Tucker Carlson interviews retired Col Lawrence Wilkerson on Israel, Iran, China, and the decline of American power
Tucker Carlson speaks with retired Col Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, about the geopolitical stakes of the war with Iran, China's strategic response, the bombing of Belt and Road infrastructure, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the Kennedy assassination, AI, and the militarization of American Christianity.
Summary
Retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, joins Tucker Carlson to argue that the US-Israel war with Iran is in fact a proxy confrontation with China — one whose full stakes most Americans, and possibly President Trump himself, do not grasp. He argues that the US and Israel are bombing Chinese-built Belt and Road Initiative railroad infrastructure in Iran — a move he says signals a deeper geostrategic confrontation with China that most Americans, and possibly even President Trump, do not fully grasp. He contends that China's long-term strategy is to displace the dollar as the global reserve currency, eliminate the US sanctions regime, and win through economic and technological dominance rather than military conflict. He warns that if shipping disruptions continue through summer, the world faces recession or depression, which could accelerate China's financial offensive. He expresses serious doubts about the official account of the Kennedy assassination, arguing that the physical evidence around Oswald's rifle makes the lone gunman theory implausible, and connects the pattern of political assassination to the logic of empire. The host separately raises doubts about the official account of the Charlie Kirk shooting — an event whose facts remain unclear and which the FBI has not fully explained — and Wilkerson agrees it fits a broader pattern of politically inconvenient figures being eliminated. He also expresses alarm about what he describes as Secretary Hegseth's effort to reshape the US military around Christian nationalism, and about the existential risks posed by AI and the absence of any remaining arms control treaties.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
China's Role in the Iran Conflict and the Belt and Road Railroad
Tucker Carlson: Colonel Wilkerson, 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 in this drama, maybe in ways that we don't perceive. China would be the biggest and potentially most threatening to our interests. What is China's role in this conflict?
Col Lawrence Wilkerson: It's a role I think forced upon them at the moment. 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 this was going to happen in the way that it's happened. 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 in their Belt and Road Initiative was probably the most strategic one in many ways. It brings China's Pacific ports all the way around on land, and then, as intended, up the Persian Gulf along the old route that we used to resupply the Soviet Union during World War II, and eventually into the Caucasus and beyond. And now we're bombing it. 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. And the world is basically ignorant of it.
Tucker Carlson: Can you expand on that? There are things happening the president doesn't know about, but that some planners at the Pentagon doubtless do. What would those things be?
Colonel Wilkerson: 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 — and this is a hugely geostrategic issue that most people don't fully understand, and I'm not even 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 was by shifting maritime commerce to the land, because maritime commerce was simply becoming too expensive for them. They put the Portuguese Empire out of business, for example. What they did was shift along one of their primary routes — which was this route China is now using — to eventually go up the Persian Gulf and into Armenia and Georgia, the Caucasus, and on northward, marrying up with the other three Belt and Road Initiative railroads, which incidentally have been downgraded seriously by the war in Ukraine. Does that ring a bell with anyone 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 of 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 Bab-el-Mandeb, the Strait of Hormuz, the Suez Canal, maybe even the Panama Canal. Although China has built a very luxurious, state-of-the-art port on the west coast of Peru, that's looking toward the Pacific and toward that aspect of commerce, so don't expect a lot of that to be going through the canal. 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 — its maritime power — because we won't need to police the seas anymore. It'll all be going over land.
Geography, Commerce, and What the Pentagon Understands
Tucker Carlson: 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 could reach China from Iran overland — I think people lack the perspective of how exactly that would happen. But clearly the Pentagon understands these questions. So they're bombing that railroad for a reason, which would be what, do you think?
Colonel Wilkerson: To set it back, and to tell China we know what they're doing and we don't like it. That route is such a serious threat in and of itself. You look at commerce during the period immediately prior to World War II, when Britain and the United States moved into Iran — and I mean we moved in there. They were Nazi sympathizers at the time. We built a road, flanked it with security, and at that time the Iranians couldn't challenge it very much. We shipped all manner of goods up that road into the belly of the Soviet Union. Stalingrad would have never held out without that supply route. Hundreds of thousands of trucks, wheeled vehicles, and other implements of war went up that route. It was second only to the Lend-Lease routes, and in terms of strategic effect it was more important than many of them. How many Americans even know that? How many Americans even knew that at the time?
