Lawrence Wilkerson did not read about American power; he administered it. A retired Army colonel, he served as chief of staff to the Secretary of State, and he has spent the years since as one of Washington’s least forgiving internal critics. His verdict, delivered at length to Glenn Diesen, is blunt: the United States and Europe are failing, and the failure is chosen. In his telling, the alliance is held together by purchase — newspaper editors, union leaders, parliamentarians, two secretaries general of NATO. The Korean war that never ended became the template for everything after. A security state now weighs nuclear options against Iran while the Army’s newest shell plant fails to produce. Underneath it all runs one charge: power is moving east, and Washington refuses to move with it.
The colonel's case against the hegemon
A man who administered American power from inside now describes it as an ideology that cannot adapt. His account begins with an alliance he calls a very strange creation.
Wilkerson is not a critic peering through the fence. He is a retired Army colonel who served as chief of staff to the Secretary of State, and he speaks with the fluency of a man who read the cables he now condemns. What he brings to the conversation is not a policy paper but a worldview, and it is worth stating whole before its parts are weighed.
The worldview is this. The United States and Europe are failing, and the failure is not imposed on them but chosen. They pursue ideological hegemony (the insistence that their order must run the world) at the moment power is shifting to China and other rising nations. Adaptation is available; refusal is the policy. Europe, in his account, is the more rigid of the two, reciting the catechism as its industries strain and its alliances fray.
To explain how the trap was built, he goes back to the beginning: 1950, a war in Korea, and an alliance that was never quite what it announced itself to be.
The strange creation and the forgotten war
His story starts in 1950: a war that never formally ended, billions moved across the Atlantic, and an alliance whose political class he says was bought.
The alliance came first, and the money followed. Washington diverted billions of dollars into NATO in the early 1950s, and Korea became the forgotten war, an economy of four theaters, underfunded while Europe rearmed. The phrase does the work: Korea is the template, the commitment everyone stopped counting.
NATO is a very strange creation, if you look at our history.
The architects of that permanence, in his account, were the Dulles brothers, John Foster at the State Department and Allen at the CIA. The method was purchase. The alliance’s political class was not persuaded; it was acquired.
We bought newspaper editors, we bought labor union heads, we bought parliamentarians, we bought two Secretaries General.
The claim is sweeping, and it sets the axis for everything that follows: an empire held together by acquisition rather than persuasion. That axis runs straight into Asia.
Where the dogs were trained
North Korea, Japan, the Arctic: the same trainers, the same rigidity, and a new map drawn without Washington.
In East Asia, he argues, the same rigidity governs policy toward North Korea. Washington refuses to deal with Pyongyang on any terms but its own, and the refusal has deformed its alliances with Japan and South Korea. Both are locked into a confrontation their own interests might soften. The barking of allied capitals, he says, did not arise naturally.
The trainers of the dogs and the barking were the United States, particularly CIA.
The squeeze he describes in the region is economic as much as military. By his count, Japan now faces tariffs of 15 percent or higher on almost everything it exports to China. Taken at face value, that is America’s closest Asian ally being shut out of its largest market. He treats it as evidence that Washington’s confrontations are billed to its friends.
The Arctic is where he sees the new map drawn without Washington. Fifty-three percent of the coastline running along Russia, he says, will be developed by a Chinese-Russian consortium for the passage. He called it the Northwest Passage, though the geography he describes is Russia’s. The number aside, the direction of travel is his point: the two powers Washington confronts are cooperating exactly where the map is softening. And commerce is not the gravest risk he names.
The security state and the bomb
The apparatus that outlasts elections, a congresswoman’s tweets, and the memory of two cities: his case that the unthinkable is being entertained.
Underneath the policies he locates a structure, one he calls the security state. His reading runs to Philip Knightley’s book on intelligence agencies taking over the world, and his conclusions rhyme with it. The apparatus no longer merely serves policy, he argues; increasingly it is the policy.
The gravest claim of the interview concerns Iran. He pointed to tweets by Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia congresswoman, about people inside the current administration discussing the use of nuclear weapons against Iran. Her posts are the whole of the trail, and he passed the claim on as fact worth weighing. Why a retired colonel would amplify it becomes clear in what he reached for next.
Nagasaki and Hiroshima are the only experience we really have of nuclear weapons used against other human beings.
That is the weight he sets on the far side of the ledger: a weapon used twice, by the country he served, against cities. A security state that can discuss using it again is, for him, the truest measure of the refusal to adapt. The last measure is industrial.
The shell plant and the shifting map
His last exhibit is industrial: a flagship shell factory that cannot produce. What would confirm or break his thesis is easy to list.
The evidence he reaches for last is the plainest: the United States cannot build enough shells. A $533 million contract for robotic structures at the 155-millimeter howitzer-round facility is failing, he says, the flagship investment of a rearmament that exists mostly in speeches.
Around that failing factory sits the alliance he described at the start. Jens Stoltenberg and Mark Rutte, the two most recent secretaries general of NATO, appear in his account less as leaders of a partnership than as caretakers of an acquisition. Europe rearming on Washington’s terms, Japan squeezed between its patron and its market, Seoul locked in a confrontation it did not choose: each is the same invoice, different line item.
What remains open is everything that would prove or break the thesis. Watch the shell plant’s audit reports. Watch whether the Arctic consortium he predicts is ever announced. Watch, above all, the Iran file, where he has put a marker down: if the talk he reports ever becomes a strike order, his indictment stops being rhetoric. The power shift he describes will not wait for Washington to make up its mind. On that much, the map already agrees with him.