The Duran Podcast
Reinforcing Failure in Israel & Ukraine - Col Lawrence Wilkerson, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen
Hi everyone, I'm joined today by Alek Sander Mercurs and Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who among other roles a Colonel Wilkerson was the Chief of Staff under US Secretary of State Colin Powell during the invasion of Iraq, which I believe at least intensified some of the concern he had about the US wars, which have exhausted the US from within, caused growing concerns among allies and also incentivized collective balancing by US adversaries and even created some adversaries, I guess. I'm not sure if I framed that correctly Colonel Horr. That's fairly accurate. I noticed the other day that someone finally actually, I don't remember who it was, but they actually went to OFAC as I did and discovered that we do indeed have one-third of the world plots under sanctions of some sort. I actually published it. Well, yes, we really wanted to discuss with you today how the situation in terms of a war especially is going from bad to worse, and I thought that perhaps we could start a discussion today with Israel before moving in and why the Middle East, because Israel, well, at least from my perspective, seems to be in very, very deep trouble. Not only is its military becoming exhausted and politically divided domestically, but it's stuck in the Gaza war. Another front obviously has been opened against Hezbollah in Lebanon, which is also according to disaster. Now, they continue the attacks on Iran, at least two of them now, has resulted in the pending retaliation. So it seems as if it's becoming very difficult to avoid a larger war in the Middle East, and as not just Israel, but with the West, whenever in a whole, it pears that the solution is always to keep on digging, and there's no real way out of this, it seems to me, besides ending the genocide and agree to political settlement with the Palestinians. Alternatively, one can escalate and pull in the Americans, and it seems that the predictable choice is the latter, in which Israel is pulling in America, and America seems, at least seemingly, ready to join the fight, which I would assume would also predictably be a disaster. So I'm not sure if I'm missing something here, Colonel, or someone with experience from the top of Washington military and political circles. What is the plan of the US? What is it getting itself involved in, and also, I guess, why? What can be achieved there? First of all, Beebe's trip here was an embarrassment for every American. There's no question about that. And his appearance before the Congress, even though slightly less than 50% of the members refused to come, and the vice president refused to officiate, was everything he wanted it to be. I just checked the polls this morning, and he is stabilized in coming back up again, and the principal reason, according to the people within my ask the question, it's his visit to the US. And of course, that was the primary reason of his coming to the US. He knew he had the US Congress in the palm of his hand, and he knew he had the White House to a certain extent in the palm of his hand. But he wanted that bump in the polls back in Israel because he was looking pretty low. He was looking pretty bad. I mean, you know, he's got the potential for civil war on his hands, and so he definitely needs the United States firmly on his side, because that will be as much a deterrent if anything can deter it to any possible outbreak as anything else. The most powerful thing, Beebe Reels, is the United States of America, and he is fully cognitive of that. Now he set himself up, and I think this was planned all along, and I've no doubt in my mind. I wasn't there, of course. Let me say that forcefully. But I've no doubt in my mind that with Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley and other more Bellicose members of the United States Senate, and that's a kind phrase, he got assurances that he could do all of this. And the most important thing I think to him right now is to widen the war. And he's got several fronts on which to do that. He now has conducted a series of sham operations and real operations, killing people and getting people killed, like the Syrian citizens in the Golanites, and blaming it on Hezbollah, which clearly now we know was not Hezbollah. But he's used that series of actions, if you will, to do precisely what he's wanted to do all along. But we had restrained him from doing, in some regards, mostly the most prominent restraint we put on him was the one April, 14 April, 20 April, I think it was episode with Iran that was all orchestrated to make sure that it didn't get out of hand, and agreed with the authorities in Tehran that it wouldn't get out of hand. Now we're beyond that, we're well beyond that, and that's where Bibi wanted us. He did not like the fact that we kept him from responding on the 20th of April, as I recall, to that Iranian really massive display of what they could do, but got shot down by the Saudis, by the Emiratis, by the French, by the British, by us, by the Egyptians, and the Israelis. He failed there, and his repost was an indication of that. He only put out an S-300 missile site radar, almost inconsequential. But now he's big time, he's big time. He has got Hezbollah now, Nazarallah and Hezbollah, to Lebanon's regret. So I agree that they're changing their purpose. Their purpose was simply to aid their oppressed Gazaan friends in the Gaza Strip, and to a certain extent in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. But that was a purpose that required careful orchestration of exchange of fire no longer. What Israel has done now, majorly, by the sham operation and the Golan, and by the people they've killed in Lebanon proper, in Beirut proper, they've got Hezbollah on the warpath. It remains to be seen what Hezbollah is going to do, but I think it's going to be dramatically different from what it's done in the past. They have also created, as we all know, by the killing, and I just listened to Alistair Cook, who gave me a vivid description of a friend of his who was in the lower room beneath an ear of how it happened. They just killed a man who was consequential to the peace process, to the ceasefire process, to the exchange of hostages process. All important issues to some portion of Israel still, especially the hostages, and there was no reason for it. No reason for it whatsoever. He was not a fighter. He was the man who was heading the negotiations. So it was preposter to do that unless you had an ulterior motive. And of course, BB had an ulterior motive. He wants, not only Hezbollah, he wants Iran, but he knows the only entity that is with him and Amos Wilkstein and his dealing with the go-on heights killings was just, oh, it was sickening how much we are with BB, and Holkstein is proof of that, as Dennis Ross, Israel's lawyer, has been for so many years. Now he's got what he wants, and he wants the United States to take out Iran. That's what he wants. And he also demonstrated, of course, his ability, because I was there when we started this. I was in the government when we started this, giving