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.
China's Long-Term Strategy: Economic Dominance Over Military Conflict
Tucker Carlson: So what's the Chinese perspective on this?
Colonel Wilkerson: As it has been ever since Deng Xiaoping 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 in 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 — he put out the latest in a series of edicts that have come from Chinese premiers from Deng Xiaoping on. 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. That means the renminbi being substituted for the dollar in everything from oil sales to you name it. It will become the transactional and reserve currency — already is, to a great extent, for about 40% of the world. They're going to shoot for 60 to 70% of the world. They're going to drive the Bretton Woods 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 — through which, since the turn of this century, we have killed 38 million people, mostly men, women, and children — is a moral imperative. 38 million people. That rivals Stalin's purges, Mao's Cultural Revolution. It almost rivals Hitler in terms of the people he killed directly in World War II — not the whole war with 100 million casualties, but certainly the people he killed directly. So China looks at the United States as having done that damage in the world with our financial system, which allowed us to put primary and secondary sanctions on 30% 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 killed 500,000 in Saddam Hussein's Iraq when we had the sanctions on him. Madeleine Albright, when she was confronted with that statistic, said, "So what? It was worth it."
Tucker Carlson: This is a serious issue for China and they want to stop it.
The Dollar, Sanctions, and What Happens to American Citizens
Tucker Carlson: It strikes me that once the US government in effect loses the ability to sanction other countries, it will have only the power to sanction American citizens for disobedience — with programmable digital currency. And it will do something very similar to us.
Colonel Wilkerson: Bingo. That does seem like the natural follow.
Tucker Carlson: It does seem like the things you do to your opponents abroad will be done to your own citizens by the same government. That seems like a pretty consistent lesson of history. That's why empires are bad — because they're bad for your own population. But I wonder — we see our competition with China primarily in military terms. 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?
Colonel Wilkerson: But that's new. In my time — in George W. Bush's administration — Colin Powell was given his head on only one major international issue, and that was China. I was there when George W. Bush said its importance to Walmart meant Dick needed to stay away from it. And 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 hold our head up in the world in that regard. So he gave Colin Powell his head, and Powell was constantly thwarting the vice president in those terms, because Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney wanted a hot war or a cold war — they'd have 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 publicly repudiate Chen Shui-bian and tell him to shut up about his independence referendum, because he knew that was a red line with Beijing. So that's the last president I think we had who fundamentally understood this economic relationship and thought we could wage it with them and at least tie them, if not win.
Why Cheney and Rumsfeld Wanted Confrontation With China
Tucker Carlson: The impulse to go to war with China — at least an exchange of ballistic missiles. Where does that come from? Why would you want that? Why would Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld and so many others be advocating for that?
Colonel Wilkerson: I don't think they really wanted a hot war. But the thing that scared me, and scared Colin Powell too, was that they seemed to be willing to accept it if they couldn't get the Cold War. 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 sense. Cheney occasionally would reveal things like a statement: "We don't want people to love us, we want people to fear us." And that was okay, but it didn't go over that big with what I think was a genuine Christian — a Sermon on the Mount type Christian — that George W. Bush was. And so in that sense, that pushed him over into Powell's camp.
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. 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.
Tucker Carlson: But 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?
Colonel Wilkerson: You need an external enemy. If you've ever read — there was an argument over whether it was a fanciful parody from somebody at the New Yorker or was it a serious study — it was called the Report from Iron Mountain. It was a pamphlet. Lyndon Johnson, when he read it, told his staff to get rid of it, ban it. It didn't happen. The New York Times picked up on it. It went viral. Two issues were put out.
In that report — which many thought really was a response to Kennedy's June speech at American University — they went through all the Cold War parameters and 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. The monarchs, the prince, the prelate — they used to threaten the people with God. "You're going to burn in hell if you don't do what I tell you to do." Torquemada looking at the Muslims and saying, "Repent. Become a Christian or I'll cut your throat." And that's what he did. But they thought 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.
Tucker Carlson: To keep your own citizens obedient.
Colonel Wilkerson: Yes, very much so. That's a part of it too — to keep them toeing the line, paying their taxes, and doing everything you do in a state that once was a republic and now is an empire.
The Kennedy Assassination
Tucker Carlson: This is not at all related to what I asked you to have this conversation about, but I can't resist. Who do you think did kill Kennedy?
