Colonel Larry Wilkerson:
“I’ll just add to what was just said.
“I thought when Teddy Allen brought Ferdinand Marcos and Imelda Marcos to Pearl and we escorted them up to Camp Smith, that the Philippines had finally awakened and thrown us out and that we would never be back. And then I saw Donald Rumsfeld take advantage of 9-11 and start infiltrating special forces back into the Philippines. And I knew the game was back on again.
“So I agree with what both Scott and Colonel Black said. There’s a lot of affection on my part for the Philippines too. But you should grow up and not need the United States and not put the United States and China at loggerheads over your dead body, because that’s what it will be about.
“The topic here today was nuclear weapons. And I’ll just say this again, the most likely state owning nuclear weapons today to use those nuclear weapons again is the United States. And we have put ourselves in that position and in that posture by our incompetence at the other skill sets, most prominently diplomacy, necessary for the relations of nations.
“We are not a very competent in any vein of diplomacy entity anymore. There’s an old principle of the relations of nations called conservation of enemies. Simply stated, it says that a prudent state never has any more enemies at any one time than it can handle.
“We have 3.6 billion and growing every day, probably by 100 million a week, people who hate our guts, who detest us, who are fed up with us, who think the rules based order is our rules and orders to them. That’s not going to last. It’s not going to preserve us.
“It’s not going to preserve our empire in any way, fashion or form. So if we don’t change very quickly, we’re going down. And what I would advise people like the Philippines and Australia and other of our good allies over this last 50, 60, 70 years is to check your six really closely and see what you can do to make accommodations with the other powers in the world, most prominently Russia and China.
“But India is big time in there, too. India will be a replacement for China if she just keeps her act together for the next 20 years. And then we’ll have those two countries that loggerheads.
“But you’re you’re looking at a dying empire. You’re looking at a dying empire. And if we don’t do something about it, we’re going to have a really bad death rather than a death, say, like Britain had, where she is still around, stupidly led by Rishi Sunak, but soon to be gotten rid of, probably.
“So it’s a different world. It’s a totally different world. It’s no longer unipolar.
“It’s multipolar. And it’s going to act that way. It’s going to have a new financial system, a new monetary exchange system, a new banking system.
“Everything’s going to be new. And we’re going to be on the outside unless we learn to accommodate. And you learn to accommodate with that deft instrument of national power called diplomacy.
“So we’d rather grow
some diplomats and fast.”
PH