Tucker Carlson × полк. Лоуренс Уилкерсон: «иранская война рискует превратиться в столкновение с Китаем»

thank you so much for doing this i think most americans understand this as a war between the united states in partnership with israel against iran but there are of course a lot of other players acting on this drama maybe in ways that we don't perceive china would be the biggest and potentially most threatening to our interest what is china's role in this conflict it's a role i think forced upon them at the moment um not that they can't handle it they seem to be quite adaptable with regard to this very frenetic and indeterminate presidency and empire but it's forced on them because they didn't think that this was going to happen in the way that it's happened i think that is to say this being the war of choice with iran and some things are happening in the war that are probably disturbing to them for example the latest completed railroad and their five base road initiative railroads was the probably the most strategic one in many ways it brings china's pacific ports all the way around on land and then intended was up the persian gulf along the old route that we used to resupply the soviet union during world war ii and eventually into the caucus and beyond caucuses and beyond and now we're bombing it uh israel and we are bombing that railroad now of course railroads don't get bombed very well you could drop all the ordnance in the world on them and they'll get a bunch of people out there and repair them pretty quickly but nonetheless it shows that there's something more to this war of choice than perhaps even trump knows about i'm sure there are people in the pentagon who know about it um that are happening and the world is basically ignorant of it well can you expand on that there are things happening the president doesn't know about but that some planners the pentagon doubtless do what would those things be well one of them is bombing that railroad it just started recently with both israel and the united states making it a principal target and one of the things they're trying to do of course and this is a hugely geostrategic issue that most people don't uh i'm not sure i understand it completely but if you go back in time to earlier empires when the real power cultural technological economic military and otherwise was in the east you see one of the ways that those empires roughly defeated other empires by shifting maritime commerce to the land because maritime commerce was simply becoming too expensive before them they put the portuguese empire out of business for example and what they did was they shifted along one of their routes primary routes was this route china is now using to eventually go up the persian gulf and into azubrajan or minia and georgia the caucasus along northward marrying up with the other three base road initiative railroads which incidentally have been adumbrated seriously by the war in ukraine does that ring a bell with anybody geostrategically they're not emptying into europe as they were intended to do they've stopped pretty much and what does that do well basically those railroads mean that instead of two and a half to three days and very expensive maritime shipping for china's pacific port produce it's 16 hours into the heart of europe that's a huge change one that will drive a lot of commerce off the seas and will to a certain extent negate the babel mandeb the strait of hormuz the suez canal maybe even the panama canal although china's built that very very luxurious state-of-the-art port on the west coast of peru but that's looking toward the pacific and looking toward that aspect of commerce so don't expect a lot of that to be going through the canal even these railroads are a game changer in terms of commerce and think about this for a moment in terms of one of the united states's supposedly great strengths it's maritime power because we won't need to police the seas anymore it'll all be going over land i think a lot of americans are at a great disadvantage in understanding this because they lack a sense of the mechanics of commerce products just appear it's not clear how and they lack a sense of geography the idea that you know iran you could reach china from iran overland i people i think lack the perspective of how exactly that would happen um but clearly the pentagon understands these questions right so they're bombing that railroad for a reason which would be what do you think well to set it back and to tell china we know what they're doing and we don't like it um that route is such a serious threat in in and of itself um because of what you you look at in terms of commerce during the period immediately prior to world war ii when brit britain and the united states sneaked into iran and i mean that we sneaked in there they were nazi sympathizers at the time and we built a road and we flanked it with security and at that time the iranians couldn't challenge it very much and we shipped all manner of goods up that road into the belly of the soviet union stalingrav would have never held out without that supply route hundreds of thousands of trucks and wheel vehicles and other implements of war went up that route it was second only to murmansk and in terms of strategic effect it was more important than romance how many americans even know that how many americans even knew that at the time right so it's a real game changer in terms of the united states if it has to do anything about china viscerally if it has to go to war with china if it has to fight them it's essential that we control these lines of communication and we're not so what's the chinese perspective on this as it has been ever since dung zhao ping started capitalism with chinese characteristics we do not want a war we will beat you without a war we are going to beat you technologically we're going to beat you culturally we're going to beat you militarily we're going to beat you every dimension of power that you can imagine and this latest edict by xi jinping which the american press has completely missed as far as i can tell um he put out the latest uh in a series of edicts that have