying their taxes and
15:11everything that you do in a state that once was a republic and now is an empire.
15:18This is not at all related to why I asked you to have this conversation, but I can't resist.
15:24Who do you think did kill Kennedy?
15:27I'm fairly certain after a lot of study.
15:29I'm a hunter.
15:30I know weapons fairly well.
15:32I know that weapon that Lee Harvey Oswald wielded.
15:36No way it shot John Kennedy and killed him.
15:38I don't even think he could hit him from there.
15:40You know, the FBI guy, the expert, tried with that very weapon three times to simulate the Zapruder film intervals
15:50and get that many rounds off, even get them off, not just accurately, and he couldn't do it.
15:56I think it was a combination of CIA, mafia, and probably Pentagon.
16:02And I don't mean organizationally, but I mean dissenters in all three of those groups.
16:09And the motive would be what?
16:12They thought, especially with what he had done with regard to Cuba in October of 62, and then the speech
16:20in June 10th, I think, of 1963 at American University, that he was serious.
16:27He was serious, and his brother was serious with regard to the mafia and policing it up.
16:33But Kennedy himself, the president, was serious about seeking first rapprochement with the Soviet Union.
16:40Cuba had really, and Berlin, too.
16:42Berlin was a more serious crisis in the hot summer of 61 than Cuba was.
16:47Cuba was 13 days packed into, you know, dynamism and the UN and everything else.
16:53And we thought it was serious.
16:54Well, Berlin was strategic for the Russians.
16:57If the GDR disappeared, and it was disappearing at about 10,000 citizens a week, think of that for a
17:04minute.
17:04We helped them build the wall.
17:06We actually helped them build that wall.
17:08When I say helped, I mean our tanks, our machine guns oversaw the parties building the wall to prevent anyone
17:15from interfering with them.
17:16We let them build the wall because that was the only way to stanch that flow out of the GDR,
17:23East Germany.
17:24And that was strategic for the Russians.
17:26So that was a much more serious crisis.
17:29But he'd gone through both of those.
17:30And he knew how close we'd come to an exchange of nuclear weapons.
17:34And he wanted an end to that.
17:36And they thought this was ephemeral wishes and even dangerous wishes.
17:41They thought that Soviets would pull a trick on us, you know, all the things you usually throw out there
17:46when you don't trust your enemy.
17:48And they were willing to take him out in order to prevent that from happening.
17:52And they were mad at him for the Bay of Pigs.
17:55Where do you think Jack Ruby came from?
17:58They found him somewhere.
17:59I was at Baylor University at that time.
18:02And I remember when the announcement was made, I was absolutely stunned.
18:07Me and my roommate could barely talk for about a half an hour.
18:11The president's just been shot not too far from us.
18:13We were in wake up.
18:15And then we were on the TV.
18:17And we watched this guy walk up to Ruby and shoot him right there.
18:22And at that moment, Bob and I said to ourselves, this stinks.
18:27This really stinks.
18:29Yeah.
18:29When the lone gunman kills the lone gunman, they're probably not lone gunman.
18:33You got it.
18:34You think about Charlie Kirk, for example, and what's happening right now with that assassination, which I can't even tell
18:40you what's happening.
18:40I don't even know the FBI has been so unforthcoming.
18:43But I know.
18:44I told you I'm a weapons guy.
18:47That did not happen the way they're saying it happened.
18:50And I doubt very seriously if that guy stuck a 30-06 down his pants leg and walked away.
18:56It's, yeah.
18:57I mean, I think it's pretty clear that the investigation into that has not been as full as Charlie's family
19:03and the rest of us deserve.
19:05I mean, there's no question about that.
19:06And I'm sorry to get you sidetracked, but you're obviously really knowledgeable.
19:10And I hope you'll come back, by the way, at some point.
19:12But back to China.
19:14So the United States is, and with Israel, blowing up Chinese-built infrastructure.
19:21So that seems like a big step.
19:23And it seems like in so doing, you could risk Chinese further participation in this conflict.
19:29Are we risking that?
