Trump’s Weaponization of Space & the War in Ukraine – Wilkerson & Jay Pt. 2/2

Paul Jay
Hi, 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 Wilkerson
Yeah.

Paul Jay
Maybe 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 Wilkerson
That’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 Jay
Okay, 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 Wilkerson
Except 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 Jay
Well, 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 Wilkerson
Along with Mossad.

Paul Jay
Yeah, 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 Wilkerson
Right. 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 Jay
Talk 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 Wilkerson
It’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 Jay
It’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 Wilkerson
The 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.

Paul Jay
Which is not true either. They can knock out every major city in the U.S. right now.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
We also think that our attack submarines are so much better than theirs that we could get inside the ballistic missile envelope, as it were, and kill it before it could shoot. We usually do have an attack sub-trailing every Boomer that the Russians have. The Chinese are limited right now, but they’re going to build, too. They’ve got a much more robust shipbuilding industry than we do. We’re looking at the Columbia class, the replacement for the Boomer, and the Virginia class, the replacement for the Los Angeles attack. We’re looking at them over cost, beyond schedule, and under the law passed by Congress itself, supposed to be killed because they are so bad in both categories. But can we do that? We’ve got to keep these submarines coming or do service life extensions on all the existing submarines, and they’re already 30 years old. We’re in a pickle with the most competent, capable, invulnerable even aspect of our triad because we can’t build submarines.

Paul Jay
Well, there you go, because now we can launch everything we want from space. We’ll fire everything down from space. Blow up our enemies. The insanity of it is beyond comment. So I don’t know.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
Elon’s got to increase his– Bezos and all of them. They’ve got to increase their thrusts. The Russians are still way ahead of us in that. They’ve got to increase their rocket trust and other parameters in order to get this huge weight up into space and in the quantities that you need it. 

Paul Jay
Bill Black, I’ve quoted this a few times, the former financial regulator, and he teaches economics and such now and white-collar crime. He had a great line when I asked him. I said, “I don’t understand the ’07, ’08 crisis. These guys knew this whole thing was going to blow up. They knew the bubble was going to blow. They knew their own institutions, their own financial institution, their banks were at great risk. Why did they do it?” And he said, “Paul, it’s not about the banks. It’s about the bankers. It’s about the fees they were making.” They didn’t give a damn about their own banks, and they figured the feds would come bail them out anyway. Even if they didn’t, they’re all walking away.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
And it was the same with the mortgage guys.

Paul Jay
Yeah, same thing, and it’s the same thing, I think, with this crazy shit about nuclear. It’s not about whether it actually works or could be really effective. They think, “Well, we won’t blow up the world. Somehow, we’ll stop from doing that. And we’re just going to make so much money along the way.”

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
I fear you are right in many ways, although there are a few people that really disturb me in the way they wholeheartedly believe in this, “We can win a nuclear war.”

Paul Jay
Well, this is the ghost of Curtis LeMay. If anyone watching this doesn’t know who Curtis LeMay is, look him up because he was the head of the Air Force and head of Stratcom. He was the guy under five presidents, trying to talk each president into launching a first strike against the Soviet Union. If he had it his way, we wouldn’t be here talking right now.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
We need another 1964 [inaudible 00:14:04]- what was the name of that movie that depicted LeMay? Scott. George C. Scott played LeMay, I think, in that movie. What was that?

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
It was also Dr. Strangelove.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
Dr. Strange love. Yeah, that’s right. How I learned to love the bomb.

Paul Jay
How I learned to love the bomb. Yeah. 

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
How I stopped worrying and learned to love the bomb.

Paul Jay
That’s right. Yah. I did a piece recently the Iron Dome where I said how Donald Trump learned to love the bomb. Although it’s terrible that in the U.S. presidential election, the only person that actually mentioned the issue of nuclear weapons actually was Trump. Harris– the Dems don’t even talk about it.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
I’ve got to say, I was shocked the other day. He’s talking about doing things with our nuclear modernization, securitization, whatever program, like reducing the cost. Why do we need nuclear weapons in the quantities, you never know [inaudible 00:15:02]. 