him tankers. Week by week, month by month, year by year, we'd give him a new tanker, or two, or three. And now he's demonstrated when he went down to Haudeta and dropped some bombs there. And it was secondarily for punishing the Houthis. It was primarily, you show Iran, I have the tanking now, and my extended range F-15s, F-35s, all of my airplanes can come to you and bomb you ceaselessly. And I can bring my pilots back and bring them back again and again and again, because I have 2,000 article mile legs now. These are all things to get the war started, and he wants the war. He wants it badly, and he wants the United States to take out Iran's nuclear capability, which he has said in the past, if they got within a week or a day or, God forbid, actually, we're moving into making a bomb, he'd take it out. He'd take the facility out, meaning the United States would help him, of course, at that time, because he didn't have the tanking. Now he has the tanking, but he still needs the United States if he's going to do the job thoroughly and well. So that's what he's after right now. I mean, it's very clear. There are some real problems developing, though, as I had seen in my opening remarks. I think we have an element within the IDF, and indeed it might be the majority of the IDF that is weary. It's tired. It sees no strategy. It sees no in-game. It sees nothing, but Netanyahu telling them to kill more and more Palestinians in whatever way fashion they can. And so it's beginning to be a little bit recalcitrant. The reserve is in particular, and if he has to call up to 300,000 more to take on Hezbollah and even an interim way, until the United States takes them on in a big way, that's going to exacerbate things even more. And then on the other hand, he's got these 800,000-plus followers of what's the rabbi's name, Dovilil, the man who started all this modern Zionism, the man who was behind the killing of the, I think it was 29, in a chapel in the West Bank by the settlers, the man who's behind Smotrich and Ben Givir, and indeed behind all the movement to dispossess Palestine ends and so forth, because he's the John Hagey of Israel. He wants the Messiah to come, the Messiah's going to come, the settlers want the Messiah to come. They are religious zealots about expanding because that's part of his philosophy. You must expand. You must kill. You must be aggressive in order to bring about the coming of the Messiah, the Jewish Messiah. Hagey, of course, wants Christ to descend and establish the thousand-year kingdom. And when you ask John Hagey, well, Christ is going to kill all the unbelievers at that time with his flaming sword, right? Well, aren't the Jews unbelievers? Well, they're converted at that time. Right, John. But you've got these two conflicting religious mantras, if you will, dogma that are motivating in a lot of these people, all to say that you've got these settlers who are going to start attacking the IDF and the IDF, they already have in a couple of incidents. And the IDF is going to have to defend itself against not only the remnants of Hamas and ultimately Hezbollah, but also their own people. And we're going to have the potential for a civil war inside Israel between those who were in the IDF and are rapidly becoming dispossessed of their desire to continue killing people for no apparent purpose. And the settlers who want them to continue killing those people for no apparent purpose. This is a disaster. And it's why I said some years ago, Israel will not be a state very much longer. It certainly will not be a Jewish state. It's not a liberal democracy now. It's a democracy. It's a apartheid state with remnants of democracy. It very rapidly has made itself, as I was just trying to imperfectly explain, a true Jewish state. But in the old school Jewish philosophy, not the modern school, so it can't continue to exist. It simply can't continue to exist. I don't know what the United States is going to do about that. I think it's going to fight to the last dead American, Israeli, whatever, to keep that from happening. And that's a sad, sad reality. And I don't know where we're going to come out of that. But I do know where Israel's going to come out of that. There will be no Jewish state in the Levant. I have to say, I think what you say is not only true, but I mean, it is tragically true. There's some things that I still find very difficult to understand. And, you know, I probably being, frankly, naive here. But you have baby Netanyahu. He comes to Washington. He gives a speech to Congress. He then meets the president of the United States. Apparently, we're told he did not disclose to the president of the United States that he was planning on assassinating the chief negotiator of Hamas in the very negotiations that the president of the United States is trying to broker. He's now trying to involve the war, the United States, in a war that baby Netanyahu has himself provoked, provoked. In fact, he's been working towards that objective for months. Time again. And the president who has been lied to and who's been humiliated, because to me, this is a humiliation if you've been treated in this way. Now, tell us the Prime Minister of Israel, tell us baby Netanyahu. That's fine. I'm going to give you all the weapons and support that you need so that you can go ahead with this policy in which I have been humiliated and which my policy of trying to achieve a ceasefire has been overturned and made impossible. Now, I was reading this morning that Secretary Blinken apparently looks frustrated. I can completely understand why he looks frustrated. But I mean, they're bringing this on themselves. Why did they let this happen to them? Time and time again. I just cannot understand the mindset of this. Is it politics? Is it some kind of mental block? Is it some issue they have with Iran? Perhaps you could expect a listen. A little bit of all of that. I think it was Matthew Arnold that used the term one time in a poem. I can't remember. Maybe it stands us from my grand chartreuse. It came out creepingly. It took a lot of time. I got to see the most dramatic aspect of the vote fuss, the change that took place in the early 2000s, post 9/11, when George Bush met with then president, of course, met with Arik Sharon in the Oval Office. And when Powell was desperately trying, with the Vice President fighting in tooth and nail, to reconstruct something of the roadmap, the Middle East peace process, all the acronyms and words we use for it. Bush told Sharon, it's all a failure. He essentially said everything Powell was trying to reconstruct and put in process again. He was meeting with our fund. It was a failure, a total failure, which happened to be true. But he didn't enumerate why it was a failure. And he told Arik Sharon, over to you. There was quite a surprise on the then prime minister's face. But he went back, and that's what they've been doing ever since. And what over to you meant was whatever you do, we will back you 100%. Ever since, with a lot of neoconservative assistance and help, that has more or less been. And it's very different, if you think about it. I mean, Ronald Reagan sold F-15s and AWACs to the