19:31I think we are.
19:32We're not at the cusp yet, I don't think.
19:35I'm waiting to see just exactly how we deal with all the Chinese shipping.
19:41That would be, I think, a deal breaker and perhaps get China more infuriated and maybe even doing more than
19:48she's already doing.
19:50But I know, too, I've been in the Central Party school, one of the few Americans who had.
19:54I've been in China since 1984 and almost every other year or so.
20:01And I've done simulations in Beijing with the Chinese.
20:06In fact, I did one in 2009 that was called, are you ready for this, the oil disruption exercise.
20:13No way.
20:14We had everybody there.
20:16We had Marad.
20:17We had AIG.
20:18We had Lloyd's of London.
20:19We had all the countries involved.
20:21And we took down Rastanora at that time, about 8 million barrels per day, production capacity.
20:26And West Exeter Intermediate, Brent Crude, went to $200 almost overnight.
20:31Shippers wouldn't ship.
20:32Insurers wouldn't insure.
20:34And, of course, everyone in the room, including the Chinese, this was very instructive, but this was 2009,
20:41agreed to allow the United States Navy and the Group of Five, led by Singapore, with their little Navy, about
20:50one ship per country,
20:51police the Strait of Malacca, because that's where we were threatening another act,
20:56and let the United States Navy almost exclusively clear the Strait of Hormuz and fix the situation at Rastanora.
21:04And all it took at that time, because we were much bigger, we put ships in there.
21:09We put an aircraft carrier, not too much different from Lincoln right now.
21:14And that calmed things down, and people began to realize that if there were further problems,
21:20because this was a terrorist attack on Rastanora that we postulated,
21:23if things were to get out of hand again, the United States Navy was there, and other Allied navies were
21:31there, too.
21:31So it calmed down, and oil went down again.
21:34But very, very dicey moment.
21:37It was so dicey on the game floor, Tucker.
21:39I've never seen this before, and I've done hundreds of simulations.
21:43The Chinese actually, when the move to shift oil reserves around the world to take care of this problem
21:50so there wouldn't be a real global depression developed,
21:54had to go back to their Ministry of Foreign Affairs and consult
21:57before they could come back to the game floor and make a decision.
22:02Chaz Freeman, Ambassador Chaz Freeman, was there with us.
22:06And at breakfast the next day, they didn't know Chaz was fluent in Mandarin.
22:10I couldn't believe that, but they didn't.
22:12Their intelligence had failed them on that.
22:14So we're at breakfast, and I said, Chaz, what was said?
22:18And he told me what was said.
22:20It was interesting.
22:21I mean, they were actually seriously worried about making a decision that took oil at that moment away from China
22:29and, say, gave it to Korea or gave it to some other country like Japan that needed it more desperately
22:35than they did,
22:36because that's what we did for a time.
22:38We divided the oil flows up around the world so they'd be more economic and more helpful to countries that
22:44were being hurt.
22:46That was the last time I saw a real camaraderie between, I think that's a fair term to use, too,
22:53between Chinese diplomats, Chinese, you know, we knew that probably 10% of the Chinese delegation was Intel.
23:01Ours was, too.
23:03But that was the last time I saw comedy, and I saw willingness to work together in a significant way.
23:12And that was a dicey situation, very dicey on the game floor.
23:17How does it get reopened now, do you think?
23:20I think it's going to have to be the force of the reality of what we're doing to the globe.
23:27I'm looking very closely at economic analyses that tell me by the end of June,
23:32if we're not back to reasonable shipping again, we'll be certainly in recession, global recession.
23:39And if we go to the end of August, we might be in global depression.
23:44And Putin and Trump can say over and over again that we have plenty of LNG and plenty of oil
23:51and everything.
23:51It doesn't matter.
23:52However, you're not going to survive in that kind of autarkic sense.
23:56Economically, you're going to crash, too.
23:59So we would be looking, I think, at not only that coming to impact us,
24:05and at the same time, our incredible debt,
24:10coupled with the fact that Xi Jinping would probably accelerate the replacement of the dollar with renminbi,
24:16because there would be a moment to do it.