Paul Jay
Because it all feeds into space stuff. It’s all about, “Let me look like an anti-nuclear weapons peacenik as I take money away from Northrop Grumman and give it to Elon Musk.” People don’t get how dangerous all this is. Okay, let’s finish this segment off. Let’s talk a bit about Ukraine. What’s your take on where we’re at now? Things are changing every day, so who knows? I hope by the time we publish this, there isn’t already some major meeting, but I don’t think so.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
I think it was a very positive development that the U.S. Secretary of State was sitting down in Riyadh across from the Russian Secretary of State, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and that we are talking again. One very positive point there is that we’re talking again. The last Russian ambassador, Antonov, I had lunch with him. He said, “I’m going home.” I said, “Why are you going home?” He said, “I’m going home because there’s no need to have an ambassador here. You won’t talk to me.” We haven’t had an ambassador in Moscow, nor they here for almost two years.

Paul Jay
You’re talking about the Russian ambassador in D.C.?

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
Yeah, because Biden said, “We don’t talk to Russians.” That’s insane. So that’s a positive point there.

Paul Jay
I agree with that.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
Yeah. The second positive point was that they’re going to talk. Trump and Putin are going to talk. They’re actually going to sit down together, and they’re going to talk about Ukraine, and they’re going to talk about other issues, too, I’m sure. What I understand they’re they’re going to talk about that excites me is they’re going to talk about a new European security architecture, and Russia would be a part of that. Now, that’s hard to believe that Putin could get himself to come into an organization that was more or less designed by the duplicitous United States Empire. But if he will, that’s fine because we can’t keep dealing with Russia as if it were not a member of Europe. It is.

If we keep doing that, we’re going to force them to join the momentum moving the other way. Compel them to move the other way. They don’t want to. They do not want to move that way. China is capitalizing on the inability of Russia right now to pay attention to its Far East. It’s got more people in the Far East than Russians do. These antagonisms aren’t going to go away. So, we need to have Russia more attracted to the West than to the East.

I think you know about my theory that power is going back to the East, and it’s inextricable, and there’s not much we can do about it. What we should be doing, of course, is comedy, collaboration, and cooperation. We should be dealing with climate change, nuclear weapons, and other things and not worrying so much about this power shift, because it is shifting, and China is the magnet of it. I mean, one in five is Chinese, one in five is Indian, three in five, 60 % of the world’s population is Asian. The money and the GDPs are there now. They’re not here. Europe is squeezed in the middle. Russia is squeezed in the middle, always has been, but you want Russia to be a part of Europe. Then it’s that 700 million people, almost a billion, and if it’s really working, $20-$30 trillion GDP. Last time, it had one that was comparable to ours. It was $23 trillion, but it’s really plummeted now.

There’s so much that needs to be done, and they got it started, at least. The transcript I saw said they talked about these things. Lavrov is a genius in this stuff. Wang Yi is a genius in this stuff. The two best ambassadors in the world for any country right now are Wang Yi from China and Sergey Lavrov from Russia. Now we finally have a reputable Secretary of State, maybe, sitting down to talk with them. That’s a positive development, no matter what I think of Trump, his team, or anything out. As far as Ukraine goes, they’re all right. Ukraine’s lost. They’ve lost. We need to get a settlement and stop the killing. We’ve lost almost a million people, and Ukraine has lost the predominant number of them. They’ve gone from a nation of roughly 48 million to a nation maybe of 28 million.

Paul Jay
I agree with almost everything you just said. Maybe I agree with everything you just said. I’ll just add something or a somewhat different context. First of all, I think you’ve got to see all this within the context of the crisis of global capitalism. Too often, it’s good guys and bad guys. So it’s either the bad guy, Putin, Russia, or some people who want to make the U.S. the bad guy. If you want to have bad guys and good guys, they’re both the bad guys. We’re dealing with two rogue states.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
What are the two rogue states?

