Lawrence Wilkerson: America Is Failing to Adjust to a Multipolar World

ScheerPost Staff

Retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson delivers a stark warning about a world he believes is rapidly slipping beyond Washington’s control. In a sweeping conversation with Glenn Diesen, Wilkerson argues that the United States is failing to adapt to the rise of a multipolar order—one increasingly shaped by China’s strategic patience, Russia’s military escalation, and the collapse of diplomatic norms that once restrained global conflict.

From NATO expansion and the war in Ukraine to tensions with Iran and the erosion of trust between nuclear powers, Wilkerson paints a picture of leaders trapped in outdated imperial thinking while the geopolitical ground beneath them shifts dramatically. The result, he warns, is a dangerous mix of technological upheaval, declining U.S. influence, and political desperation that could push the world toward catastrophic confrontation.

Wilkerson paints a picture of leaders sleepwalking toward catastrophe while convincing themselves they are preserving peace. And as the former insider surveys the accelerating breakdown of global stability, he leaves viewers with a chilling admission: “I hope I’m wrong more than anyone.”

world he believes is rapidly slipping beyond Washington’s control. In a sweeping conversation with Glenn Diesen, 

Retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson does not sound like a man who believes the world is stabilizing. In a sweeping and deeply unsettling conversation with Glenn Diesen, Wilkerson paints a portrait of a global order entering a dangerous transition — one in which the United States remains trapped in the mindset of unipolar dominance even as the foundations of that dominance visibly erode.

For Wilkerson, the central reality shaping the 21st century is simple: power is moving eastward, and Washington either cannot or will not accept it.

“China is winning and doesn’t want to do anything to interrupt that victory.”

That observation becomes the organizing principle of the interview. While China, in Wilkerson’s view, pursues long-term strategic patience, the United States appears increasingly reactive, erratic and unable to adapt to a multipolar world it no longer fully controls.

One of the most striking parts of the discussion centers on the collapse of diplomacy itself.

Wilkerson repeatedly emphasizes that genuine negotiations between Washington and Tehran barely exist. According to him, there have been no meaningful face-to-face talks between senior American and Iranian officials, only intermediaries passing messages between hostile states.

For Wilkerson, this is not merely incompetence — it is historically dangerous.

“The first ingredient in diplomacy is trust.”

Without direct dialogue, he warns, every “peace process” becomes theater. Every ceasefire becomes temporary. Every negotiation risks becoming little more than cover for the next escalation.

He predicts that the United States could once again drift toward military confrontation with Iran after another failed diplomatic spectacle — a cycle he believes has already repeated itself multiple times.

Wilkerson’s analysis of Ukraine is equally bleak.

Rather than viewing the conflict strictly through the lens of democracy versus authoritarianism, he argues that powerful Western states increasingly see Ukraine as a battlefield laboratory — a place to experiment with advanced military technologies, drone warfare, electronic warfare systems and new methods of combat.

The comparison he reaches for is chilling:

“We’re like Hitler in 1936 in Spain watching those Stukas dive and amending their performance accordingly.”

The implication is clear: major powers are learning from Ukraine in preparation for future wars, not necessarily trying to end the current one.

At the same time, Wilkerson warns that Russia appears to be preparing psychologically and strategically for a direct confrontation with NATO itself. He points to Moscow’s recent nuclear exercises and escalating rhetoric as evidence that the Kremlin increasingly sees conflict with the alliance as inevitable.

Throughout the interview, Wilkerson repeatedly returns to one idea: America no longer appears capable of coherent grand strategy.

Donald Trump, in Wilkerson’s telling, governs impulsively, driven more by personal instinct and political survival than any consistent geopolitical doctrine. Yet Wilkerson reserves criticism not just for Trump, but for the broader American foreign policy establishment — intelligence agencies, defense contractors, ideologues and political elites who continue acting as though the United States still exists in the uncontested post-Cold War moment of the 1990s.

The result is a dangerous contradiction:

• Washington continues expanding military pressure abroad.
• NATO continues moving toward Russia’s borders.
• The United States escalates confrontations with Iran and China.
• Yet diplomacy steadily disappears.

For Wilkerson, this is not deterrence. It is provocation masquerading as stability.

“What provides deterrence… is diplomacy.”