24:20So at that point, I mean, you can see chaos, right?
24:25I mean, economic.
24:26Yes.
24:26Right.
24:27The lengths the Roosevelt administration went to keep the country stable, including authoritarian lengths.
24:33I mean, that was their single-minded obsession.
24:35Like, depression means people get restive and scary.
24:38I just read a history of the – I didn't even know it existed.
24:43And the historian lives in a false church.
24:45He's an old dude.
24:45He gave me a copy of it.
24:47I almost dropped it.
24:49It's so thick.
24:49It's called Recall the Civilian Conservation Corps.
24:53It's a wonderful book.
24:55It's just full of pictures.
24:56But you see what Roosevelt had to do, and the fact that ultimately he had to order the army in
25:04to do that.
25:05Principally, the army became the ingredient of the CCC that made it work.
25:09And who ran it?
25:10Everyone forgets who ran the CCC.
25:12Yes.
25:13MacArthur.
25:14Yep.
25:15Yep.
25:15But MacArthur was an interesting character in Roosevelt's administration.
25:22More than once, FDR said things that made anyone around him realize he knew how dangerous Doug MacArthur was in
25:31every sense of the term.
25:33And after the bonus marchers and MacArthur's attempt to kill them, Eisenhower was his aide at that time.
25:42And you see Eisenhower in some of the pictures in this book, as a matter of fact.
25:46I think FDR had a real weather eye for MacArthur, but he made a huge mistake, and he made it
25:53because he was frightened of him.
25:54He should never have divided command in the Pacific.
25:58It cost 100,000 American casualties between Nimitz and MacArthur.
26:03Put MacArthur in charge if you've got to do that.
26:06But no, Stark and King wouldn't let him.
26:09So he had to compensate Stark and King and the Navy and give them the Central Pacific, MacArthur the Southwest
26:16Pacific.
26:16We had a bloody strategy in the center, a bloody strategy.
26:21We didn't have to take half of those islands.
26:23MacArthur showed us what to do.
26:25You just bypass them and let them wither.
26:27Exactly.
26:28You don't attack them, but we attacked them in the Central Pacific.
26:34What do you think Israel will do, and will have to do, if come June or July or August, when
26:43the economic effects become impossible to ignore, dangerous to everybody, regimes around the world teeter and fall in the face
26:51of recession and depression?
26:52And the United States says, you know, we're just, we're out.
26:55That leaves the Iranian regime really in charge and more powerful than it was on, you know, February 27th.
27:04Can Israel live with that?
27:06I think not.
27:07And you probably know what I think about the Jewish state of Israel.
27:12I don't think it has a long riddle of life.
27:14I don't think it can survive in the Levant because the original conception was a safe haven, and it's anything
27:20but a safe haven.
27:21And that's been demonstrated markedly to all of its Jewish citizens, many of whom have left.
27:27And probably more would have left if Netanyahu would have left them.
27:31So I think it can survive as a democracy, a true democracy, that is to say, Palestinian, Arabs, Christians, everyone
27:39living there, and Jews living there with them.
27:42And I don't buy the power of the womb bit.
27:44But I don't think that would be so overwhelmingly quick that you couldn't adjust the democracy to be a real
27:51democracy, even if the Jewish citizens of it suddenly became a minority.
27:57Or I don't think it would be suddenly.
27:58As I said, I think it would be over time.
28:00But they don't want to do that.
28:02So I think they're sealing their own demise as a state at all in the Levant, democratic or otherwise.
28:10And so you're right.
28:12It's a dangerous situation.
28:13And what we're doing in Lebanon right now is just unconscionable.
28:16West Bank is bad enough, but Lebanon, we're killing 200 or 300 civilians about every 48 or 96 hours.
28:23And they're just civilians.
28:25We're bombing dry cleaners.
28:27We're bombing bars.
28:28We're bombing restaurants.
28:29We're bombing hotels.
28:31We, I say, I always say we because Israel couldn't do it without us.
28:37And we built the most expensive, largest embassy in the world.