Colonel Wilkerson: I'm fairly certain, after a lot of study — I'm a hunter, I know weapons fairly well — I know that weapon that Lee Harvey Oswald wielded. No way it shot John Kennedy and killed him. I don't even think he could hit him from there. The FBI expert tried with that very weapon three times to simulate the Zapruder film intervals and get that many rounds off — even just get them off, not just accurately — and he couldn't do it.
I think it was a combination of CIA, Mafia, and probably Pentagon. And I don't mean organizationally, but I mean dissenters in all three of those groups.
Tucker Carlson: And the motive would be what?
Colonel Wilkerson: They thought — especially with what he had done with regard to Cuba in October '62, and then the speech on 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 a 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 dynamism and the UN and everything else, 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. 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 East Germany. And that was strategic for the Russians.
So that was a much more serious crisis, but Kennedy had 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 ephemeral wishes, and even dangerous wishes. They thought the Soviets would pull a trick on us — all the things you usually throw out there when you don't trust your enemy. 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.
Tucker Carlson: Where do you think Jack Ruby came from?
Colonel Wilkerson: They found him somewhere. I was at Baylor University at that time, and I remember when the announcement was made. I was absolutely stunned. Me and my roommate could barely talk for about a half an hour. The president had just been shot not too far from us — we were in Waco. And then we were on the TV and we watched this guy walk up and shoot Oswald right there. And at that moment, Bob and I said to ourselves, "This stinks. This really stinks."
Tucker Carlson: When the lone gunman kills the lone gunman, they're probably not lone gunmen.
Colonel Wilkerson: You got it.
The Killing of Charlie Kirk
Tucker Carlson: 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 that that guy stuck a .30-06 down his pants leg and walked away.
Back to China: The Risk of Escalation
Tucker Carlson: Back to China. The United States and Israel are blowing up Chinese-built infrastructure. That seems like a big step, and it seems like in so doing you could risk further Chinese participation in this conflict. Are we risking that?
Colonel Wilkerson: I think we are. We're not at the cusp yet. I don't think. I'm waiting to see 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 has. I've been in China since 1984 and almost every other year or so. And I've done simulations in Beijing with the Chinese. 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 Lloyd's of London, we had all the countries involved. We took down Ras Tanura — at that time about 8 million barrels per day of productive capacity — and West Texas Intermediate and 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 — and this was very instructive — this was 2009 — agreed to allow the United States Navy and the group of five led by Singapore, with their little navy of about one ship per country, to 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 Hormuz and fix the situation at Ras Tanura.
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 the Lincoln right now. And that calmed things down, and people began to realize that if there were further problems — because this was a terrorist attack on Ras Tanura 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 again.
But it was a 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 — developed, 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.
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, and it was interesting. They were actually seriously worried about making a decision that took oil at that moment away from China and 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 to countries that were being hurt.
That was the last time I saw a real camaraderie — and I think that's a fair term to use — between Chinese diplomats and ourselves. We knew that probably 10% of the Chinese delegation was intel. Ours was too. But that was the last time I saw camaraderie and willingness to work together in a significant way. And that was a dicey situation. Very dicey on the game floor.
The Economic Consequences of Prolonged War
Tucker Carlson: How does it get resolved now, do you think?
Colonel Wilkerson: I think it's going to have to be the force 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 certainly be in recession — global recession. And if we go to the end of August, we might be in global depression. And Putin 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 sense economically. You're going to crash too.
So we would be looking at not only that coming to impact us, but at the same time our incredible debt, coupled with the fact that Xi Jinping would probably accelerate the replacement of the dollar with the renminbi, because there'd be a moment to do it.
Tucker Carlson: At that point you could see chaos — economic chaos.
Colonel Wilkerson: Yes.
Tucker Carlson: The lengths the Roosevelt administration went to keep the country stable — including authoritarian lengths — that was their single-minded obsession. Depression means people get restive and scary.
Colonel Wilkerson: I just read a history of the Civilian Conservation Corps. I didn't even know it existed. The historian lives in Falls Church. He's an old fellow. He gave me a copy of it. I almost dropped it, it's so thick. It's called Recalled: The Civilian Conservation Corps. It's a wonderful book, full of pictures. But you see what Roosevelt had to do, and the fact that ultimately he had to order the army in to do that. But principally the army became the ingredient of the CCC that made it work.
