Iran Update: Israel’s Newest Bombing Campaign, the Oncoming War With China and How to Avoid It

0:04Colonel 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? 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 say this being the war of choice with iran and some things are happening in the war that are probably disturbing to them.

0:56For example, the latest completed railroad in their five base 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.

1:40But 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. Well, can you expand on that? There are things happening that the president doesn't know about, but that some planners at the Pentagon doubtless do. What would those things be? 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 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.

2:46because 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 along northward, marrying up with the other three base road initiative railroads, which incidentally have been adumbrated seriously by the war in Ukraine. Does that ring a bell with anybody, Geo, strategically? If they're not emptying into Europe as they were intended to do, they've stopped pretty much.

3:22And what does that do? Well, basically, those railroads mean that instead of two and a half to three 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 Babel-Mandeb, the Strait of Hormuz, the Suez Canal, maybe even the Panama Canal. Although China has 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 be going through the canal even.

4:08These 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, it's maritime power. Because we won't need to police the seas anymore. It'll all be going over land. I think a lot of Americans are at a great disadvantage in understanding this because they lack a sense of the mechanics of commerce. Products just appear. It's not clear how. And they lack a sense of geography. The idea that, you know, Iran, you could reach China from Iran overland. People, I think, lack the perspective of how exactly that would happen.

4:49But clearly the Pentagon understands these questions, right? So they're bombing that railroad for a reason, which would be what, do you think? Well, to set it back and to tell China we know what they're doing and we don't like it. And 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.

5:34And 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 wheel vehicles and other implements of war went up that route. It was second only to Murmansk. And 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.

6:16And we're not. So what's the Chinese perspective on this? 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, who Xintao was a little bit of an aberration.

7:00That'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 and 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.

7:40They'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.

8:18So 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. Madeleine want to join Hillary in the world of cretins? She did. This is a serious issue for China, and they want to stop it.

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10:49It's also a moral state on the United States. And just jumping ahead, it strikes me that once the U.S. 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. Bingo. Yeah, I mean, that does seem like, you know. A natural follow-on. Well, it does seem like the things you do to your opponents abroad will be done to your own citizens by the same government. Yes. I mean, that seems like a pretty consistent lesson of history. So that's why empires are bad, because they're bad for your own population.

11:25But 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? 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 he meant that. He meant that we were in strategic economic competition with China.

12:07And 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'd have preferred the latter with China. And Bush didn't want it. So he turned cold and 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.

12:54So 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 impulse to go to war with China, like an exchange of ballistic missiles, at least, where does that come from? Why would you want that? Why would Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld and so many others be advocating for that? 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.

13:41Cheney 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. 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.

14:28And 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. 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? 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 read it, told his staff to get rid of it, ban it.

15:12It didn't happen. The New York Times picked up on it. It went viral. Two issues were put out. In that report, which many thought really was a response to Kennedy's June speech at American University, they said impossible. 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.

16:02You know, 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. Tork Mata 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 passe, 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.

16:47You needed that kind of threat. To keep your own citizens obedient? Yes, very much so. That's a part of it too, to keep them towing 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. this is not at all related to i i asked you to have this conversation but i can't resist who do you think did kill kennedy i'm fairly certain after a lot of study i'm a hunter i know weapons fairly well i know that weapon that lee rv oswald wielded no way it shot john kennedy and killed him i don't even think he could hit him from there you know the fbi guy the expert tried with that very weapon three times to simulate the Zaprooter film intervals and get that many rounds off, even get them off, not just accurately.

17:42And 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? But they thought, especially with what he had done with regard to Cuba in October of 62, and then the speech in 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.

18:29Berlin was a more serious crisis in the hot summer of 61 than Cuba was. Cuba was 13 days packed into, you know, 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.

19:11And 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 ephemeral wishes and even dangerous wishes. They thought that Soviets would pull a trick on us, you know, 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. Where do you think Jack Ruby came from? They found him somewhere.

19:46I was at Baylor University at that time, and I remember when the announcement was made, I was absolutely stunned. Me and my roommate could barely talk for about a half an hour. The president'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 at that moment, Bob and I said to ourselves, this stinks. This really stinks. Yeah. When the lone gunman kills the lone gunman, they're probably not lone gunman. 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.

20:27I 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. Cost of living is already making it hard to live here, and it's not getting any better. Unfortunately, it's likely to get worse, and a lot of Americans fill the gap with credit cards, not just for fancy dinners, but to cover things like groceries and bills. That is a disaster. It's understandable, but don't go down that road because there is a tax, in effect a survival tax, of 20 % interest or more.

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21:42They're salary-based, not commission-based, which means they actually work for you, not the banks. They're called America's Home for Home Loans for a reason. Call 800-685-5696. 800-685-5696. Or visit AmericanFinancing.net slash Tucker. It's, yeah. I mean, 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. So, and I'm sorry to get you sidetracked, but you're obviously really knowledgeable. And I hope you'll come back, by the way, at some point. But back to China. So the United States is, and with Israel, blowing up Chinese-built infrastructure.

22:25So 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? 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 deal breaker and perhaps get China more infuriated and maybe even doing more than she's already doing. But I know, too, I've been in the Central Party school, one of the few Americans who 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.

23:10In 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 Rastanora 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.

24:00and let the United States Navy almost exclusively clear the Strait of Hormuz and fix the situation at Rastanora. 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 further problems, because this was a terrorist attack on Rastanora 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.

24:41It 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. Wow. Chaz Freeman, Ambassador Chaz Freeman, was there with us. And at breakfast the next day, they didn't know Chaz was fluent in Mandarin. I couldn't believe that, but they didn't. Their intelligence had failed them on that.

25:19So we're at breakfast, and I said, Chaz, 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 between, I think that's a fair term to use too, between Chinese diplomats, Chinese.

26:01We 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. How does it get reopened now, do you think? 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.

26:48And 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 autarchic 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. Yeah. So at that point, I mean, you can see chaos, right? I mean, economic. Yes. Right. Right. The lengths the Roosevelt administration went to keep the country stable, including authoritarian lengths.

27:37I mean, that was their single-minded obsession. Like, depression means people get restive and scary. I just read a history of the—I didn't even know it existed. And the historian lives in false church. He's an old dude. He gave me a copy of it. I 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, principally the army became the ingredient of the CCC that made it work. And who ran it? Everyone forgets who ran the CCC.

28:17Yes. MacArthur. Yep, yep. But MacArthur was an interesting character in 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, 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.