28:41Where did we build it?
28:42We built it in Beirut.
28:43Why did we do that?
28:44Well, it didn't for diplomacy.
28:46We built it there because it's a haven for Mossad, MI6, and CIA.
28:51And because we plan on, in that center piece in the eastern Mediterranean, mounting our guns against China and Russia,
29:00too, if we have to.
29:02But we don't have any respect for Lebanon.
29:04Lebanon could disappear tomorrow morning.
29:06Our embassy would still be there, fortified to the hill, of course.
29:10We just don't care anymore.
29:12And we're lashed up with the wrong people in Lebanon.
29:15We always have been, really.
29:18Who are the right people in Lebanon?
29:19The right people are the people that Hassan Nasrallah was trying to introduce to the political situation, cease his militaristic
29:29angle, and become the politician in Lebanon who would finally, after years and years, consolidate the government and have a
29:37government that the majority of Lebanese could support.
29:39And Netanyahu, what did Netanyahu, of course, that's what he kills the people he needs.
29:45So, I mean, what is Israel's goal in Lebanon?
29:50Israelis say, I don't know if it's true, but that the IDF is just stretched to breaking, can't possibly occupy
29:58southern Lebanon, much less, you know, Beirut all the way down.
30:02So, like, what is the point of this?
30:05I've always thought that Israel's real policies, and I've been associated with this for 50 years, with respect to Lebanon,
30:15was demolishing periodically its economic capacity.
30:21Remember, Lebanon way back there was the pearl of the eastern Mediterranean.
30:27Oh, yes.
30:27It's a place where everybody wanted to go.
30:29Beirut was beautiful.
30:31And Israel then came along.
30:34And Israel became, on our dollar, to a certain extent, a very capitalistic, predatory capitalistic, and successful, in that regard,
30:44economy, and wanted to stay that way, and even wanted to grow and grow and bring in other people to
30:50that economy, under the Jewish writ, of course.
30:53But nonetheless, come in, Abraham Accords being one latest example.
31:01And so, they had to take Lebanon down a peg every time.
31:04If you go back and examine those bombing campaigns, even the 82 invasion, when they were really after PLO and
31:10Arafat, they bombed the bejesus out of the economic structure of Lebanon.
31:15And at the time, we military officers were saying, why are they doing that?
31:18That's just making them hate them.
31:20Why are they doing that?
31:21They don't need to do that.
31:22And then, you know, stupid us, we figured it out after about two or three iterations.
31:26They're bombing the hell out of their economic might.
31:29So they can't, you know, 10 years to get back up again.
31:32Then they'd bomb them again.
31:36That's very, very dark.
31:38I mean, and we paid for it.
31:40So what do you think, I mean, President Trump didn't explain really why he began this war, other than to
31:49say Iran can't have a nuke, which is not an adequate explanation.
31:53What do you think the real motive was in starting a war with Iran?
31:58I think that New York Times piece, as much as I hate to praise the great lady these days, was
32:06probably fairly accurate.
32:08I think most of his advisors, the principal ones anyway, were saying no or, you know, arguing negatively.
32:17And Netanyahu persuaded him to do it.
32:19Now, why did he listen to Netanyahu when everyone else, the ants, probably everyone but Hegseth, was at least somewhat
32:29opposed, if not strongly opposed, which I'm told with some reliable information that Cain was, the chairman of the Joint
32:37Chiefs of Staff, and others in the military.
32:42It was persuasive because Netanyahu said it, and I can't tell you whether it was Miriam Adelson's millions or Trump's,
32:51I don't think he's got a real high regard for Bibi Netanyahu in terms of loving him.
32:57But something there told him, indicated to him that he needed to go against all of his advisors and follow
33:04Netanyahu's recommended course of action, which, of course, I think is disastrous.
33:09And yet he did.
33:12Does America's relationship with Israel change after this is over?
33:18I don't see how it can remain the same with a new president who's got to pick up on what's
33:25happening with the American people, not least of which caused by Charlie Kirk.