Saudis. H.W. Bush, using the capital he gained after the first Gulf War, forced the Israelis, and that's one reason he lost the election to Bill Clinton, he forced the Israelis into talks. They didn't want to go into it. We had a balance, a rough balance. It was tending more and more towards Israel, but we had a rough balance. After 2004, that balance was gone. It was we are in for a penny, in for a pound, do whatever you have to do. And we understood, Powell even understood, that diplomacy associated with that would have to be exquisite in order to maintain any kind of picture of sobriety in the world. But, well, we've had idiots in the diplomatic service ever since. We've had morons from Pompeo to Tillerson to remember, with Blinken, I didn't include him there. I have a nickname for Sullivan and Blinken and Biden, Blinken, Blinken and Nod, and you don't know who is who. So, it changed dramatically. It was already bad, but it changed dramatically for the worse. And that's where we are now. Has a lot to do with money, of course, Lindsey Graham and Josh Hall. Medea Benjamin has a wonderful set of videos on YouTube. I look at them all the time, I call her my heroine, because she goes up to these congressmen and she puts that microphone right in front of their face and she says, "Are you for baby-killing? Do you know the Palestinian women are dying and babies and teenagers and everything are dying? I don't care if they kill ever damn one of them." She gets them on record saying that. And that's how bad it is in the United States Congress. John Mearsheimer has made a point. He and Steve Walton is booked. They didn't go far enough. The Israel lobby runs the United States of America, particularly its Congress when it comes to Israeli policy. That's it. That's the truth. Many Americans can't understand that even. And fortunately, it won't be in time, but fortunately, they're changing their minds to a certain extent. The polls reflect about US relations with Israel. And God is doing a lot to do that. But still, you have this attraction, this magnetic attraction, if you will, in Washington that is oiled and greased with tons of money. APAC makes sure of that. I don't know if you've watched Tom Massey's interviews where he essentially says there's a handler for every congressman and it's a constituent. And when I say congressman, I mean senators too. So it's inexplicable and yet it is granularly explicable. That's the best way I can put it. Yeah, also thinking to what extent the lobby has some influence, well, not obviously, but if this is the main variable to look at because much like Alexander a bit perplexed when I'm trying to identify America's position. I mean, for Israel, it seems well, one can understand because they've always had the backing of the US. They never had to make any compromise. They see the US possibly in relative decline. This is all or nothing now, not that I would condone this. But the US position, it's not clear how any of this would be in its interest. And often it expresses the push for Israel to restrain, but it doesn't mean limiting the weapons. And again, the US makes the argument that it does not want to follow Israel into war. On the other hand, Washington does state that if Israel is attacked, then they will come to defend Israel. And Israel is always the perpetual victim. Every time they bomb it's because they're defending themselves and they have the right to do so. Now, what one can argue that this is all deceptive or an alternative explanation? Obviously, no one is really behind the wheel. And I think here, maybe the lobby could be an explanation for why the Washington isn't really pursuing national interest here. And it is a huge thing. I mean, they're pumping so many billionaires of dollars into Israel. And then this money makes its way back into Congress in the form of various donations, which is hardly a secret anymore. I'm just still, I'm missing an articulation of US strategy. What, how can these issues be solved? How does it serve US interests? What are the objectives? How can these objectives be met? Because at the moment, sending all these troops into the Middle East, they don't seem sufficient to do much. If they actually end up in a war with Iran, are they simply going to bomb Iran a bit and then tell Iran, it's okay, now we're done. Let's stop. Don't attack us. Are they going to keep the Russians or Chinese from supplying Iran? Nothing really makes sense here. This just looks like it's going to blow up very predictably. It's going to end in disaster also, not just Israel and the United States, but the wider world. And still, there's no course correction. It's just, it's hard to grapple when there's an absence of strategy. I hope you don't. I mean, he argued with your premises. I was hoping you would. You were describing Ukraine too. Yeah, different theater and different motivations and got some really stupid European Europeans in there with us. But nonetheless, you're describing that also. The best I can do, I've just finished my third reading of Peter Frankopan's wonderful book, The Silk Roads, A New World History. And when you look at the hundreds of empires that he goes into some detail to describe over three millennia, and you look at the ones that are the latest, if you will, like the one the sun never set upon the British, and you look at how they went out, you can find aspects of what we're doing now that are just as insane. Whether you're looking at the moguls, the Mongols, the Persians, the Eastern or Western Romans, you know, they all are the British. They all do really stupid things at the end. So I think that's a huge component of it. It's power pollutes and absolute power pollutes, absolutely, that sort of thing. But there are some intricate reasons in here that make you want to upchuck if that's the right word. One of them is the neoconservatives and how they have captured American foreign policy at almost every juncture, whether it's, let me give you a perfect example. I'm an advisory board member for something called the Baskerville Institute, which is out in Salt Lake City where they have had relations with Iran for years ever since Howard Baskerville, actually. And what we just did in Tbilisi, Georgia was convene a group of people from Central Asia, including the Iranians, to talk about education exchanges. Farsi for English, English for Farsi, history, you know, those sorts of things, perfectly and completely approved by the office of financial assets control. All the licenses were done. All the IRS regulations were followed and such. Yuani, full, you know, what's that acronym stand for, United against Iran or something like that, featuring such stellar people as Elliot Abrams, Dennis Ross, Israel's perpetual lawyer, Otto Reich, who was even by my administration withdrawn in terms of being Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs, because of his involvement in Iran Contra, the Congress let us know they wouldn't approve him, Roger Noriega, and a host of other people at this place really took umbrage to the fact that we did that. Well, that's just the surface of the people in the United States who for some reason or another, Realpolitik or just Vinal