Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: Is Trump for Peace? 🕊️🇺🇸

Name: Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: Is Trump for Peace? 🕊️🇺🇸 | Forbidden News
Uploaded: 2025-05-10T22:42:10+00:00
Duration: 26 min 16 s
Channel: Forbidden News

Forbidden News

2 days ago

In this thought-provoking discussion, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson asks the pivotal question: Is Trump truly committed to peace in today’s complex geopolitical landscape? 🌍💬
With a focus on Trump’s foreign policy decisions and the current global tensions, Wilkerson provides his expert analysis on whether Trump’s actions align with his peace promises 🕊️🤔.
An essential conversation for understanding US politics and international relations 🔍🌐.

#LawrenceWilkerson #TrumpForPeace #USForeignPolicy #PeaceInOurTime #Geopolitics #TrumpAnalysis #GlobalTensions #PeaceDiplomacy #USPolitics #PoliticalAnalysis #ForeignPolicyDebate #MiddleEastPolicy #DiplomaticSolutions #InternationalRelations #PeaceTalks #Trump2025 #PoliticalInsight #GlobalCrisis #PeaceProcess #USMilitary #PoliticalRoundtable

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00:00Transcription by CastingWords

00:30Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.

00:36Today is Thursday, May 8th, 2025.

00:40Our dear friend, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson joins us now.

00:43Colonel Wilkerson, a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you for joining us.

00:47Big picture question I want to put to you is, is Donald Trump for peace?

00:52And before we actually get there, I wonder if you've seen this and what you think Trump's understanding of the Russia-Ukrainian conflict is after watching this.

01:07Chris, cut number 10.

01:08Ukraine, there's been discussions they will have to give up some of the land.

01:11Russia will have to give up all of Ukraine because that's what they want.

01:15All of Ukraine, meaning they wouldn't keep any of the land that they've claimed?

01:19Russia would have to give up all of Ukraine because what Russia wants is all of Ukraine.

01:26And if I didn't get involved, they would be fighting right now for all of Ukraine.

01:30Russia doesn't want the strip that they have now.

01:33Russia wants all of Ukraine.

01:35And if it weren't me, they would keep going.

01:38How can such a profound misunderstanding, unless it's some sort of a farce or political ploy, be taken by the Kremlin and extrapolated into negotiations?

01:57You know, Judge, watching that, and I'd seen it one time before with utter disbelief,

02:02it recalled to me a line from Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Pushkin being probably the best Russian poet that ever lived.

02:11He goes something like this,

02:13Enough, enough, I tell you.

02:16You've paid insanity its due.

02:19Think about that for a minute.

02:21Enough, Donald.

02:22You've paid insanity its due.

02:24Where are you on any substantive issue that you claim to be here on on Monday, there on on Tuesday, and utterly divorced by him on Friday?

02:37This president is insane.

02:41How does this play in the Kremlin?

02:44How does it play with the others with whom Steve Witkoff is negotiating, whether it's Hamas or Israel or the Iranians?

02:56Not well, because it signals what he is, which is a circus clown, apparently.

03:03I've gone out of my way to try and give him credit for this or that and try to find some reason in his madness to try and understand if he's trying to build pressure because he's behind the power curve and understands he is, and that's the case in Ukraine.

03:21But I think it's just, as I said, it's insanity.

03:25I don't know what he's up to.

03:26I don't see even a scintilla of strategic thought in anything he is doing.

03:34Here is one of his two emissaries.

03:40I don't know why General Kellogg is still around, but tell me what you think of this, cut number 18.

03:47So you tell the Ukrainians, look, this is one of those things that's going to be evolving over time.

03:51And if you do a ceasefire in place, the ground that you own, the ground that you fought for, that that's your ground right now, what happens five or ten years down the line is different.

04:00And you don't have to basically freeze everything in place.

04:02Right.

04:02And we've got that right now.

04:04The Ukrainians are willing to do a freeze in place, what I call a ceasefire in place.

04:08And then for a period of time, they're willing to set up a militarized zone.

04:13What they basically said is, we'll back up 15 kilometers, you back up 15 kilometers to the Russians.

04:17So you know, that's a 30 kilometer, 18 mile zone that you can actually observe.

04:21And you can actually say, okay, are there any intrusions?

04:23And you've got what's called the Coalition of the Willing.

04:25That's the British, the French, the Germans, plus right now at least 12 other countries are willing to put forces in an air cap west of the Dnieper River, not east.