come from chinese premieres from dung zhao ping on who xin tau was a little bit of an aberration but that's one reason they got rid of him but xi jinping has been right in there and this latest one says we are essentially triumphant in every element of global power but one now we're going to take on that one and that one is financial control and that means the remember being substituted for the dollar and everything from oil sales to you name it it will become the transactional and reserve currency already is to a many to a great extent for about 40 of the world they're going to shoot for 60 to 70 percent of the world they're going to drive the bretonwood system back where it came from they're going to eliminate swift they're going to eliminate our ability to sanction countries that's one of their major purposes and that's an altruistic purpose for them they think eliminating our ability to put sanctions on other countries in the world through which since the turn of this century we have killed 38 million people 38 million people mostly men women and children 38 million people that rivals stalin's purges mao-sitong's cultural revolution it almost rivals hitler with in terms of the people that he killed directly in world war ii not the whole war with 100 million casualties but certainly he the people he killed directly so we're looking at the united states and china looks at us this way is having done that damage in the world with our financial system which allowed us to put primary and secondary sanctions on 30 percent of the world go to ofac and see how many countries we have under sanction it's incredible and these sanctions kill men women and children over time we kill 500 000 in sodom and sayings uh iraq when we had the sanctions on him madeline albright said when she was confronted with that statistic so what it was worth it uh madeline want to join hillary in the world of cretins she did yeah this is a this is a serious issue for china and they want to stop it well here's something that thieves count on security cameras usually stop where wi-fi stops right makes sense so if you've got a barn a job site equipment parked outside long driveway criminals does a good chance that nobody is watching this because there's no wi-fi and that's why we like defend by tactic cam it's a new sponsor of this show defense cameras don't run on wi-fi they run on cellular just like your phone so they work everywhere if you've got cell signal you've got security middle of nowhere edge of your property construction site wherever you need it you don't need wi-fi big difference and you can see why it matters so we use these cameras in places where wi-fi doesn't reach the setup is super simple you mount the camera open the defend app and you are live you get clear footage night vision alert sent right to your phone it's great for construction sites ranches farms or anyone with a property that stretches beyond a router and here's something we really appreciate defend does not sell your data not to tech companies not to advertisers not to china no one your footage belongs to you and that's big plan started about five bucks a month no contract cancel anytime visit defend sell cam.com that's defend sell cam.com it's also a moral stand in the united states and just jumping ahead it it strikes me that once the u.s government of fact loses the ability to sanction other countries it will have only the power to sanction american citizens for disobedience with programmable digital currency and will do something very similar to us bingo yeah i mean that that does seem like you know a natural follow-on well it does seem like it does seem like the things you do to your opponents abroad will be done to your own citizens by the same government yes i mean that seems like a pretty consistent lesson of history so um that's why empires are bad because they're bad for your own population but i i wonder like china we see our competition with in primarily military terms i think that's what we talk about in public no one ever talks about the relative size of the economies it's like how many aircraft carriers do they have but that's new that's new in my administration my administration in george w bush's administration colin powell was giving his head on only one major international issue and that was china and george i was there when george george w bush said it's importance to walmart meant dick needed to stay away from it and that he meant that he meant that he meant that we were in strategic economic competition with china and he didn't mind that because he thought we were better than they were at capitalism and we should certainly hold our head up in the world in that regard so he gave colin powell his head and powell was constantly constantly thwarting the vice president in those terms because donald rumsfeld and and dick cheney wanted a hot war or a cold war they preferred the latter with china and bush didn't want it so he turned colin loose on taiwan in particular and wound up at the end of his first term having to repudiate chen shui beyond publicly and tell him to shut up about his independence referendum and get off that kick because he knew that was a red line with beijing so that's the last president i think we had who understood fundamentally this economic relationship and thought that we could wage it with them and at least tie them if not win the impulse to go to war with china like an exchange of ballistic missiles at least where does that come from why why would you want that why would dick cheney and rumsfeld and so many others be advocating for that i don't think they really wanted a hot war but the thing that scared me and scared colin powell too is that they seem to be willing to accept it if they couldn't get the cold war but what they really wanted was a replacement for the cold war that would put the same pressures on us that the cold war did and that would be good in their in their sense uh cheney occasionally would reveal things like uh a statement uh we don't want people to love us we want people to fear us um and you know that that was okay but it didn't go over that big with i think a