'What Is The Empire's Strategy?' - Col Lawrence Wilkerson Speech At RPI Media & War Conference
Does the US empire have a strategy? Why does the US go from blunder to disastrous blunder in the Middle East and Near Asia? Is there an objective? Col. Lawrence Wilkerson delivers the first speech at the Ron Paul Institute's 2018 Washington conference.
Support the Ron Paul Institute with a tax-deductible donation: http://ronpaulinstitute.org/support/
Does the US empire have a strategy? Why does the US go from blunder to disastrous blunder in the Middle East and Near Asia? Is there an objective? Col. Lawrence Wilkerson delivers the first speech at the Ron Paul Institute's 2018 Washington conference.
Support the Ron Paul Institute with a tax-deductible donation: http://ronpaulinstitute.org/support/
Does the US empire have a strategy? Why does the US go from blunder to disastrous blunder in the Middle East and Near Asia? Is there an objective? Col. Lawrence Wilkerson delivers the first speech at the Ron Paul Institute's 2018 Washington conference.
Support the Ron Paul Institute with a tax-deductible donation: http://ronpaulinstitute.org/support/
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
For today's program, we want to present the first of our speakers from last weekend's Ron Paul Institute Washington Conference on Media and War.
The first speaker is Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson.
Colonel Wilkerson is on the board of the Ron Paul Institute.
He was a speaker on Capitol Hill for Dr. Paul, as you'll see in the introduction.
And he was also the chief of staff for then Secretary of State Colin Powell, was in the midst of the run-up to the Iraq War.
He was there.
He's seen the disaster.
He knows where the bodies are buried.
And he's a very good friend of the Ron Paul Institute.
I think you're going to really enjoy this speech.
So sit back, relax.
Here's the first speech from the Ron Paul Institute Conference.
First thing I want to say is thank you to the Ron Paul Institute for having me here and for Daniel in particular for pursuing me.
I've got to make a preliminary comment too based on some of the remarks that were just made.
I've been on the Hill for the past three months in the Senate and the House, working particularly on House continuing Resolution 81 and Senate Special Resolution 54, which essentially used the United States Constitution to say the war in Yemen, and our support for that war is unconstitutional.
It is the most brutal war probably on the face of the earth.
It's a first-class humanitarian disaster, if that's not an oxymoron.
It is unheard of in terms of our mainstream media until recently, when with U.S. munitions and U.S. intelligence support, I think we can say conclusively now the Saudis recently hit a school bus and killed a whole lot of children.
This is just routine for the Saudi UAE effort in Yemen, and the United States is supporting them.
We finally had a breakthrough with AP in the New York Times saying, guess what, General Votel, the Central Command Commander, and Jim Mattis, the Secretary of Defense, you lied to the Congress.
Maybe you didn't know you were lying, but you did.
We actually have special forces on the ground in Yemen assisting the ground effort, not just intelligence, munitions, and air support.
This is a horrible thing we're doing.
And I think the momentum is finally building on the Hill to where we're going to have enough senators and enough representatives who are going to push us out of that war.
But it's late.
It's very late.
Thank you for having me here, Daniel, in particular.
I asked Daniel to list my title as What is the Empire Strategy?
We are an empire.
There's no question about that.
I don't mean how do we get through the week or the month or the year or even the decade, or as being increasingly asked these days through the present presidency.
These are not unimportant matters, but without some sort of strategic umbrella under which to operate, even good answers to these short-term issues might not be the best answers for the long term.
For example, drilling for oil or mining for copper in pristine Alaskan environments might seem a positive, profitable activity for the short term, and I've had people tell me that both of those actions are.
But if it's in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or it's Pebble Mine in Bristol Bay where I have fished for salmon and where one of the largest, if not the largest, salmon locations on the face of the earth still exists, still perseveres, then it might not be the best long-term decision.
In the long term, such exploitation might prove highly negative for a major ecosystem as well as for a whole lot of people who depend on the present circumstances.
Moreover, it might well prove extremely negative with regard to the planet's capacity to continue to absorb humanity's assault upon it with some major repercussions.