That line cuts directly against the dominant assumptions now driving much of Western foreign policy. Wilkerson argues that military buildups without trust merely intensify paranoia and insecurity on all sides.

Perhaps the most haunting sections of the interview concern the speed of technological change and its implications for war.

Wilkerson argues that warfare is evolving faster than political institutions can comprehend. Drone swarms, electronic warfare systems, microwave defenses and AI-assisted battlefield technologies are reshaping military realities at extraordinary speed. Traditional concepts of deterrence, escalation and even victory may no longer apply.

At the same time, he believes the United States is confronting something it has not faced in generations: relative decline.

In Wilkerson’s framework, the world now contains:

• A rising power — China — that prefers patience and stability.
• A declining power — the United States — struggling to preserve global dominance.
• A rapidly destabilizing international system increasingly defined by insecurity and mistrust.

That combination, he warns, is historically combustible.

“There’s never been a time… that we were closer to the use of these weapons than now.”

Unlike many Cold War analysts who relied heavily on historical parallels, Wilkerson argues today’s environment may be even more dangerous precisely because it is unprecedented. Technology is changing too rapidly. Political leadership is weaker. Diplomacy is collapsing. And nuclear powers are communicating less, not more.

One of the more revealing sections of the discussion arrives near the end, when Wilkerson turns toward demographics and generational politics.

He argues that younger generations across Asia — and increasingly across the world — no longer see the United States as a stabilizing force. American military presence abroad, particularly after Gaza and years of endless wars, has deeply damaged Washington’s global legitimacy among younger populations.

He specifically points to South Korea, Japan and the Philippines as countries where younger generations are steadily becoming more skeptical of permanent alignment with the United States.

That generational divide, he suggests, may ultimately reshape global alliances more dramatically than any battlefield.

What makes Wilkerson’s warnings so unsettling is not simply his fear of war. It is his suggestion that the political class driving the current order may be psychologically incapable of adjusting to a world where the United States no longer dominates uncontested.

Again and again, the conversation returns to the same contradiction:

The global balance of power is changing, but Western institutions continue behaving as though nothing fundamental has changed at all.

The danger, Wilkerson implies, is not merely miscalculation. It is denial.

And denial inside nuclear-armed empires has historically ended catastrophically.

By the interview’s conclusion, even Wilkerson appears exhausted by the scale of the crisis he is describing. Asked whether the world may be drifting toward a larger war, he does not offer reassurance.

Instead, he offers a grim acknowledgment that perhaps defines the entire discussion:

“I hope I’m wrong more than anyone.”

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https://scheerpost.com/2026/05/27/lawrence-wilkerson-america-is-failing-to-adjust-to-a-multipolar-world/

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Glenn Diesen: […] The Europeans are talking about NATO, establishing a NATO without the US – a different NATO, that is – and at the same time, as you’re seeing the situation [in Ukraine] getting worse, the Europeans still appear to be escalating.
    That is, these massive drone programs they’re sending to Ukraine, seemingly allowing their territory to be used to strike Russia’s Baltic coast. And yeah, we now see that Russia is essentially warning that all of these factories producing all these drones are considered now legitimate targets. Where do you see all of this going? Because they seem – I don’t want to say, I’m wondering how to describe this best – there seems to be some massive, not panic, but delusion. I’m not sure what is a good word to describe what is happening in Europe now. But it’s, yes, there’s not much strategic thinking. It’s just this obsession with defeating Russia. Yet the weapons are drying up. Lack of capability seems to be compensated with more belligerent language and dismissing all the red lines. So where do you think this will take us? 