genuine christian as i mean genuine christian a sermon on the mount type christian that george w bush was uh and so in that sense that pushed him over into in the powell's camp um but they wanted that cold war for sure because they thought judging from their experience for their whole lives virtually that was the only way to keep the empire in power and in check domestically and internationally is to have that huge pressure on them all the time and it was also the only way for halliburton and lockheed martin and a host of others whom dick loved and don loved to make a lot of money but why what do you mean when you say a cold war would be the only way to keep the empire together internally what does that mean you need an external enemy if you if you've ever read uh maybe you're too young but uh there's a uh there was an argument over whether it was a fanciful parody from somebody at the new yorker or or was it a serious study it was called the report from iron mountain um it was a pamphlet lyndon johnson when he said it and when he read it said told his staff to get rid of it you know ban it um it didn't happen the new york times picked up on it it went viral set two issues were put out but in that report which many thought really was a response to kennedy's june speech at american university yes um they said impossible in that report they they went through all the cold war parameters and such and they said impossible you can never have peace the only way an empire like the united states of america can survive is to have a constant threat it must have a threat in order to survive they did say at the end that if you could dream up some other way of creating the same kind of pressure that that sort of threat did and they even said religion used to do that you know the monarchs the prince the the prelate they used to threaten the people with god and that and that pretty much kept them in line you're going to burn in hell if you don't do what i tell you to do that sort of thing uh torkmata looking at the uh the muslims and saying uh repent become a christian or i'll cut your throat and that's what he did if they didn't repent many of them repented you could have that but they thought that that was passe that that kind of threat wouldn't do the sort of thing that an actual state threat would do and so their conclusion was kennedy was nuts you needed that kind of external threat to keep a country as variegated as diverse and as ultimately powerful as america was in check you needed that kind of threat to keep your own citizens obedient yes very much so that's a part of it too to keep them towing the line and to keep them paying their taxes and everything that you do in a state that once was a republic and now is an empire this is not at all related to i i asked you to have this conversation but i can't resist who do you think did kill kennedy i'm fairly certain after a lot of study i'm a hunter i i know weapons fairly well i know that weapon that lee rv oswald wielded no way it shot john kennedy and killed him i don't even think he could hit him from there you know the fbi guy the expert tried with that very weapon three times to simulate the zaprooter film intervals and get that many rounds off even get them off not just accurately and he couldn't do it yeah i think it was a combination of cia mafia and probably pentagon and i don't mean uh organizationally but i mean dissenters in all three of those groups and the motive would be what they thought especially with what he had done with regard to jf with regard to cuba in october 62 and then the speech in june june 10th i think of 1963 at american university that he was serious he was serious and his brother was serious with regard to the mafia and policing it up but kennedy himself the president was serious about seeking first rapprochement with the soviet union cuba had really and berlin too berlin was a more serious crisis in the hot summer of 61 than cuba was cuba was 13 days packed into you know dynamism and the u.n and everything yes and we thought it was serious well berlin was strategic for the russians if the gdr disappeared and it was disappearing at about 10 000 citizens a week think of that for a minute that we helped them build the wall we actually helped them build that wall when i say helped i mean our tanks our machine guns oversaw the parties building the wall to prevent anyone from interfering with them we let them build the wall because that was the only way to stanch that flow out of the gdr east germany and that was strategic for the russians so that was a much more serious crisis but he'd gone through both of those and he knew how close we'd come to an exchange of nuclear weapons and he wanted an end to that and they thought this was uh from ephemeral wishes and even dangerous wishes they thought that soviets would pull a trick on us you know all the things you usually throw out there when you don't trust your enemy um and they were willing to take him out in order to prevent that from happening and they were mad at him for the bay of pigs where do you think jack ruby came from they found him somewhere i was at baylor university at that time and i remember when the announcement was made i was absolutely stunned um me and my roommate could barely talk for about a half an hour the president's just been shot not too far from us we were in wake up um and then we were on the tv and we watched this guy walk up to ruby and shoot him right there and we at that moment bob and i said to ourselves this stinks this really stinks yeah when the lone gunman kills the lone gunman they're probably not lone gunman nah you got it you think about charlie kirk for example and what's happening right now with that assassination which i can't even tell you what's happening i don't even know the fbi has been so unforthcoming but i know i told you i'm a weapons guy that did not happen the way they're saying it happened and i doubt very seriously if that guy stuck a 30-06 down his pants leg and walked away cost of living is already making it hard to live here and it's not getting any better unfortunately it's likely to get worse and a lot of