Let me tell you that I belong to a group called the Climate and Security Working Group.
I've belonged to it for some years now.
It is mostly retired and active duty civilian and uniform DOD in Homeland Security.
We are pressed right now with one issue: sea rise.
In Charleston, in Norfolk, in Mayport, in Miami, in Houston, in New Orleans, Pascagoula, and other places in this country, the DOD, with your tax dollars, is going to have to spend $80 to $100 billion probably just in the next 20 to 30 years to adapt to the sea rise.
It's coming up so fast, it's coming up much faster than the computer models have told us it is going to come up, and it is destroying or potentially destroying a lot of coastal military facilities.
So, DOD is the lead entity in the federal bureaucracy right now in trying to combat this claim.
Secretary Mattis, to his credit, actually left this in his national military strategy when the rest of the American government essentially was ordered not to think about it.
But a national strategy for the long term, whether in war or peace, is a true strategy.
It's what some have called grand strategy.
For example, the World War II grand strategy of being the arsenal of democracy and using our unprecedented and pent-up industrial capacity, pent up because of the Depression, of course, to outfit not only our own armies, but those of Britain, Free France, Free Poland, and the Soviet Union, and others succeeded in winning a two-ocean war against the powerful empires of Germany and Japan.
And almost immediately, by the way, Stalingrad and Paulus's Sixth Army, the Nazi army that penetrated the Soviet Union, the deepest, Stalingrad would never have happened had it not been for that line of communications that we opened from Bandur Abbas in Iran all the way up into the southern belly of the Soviet Union and supplied the Soviet armies with trucks, artillery, guns, ammunition, you name it.
They never would have stood the Nazi onslaught in Stalingrad without our logistic help.
And almost immediately after implementing that grand strategy, we implemented a grand strategy that we call containment, attached, again, adroitly to our economic power and executed fairly well over about a half century.
Terrorist Attacks and Cheney's Rise00:02:48
And we ended the Cold War on terms favorable to our country.
But since that war's end, and particularly since the majorly destabilizing terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the U.S. has had no strategy, certainly no grand strategy, not a zilch.
Nothing.
And as King Lear said to his daughter Cornelia, nothing will come of nothing.
What did come was a repudiation of George H.W. Bush's nascent European strategy, at least there was something there, of welcoming a reformed Russia into NATO and its replacement by a rapacious and oligarchy-based strategy led by Goldman Sachs,
Bob Rumin, and Larry Summers, and completely complicit in by the President of the United States, William Jefferson Clinton, to expand NATO directly in the Moscow space and thus provoke the reactions we have witnessed since the pushback by Russia in Georgia, Crimea, Ukraine, and elsewhere.
Then came George W. Bush, my president, who said he wanted to establish in the world a balance of power that favored freedom.
Michael Gerson alliteration, notwithstanding, he forgot to consider his Machiavellian vice president, Richard Cheney.
Along came the terrorist attacks of 2001, and Cheney took over.
His strategy, I'm loath to call it a strategy, was not only foolhardy, but potently destructive of what remained of American credibility.
In the first place, to make war on a methodological phenomenon, terror, is about as stupid as making war on a human addiction like drugs or a human condition like poverty.
Unless, of course, you want the war to last forever and cost zillions because you can never win.
Takes me back to 1989, Lieutenant Colonel fresh caught by Colin Powell, joining him at Forces Command at Fort McPherson in Atlanta, Georgia.
Powell is waxing euphoric in his office one morning.
Remember, I'm fresh caught.
I can't be too brazen.
I say, what's got you excited, boss?
He says, well, we're getting ready to enter the drug war.
We're going to fulfill Ronald Reagan.
He was Ronald Reagan's sixth and final national security advisor just before this, you'll recall.
We're going to fulfill Ronald Reagan and now H.W. Bush's desire to have the military participate in the drug war.
I said, General, why would the military ever want to participate in a war it can't win?
He looked at me with some incredulity on his face, and I realized I'd overstepped my bounds.