Hatred, don't want Iran to exist. They want it to go away or they want it to be a totally in sync with Israel State, I guess you would say. They are in, they have a vendetta against Iran and it's not just because of the hostage taking and the 400 days and such, it's because they really hate the Persians, they hate Iran, they hate them with a passion. And they see Israel as the clearest route to doing that. So that's a big part of the US backing of Israel that has nothing to do with the Holocaust, with strategic relations between Americans and Israelis or vice versa. It just is that they want to destroy Iran. Iran is truly the root of all evil in the world. Indeed, my administration, my administration, the first George W. Bush administration, in the Pentagon, under the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, who himself was a Jewish spy in the Pentagon. Doug was fired, a Jewish spy in the Pentagon. Donald Russell once walked down to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy's office, turned around and discussed, walked back up to his office and said something to the effect of, and you can even find this online because Roosevelt put all this stuff online. Something to the effect of, I don't run this building, Massad does. He was right. Massad occupied vice office for the entire time that he was there as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, number three man in the Defense Department of the United States. Not only that, Massad didn't need to go through security. They didn't go through the river entrance, go through the term style. They just stayed in the Pentagon. That's the kind of influence you're talking about that these people have. They are for the destruction utterly of Iran, and they're going to see to everything they can to bring that about. So when Israel helps them with that, they cheer and they help, but they don't have any great affection for Israel, other than the ones of them who are dual citizens, and I suspect it did the legitimate to call them spies. And the most powerful foreign agent operating on American soil is not China or Russia, nor is it a domestic entity like the NRA or others, the old people's whatever they, I forget that I'm not a member of it. They keep sending me correspondence, but the real estate industry, for example, the real estate and insurance industry that has huge powerful lobbyists on it, they pale beside AIPAC. They pale in terms of insults beside AIPAC. AIPAC eliminates senators, eliminates congressmen, puts senators, puts congressmen in office. It eliminates presidents when it wants to. So this is an incredible confluence of influences that bring about this utter stupidities, which you well expressed, and that you can't comprehend and understand, nor can I accept it by parse it and look at all these different portions of it. And then they come back to Peter Farrakhan's book, say, this is what empires do at the end. This is what almost every empire you want to study in one fashion or another, complete with physical profligacy, that is to say, as the old Scotsman said, when a country can vote itself the national treasury, it will. That's what we do. I have people in my political party who tell me, Larry, you don't worry about that $50.7 trillion aggregate debt by 2034. And the $2-3 trillion interest payments you'll have to pay every year, interest payments that will equal social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the defense budget combined. Don't worry about that, Larry, because there's plenty more where that came from. Then I have other members of the party who will tell me, we'll start a war, we'll use nuclear weapons, and we'll make a lot of money out of it. These are people who actually breathe. They have blood in their veins. They're the same people who turned around to Medea and say, as one did yesterday, Congressman, I hope they kill every Palestinian in Gaza. That's a Congressman of the United States of America. So it's full of all manner of component parts, but it is part and parcel, a sign, a symptom of the disappearance of any sanity in the leadership of this empire, which is very much in sync with history's examples. Hey, can I have a very, very worrying? Can I just ask a question? Because it was something that we had a discussion last week with Theodore Postor, and he was describing his experiences in the Pentagon. I have to say it was quite chattery and very, very, very, very alarming to me. But he did seem to be making some kind of a distinction between people, the uniformed military in the Pentagon, whom I got the sense that he thought you could talk to them. You could discuss things with them. They seem more open to discussion about resources and about the potential things, and the civilians in the Pentagon, who he thought collectively, pretty much all of them, were exactly the kind of people that you've discussed. Is he right? I say this because I do sometimes hear various American generals or ex American generals appear on television, writer articles. I don't want to name who they are. But they say things, which I find every bit as alarming, as all of the other neocons that we talk about. Does this division in the Pentagon actually exist? It does. And one of the points where the divide is most acerbic and most visible when it does come out is what I would call Christian nationalism. There is a strain of Christian nationalism in every rank, every single rank, including four stars in the US military. Very worrisome right now. There is a strain that says what General Flynn would have said, the first very short time national security advisor for Donald Trump, which is Christianity should be declared by Congress is the national religion. And we should all sign up to that. There's some other things he said that are even worse than that. Or General Boykin, who said, when Christ comes down to kill all the unbelievers, he won't use the sword. He will use an AR-15 in uniform at the time. These are rare examples, but I use them just to describe the influence that flows down the chain all the way to the bottom. When you go to Fort Jackson, for example, and watch a graduation there, and you see 60 or 70 of the people who just graduated from basic training in the river outside Fort Jackson being baptized for Jesus and being called soldiers for Jesus. And you realize that what these people baptizing them are looking for is missionaries in uniform. So that's one strain of it that causes this concern that I have for the uniform part of the military. The other concern is one pal expressed to Chuck Hagel when Hagel was on the Senate Armed Services Committee and called him one day and said, "Colin, I'm looking at the list here. I'm supposed to approve, perfunctarily, for three stars and four stars, and it's not a single individual on this list. I would make a unified command commander, let alone a vice chairman or chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, let alone a chief of service. What's wrong, Colin?" And then I'll have motivated him about how we had ruined our personnel system in the Army and the other services to an extent. And we really weren't promoting anything but, yes, men, up to the top. That's a problem. They're not all that way, but that's a problem. And if you look at what's happening right now with the defense budget, where they're getting, what, two or three times what the other 10 nations below them are getting, well over a trillion dollars when you look at the national security budget and you include all the aspects of it, VA, for example, our Veterans Affairs was broken out by the DOD because it was getting about 40 billion dollars, maybe 15, 20 years ago. It's getting 300 billion now. We've created four and a half million new veterans, whole new bureaucracy now. But much of the money is being used for people. The all-volatile force is an extraordinarily expensive force. 