33:31What's happening with the American people, even in the core of MAGA, under 40 in particular, and under 20 on
33:41college campuses and things like that, generally, is don't like Israel, period.
33:47Even, I could use a stronger word than don't like.
33:52Why do you connect that to Charlie Kirk?
33:56Because I think he was changing his mind, and it was obvious he was changing his mind about being so
34:03attached to Israel, both in terms of U.S. security and in terms of just the American people.
34:09I think he was beginning to realize that it was poisonous, and that was dangerous.
34:15I don't, for a minute, think that we might not find out down the road something about his assassination that
34:22resembles Kennedy's and Martin Luther King's and others who've been shot in our country.
34:28Which is, you know, for people overseas sometimes, whom I talk to infrequently now, but used to talk to a
34:36lot, like in France and England and Germany, they don't understand why we kill people at the rate we kill
34:43people, you know.
34:44And as an American, I say, wait a minute, wait a minute.
34:46And they'll tick them off, you know, all the way back to Roosevelt becoming president, you know, because they thought
34:52they got rid of him as vice president.
34:54And all of a sudden, McKinley's killed, they'll tick those things off all the way back to Lincoln, and they'll
35:00say, you're a pretty violent country.
35:01You assassinate people quite frequently.
35:04So it's, I've had a very similar experience in every country I've ever been to other than this one.
35:13They don't buy it.
35:15But I mean, but you think that's correct.
35:18It's pretty obvious that lone gunmen seem to kill people who are a challenge to entrench power.
35:25And maybe that's not an accident.
35:26Yes.
35:27Yes.
35:27More often than not, I think it's not an accident.
35:30I just, if you go back and you look at any of the empires of old, but particularly the Eastern
35:38and Western Roman Empire,
35:40the Eastern figured it out by the time it came to the Byzantine Empire, and Constantinople turned around on the
35:49then-ruling entity's adaptation of Christianity and mellowed out a little bit.
35:58That famous period there probably extended their life by years, if not decades and generations.
36:06If you look at those people at the head of those groups, whether it's like Mary Beard's new book, The
36:13Twelve Caesars,
36:14Suetonius' Twelve Caesars, between Julius crossing the Rubicon and walking decidedly into assassination,
36:22even though he was warned multiple times, should have known, walks in the Senate, he's assassinated,
36:28and then Octavian and the Civil War start, and then Octavian becomes Augustus and consolidates the empire,
36:35and the Roman Republic is gone, gone, totally gone.
36:38And you look at the period that she writes about, those Twelve Caesars, roughly between Julius Caesar and Suetonius,
36:46and you see the depravity.
36:48You see Epstein all through it, you know?
36:50And you understand what that does to you.
36:54Well, since 1945, arguably, with the Cold War as a check on us, and then since the end of the
37:01Cold War,
37:01with no check whatsoever, we have turned into that version of the Western Roman Empire.
37:09It's distressing to see it.
37:10Can I ask you a bigger question?
37:12I remember when I was much younger and I would run into guys, you know, your age who served at,
37:18you know,
37:18the highest levels of government in Washington, and they were always much more open to the existence of conspiracies.
37:27And I just wonder if, you know, we deride conspiracy theories,
37:31but the people who seem to believe in them the most are also the most knowledgeable.
37:36Have you noticed that?
37:38I have noticed that, yes.
37:40And the people who could talk about them most explicitly and carefully in chambers, as it were.
37:46Yes.
37:47They're those people.
37:49That's so interesting.
37:50So when you were, I don't know, 30, you probably didn't believe that that stuff was real, I assume.
37:58I did not.
37:59I had great faith in my country, great faith in people like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson
38:06and a host of others.
38:07I knew they were flawed, but I had great faith in their building power and in their faith in what
38:14they built.
38:15I can't say that anymore.
38:17I can't say that anymore.
38:19And I can even, particularly with Jefferson, I can even, Powell used to quote him to me all the time
38:24because he loved Jefferson's inaugural addresses.
38:27He would pick out pieces and like pieces like, I know I shall leave this office much more chagrined than
38:36I entered it.