Afghanistan's Future00:14:48
And I shut up.
Nonetheless, I made my point.
Today, I won't pretend that in my allotted 20 minutes I can delineate a grand strategy to you.
Unless I seem too praiseworthy of our past, let me offer a caveat for the past half century as well, because it's a period that Donald Trump, in particular, seems to yearn for.
Here I'm quoting from a Cato Institute piece of June the 5th of this year, in which Patrick Porter writes, quote, while liberalism and liberal projects existed, such, quote, order, unquote, as existed rested on the imperial prerogatives of a superpower that attempted to impose that order by stepping outside rules and accommodating illiberal forces.
And some of the most doctrinaire liberal projects produced illiberal results, end of quote, such as interventions in Africa, Southeast Asia, my war, Vietnam, Central America, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and we could probably go on.
Porter goes on to conclude that the United States needs, quote, to appraise its grand strategy in order to bring its power and commitments into balance, unquote.
Now, you might have gleaned my difference with Porter is this, since 1993, what grand strategy, pray tell?
Let me start with the most important parts of such a strategy and briefly make some key points about ways, means, and ends.
The ways, of course, are the methods to be used to execute the strategy.
The means are the resources we possess to be applied to that execution, and the ends are, of course, what we want to achieve.
Ways are things such as note what I put first: diplomacy, financial instruments, economic power and policies, cultural influences, technologies, and note what I put last: military power.
Means are money and people basically.
Ends are what the devil do we want to do in the world at home and abroad.
And increasingly, you cannot decouple the two environments.
The idea, for example, that politics or foreign policy should stop at the water's edge is utter nonsense, particularly in a democracy, as letters from members of Congress to foreign leaders clearly indicate.
And such affairs does not start with Tom Cotton and his gang of morons.
Most of my over 500 students on two campuses over the past 13 years, incidentally echoing what Ron Paul said last night, they're the only thing that give me hope for the future is these young people, who have studied every post-World War II president from Truman to Trump.
They will tell you that domestic politics influenced national security decision-making almost as much as any other aspect of that decision-making.
And in some specific cases, like President Johnson making the decision in 1965 to escalate in Vietnam, influence it overwhelmingly.
And all one need look to for awesome proof of that today is our president and what is his strategy.
As Germany's foreign minister said, rather laconically, when Trump violated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the nuclear agreement with Iran, he did it based on domestic politics, pure and simple.
Anyone with half a brain knows he did.
But back to our grand strategy.
One of the most vital aspects, as I hope I've indicated, of a good grand strategy for the United States in particular is hooking up its economy, one of our strongest features, or it used to be, to the achievement of our ends, as we did so brilliantly in World War II and somewhat brilliantly in the Cold War.
And I say somewhat brilliantly because I'm reading at present William Taubman's new book, Gorbachev.
I recommend it highly.
When one begins to comprehend the problems of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, one can only lament how little we really understood about the Kremlin and about the country, and as a result, how awkward and stumbling we were in helping bring an end to that Cold War conflict, which probably could have ended at least a decade earlier.
And here, a side note.
As the Soviets discovered, principally in Afghanistan, note that using the very, very expensive military instrument drains the economy and must be avoided as much as possible.
Even giving that military unquestioned and seldom well overseen funding and support short of war is debilitating and to be done only in extremists and certainly not as a constant part of a sane and sober grand strategy.
Keeping one's powder dry, or as Washington said, being prepared for war is the best way to prevent war, does not mean breaking the bank to fund the military instrument.
And we are breaking the bank today.
If we keep on the trend we're on right now, our interest payments on the debt and the military budget will equal each other annually by about 2027.
That's not very far away.
But let's focus for a moment on the most important initial part of grand strategy, the ends.
State assembly, what is it that we want to achieve at home and in the world, say, over the next half century?
And no problem here, like the anodyne statements that issue from the White House or from the Pentagon.
For example, like this year's.
Quote, no external, this is a strategic end.
No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our nation, end of quote.
Michael Gerson could have written that.
Oh, what pabl.