51 to 52 percent of that trillion dollars a year is being used just for people, so it's gone in terms of paying allowances and bonuses. We're paying $300,000 bonuses to get people stay in special skill sets now. And you're looking at a squandering of a lot of the other 48, 49 percent because it's going to Lockheed Martin. It's going to Lockheed Martin subsidiaries and such. It's not really, and it's not going for much that's productive. You look at the F-35 as a premier example of that, or the Osprey, which is now grounded and can't fly from more than 30 minutes because it's killed so many people. A general and I were talking yesterday and we said, we would not prosecute a Marine or an airman who refused to get out an Osprey. It's killed too many of them. I wouldn't prosecute them. There's no way I would. I'd say, okay, thank you. Go back to your barracks. You don't have to get on that aircraft. It's all these things that we've done to ourselves, which again are part and parcel of an empire that cannot lead itself. It cannot do well with its resource expenditure. It can't keep track of anything. The Defense Department hadn't passed in all of it in 20 years. Donald Ronsfeld told Colin Powell, I lose more money every year than you get at the State Department. He was right. That year he lost 25 billion. Our budget was 24.8. I mean, I could go on and on and on, but let me say one thing. Positive. There are some people in the military who are as concerned, maybe not quite in all the realms that I'm concerned, but concerned about the status of our country as anyone else. They don't know what to do about it. They make one of two decisions. And last year, I think it was 80% of the four stars and three stars who retired went to work for a defense contractor. So that's one way. I'm out of here and I got my gold and parachute. The other way is, I got to do something about this. And what they do is they function within their own service fee from them to try and correct some of these problems I've just pointed out. There are some good things going on right now. For example, for acquisition reform to keep us from buying more F-35 pig in a pokes or more ospreys. But there's nothing that's looking at the country in terms of mending it, if you will. And there's a real predilection not to do that in the military, because they fear they'll be accused of fomenting rebellion, and even of supporting rebellion. Because when you come down and you parse it as far as you can, you realize that's probably one of the only ways you're going to get it to change dramatically enough and swiftly enough to matter. And here's something they worry about too, and I do significantly. All these empires described in that wonderful book by Farrakhan had one difference from the American Empire. That difference was, other than prophets who predicted this from some angry God, they had no technology capable of destroying themselves, none of them. And we're here. We're here today probably because they had that void. Not true today. We have the means to destroy the planet on just our ballistic missile submarines. We have those means. So this is really frightening for some of these officers because they understand that and they understand it intuitively as well as intellectually. We could, and I remember what I think it was Ricardo Ellicom in a protocol house outside of Anna Cuba when I was working for President Obama trying to improve relations with Cuba. He said to me, "Even the dying elephant can thrash a lot of grass." "True," I said to him, "and we have nuclear weapons," and he said, "very true." That's a difference. That is a difference in all of history. No civilization, no empires, ever had the means to destroy itself and the rest of humanity until now. One scientist put it this way. We've developed the technology to destroy ourselves, and now I wonder if we have the wisdom to keep it from happening. That's debatable today, highly debatable. In terms of the declining empire, I guess, the United States has a lot of unique features, but it's also worth, I guess, looking at the Europeans because I remember back in 2003 with the invasion of Iraq, it was a deep resentment in Europe. They didn't care for George W's with or against us rhetoric, civilization versus terrorists, good versus evil. I was in London, and it was the biggest war threat test I've ever seen in my life. Times have changed. These days were very happy to be complicit in genocide. Also, I remember 2008, when Bush wanted to promise Ukraine and Georgia and NATO membership. The Germans, the French, they realized, "Well, this will be like starting a war with the Russians. This will be terrible." At least they pushed back to some extent, but, again, forward today, even the prospect of the US and Trump seeking a peace in Ukraine is terrifying them. They're discussing now how to continue the war. Just as an example, the new EU foreign policy chief being chosen now is Kaya Kallas. She defined victory over Russia as breaking it up into many smaller nations. Also recently, she expressed how she didn't believe effectively what is diplomacy, because she said, "Well, Putin is a war criminal, and why would we talk to war criminals? We only talk to those we obviously agree with." Any talking with the adversary would be legitimizing it. We have to isolate. No diplomacy. This is the foreign policy chief of the EU. The Europeans also seem to have gone down to this pathway of becoming more and more radical. If this kind of crazy policies could be explained to be in our interest, and hopefully proven to be so, at least one can have understanding, but there's no explanation how these serists are interested. What is going on now? What do you think we're going to do with Ukraine moving forward? Obviously, the Middle East is a horse of its own, but in Ukraine, things are unraveling very quickly. Of course, the Ukrainians are not hinting towards negotiations, but what do you see in the West? Will the US and the Europeans permit any negotiations, peace settlements, or where do you see this going? Let me address some of your very provocative remarks about the EU. I think there are a number of reasons for where the EU is right now, and I say EU, not Europe, but the European Union. One is their tendency all along to be autocratic and dictatorial and not democratic. The recent French vote, for example, was quite low, and I think that's one of the reasons I think it's that way across the member states. Two, starting in 