Because when you get this kind of chaos theory if you will in operation, you get spin offs that you never contemplated, indeed that no science or technology ever contemplated. They just happen and they happen because of a confluence of a thousand little events and suddenly you have it upon you. So that's the number one threat. Interestingly, the one element of the Federal Bureaucracy that gets this is the Pentagon.
The Pentagon is doing more right now than any other federal element to deal with, to strategize against, to think about, to build plans, ships planes, tanks and other things to deal with the problems that are going to be generated by climate change. And the Navy is probably the lead force, sailing on the oceans you might know it would be because it understands what the oceans are going to go through in the next fifty to sixty years.
It also understands that it is going to have a hundred year storm every ten years. And understands that that means ten times as many humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations like the tsunami in Indonesia in 2005, like the tsunami and earthquake in Japan, Fukushima Daiichi nuclear catastrophe and so forth. It understands that these things are going to happen ten times as often as they used to because of climate change and so you have the lead element in the federal bureaucracy, counter-intuitively if you will, is the military in trying to get the government to waken to the fact that we have got a real problem, a real challenge down the road.
That's the number one, and it's existential. It is not small, it is existential. It could destroy us. Coming back from that and looking at the immediate national security threats I think the lead one is mishandling the US-China relationship. And by mishandling I mean making the relationship antagonistic and ultimately leading to conflict when there is a clear path where you don't have to do that.
Where you can coexist, where you can deal with the problems together, where you can have a great state pact for example, not unlike the one we had under the Atlantic Mining Charter and you can deal with some of these problems together and after all you're going to have to because you're the two largest economies in the world.
The third is the potential for yet another war in western Asia where the United States comes out the end of the diplomatic track and for whatever reason someone in the congress derailed or whatever the diplomacy proves nonsuccessful and we wind up going to war and we have yet another war in western Asia.
This one will last ten years, cost five hundred thousand to a million troops, six trillion dollars and at the end of the ten years you won't know whether you've succeeded or not.
R.K.: What countries are at risk for western Asia?
L.W.: Iran is the one I am talking about. If diplomacy fails with Iran, give what the president and previous presidents have said, we don't have any choice. You know, we've said it's unacceptable for Iran having nuclear weapons.
We've said it's unacceptable that Iran continues on it's current building of centrifuges and so forth, and we've said that diplomacy is the instrument right now but if diplomacy fails and there are many, many people trying to get it to fail then we wind up back where we started from; it's unacceptable therefore what are you going to do Mister President? Well you're going to bomb. And then you've got a war.
R.K.: Well what about Israel?
L.W.: Well Israel is in the middle of all of that, of course. And Israel is a huge strategic liability to the United States. I can think of no benefit Israel brings to the United States at all except perhaps the cohesiveness of its population with our own population and that's falling off rapidly as Israel does all the things it has done and is doing to destroy it's own democracy.
Israel has destroyed its labor movement. Israel now has most of its wealth concentrated in sixty families. Israel now has the security complex owning or leasing 51% of its territory. Israel has built this humongous wall. Israel now goes to war for economic reasons. In July 2006 it bombed facilities in Lebanon as much to keep Lebanon's economic might from growing as it did to fight Hezbollah.
Israel is now treating the refugees that are flowing into the Sinai from Africa from the conflicts there and the problems there, intolerably. It's treating its own non-Jewish population intolerably. Israel looks more and more everyday like an apartheid state. Israel is a distinct liability to the United States of America and will remain so and probably only become worse.
R.K.: Now, my understanding is that, when I look at Israel I look at it being run by a guy like Dick Cheney and I look at the politics and I look at Israel having a lot of the same problems that we have here. That-
L.W.: Yes.
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