americans fill the gap with credit cards not just for fancy dinners but to cover things like groceries and bills that is a disaster it's understandable but don't go down that road because there is a tax in effect a survival tax of 20 interest or more why would you do that why would you hand money to the big banks when you can keep it for your family our friends at american financing have a better way if you're looking to buy your first home or refinance your current one they're helping americans achieve the dream of home ownership with monthly mortgage rates currently in the fives american financing saves its customers an average of 800 bucks per month that's nearly 10 grand every year back to you this isn't just a loan it's a total financial reset so debt is tough but there's a smart way to do it and a reckless self-destructive way to do it credit cards and so we recommend american financing they're salary based not commission based which means they they actually work for you not the banks they're called america's home for home loans for a reason call 800-685-5696 800-685-5696 or visit americanfinancing.net slash tucker it's uh yeah i mean i think it's pretty clear that the investigation into that has not been as full as charlie's family and the rest of us deserve i mean there's no question about that so and i'm sorry to get you sidetracked but you're obviously really knowledgeable and i hope you'll come back by the way uh at some point um but back to china so the united states is is and with israel blowing up chinese built infrastructure so that seems like a big step and it seems like in so doing you could like risk chinese further participation in this in this conflict are we risking that i think we are um we're not at the cusp yet i don't think i'm i'm waiting to see just exactly how we deal with all the chinese shipping that would be i think a deal breaker and perhaps get china more infuriated and maybe even doing more than she's already doing but i know too i've been in the central party school one of the few americans who had i've been in china since 1984 and almost every other year or so and i've done simulations in beijing with the chinese uh in fact i did one in 2009 that was called are you ready for this the oil disruption exercise we had everybody there we had marad we had aig we had lloyds of london we had all the countries involved and we took down rastonura at that time about eight million barrels per day production capacity and west exit intermediate brent crude went to 200 almost overnight shippers wouldn't ship insurers wouldn't insure and of course everyone in the room including the chinese this was very instructive but this was 2009 agreed to allow the united states navy and the uh group of five led by singapore with their little navy about one ship per country police the strait of malacca because that's where we were threatening another act and let the united states navy almost exclusively clear the strait of ormuz and fix the situation at rastonura and all it took at that time because we were much bigger we put ships in there we put an aircraft carrier not too much different from lincoln right now and that calmed things down and people began to realize that if there were problems further problems because this was a terrorist attack on rastonura that we postulated if things were to get out of hand again the united states navy was there and other allied navies were there too so it calmed down and oil went down and oil went down again but very very dicey moment it was so dicey on the game floor tucker i've never seen this before and i've done hundreds of simulations the chinese actually when the move to shift oil reserves around the world to take care of this problem so there wouldn't be a real global depression develop had to go back to their ministry of foreign affairs and consult before they could come back to the game floor and make a decision um wow chas freeman ambassador chas freeman was there with us and at breakfast the next day they didn't know chas was fluent in mandarin i couldn't believe that but they didn't their intelligence had failed them on that so we're at breakfast and i said chas what was said and he told me what was said it was interesting i mean they were actually seriously worried about making a decision that took oil at that moment away from china and say gave it to korea or gave it to some other country like japan that needed it more desperately than they did because that's what we did for a time we divided the oil flows up around the world so they'd be more economic and more helpful the countries that were being hurt that was the last time i saw a real camaraderie between um i think that's fair term to use too between chinese diplomats chinese you know we knew that probably 10 of the chinese delegation was intel ours was too um but that was the last time i saw comedy and i saw um willingness to work together in a significant way and that was a dicey situation very dicey on the game floor how does it get reopened now do you think i think it's going to have to be the force of the of the reality of what we're doing to the globe i'm looking very closely at economic analyses that tell me by the end of june if we're not back to reasonable shipping again we'll be certainly in recession global recession and if we go to the end of august we might be in global depression and putin and and trump can say over and over again that we have plenty of lng and plenty of oil and everything it doesn't matter you're not going to survive in that kind of autarkic sense economically you're going to you're going to track crash too so we would be looking i think not only that coming to impact us and at the same time our incredible debt coupled with the fact that xi jinping would probably accelerate the replacement of the dollar with renminbi because there would be a moment to do it yeah so at that point i mean you can see chaos right i mean economic right um the lengths the roosevelt administration went to keep the country stable including authoritarian lengths i mean that was their single-minded obsession like depression means people get restive and scary