2002, and I was there when we started it at the State Department, reluctantly, in some regards, with respect to power, we have used all of our influence and power, including covert operations, to influence elections in Europe, to get the people we wanted, to get the Jen Stoltenbergs, the Marc Rutes, other people like that. We failed with Victor Orban, we failed with a couple of others too, but we succeeded with the majority, and I personally think that with the series of elections that are coming up in Germany and other places, saw it a little bit in France, I think we're going to see some big changes there. So that was part of the problem. I remember Powell and I having a conversation about are we going to be happy when we actually get regimes in some of these countries that, for example, maybe cause independent countries for decades and decades to become members of NATO? I said, well, it's better than it falling apart, I guess, but he was not very much of a fan, nor was Henry Kissinger, nor is George Kennan, who told him this several times, nor I'm blanking out on the national security advisor for oh, shoot, brilliant guy, Air Force III, Sergeant General, one of the best national security advisors we've ever had. But all of these people came in and told him biggest mistake the United States is making is the expansion of NATO. Terrible mistake, George Kennan just, he was 99 years old, but still perky and he just hit it and hit it and hit it, tragic mistake. But in doing what we did throughout the first two decades of the century to shape Europe's leadership and NATO's leadership, we polluted it in many respects, I think, and people like Steve Mann and others coming along and Donald Trump coming along and scaring them, but Jesus out of Europeans who had been on the tit for so long, they didn't think they could ever get off and didn't want to get off. And all of a sudden, here's a guy saying, maybe you're going to have to get off, that scared them too. So a number of things did this, but I do have confidence that Europe is going to reverse this and probably within the next decade. And then it's going to be bye-bye transatlantic relationship, bye-bye NATO. I mean, Turkey is going to unanchor its southern flank if it hasn't already any time now. So I do think that this change is going to take place. And I think Europe's going to have a problem with the EU remaining because I don't see it turning democratic overnight as autocratic and dictatorial that it is. And maybe it'll fall apart. Maybe that'd be a good thing because the one thing missing in Europe's matching RDP basically, $23, $24 trillion, whatever, one thing in the three quarters of a billion people or three quarters of a trillion people, three quarters of a billion people give them a number screwed up that Europe now sports. If you count Russia, it's close to 700, 730 million. That's a significant economic block. If it could just get its political act together, it would be a real rival for the United States. And I think that's the way it's going to happen. It's going to change. Now it could be negative. That's worse than it could be the other way rather than more unity and a better EU. It could be falling apart and back to the squabbling and individual countries doing. I think Viktor Orban has a smell of that. He has a sense of that. And the fact that they accused him of using the presidency of the EU to perform diplomacy is reasonable. It's laughable. I mean, here's the only guy who's doing anything that's in your interest, significantly in your interest, and you're accusing him of being out of his portfolio. How stupid. But I do think that's going to change with the elections, a series of elections that are coming up. Is it going to be in time to fix things? I don't know because we're riding that train. I think Zelensky wants to negotiate. I think he wants to go to the table. He wants Putin to be at the table. He wants to cease fire. He wants a peace agreement. If it lasts as long as the one on the Korean peninsula. So what, if they have to have you in troops? So what, as long as he doesn't have a rough state left, as long as he has Odessa left, as long as he has some access to the Black Sea left, as long as there's some semblance of a Ukraine for all the blood that they've spent, he'll make a deal. But I think we're keeping in common. And I think the Europeans are cheering us. And that's sad. That's very sad because all that's happening is more Ukrainians are dying. And to a certain extent more Russians are dying, needlessly. I agree about Zelensky. I think the Ukrainians probably would like to negotiate one country that is very opposed to negotiations with Ukraine is Britain. And I have to say, when you were describing Israel wanting to pursue policies against Iran that you can't conceivably achieve by itself without the United States being pulled along. I have to say, I was thinking a bit about Britain because it's the same with Britain. Remember I'm British. I'm talking to you from London. It's the same with Britain about Russia. We have some kind of massive issue with Russia. In this country, I don't understand myself fully what it is, but we do. We want to pursue a very aggressive policy against Russia. But we know that without the Americans, we can't do anything. We don't have that power. We once did. We don't know. And I can find it very astonishing that we seem to have this great influence in the United States. We seem to be able to bend the Americans to do all of this heavy lifting for us in Ukraine, in all of these other places. We always demanding that they be aggressive, which I was very rude about the Americans, not being aggressive enough. Even when we ourselves are able to do anything, do people in the United States ever see this? Is there any kind of resentment about this? Do people in the Pentagon say to themselves, there's British people coming along again, trying to get us involved in their quarrels? I just wonder I just asked the question. The main concern in the Pentagon is how Britain has let its real defense capabilities atrophy. There's no one in the Pentagon, I think, in that field, basically, European specialists or whatever, who thinks the Brits are worth anything anymore in terms of an ally in military power. And they really lament that because they are always so professional, so good, so well-trained, and so able to do, as Jeremy Greenstock put it one day, amid the country's performance, no longer true. And maybe that once rule the oceans, barely can get out of port. That's part of the problem with the Pentagon relationship and Britain. And it's a little minimal situation, really, for most officers who really felt strongly about the British military being one of the most professional and capable in the world. The points you make, though, I think have come about since Tony Blair, really glaringly, since Tony Blair, was really so much in Bush's court and so much in the advocate of the war with Iraq, that in some respects, the only time I ever went into the House of Commons, I was in the visitor's gallery with my wife, and I had a pass and I was able to sit through Prime Minister's questions and the time and such, and it was