Welcome to the Empire Files podcast. This is Abby Martin. This is the audio version of each episode of the Empire Files hosted on Telesaur English. You can watch every episode at the Empirefiles. TV.

I'm sitting here in D.C. with a rare opportunity to speak with someone who served in the innermost circles of the U.S. war machine.

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson is a former U.S. Army airborne ranger who flew over 1,000 combat

missions in Vietnam.

He was national security advisor to the Reagan administration and later served as chief of staff

to Colin Powell during the Bush administration. You're a retired Army officer, you're Republican.

Given your insight experience in the government and military,

how would you explain the purpose of U.S. foreign policy?

Today, the purpose of U.S. foreign policy is to support the complex

that we've created in the national security

state that is fuel funded and powered by interminable war and the ramifications thereof.

That's a sad commentary on what America has become, but it's a realistic and I think honest

appraisal of what America has become.

Has it ever been about altruism?

You could say there were even altruistic aspects to the slaughter and ethnic cleansing of Native Americans

from the Mississippi to the Pacific Coast by Phil Sheridan's Army of the West if you wanted to really dip into the

bag and find something.

But I don't think overall and comprehensively it's been altruistic.

It's been about sheer power.

And lately it's not even been about realistic application of that sheer power or realistic

attempts to expand it. It's been more or less

so failed in its overall general aspects that it has diminished our real power in the world.

...