and i just read the um a history of the i didn't even know it existed and the historian lives in false church he's an old dude he gave me a copy of it almost i almost dropped it it's so thick it's called recalled the civilian conservation corps yeah it's a wonderful book it's just full of pictures but you you see what roosevelt had to do and the fact that ultimately he had to order the army in to do that principally the army became the ingredient of the ccc that made it work when who ran it everyone forgets who ran the ccc yes macarthur yeah yeah but macarthur was macarthur was a interesting character in roosevelt uh administration more than once fdr said things that made anyone around him realize he knew how dangerous doug macarthur was in every sense of the term um and after the bonus marchers and macarthur's attempt to kill them right and eisenhower was his aid at that time and uh you see eisenhower in some of the pictures in this book as a matter of fact uh i think fdr had a real weather eye for macarthur but he made a huge mistake and he made it because he was frightened of him he should never have divided command in the pacific it cost a hundred thousand american casualties between nimitz and macarthur put macarthur in charge if you've got to do that but no stark and king wouldn't let him so he had to compensate stark and king and the navy and give them the central pacific macarthur the southwest pacific we had a bloody strategy in the center a bloody strategy we didn't need to take half of those islands macarthur showed us what to do you just bypass them and let them wither exactly you don't attack them but we attacked them in the central pacific what what do you think israel will do and will have to do if come june or july or august when the economic effects become impossible to ignore dangerous to everybody regimes around the world teeter and fall in the face of recession and depression and the united states says you know we're just we're out that leaves the iranian regime in charge really in charge and more powerful than it was on a you know february 27th can israel live with that i think not and you probably know what i think about the jewish state of israel i don't think it has a long riddle on life i don't think it can survive in the levant because the original conception was a safe haven and it's anything but a safe haven and that's been demonstrated markedly to all of its jewish citizens many of whom have left and probably more would have left if netanyahu would let them um so i i think it can survive as a as a democracy a true democracy that is to say palestinian arabs christians everyone living there ran jews living there with them um and i don't buy the power of the womb bit uh i don't think that would be so overwhelmingly quick that you couldn't adjust the democracy to be a real democracy even if the jewish citizens of it suddenly became a minority um or i don't think it would be suddenly as i said i think it'd be over time but they don't want to do that and i so i think they they're sealing their own demise as a state at all in the levant um democratic or otherwise and so you're right it's a dangerous situation and what we're doing in lebanon right now is just unconscionable west bank is bad enough but lebanon we're killing two or three hundred civilians about every 48 or 96 hours and they're just civilians we're bombing dry cleaners we're bombing bars we're bombing restaurants we're bombing hotels we i say i always say we because israel couldn't do it without us um and it's we built the most expensive largest embassy in the world where'd we build it we built it in beirut why did we do that well it didn't for diplomacy we built it there because it's a haven for massad mi6 and cia and because we plan on in that center piece in the eastern mediterranean mounting our guns against china and russia too if we have to um but we don't have any respect for lebanon lebanon could disappear tomorrow morning our embassy would still be there fortified to the hill of course we just don't care anymore and we're lashed up with the wrong people in lebanon we always have been really who are who are the right people in lebanon the right people are the people that hassan nasrallah was trying to introduce to the political situation cease his uh militaristic angle and become the politician in lebanon who would finally after years and years consolidate the government and have a government that the majority of lebanese could support and netanyahu what did netanyahu do of course that's what he kills the people he needs we pray that the war with iran ends immediately but the truth is it doesn't seem to be if you're the head of household you need to think through what this could mean for you and the people you're in charge of don't wait for disaster to strike to ensure that you have the basics covered food water light energy and that's exactly why we started a company called last country supply it's our store it carries the same preparedness products that we have well in this barn for example the products that give any head of household peace of mind knowing that if something bad happened you could take care of the people you're responsible for so continue to pray for an end to war and violence but also at the same time make sure that your family is ready stock up on the products that we trust at last country supply dot com slash tucker so i mean what is is israel's goal in lebanon israelis say i don't know if it's true but that the idf is just stretched to breaking can't possibly occupy southern lebanon much less you know beirut all the way down so like what is what is the point of this i've always thought that israel's real policies and i've been associated with for this for 50 years with respect to lebanon was demolishing periodically its economic capacity remember lebanon way back there was the pearl of the eastern mediterranean oh yes it's a place where everybody wanted to go beirut was beautiful and israel then came along and israel became on our dollar to a certain extent a very uh capitalistic predatory capitalistic and successful in that regard economy and wanted to stay that