04:34That's going to be a ceasefire force to actually slow this thing down.

04:38And if you get to 30 days, John, I really believe this.

04:40You get to a 30-day ceasefire, it'll get extended.

04:43And it is so hard when you're hard to do this when you're a military guy is to restart a conflict.

04:48And I don't think they will.

04:50The straight general, the Russians who will not accept NATO in Ukraine will accept Western peacekeepers from 12 different countries in Ukraine.

05:00You can't make this stuff up.

05:03He negated it the moment he started with those forces.

05:06I mean, the man has to be certifiable.

05:09I add him to the category of enough, enough.

05:12You've given insanity its due.

05:14There's no way Russia's going to accept that.

05:17And I don't blame them a bit, given the record that we have of duplicity and nefariousness.

05:22Colonel, who's winning the special military operation militarily, Russia or Ukraine?

05:32Russia, devastatingly so.

05:34So devastatingly so that, as Klausowitz warns again and again, war has its own momentum.

05:40You let it go and stop trying to fix it, as it were.

05:46And that momentum is going to have its own purpose eventually.

05:50And that purpose might be to hell with you and all of your people, like just watching her, van der Linde, a preposterous speech, as if she were king of the world and dictating to that world.

06:05Well, you take those people and throw them all together, and Putin doesn't have really much incentive to listen to any of them and just go on with the special military operation until he's sitting at the border of NATO formally.

06:21Here's General Kellogg, who says the Russians are not winning.

06:26Cut number 16.

06:28Better go back and read the art of the deal.

06:29You know, when he said to be willing to walk away from a bad situation.

06:32And I think he's just telling both sides that, but the ones who are going to be hurt by that are not the Ukrainians, it's going to be the Russians, because the Russians are not winning this war.

06:39If they were winning the war, they'd be on the western side of the Dnieper River.

06:42They're not.

06:43If they were winning this war, they'd be in Kiev.

06:45They're not.

06:45They'd be in Odessa, and they're not.

06:47They wouldn't have lost combined forces when you talk about industrial strength killing.

06:52The losses are over one million killed and wounded on both sides.

06:56And so when people say he's winning the war, if he just comes to an agreement right now, ceasefire in place,

07:01I think then he said, okay, he's kind of accomplished everything that he may want to, and just step back from that.

07:08What do you think, Colonel?

07:09I mean, I don't know how much more criticism we can level at him.

07:13His premises are so far from reality.

07:16He doesn't want to be on the other side of the Dnieper.

07:19He doesn't want to go to Kiev.

07:22He doesn't want to take the entire country.

07:24My God, just think.

07:26Netanyahu's got his own mess brewing right now that's fierce, this sustained military operation.

07:32That's why Sharon withdrew in 2005.

07:35That's exactly what Putin would be doing, a sustained military operation amongst a bunch of partisans and guerrillas who are fierce,

07:43if he tried to take the whole country.

07:45He would rue the day he did it.

07:47So he doesn't want to do it.

07:49It's preposterous.

07:50This general is smoking some really cheap material.

07:54Why would President Trump unleash him?

07:58Why would President Trump, three days before the grand victory celebration, the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany in Moscow,

08:08say, well, the Russians didn't win World War II, the Americans did.

08:14And why would Donald Trump claim that the Russians have lost a million men?

08:20Because they're all liars.

08:22They're pathetic, patent liars.

08:25That's all I can figure.

08:26And I have so much proof of Donald Trump being a liar.

08:29I mean, if we assume that he's a typical human as A equals Z and A equals B, that he's telling a lie.

08:40Now, I don't know that.

08:41I don't know that he has enough brain power to figure out when he's telling a lie because I don't know if he intuits or knows the truth.

08:48But these are all lies.

08:50They're just preposterous lies.

08:51And by the way, somebody needs to balance this discussion a little bit.

08:55I've listened to a lot of people here lately.

08:57The United States had a strategy to be the democracy, to be the arsenal of democracy.

09:03That was a very effective strategy.

09:05FDR looked back on what the New Deal had done.

09:08It was becoming one of the most powerful economies in the world.

09:11And he knew the war would unleash it.

09:13So we became the arsenal of democracy.

09:16We supplied the free French.

09:17We supplied the British.

09:18We supplied the free Poles.

09:20We supplied the Soviets.

09:22And the Soviets would never have won at Stalingrad and never pushed the Wehrmacht back to Berlin and taken Berlin if we hadn't done that.

