Tucker Carlson Show: w/ Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson on Iran Update (Transcript)

Editor’s Notes: In this episode, Tucker Carlson is joined by Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson for a wide-ranging discussion on the escalating “war of choice” with Iran and its profound geostrategic consequences for the American Empire. Wilkerson explains how current military actions in the Middle East are impacting China’s Belt and Road Initiative, potentially triggering a global economic shift that threatens U.S. maritime and financial dominance. The conversation also delves into the historical necessity of external enemies for maintaining imperial control and the alarming trend of religious nationalism emerging within the Pentagon. Ultimately, they explore whether the United States can navigate these mounting crises—from AI to potential nuclear conflict—without succumbing to internal and external collapse. (May 4, 2026)

TRANSCRIPT:

China’s Role in the Conflict

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 on 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?

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 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 in their Belt and Road Initiative railroads was 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 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 that are happening, and the world is basically ignorant of it.

What the Pentagon Knows

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, 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?

LAWRENCE 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, of course, and this is a hugely geostrategic issue that most people don’t— 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 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. 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 Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia, the Caucasus, and on northward, marrying up with the other three Belt and 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 2.5 to 3 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 Bab-el-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 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’ supposedly great strengths, its maritime power, because we won’t need to police the seas anymore. It’ll all be going over land.

The Geography of Commerce and Strategy

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 Iran, you could reach China from Iran overland. People, I think, lack the perspective of how exactly that would happen. But clearly the Pentagon understands these questions, right? So they’re bombing that railroad for a reason, which would be what? Do you think?

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Well, 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 because of what you look at in terms of commerce during the period immediately prior to World War II, when 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.

Stalingrad would have never held out without that supply route. Hundreds of thousands of trucks and wheeled vehicles and other implements of war went up that route. It was second only to Murmansk in terms of strategic effect. It was more important than Murmansk. 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

TUCKER CARLSON: So what’s the Chinese perspective on this?

LAWRENCE 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 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. Hu Jintao was a little bit of an aberration. 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 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 in the world, through which since the turn of this century, we have killed 38 million people, mostly men, women, and children. 38 million people. That rivals Stalin’s purges, Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. It almost rivals Hitler in terms of the people that he killed directly in World War II, not the whole war with 100 million casualties, but certainly the people he killed directly.

So we’re looking at the United States, and China looks at us this way, 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 said when she was confronted with that statistic, “So what? It was worth it.” Ah, Madeleine, want to join Hillary in the world of cretins? She did. Yeah, this is a serious issue for China and they want to stop it.

The Domestic Consequences of Sanctions Power

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s also a moral stain on the United States. And just jumping ahead, it strikes me that once the US government, OFAC, 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.

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Bingo. Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, that does seem like—

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: A natural follow-on.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, it does seem like the things you do to your opponents abroad will be done to your own citizens by the same government. I mean, that seems like a pretty consistent lesson of history. So that’s why empires are bad, ’cause they’re bad for your own population. But I wonder, like, China, we see our competition with China 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?

Economic vs. Military Competition with China

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: 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 I was there when George W. Bush said its importance to Walmart meant Dick needed to stay away from it. And 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 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-bian 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 Push for a New Cold War

TUCKER CARLSON: The impulse to go to war with China, like in 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?

LAWRENCE 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. 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 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, I think, a genuine Christian, as I mean 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, 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.

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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?

The Report from Iron Mountain and the Need for External Threats

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: You need an external enemy. If you’ve ever read, maybe you’re too young, but 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 said it, 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. In that report, 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. The monarchs, the prince, the prelate, they used to threaten the people with God 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. Torquemada looking at the Muslims and saying, “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 was passé, 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. That’s a part of it too, to keep them toeing 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.

Who Killed Kennedy?

TUCKER CARLSON: This is not at all related to why I asked you to have this conversation, but I can’t resist. Who do you think did kill Kennedy?

LAWRENCE 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 guy, the expert, tried with that very weapon 3 times to simulate the Zapruder film intervals and get that many rounds off, even 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. And the motive would be what they thought, especially with what he had done with regard to Cuba in October of ’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 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 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 firm, ephemeral wishes and even dangerous wishes. They thought that 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.

Jack Ruby and the Lone Gunman Theory

TUCKER CARLSON: Where do you think Jack Ruby came from?

LAWRENCE 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 half an hour. The president’s 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 to Ruby and shoot him right there. And we, 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.

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: 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.

Risks of Chinese Involvement in the Conflict

TUCKER CARLSON: 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. And I’m sorry to get you sidetracked, but you’re obviously really knowledgeable and I hope you’ll come back at some point. But back to China. So the United States is, with Israel, blowing up Chinese-built infrastructure. So that seems like a big step, and it seems like in so doing you could risk Chinese further participation in this conflict. Are we risking that?

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: I think we are. We’re not at the cusp yet, I don’t think. I’m waiting to see just exactly how we deal with all the Chinese shipping. That would be, I think, a dealbreaker 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. 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, and we took down Ras Tanura at that time, about 8 million barrels per day production capacity. And West Texas 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 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 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 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 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 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.

TUCKER CARLSON: Wow.

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: 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 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 too— between Chinese diplomats. We knew that probably 10% of the Chinese delegation was intel. Ours was too. But that was the last time I saw comity and I saw willingness to work together in a significant way. And that was a dicey situation, very dicey on the game floor.

Economic Consequences and the Risk of Global Recession

TUCKER CARLSON: How does it get reopened now, do you think?

LAWRENCE 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 be certainly 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 autarkic sense economically. You’re going to crash, too. So we would be looking, I think, at 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’d be a moment to do it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. So at that point, I mean, you could see chaos, right? I mean, economic—

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: The lengths the Roosevelt administration went to keep the country stable, including authoritarian lengths. I mean, that was their single-minded obsession. Depression means people get restive and scary.