Tucker Carlson: And who ran it? Everyone forgets who ran the CCC.
Colonel Wilkerson: MacArthur.
Tucker Carlson: MacArthur.
Colonel Wilkerson: But MacArthur was an interesting character in the Roosevelt 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. And after the Bonus Marchers and MacArthur's attempt to kill them — and Eisenhower was his aide at that time, and you see Eisenhower in some of the pictures in this book — 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. You don't attack them. But we attacked them in the Central Pacific.
Israel's Future and Lebanon
Tucker Carlson: 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 and dangerous to everybody, regimes around the world teeter and fall in the face of recession and depression, and the United States says we're out? That leaves the Iranian regime in charge and more powerful than it was. Can Israel live with that?
Colonel Wilkerson: I think not. And you probably know what I think about the Jewish state of Israel. I don't think it has a long run of 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.
I think it can survive as a true democracy — that is to say, Palestinian Arabs, Christians, everyone living there, and Jews living there with them. And I don't buy the power of the womb argument. 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. I don't think it would be sudden — I think it'd be over time. But they don't want to do that. And so I think they're sealing their own demise as a state at all in the Levant, democratic or otherwise.
And what we're doing in Lebanon right now is just unconscionable. The West Bank is bad enough, but Lebanon — we're killing two or three hundred civilians about every 48 to 96 hours. And they're just civilians. We're bombing dry cleaners. We're bombing bars. We're bombing restaurants. We're bombing hotels. I always say "we" because Israel couldn't do it without us.
And we built the most expensive, largest embassy in the world. Where did we build it? We built it in Beirut. Why did we do that? It wasn't for diplomacy. We built it there because it's a haven for Mossad, MI6, and CIA. And because we plan on, in that centerpiece in the Eastern Mediterranean, mounting our guns against China and Russia too, if we have to. But we don't have any respect for Lebanon. Lebanon could disappear tomorrow morning. Our embassy would still be there, fortified to the hilt, of course. We just don't care anymore. And we're lashed up with the wrong people in Lebanon. We always have been, really.
Tucker Carlson: Who are the right people in Lebanon?
Colonel Wilkerson: The right people are the people that Hassan Nasrallah was trying to introduce to the political situation — ceasing his militaristic angle and becoming 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 does. He kills the people he needs.
Israel's Strategy of Periodic Economic Destruction in Lebanon
Tucker Carlson: What is Israel's goal in Lebanon? Israelis say — I don't know if it's true — that the IDF is just stretched to breaking, can't possibly occupy southern Lebanon, much less Beirut all the way down. So what is the point of this?
Colonel Wilkerson: I've always thought that Israel's real policy — and I've been associated with 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. It's a place where everybody wanted to go. Beirut was beautiful. And Israel then came along and became — on our dollar to a certain extent — a very capitalistic, predatory capitalistic, and successful economy, and wanted to stay that way and even wanted to grow and bring in other people to that economy under the Jewish writ, of course. The Abraham Accords being one latest example.
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 the PLO, they bombed the bejesus out of the economic structure of Lebanon. At the time, we military officers were 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, 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, it takes 10 years to get back up again. Then they'd bomb them again.
Tucker Carlson: That's very, very dark. And we paid for it.
Why Trump Started the War With Iran
Tucker Carlson: What do you think? 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 real motive was in starting a war with Iran?
Colonel Wilkerson: I think that New York Times piece — as much as I hate to praise the Grey Lady these days — was probably fairly accurate. I think most of his advisors, the principal ones anyway, were saying no, or arguing negatively, and Netanyahu persuaded him to do it. Now, why did he listen to Netanyahu when everyone else — the principals, probably everyone but Hegseth — was at least somewhat opposed, if not strongly opposed? Which I'm told, with some reliable information, that Caine, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and others in the military were.
It was persuasive because Netanyahu said it. And I can't tell you whether it was Miriam Adelson's millions or Trump's — I don't think he's got a real high regard for Bibi Netanyahu in terms of loving him. But something there indicated to him that he needed to go against all of his advisors and follow Netanyahu's recommended course of action, which I think is disastrous. And yet he did.
Will America's Relationship With Israel Change?
Tucker Carlson: Does America's relationship with Israel change after this is over?