Douglas Macgregor: Well, my perception is that the misrepresentation of Russia’s true intentions, which never had anything to do with conquering anybody anywhere, is going to vanish in an energy crisis that the current governments in Western Europe in particular can’t master. I think that’s the final straw. The globalist leaders who want to maintain this war against Russia will be unable to do so because they’ll be thrown out of office. I’m still surprised that we have not seen open revolution in places like Germany and Great Britain. I think we will in the future. The situation in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales is really bad. We’ve already seen the Irish come out into the streets. I think we’re going to see more of that.
    They [the protests in Ireland] may be the canary in the coal mine for the British Isles. I hope so. But the people that are running the show in Parliament are simply out of touch with reality. They recently refused licensing for more drilling in the North Sea, even though they know that the oil deposits there are enormous and the need for energy is overwhelming. But we’re still dealing with these people that live in this illusory world where wind and solar power are going to replace carbon-based energy. It’s not going to happen, not this way. I mean, perhaps at some point Tesla’s dream of harvesting energy from the atmosphere will work. But in the meantime, we have to use what we’ve got. We’ve got to survive on that. I think Europeans are concluding that. And I think in Germany, eventually you’re going to see a return to the status quo ante, which is these people that are running things are going to be gone, and they’re going to have to restart nuclear power plants. And they’re going to have, once they’ve thrown these people out, they’re going to have to come to terms with Moscow. And they should. Again, everything – all the abuse, the insults, and the lies hurled at Moscow – has to be fundamentally dismantled. It’s very hard to do when the media is controlled by these globalist governments. The media has not told the truth. They portrayed Ukraine as a sort of luminous group of patriots fighting desperately for their freedom. That’s a lot of nonsense. Ukrainians were built up for the purpose of attacking Russia by us. We encouraged this. We cultivated it.
    When I say “us”, I’m talking about us and the Europeans. NATO is finished – exactly what I thought would happen at the beginning of this crisis in January of 2022. And I said so. NATO is done. Europeans must find a way forward for themselves that makes sense. And I think eventually this will happen. I hope sooner rather than later, because President Putin has restrained the use of Russian military power. He’s held it back. He has everything he needs to finish this war decisively this year. There’s no question about that. He also has the means to flatten substantial areas in the Baltic states, in Germany, Poland, elsewhere – anywhere in Great Britain, for that matter – where they’re manufacturing these drones to be hurled against Russian infrastructure and against Russian citizens. He has sat on all of this. He has declined to do those things.
    He’s held the force back. The Russians want to do it. He doesn’t. I hope that European governments will outpace the Russian desire for action. I really do, because it would be disastrous for that war to unfold in Europe. And the Europeans today, they’ve lost their fear of war. They don’t understand just how bad it can be. And I think these governments, once they’re replaced, new people will come in and they’ll behave differently. And this man, Zelensky, and the corruption in that regime, its underpinnings, which are, you know, the worst imaginable criminality, they have to be revealed. The truth has to come out. •

https://www.zeit-fragen.ch/en/archives/2026/no-9-5-may-2026/what-becomes-of-europe

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MAKE A DEAL PRONTO BEFORE THE SHIT (WW3) HITS THE FAN:

NO NATO IN "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)

THE DONBASS REPUBLICS ARE NOW BACK IN THE RUSSIAN FOLD — AS THEY USED TO BE PRIOR 1922. THE RUSSIANS WON'T ABANDON THESE AGAIN.

THESE WILL ALSO INCLUDE ODESSA, KHERSON AND KHARKIV.....

CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954

TRANSNISTRIA TO BE PART OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION.

RESTORE THE RIGHTS OF THE RUSSIAN SPEAKING PEOPLE OF "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)

RESTITUTE THE ORTHODOX CHURCH PROPERTIES AND RIGHTS

RELEASE THE OPPOSITION MEMBERS FROM PRISON

A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE USA.

A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE EU.....

EASY.

THE WEST KNOWS IT.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - There has been no response from the UN, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), or other international organizations to Russia's appeals regarding the Ukrainian strike on Starobelsk, Russian Human Rights Commissioner Yana Lantratova told Sputnik.

Lantratova previously reported that she had sent letters to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the OSCE Secretary General, the President of the UN Human Rights Council, and other international organizations regarding the Ukrainian strike on a college and dormitory in the Lugansk People's Republic (LPR).

"We sent letters immediately after the tragedy occurred. We have not yet received any response. We are awaiting it, and hope for an objective assessment of these events by the international public... We hope for a response, and moreover, we will send [letters] to all our counterparts in various countries around the world so that people know the truth," Lantratova said.

On May 22, Ukrainian forces attacked an academic building and a dormitory of the Starobelsk Professional College of Lugansk State Pedagogical University. Twenty-one people were killed and 44 others wounded.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20260528/no-response-from-un-osce-to-appeals-regarding-ukrainian-strike---russian-ombudswoman-1124204449.html

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

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