Welcome to Pushback. I'm Aaron Mate. Joining me is Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, the former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, currently a professor at the College of William and Mary. Welcome Colonel Wilkerson to pushback. Good to be with you again, Aaron. I'm wondering your thoughts right now, as we are in these convention days, about the state of

militarism inside both parties. Trump campaigned on a quasi-anti-war platform, pretending to be

anti-war. We know how that turned out when he actually took office. Meanwhile, Biden is not

really offering, I think, much of an alternative when it comes to foreign policy, adopting a lot

of hawkish rhetoric featuring Cold Warriors at the convention. Just picked up an endorsement

from John Negroponte, veteran of the Dirty Wars

under the Reagan administration in Central America, also served under the George W. Bush

administration.

I'm wondering your overall thoughts right now on the state of militarism inside both parties

and whether you see any room internally to offer a dissenting point of view?

I think it's very difficult to derail empire.

And despite what most Americans might think, since 1945, that's been the evolutionary path the United States

has been on.

From Harry Truman to Barack Obama, we have been building an empire.

9-11 and the shock of 9-11 sort of put some real teeth in that evolutionary process, accelerated it catalytically, if you will.

But it's been there for a long time.

And if you're an empire, you grow to the point where you feel like every problem in the world needs to be handled swiftly, decisively, and usually with hard power.

What you find is that swiftness and that so-called decisiveness winds up being more often than not a failure.

I asked someone the other day in the military, still active duty, I said, tell me when the last time was the United States won a war.

He said, what do you mean? Win a war. We don't win wars anymore. We just fight them.

And I said, okay, I'll give you that. That's what empowers normally do.

An empire would claim as long as it pushes its border ever further out

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