Blair, of course. And I was struck by the fact that he was so pro-US, so pro-war, so pro-everything about the whole situation. And I couldn't figure out why. I still haven't figured out why, other than the fact that he got big rewards after he left office. But that sort of metamorphosis in my mind is what happened with the whole relationship. They suddenly made a decision. I said to myself walking out that day with my wife, I said they've made a decision that the special relationship is more important than integrity, individual action, England's security, except as it is assured by the special relationship. I think we'll go to Canada next. She used to always tell everybody, when Clinton was president in particular, she'd tell everybody she was from Canada because she didn't want any Brit to think she was from the United States of America. We went to London for 25 years without missing a year and sometimes three or four times a year, and we went all over England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, our home country. And I miss befuddled as you. I don't really know how to articulate the reason for the change. It's like Winston Churchill's back with poison. He hated the Russians. He loved the Russians. He wanted to go to war against the Russians after we beat the Germans. I don't know. I just don't know what the problem is. Rishi Sunak drove me crazy. I couldn't understand how the British people could have put that man in the prime relationship. Of course they didn't, but nonetheless, there's a, you know, there are connections. Every time I would hear him speak, I would think to myself, my God, we may have gone tremendously down into the pits, but Britain has hit the bottom. And it hurt me. I didn't like. I was glad my wife had passed the only positive aspect. She doesn't have to see this. She's a real angle file. So I don't know how to answer your questions except to say that the decision was made. The special relationship is everything. We are so weak. We are so incapable of doing anything on our own that we have to be kowtoing to the empire all the time. Never deviate kowto. That's all I can, only way I can explain it. I guess that's how Tony Blair is best remembered in Europe as well, though. He was pushing for this liberal internationalism, which he called it in, which explicitly denounced the whole idea of the Australian order, as he argued. You know, we needed one of post sovereignty, one of, effectively, one of, one of hegemoni were sovereignty for us, but not for you. I guess that's a very attractive proposition for the dominant power for the empire, which is the United States. So, but what, Boris Sergey Lavrov said in his press conference a week or two ago, he said, you know, animal farm, where all the animals are equal, except some are more equal than others. Well, this is the rules based international order. I actually have a book, which came out in February, which I refer to the rules based international order. And I, I cited George Orwell's animal farm, of all animals are equal, but some are hoping he had rather, probably. But anyways, but because of the advisor of Tony Blair was Robert Cooper, and he actually wrote a book on this as well, which called for, he didn't even use liberal internationalism. He called for liberal empire, in which the West should be less apologetic and essentially restore empire, reflecting a lot of the 19th century argument that the British empire was good for the whole world by spreading liberalism. And now the US effectively had to lead in carrying this mantle. So yeah, very, actually calling for a liberal empire again, this is, yeah, quite extraordinary. But this is, this is now Ferguson, he told us, he said, now, not an eagle, Neil, now Ferguson came to the policy playing staff at state at Richard Haas's invitation and gave a sort of synopsis of his many books on how the British empire was basically benign and wonderful for the world and good and such. And I have no problem with pointing out those aspects of it that were so, but that's ridiculous in terms of the whole picture. They were just like any other empire. You know, the British East India Company became so powerful that the Queen and the Prime Minister didn't know how to deal with it. And rape, pillage and plunder was the name of the game as long as you got paid for it. And look at what they did in Iran with that Anglo-Iranian oil company just, you know, treated Persians like they were scum of the earth and raped them to the tune of fortunes. Toilet became after World War I and World War II and oil replaced everything else as a local motion method. It became indispensable to the British Empire, which is why we went in 53 and reluctantly helped the Brits overthrow most of that. And started this mess we have with Iran today, really. And the British and the perfidious Albion. But now we're the perfidious America. Empires do not do well, and they aren't benign, especially in their latter days, and they all have latter days. I used to ask my students, show me where it's engraved in stone that the American Empire is forever. And they look at me like, you know, deer caught in the headlights until we got through the 14th, three hour seminars of that semester. And then they realized why I asked that question. And they would leave with some deep concern about the fate of the American Empire. And I hope go about doing something to arrest that fate, or to keep it from happening as abruptly and swiftly as it might. Somebody who lives again in the capital of the former Empire, the British Empire, can also say that empires do a lot of damage to the country that is at the center of them. In Britain, many, many of our problems, many more than we admit to, or are prepared to acknowledge, are the direct product of our imperial legacy. And I just want to ask a question for me, into this. I mean, we have all kinds of wars going on. They're not going especially well. Partly, I think, because the objectives are wrong, and they don't seem to be balanced with resources. One of the things I remember about Powell, by the way, is that he was always somebody who was very careful at looking at resources. You seem to say, look, can we actually even do this? Do we have the resources to do this? As far as I understand it, that was what the whole Powell doctrine is. As far as I can see, the present people who are in charge never worry about resources. They simply assume that anything and everything is possible. So we just have these wars again and again, and I was reading this morning, in the telegraph of Britain, a study apparently by the Institute for the Study of War. They say that Hamas, in Gaza after 10 months, largely reconstituted itself. The war intended to destroy it has failed. They have eight operational battalions and 13 others, which are being rebuilt. Does anybody ever take a step back, look at these wars, carry out a kind of study, ask where it went wrong. Are they doing that about in Ukraine now, where the war isn't obviously not going well. Is there any kind of retrospective analysis, re-examination? I seem to remember that the war is over Vietnam. I seem to remember that over Vietnam, the US military did go back