Pushback of the Week: July 8, 2024: Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson

“We are lashed up to them [Israel] in a way that is so debilitating, so against our national security interests, so against our humanitarian and reputational interests, that it makes your heart hurt to be in Washington and see it happening every day. It’s unconscionable what I am seeing happening in Washington.” ~ Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson is a retired United States Army colonel with a distinguished record of military and government service. During the Gulf War, he served as special assistant to Colin Powell when Powell was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and when Powell became Secretary of State in 2002, Wilkerson joined him as chief of staff. Since leaving government service, Colonel Wilkerson has served as Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William & Mary, as well as teaching national security at George Washington University for five years.

Among those with serious military experience, we know of no better source of clear, practical thinking on U.S. national security.

In 2004, journalist Ron Suskind wrote about one of Powell’s colleagues in the Bush Administration:

“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

While members of the Washington establishment became convinced that they could invent reality and impose it on the world in a unipolar empire with the techniques of hybrid warfare, Wilkerson remained rooted in “discernable reality,” understanding what it takes to win at conventional warfare and manage a global military presence that depends on an enormous and expensive infrastructure of armies, navies, and equipment on land, sea, and in the skies. While teaching national security, he has spoken publicly for many years to help educate us about what is in the U.S. national interest.

Wilkerson is our Pushback of the Week in appreciation of his continued efforts to warn us regarding the consequences of the U.S. political leadership’s refusal to integrate reality. The neocon strategies of the last two decades continue to waste precious resources, line corrupt pockets, and finance violations of international law in numerous spots around the world, all the while failing to achieve their stated goals. Washington is implementing the agenda of a small handful of private interests that wishes to consolidate power and end human liberty—including the equivalent of a financial coup d’état that is destroying the United States while wreaking havoc, chaos, and genocide around the world.

Now that the unipolar model has failed, the faster we embrace reality, the better. When empires fail, there is a tendency to not face facts and keep the pretense of empire going, with policies and behaviors that many of us have come to think of as forms of insanity. We need to cut that period short.

We recommend Colonel Wilkerson as an excellent source of sound thinking about where we need to go from here.

Lawrence Wilkerson (Wikipedia)

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson on Gaza, Ukraine and Russia, and China (YouTube)

Related Solari Reports:

Let’s Go to the Movies: Week of November 6, 2023: No End in Sight

The National Security State: What’s Next? with Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson

Let’s Go to the Movies: March 29, 2018 – Wilkerson on Israel