In part 2 of Paul Jay’s discussion with Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, they examine Trump’s push for a new missile defense system—a step toward the weaponization of space that heightens the risk of nuclear war. They also analyze the roots of the war in Ukraine, the failure of U.S. foreign policy, and what’s needed now to prevent further escalation.
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Paul JayHi, I'm Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news. This is part two of my interview with Larry Wilkerson about whether Trump is building, should I say, is the American political-economic system giving birth to a new made-in-America Mussolini-styled state. We're going to talk in this episode more about Trump's Iron Dome, nuclear weapons, and foreign policy, particularly Ukraine. Please join us.All right, let's focus on some of the foreign policy and military stuff because they're connected, obviously. I just want to start a little bit on the supposed cuts to the Pentagon. I think they're being very smart about various things, one of which they're talking about how Musk is going to go in and cut the Pentagon budget. I think it's pretty clear, and there's been even some straightforward admissions by some of the officials, that this isn't really about cuts. It's about moving the money around. It looks like there's a conflict developing between the old legacy's Lockheed and Northrop Grumman's, and the new Silicon Valley, SpaceX and Musk, Palantir of Peter Thiel, although they both invest in each other's stuff and which all want this new high tech AI weaponry. This weaponization of space. And they want to take money away from the old guys and give it to the new guys. Now, there is an easy answer if you're Trump. Give money to both.Col Lawrence WilkersonYeah.Paul JayMaybe that will be his answer because they don't really give a damn about the deficit anyway. I don't know. What's your thinking?Col Lawrence WilkersonThat's true. Well, I've seen the lines, and there's been much controversy over the lines amongst people like the Pentagon Budget Campaign, POGO, and others. There was euphoria in the beginning because it was just announced as cuts, but then very quickly, when the budgeteers got into it from all these groups, they saw, no, they're not cuts. It's just transferring money. It's going from this account to that account. This account over here is high-tech, and Elon Musk or somebody like that has a lot of stake in it. This account over here is old, and that's what he's doing. No cuts at all. There are zero cuts so far in terms of the top line. In fact, there's going to be a $100 billion-plus increase in the top line forced by Wicker and others in Congress.So we're going to be close to a trillion dollars. It's going to be clear it's over $900 billion, but it's going to be close to a trillion. And you're right. What you might call the vested contractors do not like the fact that, in many cases, the money is going away from accounts over which they have the profit-making capacity to accounts where other Silicon Valley, smaller startups, or whatever have the capacity because Hegseth thinks, and he may be right in this, these people are agile. They move fast, they move quickly, and if they make a mistake, they fix it. They don't charge you necessarily for fixing it, which has become a practice of the big guys. He's got some people in the Pentagon who are not necessarily displeased with this shifting of funds, but it's clear, and people need to understand this: there's no cutting going on. In fact, as I said, with Congress beefing it up by 100 plus, it's going to be an even bigger top line than last year.Paul JayOkay, so what do you say to people, whether they're Trump supporters or not? Because I think a lot of people don't understand the issue. Okay, you're going to weaponize space, but what you're really doing, according to President Trump, is creating, finally, after so many failures, an effective anti-ballistic missile system. So what's wrong with that, people will say? Col Lawrence WilkersonExcept it's not effective against Avangard systems that the Russians have developed. Those systems are so fast and so incredibly devastating that you, right now, with an existing technology, and technology expected in the next two decades or so, cannot deal with them. You can't stop them. The Russians have stolen the march on us with regard to both the INF Treaty being done away with. They started right away working on it because they said, "Well, if you're going to do away with the treaty, we might as well have a category of weapons that was banned." I'm not sure they ever got rid of that category, but they certainly modernized them.The Oreshnik was an example of that. Not all as fast as Avangard. Avangard goes 33,000 kilometers an hour. You can't hit that. That's something like about 9,000 miles an hour. You can't hit that with anything that we have. You can't defend against that. That's their nuclear, intercontinental