and look at what went wrong in Vietnam, and quite a lot of good came out of that. Did the same thing happen after Iraq? Is the same thing going to happen over Ukraine? I presume the Israelis are not going to do this exercise over Gaza. But is there any kind of re-examination ever of what goes wrong now? It's an interesting question at the Eisenhower Media Network. A group of us had this conversation about a week ago. And the first thing that we concluded was beginning with the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, accountability has become a foreign term. No one wants to achieve accountability for past errors. In order to achieve accountability, of course, you have to do what you said. You have to have some intensive study of what went wrong and why. It can't ever be perfect, but you want to come out with something. The Chilcot Report was an example of Britain trying to do that with regard to torture. And you could look at the rendition, detention, rendition, interrogation program run by the CIA, the official program of torture, sanctioned by the President of the United States, and say the same thing, except we didn't have a Chilcot Report. Our report with some 5,000 plus pages came out of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the chairman restricted its distribution on the president of health. We concluded in this group we were discussing. This is general officers and admirals and others. There's no accountability. And if you do the kinds of things you're saying, you at least aim peripherally at accountability. Well, we don't do them anymore. Now, we'll help thank tanks and one of the others, like Cato Institute and people will come out as they just did with the Iraq War, the 2003 Iraq War. And they'll say, these are the mistakes. Nobody reads those things. Nobody pays any attention to them. Certainly not in government, where it would most have an impact. We just don't do that anymore. That is another symptom of imperial decay. As we're running out of time, I guess to finish on a positive note, I think despite the F-16s now possibly escalating the war further, there is some room for optimism, I guess, because one of my key concerns with Zelensky was always that he forbade, well, had laws against negotiating with the Russians and hardened down, so make it very difficult to turn the propaganda machine around. But now that he's proposing a referendum on peace settlement, that seems to remove some of the responsibility from him, which opens up the prospect. That one can argue, well, if you can have a referendum during the war time, how come they couldn't have an election? But we don't need that much consistency. My point is this could be a way of decoupling a bit from the propaganda machine that is running for the past two and a half years, where they say we're winning, we're winning, we're not going to make any compromise before the Russians are defeated, pay war operations and get out. But there could be some optimism. Of course, we could also hope for more political imagination among western leaders, because, well, for many years, we had people like Rand Paul arguing that the option for the US was either to have an orderly reduction of empire or uncontrolled collapse, I think, as we're reaching the brink. I don't see any signs of it, but one could hope that there will be some political imagination to look for a way of having some orderly reduction. I don't see it, of course, I see doubling down, but perhaps if things can resolve itself in Ukraine, there will be, yes, interest. One of the other very blatant signs of imperial decline is reinforcement of strategic failure, rather than backing away from it. I hope your signs of optimism or your attempt to end optimistically meets fruition, particularly with regard to Ukraine, because that's just bloody-minded conflict, just bloody-minded Russians and Ukrainians dying for no purpose, really. Not anymore. There's no purpose. Putin doesn't have a purpose anymore, other than—I mean, he's ended the existential threat to the Soviet Union or to the Russian landmass, as it were. I don't think he has any reasons at all to go any further than that, but I would be very—as Putin has implied, and Sergey Lavrov has said many times, "America's not trustworthy anymore." I'm hearing that more and more across the globe from other people, not trustworthy anymore. I'm not sure we have been trustworthy since 9/11, maybe even since World War II, a growing distrust, if you will. But now, I'd say half the world doesn't trust the United States to do anything that is even remotely akin to what needs to be done, to include with the climate crisis. This is very disturbing. I'm deeply involved with that. And there are countries in the world who are already suffering grievously in some respects. Check out the temperatures day after day after day in Basra, Iraq, for example. Check out the temperatures in Nevada. Here's a sign of—here's a sign of idiocy. Nevada's population is growing, like leaps and bounds, and they had a series of 115-degree Fahrenheit days. And yet they're still growing because the people can go into the casinos, lock themselves in the air conditioning, and lose themselves in the one-armed bandits. Is that another sign of the deterioration of the country? Absolutely it is. I don't know how you rest these things. I don't know how you stop them. And I know from history that no one has ever succeeded when they get to this point. No one, no empire in history has ever succeeded. They go. Now, the Romans in the east and the west, and particularly in the east, held on for a long, long time. But they're going to. Well, sadly, my ostrichism was desperate, but nonetheless. Let me a little bit more optimistic. The United States does have a very strong democratic tradition and a constitution and institutions which I take very seriously and greatly admire. And I think provided those are there, they've been very, very battered, damaged, and often disregarded. Now, provided those are there, they do offer a way through. I mean, the very fact that there is still a possibility of talking about some of these things in the United States. You have much more debate about many of these conflicts in the United States than we have in Britain now, just saying. So that does make you different. Does make the Americans different from the empires of the past. I mean, you wouldn't have had much debate in Rome in 400 AD, just saying. Or indeed, even in London, if I can say, because London was never really particularly democratic, not in the way that America is. Even in Britain, you didn't. But in America, you still have that. And that might provide you with a way back. Provided you hold on to it. Thank you. That last remark was well made because there is a looming election that might be the end of it. I don't have nearly the fears of Donald Trump that some of my colleagues do. Well, thank you both for this. Yeah, we definitely run out of time now, but yeah, we hope to be able to worry back some time and pick your brain a bit more. So thanks again. Thanks for having me. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your show to watch it quite often. Thank you very much.