Colonel Wilkerson: I don't see how it can remain the same — with a new president who's got to pick up on what's happening with the American people. Not least of which caused by Charlie Kirk. What's happening with the American people, even in the core of MAGA — under 40 in particular, and under 20 on college campuses — is: they don't like Israel. Period. I could use a stronger word than "don't like."
Tucker Carlson: What do you connect that to Charlie Kirk?
Colonel Wilkerson: 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 US 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 in our country. Which is — for people overseas, sometimes, whom I talk to — they don't understand why we kill people at the rate we kill people. And as an American, I say, "Wait a minute." And they'll tick them off, you know, all the way back to Roosevelt becoming president because they thought they'd gotten rid of him as vice president and all of a sudden McKinley's killed. They'll tick those things off all the way back to Lincoln and they'll say, "You're a pretty violent country. You assassinate people quite frequently."
Tucker Carlson: I've had a very similar experience in every country I've ever been to other than this one. They don't buy it. But you think that's correct — it's pretty obvious that lone gunmen seem to kill people who are a challenge to entrenched power. And maybe that's not an accident.
Colonel Wilkerson: Yes. More often than not, I think it's not an accident. If you go back and look at any of the empires of old, but particularly the Eastern and Western Roman Empire — the Eastern figured it out by the time it became the Byzantine Empire. Constantinople turned around on the then-ruling entity's adaptation of Christianity and mellowed it out a little bit. That famous period there 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 Mary Beard's new book, The Twelve Caesars, or Suetonius's Twelve Caesars — between Julius crossing the Rubicon and walking decisively into assassination, even though he was warned multiple times and should have known — walks into the Senate, he's assassinated, and then Octavian and the Civil War start. And then Octavian becomes Augustus and consolidates the empire. The Roman Republic is gone. Totally gone.
And you look at the period she writes about, those twelve Caesars roughly between Julius Caesar and Suetonius, and you see the depravity. You see Epstein all through it. And you understand what that does to you. Well, since 1945 — 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.
Conspiracy, Knowledge, and the Most Informed Believers
Tucker Carlson: 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 your age who served at the highest levels of government in Washington, and they were always much more open to the existence of conspiracies. And I just wonder — we deride conspiracy theories, but the people who seem to believe in them the most are also the most knowledgeable. Have you noticed that?
Colonel Wilkerson: I have noticed that. Yes. And the people who could talk about them most explicitly and carefully, in chambers as it were — they're those people.
Tucker Carlson: That's so interesting. So when you were, I don't know, 30, you probably didn't believe that stuff was real. I assume.
Colonel Wilkerson: I did not. 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'd built. I can't say that anymore.
And I can — particularly with Jefferson — Powell used to quote him to me all the time because he loved Jefferson's inaugural addresses. He would pick out pieces, like: "I know I shall leave this office much more chagrined than I entered it." That sort of thing. "I know my reputation won't survive." Which is one reason why Powell decided in 1995 not to run for president. He essentially said, "I understand what Jefferson meant and I'm not willing to suffer it."
But anyway, it's been — I'm 81 now, and I've 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, exposed to that power — I have really become a cynic about our ability even to survive much longer in a way that is anything like our past.
AI, the End of Empire, and Existential Risk
Tucker Carlson: What do you think the future holds — 10 years out? What will we be looking at?
Colonel Wilkerson: 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 Oppenheimer 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 had an epiphany right there on the bench: this is dangerous what we're doing.
Tucker Carlson: Do you have a clear picture of what some of the effects might be?
Colonel Wilkerson: I'm seeing the effects already on young people whom I stay in contact with at GW and William and Mary. I probably had roughly 600 students over the 16 years I taught, and a lot of them stay in contact with me. One of them was the EA to Mark Carney. And when Mark ran and was elected in Canada, he got shifted to another person 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. 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. 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 — there's no way we're going to survive with that in our midst, not as humans. Your human autonomy point 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 robots and ourselves. And I'm one who has always read and watched science fiction, because more often than not there's something in that H.G. Wells piece or that Lucas piece or whatever — Star Trek, pick your video adaptation — that's true, that's going to come about. And I see, and I think they see too, because they're a much more visual, video-oriented generation than I was — I was mostly the written-word-oriented generation — they see some of the science fiction that's been most dire coming about.
Tucker Carlson: Is there any way to stop it?
Colonel Wilkerson: That's the question of the hour, I think, with regard to it and robotics too. Are we going to be able to manage it? There was a gentleman not too long ago who made a statement — I think he was a NASA scientist. He said: "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. And 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 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.