38:37You know, that sort of thing.
38:38Yes.
38:39I know I won't survive.
38:40My reputation won't survive, which is one reason why Powell decided in 1995 not to run for president.
38:47Um, he essentially said, I understand what Jefferson meant and I'm not willing to suffer it.
38:53Um, but anyway, it, it, it's been, you know, I'm 81 now and I got to say in the years
39:00since I entered in 1993, arguably, or even 89 when I was with him, when he was chairman, the highest
39:08realms of American power and was exposed to that power.
39:11I have really become, uh, a cynic about our ability even to survive much longer in a way that, uh,
39:20is anything like our past.
39:24What, what do you think the future holds like 10 years out?
39:27What will we be looking at?
39:29I'm really worried about AI.
39:31I'm really worried about it.
39:33I don't know if you saw that piece the other day by that gentleman.
39:35I forget his name now from Cambridge, I believe who sold some of his AI development.
39:40He's sort of the Oppenheimer of the AI movement to Google.
39:44And he said he was on his bench outside his lab or something.
39:48And all of a sudden his cell phone rang and it was his AI.
39:52And it was checking up on him and he, he had a, you know, an epiphany right there on the
39:57bench.
39:58This is dangerous what we're doing.
40:03Do you, do you have a clear picture of what some of the effects might be?
40:07Well, I'm seeing the effects already on young people whom I stay in contact with, uh, at GW and, uh,
40:15GW and, uh, William & Mary.
40:18I probably had roughly 600 students over the 16 years I taught.
40:22And they, a lot of them stay in contact with me.
40:26One of them was the EA to Mark Kearney, and when Mark ran and was elected in Canada, he got
40:34shifted to another guy by Mark.
40:37And I said, well, who are you working for now?
40:39And he said, Mike Bloomberg.
40:41So I have students all over the place, uh, and they stay in touch with me and they reflect the
40:48same angst I have, but in a much more visceral way, because it's their future.
40:53It's their life.
40:55Um, and they're extremely worried about AI.
40:59Because they think it will eliminate their jobs or eliminate human autonomy.
41:04That's part of it.
41:05But the latter is the bigger part of it.
41:07And there's also a component of it that is, there's no way we're going to survive with that in our
41:13midst.
41:16Because?
41:17Not as humans.
41:18Your human autonomy business is probably as good a description of it as anything else.
41:23But there are a couple of them who think we're going to wind up in a huge conflict between AI
41:31-generated, AI-led, AI-whatevered robots and ourselves.
41:37And, you know, I, I, I'm, I'm one who has always read and watched science fiction because more often than
41:46not, there's something in that H.G.
41:49Wells piece or that Lucas piece or whatever Star Trek, pick your, pick your video adaptation that's true, that's going
41:59to come about.
42:00Um, and I see, and I think they see too, because they're much more visual, video-oriented generation than I
42:08was.
42:08I was mostly the written word-oriented generation.
42:12Um, they see that too.
42:14They see some of the science fiction that's been most, uh, dire, most dour, uh, coming about.
42:23Is there any way to stop it?
42:26Um, that's the question of the hour, I think, with regard to it and robotics, too.
42:31Um, are we going to be able to manage it?
42:34Um, there was a gentleman not too, too long ago who made a statement.
42:39I think he was a NASA scientist.
42:41We have been given incredible powers.
42:44We have been given incredible riches.
42:47And he was referring to the United States.
42:49We have also been given wisdom.
42:52Um, the question in the future is going to be, will we use it or will we be overcome?
42:59I think that's a huge question.
43:02Um, and I don't, I don't count myself in the camp of those who think it's impossible to eliminate the
43:09human race.
43:09It is not impossible.
43:12Nuclear weapons, the newest technology in the world, no empire in all of 5,000 years of empires has ever
43:19possessed.
43:20The technological means to destroy itself and others around it.
43:26None, not a single one.
43:28And to think that human nature will allow us to get through a demise of empire without ultimately trying that
43:37method to save it, I think is wishful thinking.