We might conclude scratching our collective heads.
We're doing that best ourselves.
No need for an external threat.
But look at that statement from a general perspective of helpfulness in delineating a grand strategy.
It's useless.
It's like looking at a beautiful trout stream with a $3,000 handmade cane rod in your hand and saying your objective is to catch fish.
Well, of course, that's part of it, but it's far and away all of it.
I want to catch 19-inch West Slope cutthroat trout.
I want to catch them on dry flies during a magnificent hatch of caddis and blue-wing olives.
And I want to catch them on a tumbling, icily cold, crystal-clear stream high in the Bitterroot Mountains with only the silent sound of my superbly balanced cane rod-delivered fly gently touching the water, and no other humans around to disturb that idol, and perhaps with an elk standing downstream watching me warily.
In short, a grand strategy needs specificity, it needs granular details.
FDR hired the dollar men, some of America's most brilliant industrialists, to put together the linkage between America's awesome but then latent productive capacity and the urgent needs of a global war.
These men did the details, and if you know anything about that time, you know they did the details.
Extraordinarily did the details.
Ain't nobody, man or woman, doing the details for anything today, except on a select basis for extremely narrow interest with little national payback and lots of national debt, harm, and injury, and reporting in the mainstream media that it's all copacetic and wonderful.
Or it's terrible if it happens to be Kim Kardashian's ass and it's not looking well that day.
As an example, let's take the Middle East for a moment.
And I'm taking that region for a reason.
Because regardless of how many times Trump, Bolton, or Mattis, or anyone else says the Indian Pacific is the new U.S. strategic emphasis, which they've said repeatedly, we cannot escape the fact that the majority of our time, effort, and military might is in the Middle East.
What should a presidential administration declare to the American people as our strategic end for that region?
Let me take a shot at it.
Here's what I suggest: that the oil from its producing countries flows constantly at a consistent and affordable price to our friends and allies, and if necessary, to ourselves.
All this as we ready ourselves for a future without any oil whatsoever.
And that future is already upon us.
So that would be the biggest part of the end.
Oh, yes, as ships with sails did not in the past disappear from the face of the earth, so oil might linger in esoteric places.
But it will not be the very essence of economic might, not even close.
Even Royal Dutch Shell knows that.
Talk to its strategists if you don't believe me.
Note that there is nothing in this expression of ends about state building of Jeffersonian democracies, nothing about bringing freedom to the huddled masses, nothing about sidling up the dictators and their gangs in order to ensure access to their oil, and absolutely nothing about building U.S. military facilities all across the region.
There is, on the other hand, a recognition that oil is fungible, that it must be sold, that hoarding it for long, anyway, is not a tendency of petroleum-producing states, and if they are convinced you will not like it if they hoard it, they will, in fact, agree to sell it.
And they will scramble to accommodate you as oil disappears from use because you are the technology leader in the world, though Beijing is approaching fast.
We could do the same sort of reasonable delineation of ends for Europe, the whole of Southwest Asia, including Afghanistan.
But hold on a moment.
I'm going to tell you something about that.
North and Southeast Asia, and most, if not all, of the world.
I believe that if we did this sort of realistic formulation of strategic ends, we could move on to an equally reasonable look at the ways and means we have at hand to achieve them.
For example, in the Middle East, it would definitely not feature the largest U.S. Air Force base on earth in Qatar, a country now at almost war-provoking odds with Saudi Arabia and its friends like the UAE, nor a huge Air Force base in Saudi Arabia itself, nor the largest U.S. naval fleet headquarters in Bahrain, a lackey of Saudi Arabia, nor huge logistic facilities in Kuwait, nor a U.S. Air Force base in Israel.
Anybody know that?
I ask all across the country.
I've been in all 50 states.
I ask all across the country.
You know, we have a base, a U.S. base in Israel now?
Since 1948, we have not had a base in Israel.
By policy, we have not had a base in Israel.
Think about it for a moment.
We now have the stars and stripes flying over a base in Israel.
Neither would it include a completely antagonistic relationship with the true power in that region, Iran.