Tucker Carlson: And 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. There's an actual threat for the first time in a long time.
Colonel Wilkerson: The greatest threat, right?
Tucker Carlson: And that's a nuclear-armed power. And we're at that point, 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.
Tucker Carlson: 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?
Colonel Wilkerson: I am not given confidence by a man who argues with the Pope and dresses up 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.
Tucker Carlson: How would you interpret that?
Colonel Wilkerson: 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 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 Augustine's place and sort of celebrate. It was bad timing and it was bad juju all around to do that.
And I know from my own experience — seven decades of sentient experience anyway — that we've had an effort in this country for a long, long time, very stealthily, under the table, to create an American Catholic church and to have our own pope. I remember when Leo's selection was first announced and I said, "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. Right now I know it's a minority of Catholics, but it is a powerful minority, and they've been around for at least a hundred years — not very successfully, but nonetheless they've pursued that for a long time.
Tucker Carlson: Why would people — pardon my ignorance as a birthright Protestant, I wasn't even aware of any of this — why would people want an American Catholic church?
Colonel Wilkerson: 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 real power of the pope in Rome. And I suspect doctrinally they'd try to divorce that pope from the idea of being from God.
Tucker Carlson: Are there ideological or theological motivations?
Colonel Wilkerson: I think it's all power. I really do. I think people who have come out of great awakenings — and by the way, I 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 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. Very damaging periods in our history, whether it was burning witches or Prohibition. Prohibition really generated the momentum for organized crime. Al Capone was the first organized criminal, if you will. So they're dangerous periods.
Hegseth, Christian Nationalism, and the Military
Colonel Wilkerson: And if we get out of this one without any more danger — I mean, Hegseth is holding — I got it yesterday, I couldn't believe it — I couldn't believe this had developed. OSW protocol prayer services have been going on every week for 13 months. And always with the same line: general officers and admirals will have reserved 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 invitation.
This is not very American. This is uncommonly un-American, really — to mix 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 exceeding Congress's limits on mental category 4 recruits. They're like McNamara's 100,000, 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. They produce these people at an alarming rate. And he's getting them in — Congress put a 4% cap on it. Well, he got 11% the last time around.
The Inspector General — brave man — went over and told the Congress. And what Hegseth 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 want to 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 4, and 7% of them did that. So we didn't exceed your cap. We kept your cap at 4%. That's just a dog and pony show. They're taking people in who — a good example that's very illustrative is 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.
Tucker Carlson: But the Gospels don't provide any basis for that theology at all. That's not the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon on the Mount would preclude 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.
Colonel Wilkerson: Absolutely. And talk about corruption — Franklin Graham, in the center courtyard of the Pentagon, where I've been a number of times for ceremonies — I once escorted Robert McNamara in there. Had a good talk with him about Vietnam as I escorted him. And he was very contrite, actually contrite as we walked in. I was a lieutenant colonel at the time.
Billy Graham's son Franklin Graham — and Billy Graham must be rolling in his grave, because I knew him and he was not this way — Franklin Graham gave a sermon 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 — 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.
Tucker Carlson: Well, that's like blasphemy, it seems to me.
Colonel Wilkerson: It is to me too. I mean, I'm a Christian, but I'm not that kind of Christian.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. Well, I don't think there is that kind of Christian — that's my view.
What an amazing, unexpected conversation. I'm sorry to take you on all these different tangents. I hope you will come back, because the scope of your thinking and the grasp of history that you have is amazing. So I appreciate it. Colonel Wilkerson, thank you very much.
Colonel Wilkerson: Well, I appreciate the opportunity. And I must say I'm impressed with yours too.
Tucker Carlson: Well, not really, but I'm interested. I think it matters. I've watched a lot of your interviews and I'm impressed — particularly when you do things like what you did with Ted Cruz.
Colonel Wilkerson: Well, that was easy.
Tucker Carlson: The very dumb questions.
Colonel Wilkerson: The very idea that I consult Genesis for national security decision-making just drove me back against the wall. I couldn't believe that.
Tucker Carlson: Especially when he didn't know it was in Genesis.
Colonel Wilkerson: Yeah.
Tucker Carlson: It's unbelievable. Anyway, thank you very much. Great to talk to you.
Colonel Wilkerson: Thank you. Take care.