Paul Jay
Russia and the United States. Well, let me finish my spiel. I let you go; now you’ve got to let me go. I don’t think there’s any question that the expansion of NATO, the refusal to create a European security architecture in the 1990s that included Russia, and the lying about the expansion of NATO, I don’t think there’s any question these were conditions or things, factors that facilitated and energized the worst traits of this rising oligarchy in Russia and created a very toxic, nationalist, religious, theocratic state led by Putin. I don’t think it had to happen in the sense that if they hadn’t excluded Russia from being a normal capitalist country in global capitalism.

But the United States didn’t want to contend with Russia as a competitor in Europe. They didn’t want such a big potentially– imagine if Russia had been part of Europe and then you had a Russian-German cooperation. That’s the end of the U.S. domination of Western Europe, which is what the whole point of NATO is anyway. I mean, I don’t buy that NATO is a threat to Russia. I think it’s about the suppression of Europe, NATO. It’s about bilking Europe.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
Let me just say this one thing– within the context of current events, a Germany-Moscow Axis might happen.

Paul Jay
Well, I wouldn’t rule out anything right now. That’s no question. That’s extremely dangerous. Maybe Trump– if Musk and Trump are successful in getting the far-right in power in Germany, we could be seeing a fascist alliance. I want to say this first. There is no rogue state since World War II that has committed the crimes of the American rogue state.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
Bingo.

Paul Jay
When they talk about an international rules-based order, they say it because they don’t want to follow international law. They don’t want to admit the invasion of Iraq was illegal. The invasion of Vietnam was illegal. Frankly, if the Russians weren’t so damn asleep at the wheel, the invasion of Korea should have been illegal, except the Soviet Union, for ridiculous stupidity, doesn’t go to the Security Council and vote against the UN mission into Korea. That doesn’t mean we, as ordinary people– we have to deal with the complexity of all of this, which is essentially the product of modern capitalism.

There is a point sometimes where the West might create such a toxic brew, and boy, a German-Russian would be quite a toxic brew. Who knows how the alignment of forces will be in pushing back against that? If you take the rise of Hitler, it was not the only reason Hitler rose, but the Versailles Treaty sure had a lot to do with it. If Germany had been incorporated as a normal country after World War I and rebuilt, would we have seen a Hitler? Maybe not. [crosstalk 00:23:39]. You never know, but maybe not. So why don’t we learn something from that?

So let me just say, after saying all of that, I’ve been saying from day one of this war that this war needs to end. If people want to fight the Russian incursion occupation, go ahead. There are other ways to fight. You can have general strikes, you can have mass protests, you can demand referendums. But hundreds of thousands of people are being slaughtered so that the Ukrainian oligarchy can get back into being in control as corrupt as they are. We don’t need to side with one oligarchy or the other. That includes we don’t have to side with the American oligarchy. We don’t have to side with the Russians or the Ukrainians. We need to take a position as people who want a better world. So that’s my spiel.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
I’m 100% with you on that. I do think that we misjudge the Asian community’s attitude toward the current and rising economic and financial power in the world and the military power too, China. I think that’s China’s attitude. Now, they can be aggressive in their economic and financial pursuits, no question. They learn capitalism really well. Deng Xiaoping, he taught them well. But they do not want to sanction people. They do not want to use their military against people. They do not want to use their Navy against people. They don’t want to bomb people. They don’t want war. They are confident in their ability to survive in the world and keep their country together through their own skills in our practice, capitalism, and they are good at it. We want war. We want sanctions. We want to bash people. We have 2.6 billion people in the world under our sanctions. 2.6 billion. That’s our only diplomacy. Under four years of Biden, I’m sorry to say, we had no diplomacy. Tony Blinken just sanctioned you or shot you. That’s what it was all about.