way and even wanted to grow and grow and bring in other people to that economy under the jewish writ of course but nonetheless come in abraham's abraham accords being one latest example and so they had to take lebanon down a peg every time if you go back and examine those bombing campaigns even the 82 invasion when they were really after plo and our fight they bombed the bejesus out of the economic structure of lebanon it's a time we military officers are saying why are they doing that that's just making them hate them why are they doing that they don't need to do that and then you know stupid us we figured it out after about two or three iterations they're bombing the hell out of their economic might so they can't you know 10 years to get back up again then they'd bomb them again that's very very dark i mean and we paid for it so what do you what do you think i mean president trump didn't explain really why he began this war other than to say iran can't have a nuke which is not an adequate explanation what do you think the the real motive was in starting a war with iran i think that new york times piece as much as i hate to praise the great lady these days um was probably fairly accurate i think most of his advisors the the principal ones anyway were saying no or you know arguing negatively and netanyahu persuaded him to do it now why did he listen to netanyahu when everyone else vance probably everyone but hegseth um was at least somewhat opposed if not strongly opposed which i'm told with some reliable information that kane was the chairman of the joint chief of staff and others on the military in the military um it it was persuasive because netanyahu said it and i can't tell you whether it was miriam adelson's millions or trump's uh i don't think he's got a real high regard for bb netanyahu in terms of loving him but something there told him indicated to him that he needed to go against all of his advisors and follow netanyahu's recommended course of action which of course i think is disastrous and yet he did does america's relationship with israel change after this is over i don't see how it can remain the same um with a new president who's got to pick up on what's happening with the american people um not least of which caused by charlie kirk what's happening with american people even in the core of maga under 40 in particular and under 20 on college campuses and things like that uh generally is don't like israel period even i could use a stronger word than don't like what why do you connect that to charlie kirk because i think he was changing his mind and it was obvious he was changing his mind about being so attached to israel both in terms of u.s security and in terms of just the american people i think he was beginning to realize that it was poisonous and that was dangerous i don't for a minute think that we might not find out down the road something about his assassination that resembles kennedy's and martin luther king's and others who've been shot uh in our country which is you know for for for people overseas sometimes whom i talk to uh infrequently now but used to talk to a lot like in france and england and germany yeah they don't understand why we kill people at the rate we kill people you know and as an american i say wait a minute wait a minute and they'll tick them off you know all the way back to roosevelt becoming president you know because they thought they got rid of him as vice president and all of a sudden mckinley's killed they'll they'll tick those things off all the way back to lincoln and they'll say you're pretty violent country you assassinate people quite frequently so it's it's i've had a very similar experience um uh in every country i've ever been to other than this one um they don't buy it but i want i mean it but you think that's that's correct it's pretty obvious that lone gunmen seem to kill people who are a challenge to entrench power and maybe that's not an accident yes yes more often than not i think it's not an accident i i just uh you if you go back and you look at any of the empires of old but particularly the eastern and western roman empire the eastern figured it out by the time by the time it came the byzantine empire uh and constantinople uh turned around on the then ruling entities adaptation of christianity and mellowed out a little bit um that famous period there uh probably extended their life by years if not decades and generations if you look at those people at the head of those groups whether it's like mary beard's new book the 12 caesars suetonius's 12 caesars between julius crossing the rubicon and walking decidedly into assassination even though he was warned multiple times should have known walks in the senate he's assassinated and then octavian and the civil wars start and then octavian becomes augustus and consolidates the empire and the roman republic is gone gone totally gone and you look at the period that she writes about those 12 caesars roughly between julius caesar and suetonius and you see the depravity you see epstein all through it you know and you understand what that does to you well from since 45 arguably with the cold war as a check on us and then since the end of the cold war with no check whatsoever we have turned into that version of the western roman empire ah it's distressing to see it can i ask you a bigger question i remember when i was much younger and i would run into guys you know your age who served at you know the highest levels of government in washington and they were always much more open to the existence of conspiracies and i just wonder if you know we deride conspiracy theories but the people who seem to believe in them the most are also the most knowledgeable have you have you noticed that i have noticed that yes and the people who could talk about the most explicitly and carefully in in chambers as it were yes they're those people that's so interesting so when you were i don't know 30 you probably didn't believe that that stuff was real i assume i did not i i had great faith in my country great faith in people like george washington and abraham lincoln and thomas jefferson a host of