Now, as I intimated, Afghanistan is an altogether different matter.
That country demonstrates the danger of having a president who is only interested in domestic politics.
Into that void comes the most powerful and most strategically oriented bureaucracy in our government, the one I spent 31 years in, the military.
Here is what it has decided for Afghanistan.
And I bet you don't know this either.
We are in Afghanistan as we were in Germany post-World War II.
That is for at least a half a century.
It has nothing to do with Kabul and state building, nothing to do with fighting the Taliban or proving that we can reconcile with the Taliban, and nothing to do with fighting any terrorist group.
It has everything to do with three primary strategic objectives.
And I, really, as a military officer, as a professional, I don't necessarily object to these objectives, but I believe the American people probably ought to be told about them, and there ought to be a debate as to whether or not they want to spend their money on these objectives.
First objective is to be in the place that Donald Rumsfeld discovered was the most difficult country in the world to get military power into in 2001.
And take my word for it, it is.
Look at it on a map.
And leave it there because it is the only hard power the United States has that sits proximate to the central base road initiative of China that runs across Central Asia.
If we had to impact that with military power, we are in position to do so in Afghanistan.
Second reason we're there is because we're cheekin' jowl with the potentially most unstable nuclear stockpile on the face of the earth in Pakistan.
We want to be able to leap on that stockpile and stabilize it if necessary.
And the third reason we're there is because there are 20 million Uyghurs and they don't like Han Chinese in Xinjiang province in western China.
And if the CIA has to mount an operation using those Uyghurs as Erdogan has done in Turkey against the Saud, there are 20,000 of them in Idlib, in Syria right now, for example.
That's why the Chinese might be deploying military forces to Syria in the very near future to take care of those Uyghurs that Erdogan invited in.
Well, the CIA would want to destabilize China, and that would be the best way to do it, to foment unrest and to join with those Uyghurs in pushing the Han Chinese and Beijing from internal places rather than external.
Not saying it's going on right now, you didn't hear that, but it is a possibility.
So that's why we're there, and I'll wager there are not a handful of Americans who realize that we, our military, has decided that for these strategic reasons, which are well thought out, we're going to be in Afghanistan for the next half century.
Ladies and gentlemen, it's almost trite to declare our nation at a crossroads.
Nevertheless, I think we are.
One that reminds me eerily of the place we came to in 1866.
If you've read Ron Chernow's new book on Grant, and I recommend it to you, it's 900-plus pages, but I recommend it.
It's excellent reading.
You understand that in 1866, Ulysses Grant was in charge of the most powerful army on the face of the earth.
It had just come through four years of war.
Brits, French, Swedes, everyone had been there to watch it.
Observers were all over the battlefield.
They knew this was the future.
You have to ask yourself, how did World War I occur if they knew this was the future?
I'll tell you the answer: stupid generals fighting the last war and so forth.
Grant's Extraconstitutional Actions00:01:47
But at that time, Grant acted outside the Constitution.
He acted outside the standard civil-military relationship.
He had to.
Andrew Johnson, the president, who would finally be impeached, not successfully removed, but impeached, and only by a vote or two was he not successfully removed, wanted to negate the results a million people had died to achieve.
Grant refused to allow that to happen, as you might well suspect, and dispatched Sheridan, Sherman, and other military leaders to places like New Orleans and Charleston and stop the killing of blacks that was taking place because the South did not want them to have political power and so was using the Ku Klux Klan and other things to prevent that.
Grant acted outside the Constitution with the United States Armed Forces a million strong at that time.
Think about that for a moment.
It is bizarre, to me anyway, as a sort of a historian at least, it's bizarre that there is so much similarity between that period and the period today, particularly in terms of how we are divided on really critical issues about 50-50.
There are political scientists that will contend democracy is impossible if the people in that democracy, the demos, are 50-50 on all critical issues.
These similarities, to me, afford credibility to Karl Marx's declaration that history does not in fact repeat itself, or it does in fact repeat itself first as tragedy and then as farce.
What I fear is that today we are living the farce.