Paul Jay
Well, I’m in favor of almost anything that ends this war in Ukraine. I’m not Ukrainian, although I do have Ukrainian ancestry, but I don’t live there. That said, it’s easy for me to say, but I don’t care where the– draw the lines wherever the hell they are. Right now, as I said earlier, people can continue this fighting without this conventional, insane World War I-style slaughter. If the people in Eastern Ukraine don’t want to be in Russia, fight. There are other ways to fight and make it clear. If the people in Crimea don’t want to be in Russia, which I think they probably do from the polling I’ve seen, although it’s pre-war polling, so, that might have changed. I don’t know.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
That’s still around 80%.

Paul Jay
Yeah, I mean, I think Western polling companies have done polling in Crimea and found out people want to be in Russia. But the slaughter has to change and stop. Frankly, I would love to see ordinary Ukrainians and Ukrainian workers who have all these guns now turning them on your own bloody oligarchy.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
Yeah.

Paul Jay
Throw these people out. Then make a stand for a neutral Ukraine, a progressive democratic Ukraine. Then maybe you call on your fellow Ukrainians in Eastern Ukraine and say, “Listen, wouldn’t you rather be part of this than part of Putin’s Russia?” Fine. And if they want to, let them hit the streets, but the war needs to stop.

I just wanted to add one other thing. Why is Trump doing what he’s doing? Why try to resolve this? Because it’s not like– Musk is making money out of this war. So is Peter Thiel through Palantir. There’s lots of money being made by Trump allies, but I do believe he wants to. I think he wants to because part of this deal is going to be one: they’re going to pillage and rape Ukraine. They, being the United States. The part that isn’t going to be part of Russia is just– they’re saying it. They’re going to take 50% of the minerals.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
We were going to do that anyway.

Paul Jay
They’re going to pillage the place. Number two.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
Biden was going to do that, too. 

Paul Jay
Normalize with Russia. Now Americans start selling their products back into Russia. They might even make part of this deal that Putin allows American finance into Russia, which they were keeping out before. If you can open up–

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
$350 billion was lost, according to Lavrov.

Paul Jay
Yeah, of American companies that had to close down.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
Exactly.

Paul Jay
They get to scoop up all this Russian market, and given that Trumpian forces see China as the real problem, they hope they can pry Russia away from China. However, I don’t see that necessarily happening. And there’s this ideological similarity, which the Christian nationalists, he can imagine, Bannon, Trump, and others, a Europe with a Putin and the far-right in power in Western Europe, and they create this new axis. I think that’s part of their vision.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
It has its priests and its gods, and their priests and their gods.

Paul Jay
And they share the same. The priests may wear different costumes, but they more or less share the same God. Just to say what that God is, it’s the Christianity of the crusades. It’s not Jesus Christ.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
Yes. It’s not the sermon on the mount.

Paul Jay
Sure ain’t. So, just to end things, Larry and I are going to do another piece. Not right now, but we’re going to do a piece on what we think people can do about the situation in the United States because the situation is deliberately and spontaneously– I mean, it’s happening out of the economy, and it’s happening deliberately at the political level, which is we are heading into extreme chaos. In that chaos is a great opportunity, I think, for progressive democratic forces and great danger, as we’ve seen in the 20th century. It could go either way, and we need to get organized. We’re going to do another session about that because we don’t want to leave people just thinking it’s so bad, “Why don’t we just blow our brains out?” 

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
I agree with you. I think this is a marvelous opportunity. The old Chinese saying, in every crisis is an opportunity. This is a life-sustaining opportunity, if you will.

Paul Jay
Yeah.

Okay, great. Thanks very much for joining us, Larry.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
Thanks for having me.

Paul Jay
Thank you for joining us on theAnalysis.news. Don’t forget, there’s a donate button because if you don’t support us, we can’t do this.