The Civilian Conservation Corps and Roosevelt’s Response to the Depression

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Yeah. I just read the history of the— I didn’t even know it existed. And the historian lives in Falls Church. He’s an old dude. He gave me a copy of it. Almost dropped it. It’s so thick. It’s called Recall: The Civilian Conservation Corps. It’s a wonderful book. It’s just 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.

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: MacArthur.

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Yeah. 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—

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TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

MacArthur, Pacific Strategy, and the Division of Command

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: And Eisenhower was his aide at that time. And you see Eisenhower in some of the pictures in this book. As a matter of fact, 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 100,000 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.

Israel, Iran, and the Question of Survival

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, 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?

LAWRENCE 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 read 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 yeah, probably more would have left if Netanyahu would let them.

So I think it can survive as a, as a democracy, 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 bit. 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. 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 so I think they’re sealing their own demise as a state at all in the Levant, 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 2 or 300 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.

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 Mossad, 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. 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.

The Right People in Lebanon

TUCKER CARLSON: Who are, who are the right people in Lebanon?

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: The right people are the people that Hassan Nasrallah was trying to introduce to the political situation, cease his 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— he kills the people he needs.

Israel’s Strategy in Lebanon: Demolishing Economic Capacity

TUCKER CARLSON: So I mean, what 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 Beirut all the way down. So what is the point of this?

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: I’ve always thought that Israel’s real policies, 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.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh yes.

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: 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 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 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 Arafat, 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 2 or 3 iterations. They’re bombing the hell out of their economic might so they can’t, 10 years to get back up again. Then they bomb them again.

Trump, Netanyahu, and the Real Motive for War with Iran

TUCKER CARLSON: 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 real motive was in starting a war with Iran?

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: I think that New York Times piece, as much as I hate to praise the gray lady these days, was probably fairly accurate. I think most of his advisors, 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, the ants, probably everyone but Hegsa, was at least somewhat opposed, if not strongly opposed, which I’m told with some reliable information that Cain was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and others on the military, in the military.

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 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.

America’s Relationship with Israel After the War

TUCKER CARLSON: Does America’s relationship with Israel change after this is over?

LAWRENCE 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. Yeah. 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, generally is don’t like Israel, period. Even I could use a stronger word than don’t like.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why do you connect that to Charlie Kirk?

LAWRENCE 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 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 in our country, which is, you know, for people overseas sometimes whom I talk to 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 because they thought they got 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.”

Lone Gunmen, Conspiracies, and Entrenched Power

TUCKER CARLSON: “You assassinate people quite frequently.” 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.

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Yes, yes. More often than not, I think it’s not an accident. 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 it became the Byzantine Empire, and Constantinople turned around on the then ruling entity’s adaptation of Christianity and mellowed 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 like Mary Beard’s new book, The Twelve 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 into the Senate, he’s assassinated, and then Octavian and the civil war 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.

Conspiracy Theories and the Most Knowledgeable

TUCKER CARLSON: 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 noticed that?

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: I have noticed that. Yes. And the people who could talk about them most explicitly and carefully in, in chambers, as it were. Yes. 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 that stuff was real, I assume.

LAWRENCE 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. I can’t say that anymore.

And I can even, 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 and 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, 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, 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 a cynic about our ability even to survive much longer in a way that is anything like our past.

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Looking Ahead: What Does the Future Hold?

TUCKER CARLSON: What do you think the future holds, like 10 years out? What will we be looking at?

The Threat of AI and the Future of Humanity

LAWRENCE 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. 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?

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Well, I’m seeing the effects already on young people whom I stay in contact with at GW and William 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 aide to Mark 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 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.

TUCKER CARLSON: Because they think it will eliminate their jobs or eliminate human autonomy?

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: 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, AI-led, AI-whatever 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 that too. They see some of the science fiction that’s been most dour, most dour coming about.

TUCKER CARLSON: Is there any way to stop it?

Nuclear Risk and the End of Empire

LAWRENCE 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. “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. I mean, you just described it. There’s an actual threat for the first time in a long time, the greatest threat, right? And that’s a nuclear-armed power.

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: 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?

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: I’m 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?

Religion, Power, and the American Catholic Church

LAWRENCE 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. 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, 7 decades of sentient experience anyway, that we’ve had an effort in this country for a long, long time, very sotto voce, 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, “Ooh, 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.

TUCKER CARLSON: 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?

LAWRENCE 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: Is there like an ideological motivation or theological motivation?

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: I think it’s all power. I do. I really do. I think 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.

Very damaging periods in our history, whether it was burning witches or Prohibition. That really— that Prohibition really generated the momentum for organized crime. Al Capone was the first organized criminal, if you will. So they’re dangerous periods.

Hegseth, the Military, and Christian Nationalism

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 just couldn’t believe that 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 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. So I 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 4% cap on it. Well, he got 11% the last time around. The inspector general, brave man, he 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 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 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 are— what shall I say? Well, a good example of it 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 I mean, the gospels don’t provide any basis for that theology at all.

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: I mean, that’s not—

TUCKER CARLSON: 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.

LAWRENCE 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 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 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, and 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.

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: It is to me too. I mean, I’m a Christian, but I’m not that kind of Christian.

Closing Remarks

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.

LAWRENCE 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.

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: I’ve watched a lot of your interviews and I’m impressed with what I— particularly when you do things like what you did with Ted Cruz.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, that was easy.

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Just ask dumb questions. The very idea that I consult Genesis for national security decision-making just drove me back against the wall.

TUCKER CARLSON: I couldn’t believe that, especially when he didn’t know it was in Genesis.

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s unbelievable. Anyway, thank you very much. Great to talk to you.

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Thank you. Take care.