43:43And we're, we're at that point right now because we're looking at the end of the American empire, looking at
43:49an actual threat to Israel.
43:52I mean, I mean, you just described it.
43:53There's an actual threat for the first time in a long time.
43:57The greatest threat, right?
43:58And that's a nuclear armed power.
44:00And we're, we're at that point, as you, as you well know, without a single treaty.
44:06They're all gone now.
44:07Every single one from the ABM treaty all the way to Newstart, gone.
44:11No treaties.
44:14So, do you think that this administration can navigate a moment this fraught without either using or allowing its partner
44:25in this to use nuclear weapons?
44:27I'm not given confidence by a man who argues with the Pope and dresses up as Jesus Christ for an
44:35ad.
44:35I mean, I know he probably didn't do that intentionally, but he allowed it to happen.
44:39And this argument with Leo is just absurd.
44:44What do you, what do you, how would you interpret that?
44:49Well, I think he's backing up from it a bit.
44:52I wish he'd back up a little more abruptly and a little more apologetically, but it's done.
44:58The damage is done.
44:59And done at a moment when Leo, the first Augustinian, is headed for Africa to go to Augustus' place and
45:08sort of celebrate.
45:09I mean, it just didn't make, it was bad timing and it was bad juju all around to do that.
45:16And I know from my own experience, and it's, as I said, seven decades of sentient experience anyway, that we've
45:26had an effort in this country for a long, long time, very sotovoki, if you will, under the table, to
45:33create an American Catholic church and to have our own Pope.
45:36And I remember when Leo's rise was first announced, when his selection was announced, I said, ooh, that'll put a
45:45stop to that because an American is now the Pope in Rome.
45:49But I didn't think long enough.
45:51That's not what they want.
45:53They want an American Pope and they want an American Catholic church.
45:57Now, right now, I know it's a minority of Catholics, but it is a powerful minority of Catholics.
46:03And they've been around for at least 100 years, not very successfully around, but nonetheless, they've pursued that for a
46:11long time.
46:13Why would people, and pardon my ignorance as a birthright Protestant, I wasn't even aware of any of this.
46:18Why would people want an American Catholic church?
46:21Then they wouldn't have to take any instructions at all from Rome.
46:25None at all.
46:26Rome would just be out there.
46:29There wouldn't be any real power of the Pope in Rome.
46:34And I suspect doctrinally they'd try to divorce that Pope from the idea of being from God.
46:43Huh.
46:44Is there like an ideological motivation or theological motivation?
46:47I think it's all power.
46:49I do.
46:50I really do.
46:50I think people who have come out of great awakenings, and I, by the way, think this is our fault.
46:56Fourth one, most historians won't go with me yet, but I bet you in 10 or 20 years they will
47:02look back on this period and they will call it a great awakening.
47:05Just like they did the one that produced prohibition and an amendment to the Constitution to prohibit alcohol and then
47:12an amendment to rescind it.
47:13Very damaging periods in our history, whether it was burning witches or prohibition, that prohibition really generated the momentum for
47:24organized crime.
47:26Al Capone was the first organized criminal, if you will.
47:31So they're dangerous periods, and if we get out of this one without any more danger, I mean, Hexeth is
47:38holding – I got it yesterday.
47:40I couldn't believe it.
47:42I just couldn't believe that this had developed.
47:45OSW protocol prayer services have been going on every week for 13 months.
47:51And always with the same line, general officers and admirals will have reserve seats in the front rows.
48:00All else will sit elsewhere.
48:03No one is allowed to come in but those invited.
48:06It's all on the invitation.
48:08This is not very American.
48:11This is uncommonly un-American, really.
48:14But the mixed religion and the military, the way Hexeth is doing it, it's very dangerous.
48:20And he's also preacher packing, we used to say in South Carolina, putting the rotten strawberries on the bottom and
48:28the fresh strawberries on the top, the ranks.
48:31He's making sure very carefully that he's eliminating flag and admiral officers who are or might be opposed to the
48:40military becoming a defender of Christianity as the national religion.