one, but the intermediate-range ones are fast enough to avoid anything that we have. No Patriot battery or anything, even equivalent, would bring it down. So we're already in a world where we should never have gotten rid of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.Paul JayWell, let's talk about that because most people, how can you follow everything? The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty was negotiated in 1972, and Nixon and Brezhnev signed it. It's actually a brilliant treaty. Given the Cold War and how dangerous it was, they agree that if we don't have mutual self-destruction– if one side actually gets into a position where it can sustain enough of a first strike and launch a second, and so on and so on, that's so destabilizing. So, they signed this treaty, which was a great disappointment to the arms manufacturers because nothing is as much a boondoggle as an ABM system. It's very interesting. And this thing called the Project for the New American Century, which came out in the late 1990s, is that whole gang of neocons like Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle, who all became George Bush's Defense Department and launched the Iraq War.Col Lawrence WilkersonAlong with Mossad.Paul JayYeah, but in that document they created, which is called Rebuilding American Armed Forces, I just went back and re-read it a couple of months ago. The number one recommendation is to abrogate the ABM Treaty and build a new ABM system. Why? Because how much does it cost is how long is a piece of string. Whatever you can talk Congress and the American people into, that's what it costs [crosstalk 00:06:53]. In that document, to remind everybody– sorry, just let me finish and go on a bit here. In that document, it says, "We won't be able to spend all this money because the American people have Vietnam syndrome. And the only thing that might change it is another Pearl Harbor." As you know, Larry, that's actually in the document. Of course, they got their Pearl Harbor on 9/11. What's one of the first things Bush did after 9/11, I think two months later, he abrogated the 1972 ABM Treaty.Col Lawrence WilkersonRight. With massive opposition from his Secretary of State, Colin Powell. Powell was so furious about it that he dispatched Bolton to Moscow, punishing John at the same time. John hates treaties. He hates any kind of treaty. Any kind of treaty that limits weapons John hates. So he dispatched him there to negotiate the Moscow Treaty to try to appease the Russians because that was a blow. It was right in your face. Six months, I think, was the notice time. We gave six months and said, "We're out." No consults, no talks, nothing. Just, "We're out."So we went to Moscow, and we got a two-page treaty that said we would restrict our stockpiles at that point. We were going down, really still going down. We were going to restrict them from somewhere between 1,200 and 2,000. Imagine that. We're now at about 5,000, 6,000 each. So we stopped, but that started it. That started the unraveling of all the treaties, and now we are treatyless and we are naked.Paul JayTalk about why an ABM system, particularly if it actually seems to be somewhat effective, which is, as you say, is even likely, but even if it seems like it might. Why is that destabilizing?Col Lawrence WilkersonIt's destabilizing because if you really can knock down their rockets or they think you really can knock down their rockets, then you have just told them that you are possibly contemplating a first strike because they can't do anything back to you. You'll get most of their missiles in that first strike, and any that you don't get that are coming at you, you'll shoot down with your anti-ballistic missile system. You'll be unscathed, or virtually unscathed, and you will have devastated them.Now, what we're doing, Paul, is we've reversed that logic to a certain extent. Now, what we're doing is we're designing our missile warhead technology in such a way that it is so accurate that we now, in a first strike with a wave of our new Sentinel Ballistic missiles and these new warheads, we can be guaranteed almost of a 95% plus destruction of the enemy's land-based missiles. That is the way these people are talking about warfighting in the nuclear age.Paul JayIt's so insane because I've talked to guys who have been missileers, and I've talked to other people, I'm sure you have. It's not like the Russians and Chinese don't have early warning systems themselves. They may not be as good as the Americans, but they got them. Why on earth does anyone think there's still going to be any missiles sitting there waiting to get hit? They're going to cross each other in the air. The whole thing is ridiculous.Col Lawrence WilkersonThe missiles contained on their ballistic missile submarines aren't sufficient to do all the damage. Then we think we're going to have a ballistic missile defense that will take care of those few missiles that will come from their ballistic missile submarines.