others i knew they were flawed but i had great faith in their building power and in their faith in what they built uh i can't say that anymore i can't say that anymore and i can even particularly with jefferson i can even powell used to quote him to me all the time because he loved jefferson's inaugural addresses he would pick out pieces and like pieces like i know i shall leave this office much more chagrined than i entered it you know that sort of thing yes i know i won't survive my reputation won't survive uh which is one reason my pal decided in 1995 not to run for president he essentially said i understand what jefferson meant and i'm not willing to suffer it um but anyway it it's been you know i'm 81 now and i got to say in the years since i entered in 1993 arguably or even 89 when i was with him when he was chairman the highest realms of american power and was exposed to that power i have really become uh a cynic about our ability even to survive much longer in a way that uh is anything like our past what what do you think the future holds like 10 years out what will we be looking at i'm really worried about ai i'm really worried about it i don't know if you saw that piece the other day by that gentleman i forget his name now from cambridge i believe who sold some of his ai development he's sort of the open timer of the ai movement to google and he said he was on his bench outside his lab or something and all of a sudden his cell phone rang and it was his ai and it was checking up on him and he he had a you know an epiphany right there on the bench this is dangerous what we're doing do you do you have a clear picture of what some of the effects might be well i'm seeing the effects already on young people whom i stay in contact with uh at gw and uh gw and uh william and mary i probably had roughly 600 students over the 16 years i taught and they a lot of them stay in contact with me one of them was the ea to mark carney carney and when mark ran and was elected in canada he got shifted to another guy by mark and i said well who are you working for now and he said mike bloomberg so i have students all over the place uh and they stay in touch with me and they reflect the same angst i have but in a much more visceral way because it's their future it's their life um and they're extremely worried about ai because they think it will eliminate their jobs or eliminate human autonomy that's part of it but the latter is the bigger part of it and there's also a component of it that is there's no way we're going to survive with that in our midst because not as humans your human autonomy business is probably as good a description of it as anything else but there are a couple of them who think we're going to wind up in a huge conflict between ai generated uh ai led ai whatever robots and ourselves and you know i i'm one who has always read and watched science fiction because more often than not there's something in that hg wells piece or that lucas piece or whatever star trek pick your pick your video adaptation that's true that's going to come about um and i see and i think they see too because they're much more visual video oriented generation than i was i was mostly the written word oriented generation um they see that too they see some of the science fiction that's been most uh dire most dour uh coming about is there any way to stop it that's the question of the hour i think with regard to it and robotics too um are we going to be able to manage it um there was a gentleman not too too long ago uh who made a statement i think he was a nasa scientist we have been given incredible powers we have been given incredible riches and he was referring to the united states we have also been given wisdom the question in the future is going to be will we use it or will we be overcome i think that's a huge question um and i don't i don't count myself in the camp of those who think it's impossible to eliminate the human race it is not impossible nuclear weapons the newest technology in the world no empire in all of 5 000 years of empires has ever possessed the technological technological means to destroy itself and others around it none not a single one and to think that human nature will allow us to get through a demise of empire without ultimately trying that method to save it i think is wishful thinking and we're we're at that point right now because we're looking at the end of the american empire looking at an actual threat to israel i mean it's i mean you just described it that there's an actual threat for the first time in a long time the greatest threat right and that's a nuclear armed power so and we're we're at that point as you as you well know without a single treaty they're all gone now every single one from the abm treaty all the way to new start gone no treaties so do you think that this administration can navigate a moment this fraught without either using or allowing its partner in this to use nuclear weapons i'm not given confidence by a man who argues with the pope and dresses up as jesus christ as jesus christ for an ad i mean i know he probably didn't do that intentionally but he allowed it to happen and this argument with leo is just absurd what do you what do you how would you interpret that well i think he's backing up from it a bit i wish he'd back up a little more abruptly and a little more more apologetically but it's done the damage is done and done at a moment when leo the first augustinian is headed for africa to go to augustus's place and sort of celebrate i mean it just didn't make it was bad timing and it was bad juju all around to do that and i know from my own experience and it's as i said seven decades of sentient experience anyway that we've had an effort in this country for a long long time very soto voci if you will under the table to create an american catholic church and to have our own pope and i remember when leo's rise was first announced when his selection was announced i said oh that'll put a stop to that because an american is now the pope in rome but i didn't think long enough that's not what they want they want an american pope and they want an american