48:46And he's doing the lower ranks, too.
48:48And he's doing them by doing such things as exceeding Congress's limits on mental Category 4 recruits.
48:57Think McNamara's 100,000, if you will.
48:59They can't even read their name on a guard roster.
49:02They usually come from the mountains of West Virginia or from the interior of Oklahoma or my state of South
49:08Carolina or Alabama.
49:09So I hate to blame those states, but nonetheless, they produce these people at an alarming rate.
49:15And he's getting them in at the tune.
49:18Congress put a 4% cap on it.
49:21Well, he got 11% the last time around.
49:23The inspector general, brave man, he went over and told the Congress.
49:28And what Hexneth told the Congress when they called him over to testify was, well, we created a school within
49:37the Army.
49:38This is the Army.
49:39And that school taught them how to pass the entrance exam.
49:44You don't know what they did.
49:46They taught the test.
49:47And so then they gave them the test again.
49:49And all of a sudden, they leapt up into mental Category 4.
49:53And 7% of them did that, so we didn't exceed your cap.
49:57We kept your cap, 4%.
50:00That's just a dog and pony show.
50:02They're taking people in who are, what shall I say?
50:08Well, a good example of it that's very, very illustrative is the 50 or 60 that go out of basic
50:17training into the river there at Fort Jackson and get baptized in the name of Jesus Christ.
50:23And are told by the chaplain when they rise from the water that they are soldiers for Christ.
50:29What Hexneth wants is even the oath changed from to the Constitution.
50:35The oath should be to Jesus Christ.
50:38But, I mean, the Gospels don't provide any basis for that theology at all.
50:46I mean, that's not, the Sermon on the Mount would preclude, like, a lot of things the U.S. military
50:53are doing right now in Iran.
50:54So I guess my concern would be the corruption of the Gospels by this.
51:00Absolutely.
51:01And talk about corruption, Franklin Graham in the center courtyard of the Pentagon, where I've been a number of times
51:09for ceremonies with old secretaries of defense, once escorted McNamara in there.
51:15Had a good talk with him about Vietnam as I escorted him.
51:18And he was very contrite.
51:20He was actually contrite as we walked in.
51:23I was a lieutenant colonel at the time.
51:24Now, Billy Graham, or Franklin Graham, Billy Graham's son, of course, and Billy Graham must be rolling in his grave
51:30because I knew him.
51:32He was not this way.
51:33Franklin Graham gave a sermon for Hexneth on those grounds that would make Ted Cruz happy.
51:43He resurrected all the stuff Cruz was talking about in an interview with you, I believe, from Genesis, and talked
51:51about how you had to sometimes kill everything in sight, men, women, children, and so forth, in the center courtyard
51:59of the Pentagon.
52:02Well, that's like blasphemy, it seems to me.
52:05It is to me, too.
52:06I mean, I'm a Christian, but I'm not that kind of Christian.
52:10Yeah, well, I don't think there is that kind of Christian, is my view.
52:14What an amazing, unexpected conversation.
52:17I'm sorry to take you on all these different tangents.
52:20I hope you will come back because the scope of your thinking and the grasp of history that you have
52:26is amazing.
52:27So I appreciate it.
52:28Colonel Wilkinson, thank you very much.
52:30Well, I appreciate the opportunity, and I must say I'm impressed with yours, too.
52:34Well, not really, but I'm interested.
52:37I think it matters.
52:38No, I've watched a lot of your interviews, and I'm impressed with what I, particularly when you do things like
52:46what you did with Ted Cruz.
52:47Well, that was easy.
52:49Just ask dumb questions.
52:51The very idea that I consult Genesis for national security decision-making just drove me back against the wall.
52:57I couldn't believe that.
52:59Especially when he didn't know it was in Genesis.
53:01Yeah.
53:04It's unbelievable.
53:05Anyway, thank you very much.
53:07Great to talk to you.
53:08Take care.
53:10Take care.
53:11Take care.
53:12Take care.
53:13Take care.
53:13Take care.
53:14Take care.
53:14Take care.