09:29So this is a shared victory, not a sole victory for the 20 million casualties on the Soviet side or the much fewer casualties on the U.S. side.

09:40It's a shared victory.

09:41But my point is, why would Donald Trump manifest an unrealistic view of history at the time that these people are celebrating and Witkoff is negotiating?

09:55I think because he doesn't have any view whatsoever of history that's even anywhere near accurate.

10:00Now, I can go back to my previous supposition.

10:04It's frayed now, really frayed.

10:07But he's trying to build pressure.

10:09He thinks he's doing a deal here, a real estate deal, and he's trying to build pressure.

10:15And the lies and the half-truths add to that pressure because Putin doesn't know whether he believes them or not, nor does anyone else.

10:23So he's confusing the table, if you will, on which he's dealing.

10:27But I'm really, really skeptical of that now.

10:31It looks more like a circus to me than it does a deal.

10:36Netanyahu announced that the IDF will occupy Gaza.

10:43This must mean that they will continue to use the starvation as a weapon of war,

10:50that they will either kill or expel the two million people living in Gaza,

10:56will Turkey and Egypt just take that laying down?

11:03I don't know about Turkey or Egypt, but I do know this.

11:06I know what happened to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq

11:10once we declared that sort of a vision for our strategy.

11:15And that's what Netanyahu is doing.

11:16He sold it as a sustained military operation in Gaza to the Knesset and to his cabinet.

11:22I'm told they even created a law for it.

11:25What he's doing is he's creating the situation that I just said before.

11:29Sharon withdrew from in 2005 because he was losing too many soldiers.

11:34He closed down 21 settlements and he got out of Gaza.

11:37What Netanyahu is doing is entering a Gaza that is a terrorist heaven.

11:43There are more unexpended ordinances and things to make IEDs out of,

11:49improvised explosive devices that cost most of the casualties for the Marines and the soldiers in Iraq,

11:55than you can shake a stick at.

11:57There is going to be an insurgency in Gaza that will eat the IDF's lunch if he goes ahead with this.

12:04It's totally counterintuitive to what Sharon, a much more brilliant military guy than Netanyahu,

12:10intuited in 2005.

12:12He knew he was going to get involved in an insurgency in Gaza.

12:16That's what Netanyahu is inviting.

12:18And by the way, it will also invite every Arab 18-year-old, male and female in the region to join that insurgency.

12:26Colonel, back to President Trump.

12:29Whatever Netanyahu is planning to do, whatever the cost, whatever the death, whatever the horror,

12:36whatever the terror, whatever the destruction, the United States is paying for it.

12:41Yes.

12:42Does Donald Trump have any, appear to have, even the remotest misgivings about that?

12:50The only inkling I saw of that was when he was talking about the Yemen situation,

12:56even though he was lying there, too, about some of the dimensions of it.

12:59But nonetheless, I think I detected in his words, in his manner, that he was,

13:05what the Israelis had done in Yemen to utterly destroy the Sinai airport,

13:10which was mostly civilian airplanes and civilian people, was reprehensible.

13:16And maybe that wasn't something that should be going on.

13:19So he was going to make a deal with the Hujis because that was a deal that he made,

13:22I think, stuck a finger right in Netanyahu's eye.

13:25So I think he at least showed that he could recognize that some things were going on that probably shouldn't be going on.

13:31Why can't he recognize that in Gaza?

13:33I have no answer to that question.

13:35Did we cut a deal with the Hujis and who prevailed?

13:44Pepe Escobar is saying the Hujis prevailed because they haven't been degraded,

13:49they haven't been restrained, and we wasted a billion dollars and lost three F-18s in the process.

13:54And that's, and Reapers galore, that's at $30 million apiece.

13:59That's probably a part of the reason, if not a large part of the reason, that Donald Trump did what he did,

14:04whether they agreed or not, because we're losing too much ordinance and too much money.

14:11And what did we gain by this mini-war?

14:16I say many people died, and we spent a billion dollars, but it only lasted about a month and a half in Yemen.

14:22Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

14:25Judge, we have gained nothing since we started helping Saudi Arabia and the Emirates,

14:30originally, years ago, in a frustrated effort to put the Houthis back in their place,

14:36as Mohammed bin Salman said, and they never did, and no one has, and I suspect no one's going to.

14:45Do you think that Trump is sick and tired of Netanyahu?

14:49I do. I do, and I watch his behavior, his mannerisms.