catholic church now right now i know it's a minority of catholics but it is a powerful minority of catholics and they've been around for at least 100 years not very successfully around but nonetheless they've pursued that for a long time why would people and pardon my ignorance as a birthright protestant i wasn't even aware of any of this why would people want an american catholic church then they wouldn't have to take any instructions at all from rome none at all rome would just be out there there wouldn't be any uh any real power of the pope in rome uh and i i suspect doctrinally they try to divorce that pope from the idea of being from god huh are there is there like an ideological motivation or theological motivation i think it's all power i do i really do i think uh people who have come out of great awakenings and i by the way think this is our fourth one most historians won't go with me yet but i bet you in 10 or 20 years they will look back on this period and they will call it a great awakening just like they did the one that produced prohibition and an amendment to the constitution to prohibit alcohol and then an amendment to rescind it um very damaging periods in our history whether it was burning witches or prohibition um that really that prohibition really generated the momentum for organized crime al capone was the first you know organized criminal if you will um so they're dangerous in the first periods and if we get out of this one without any more danger i mean hex f is holding i got it yesterday i couldn't believe it i i just couldn't believe that this this had developed osw protocol prayer services have been going on every week for 13 months um and always with the same line general officers and admirals will have reserve seats in the front rows all else will sit elsewhere no one is allowed to come in but those invited it's all on the the invitation this is not very american this is uncommonly un-american really the mixed religion and the military the way hegseth is doing it it's very dangerous and he's also preacher packing we used to say in south carolina putting the rotten strawberries on the bottom and the fresh strawberries on the top the ranks he's making sure very carefully that he's eliminating flag and admiral officers who are or might be opposed to the military becoming a defender of christianity as the national religion and he's doing the lower ranks too and he's doing them by doing such things as he's ceding congress's limits on mental category four recruits they're think mcnamara's hundred thousand if you will they can't even read their name on a guard roster they usually come from the mountains of west virginia or from the interior of oklahoma or my state of south carolina or alabama so hate to blame them those states but nonetheless they produce these people at an alarming rate and he's getting them in at the tune congress put a four percent cap on it well he got eleven percent the last time around the inspector general brave man he went over and told the congress and what hexath told the congress when they called him over to testify was well we created a school within the army this is the army that school taught them how to pass the entrance exam you don't know what they did they taught the test and so then they gave them the test again and all of a sudden they leapt up into mental category four and seven percent of them did that so we didn't exceed your cap we we kept your cap four percent that's just a dog and pony show they're taking people in who are uh what shall i say well a good a good example of it that's very very illustrative is there's the 50 or 60 that's the 50 or 60 that go out of basic training into the river there at fort jackson and get baptized in the name of jesus christ and are told by the chaplain when they rise from the water that they are soldiers for christ what hegseth wants is even the oath changed from to the constitution the oath should be to jesus christ but i mean the the gospels don't provide any basis for that theology at all i mean that's not the sermon on the mount would preclude like a lot of things the us military are doing right now in iran so i guess my concern would be the corruption of the gospels by this absolutely and and talk about corruption franklin graham in the center courtyard of the pentagon where i've been a number of times for ceremonies with old secretaries of defense once escorted mcnamara in there had a good talk with him about vietnam as i escorted him and he was very contrite he was actually contrite as we walked in i was a lieutenant colonel at the time billy graham or franklin graham billy graham's son of course and billy graham must be rolling in his grave because i i knew him he was not this way franklin graham gave a sermon for hegseth on those grounds that would make ted cruz happy he resurrected all the stuff cruz was talking about in an interview with you i believe um in from genesis and talked about how you had to sometimes kill everything in sight men women children and so forth in the center courtyard of the pentagon well that's like blasphemy it seems to me it is to me too i mean i'm a christian uh but i'm not that kind of christian yeah well i don't think there is that kind of christian is my view um what an amazing what an amazing unexpected conversation i'm sorry to take you on all these different tangents i hope you will come back um because your the scope of your thinking and the grasp of history that you have is is amazing so i appreciate it colonel thank you very much well i appreciate the opportunity and i must say i'm impressed with yours too well not not really but i uh but i'm interested i think it matters i've watched a lot of your interviews and um i'm impressed with what i particularly when you do things like what you did with ted cruise well that was easy well that was easy just dumb questions the very idea that i consult genesis for national security decision making just drove me back against the wall i couldn't believe that especially when he didn't know it was in genesis yeah it's unbelievable anyway thank you very much great to talk to you thank you take care