14:54I think he is, and he's searching for a way to do something about that,

14:59but he simply has no conception of how to do it,

15:02because he's so beholden to all the different wickets that the Jewish lobby,

15:07the Israel lobby, as Meerschaum recalls it, exercises.

15:11And he's also concerned about what's going to happen in the Levant, should Israel go down.

15:18And therefore, he's got no reason whatsoever to do anything to do that.

15:23What do you think would happen militarily if Trump listens to Lindsey Graham

15:30and strikes Iran with the Israelis?

15:36I think Iran will go all in and respond with everything they've got and respond all over the region.

15:45So we will have a burning Saudi Arabia in the oil facilities.

15:49We will have a destroyed LUD in Qatar.

15:52We will have probably a destroyed military city where a lot of U.S. assets are in Saudi Arabia.

15:58We will have a destroyed 5th Fleet Headquarters, the largest fleet headquarters we have now in Bahrain.

16:05We will probably have a reception and ongoing procedure complex in Kuwait destroyed.

16:12Everything the U.S. has on the ground in the Middle East will be destroyed, and Israel will be destroyed in my view.

16:20And Iran will make it existential for themselves if they have to.

16:24I mean, this is like India and Pakistan, except ratcheted up about 20 degrees.

16:31Here's Lieutenant General Dillon speaking in English.

16:37Now, he doesn't dress like a Western general does.

16:41He's a general of the Indian Air Force, basically saying, you know, Pakistan better back off or it will cease to exist.

16:50Cut number two.

16:51If you look at Pakistan from northeast to southwest, their east-west depth, they do not have the strategic depth to absorb our strike.

17:00All their major cities, population centers, they are all within this small little strip of land.

17:06Our depth is so much, when Pakistan strikes, we will be able to absorb that strike because, of course, there will be damage.

17:14But when we go back with a massive strike, which is our declared policy, and unacceptable damage, Pakistan will cease to exist.

17:23Is this going to get out of hand?

17:28I heard that same kind of language from similar people in 2002, from the ISI on the Pakistani side, not from the civilians, but from the ISI and the military, and from the military on the Indian side.

17:42The Indians sort of got their rear end handed to them when Pakistani F-16s shot most of their aircraft out of the sky because the F-16s are such a better aircraft than the Indians had, and the pilots, I think, were better.

17:55What he's saying is kind of like what Mao Zedong said when he talked about deterrence.

18:01I'll destroy Los Angeles and Houston and New York and maybe some other U.S. cities, and maybe you'll get Shanghai and maybe a little bit of Beijing, whatever.

18:10I'll still have 800 million people left, and you'll be virtually destroyed.

18:15That's the kind of threat he's making.

18:17Now, if he means it, he's a fool.

18:20If he's just saying it, I can understand that he would be doing that because there's a lot of tension between those two countries, and it's really bitter and passionate tension.

18:28I got news for him on another thing, though.

18:32If we fire, as we told them, we told Islamabad and Delhi in 2002, if we fire 100 nuclear weapons, and we thought they would probably expend their arsenals eventually because that's what escalation theory teaches us.

18:47As long as you can shoot, you're going to shoot, and if they are really devastating you, you're going to shoot everything because you don't want to lose it.

18:55You wipe both countries out virtually because Pakistan's stockpile is pretty extensive, and you probably, according to studies that have been done, eliminate agriculture, for example, in the middle of the United States between the Mississippi and the Rockies for about five to ten years because of the nuclear winter you create because of the upward atmosphere moving those clouds of nuclear waste over to us.

19:23So this is not just localized, like he was trying to hint.

19:28This is global, and he better watch out what he's talking about.

19:32I hope he's just, you know, a military guy let out there like a bulldog, like a Doberman Pinscher, to threaten the Indians to do that.

19:39So do the facts.

19:40Do you see MI6 or CIA fingerprints on any of this military activity between Pakistan and India?

19:57The CIA has always been wrapped up with the ISI, integrally wrapped up with the ISI.

20:04So their fingerprints are over things like Lashkar-e-Taiba and other terrorist groups that the ISI uses from time to time to give India trouble, particularly in Kashmir, and other groups like that.

20:16And one of the things we tried to do was talk both capitals into doing something about the Kashmir situation so that you didn't have this tendency to use that as the focal point of these terrorist groups and to get rid of the terrorist groups.

20:32Didn't work.

20:32Obviously, they're still there and they're still causing their havoc.

20:35But the answer to your question is CIA is plugged into the ISI.

20:39Here's the same general, colonel, on the concept of first strike and on the concept of surveillance.

20:49Chris, cut number three.

20:51No first use does not mean that we will wait for him to strike.

20:55Nuclear bombs are not kept at one place.

20:58Warhead is kept at other place.

21:00The launch projectile is kept at other place so that, you know, there is no accident.

21:05So when the coupling or mating starts...

21:07How do we know when the coupling starts?

21:09Our intelligence will know.

21:10Because these are not small things and we know where their things are located.

21:14And those places are always under surveillance.

21:18Not only India, the world is keeping them under surveillance.

21:21So anything moving out or moving in those locations is noticed by all.

21:26So when the coupling or mating starts...

21:28Suppose they pick up a piece, projectile from here and Warhead from there, and they bring it to place A, B or C.

21:34And now we know that they are in the process of coupling or mating or, you know, joining this as a nuclear bomb.

21:41And in the process of joining, it's not for training.

21:44It's a live bomb.

21:45That is the time we should be very clear that this is the first strike of Pakistan.

21:51We are well within our rights to prevent that first strike.

21:55Okay.

21:55For the safety of our citizens.

21:57And it is well within the declared policy of us that we will not do first strike, but we will not allow him also to do the first strike.

22:05Should this be taken seriously?

22:08Would this actually escalate to nuclear weapons?

22:13Well, if I were in the audience or I were a reporter talking to this guy, or anyone, for that matter, making these kinds of statements, I would ask, first of all, why do you have to go to nuclear weapons?

22:24Do you not have any conventional capability?

22:27Does Pakistan not have any conventional capability?

22:29If you want to teach them a lesson, go to conventional lessons.

22:33Don't go to nuclear lessons.

22:35Vice versa, the same thing.

22:37Now, one of the things we did in 2002, I was trying to see if he knew that.

22:41I'm sure he probably does.

22:43We gave them permissive action locks.

22:46We sold them.

22:47What that does is it makes each nuclear weapon require two keys and therefore two people normally to activate it.

22:54Pakistan's weapons are a little more densely placed just because of geography than India's weapons, as I understand it.

23:02And we had something to do with spreading India's weapons out, too.

23:06But you're looking at a situation where I think the civilians, now I may be wrong, I think the civilians are using people like this guy to go out there and make threats so that things do eventually calm down.

23:21And so the better, cooler heads prevail, in other words.

23:25But this is backdrop by something else, Judge.

23:28And the floods in Pakistan made this quite apparent.

23:32The Himalayan glaciers, because of the climate crisis, are melting.

23:36And they're melting much more rapidly than many experts thought they were going to.

23:41That's what caused the flood in Pakistan that flooded about a third of the country.

23:45What's happening now is Pakistan is corralling that water now as best they can and is threatening to build dams on the river and ultimately to deprive the entire western part of India of any water of consequence.

24:00So this is much bigger than just the fracas in Kashmir.

24:04Do you agree with Professor Meersheimer that Pakistan and India are in the same camp of Israel, owning nuclear weapons without signing any agreement or permitting any inspection?

24:19Yes, and I would even go further.

24:21Both cultures, and this is going to sound like a racist comment, but I don't mean it that way at all, because I've dealt with both cultures extensively, shouldn't have nuclear weapons.

24:34Should or should not?

24:36Should not.

24:37Oh, okay.

24:38I wasn't sure that I heard you correctly.

24:40I'm still waiting for somebody to ask President Trump, Secretary Rubio, Secretary Hegseth, or even Prime Minister Netanyahu about the Israeli nuclear weapons.

24:52Well, that's another one I would say.

24:54They shouldn't have nuclear weapons.

24:56I mean, let's face it.

24:58As long as Golda Meir is quoted accurately, and I think she was, the BBC printed it on the front page, yes, I would exercise the Samson option if we were in existential peril, which meant, clearly, she would use a nuclear weapon.

25:15Colonel Wilkerson, thank you very much for your time.

25:17Thank you for allowing me to go from topic to topic.

25:21Much appreciated.

25:22I know you're going to be with Ritter.

25:24Give my regards soon.

25:26Give my regards to Scott.

25:27Thank you for joining us.

25:28We'll look forward to seeing you next week.

25:31Have a good weekend.

25:32You too, my friend.

25:34Coming up at 4.30 this afternoon, he just flew from Tehran to Moscow.

25:41Who else?