Only when they realize what is happening to them and take concrete action to turn that around, and I don't mean going to the ballot box because that's become a fruitless exercise, but I mean actually taking action locally, state-wise, and then nation-wide to turn this around to change the whole situation, I don't think we're going to see any improvement. I just think we're going to slide slowly off the cliff and we're going to wind up just like every empire before us, writhing in a sea of pain and agony and breaking up and falling apart as the rest of the world marches on laughing at us.
R.K.: Wow. How would that look? I mean, are there signs of this happening already?
L.W.: I think there are signs of it happening already and people with whom I converse seriously about these matters sometimes scoff at the idea that this could happen but I mentioned the other day, the possibility of California becoming an independent country and of the usual derision was offered and I simply stated, California, by whatever measurement you want to use, is at least a tenth and some would say the seventh or the eighth largest economy in the world.
California could prosper without the rest of the United States. California transfers through tax and other redistribution of wealth, money that it makes every year to basket cases like Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, and other states who haven't made a profit, so to speak, in thirty years. And who are living off the hard work and effort and entrepreneurship and so forth of places like California. So I could easily see California becoming an independent state.
I could see New England becoming an independent entity and I could see other division, there was a book about twenty five years ago called The Nine Nations of North America, very persuasive book about how the United States could dismember itself. We had a Welsh Parliamentarian at William and Mary recently. I think he said he had twenty six years in the Welsh Parliament and he told us to the astonishment of some government professors who were in the room, that there was a t least a 50/50 chance the United Kingdom would not be the United Kingdom in twenty years. That Scotland would be independent, Wales would be independent, England would be independent, Northern Ireland would be reunited with Ireland and be an independent republic.
Well that's pretty shocking to think of the United Kingdom being just that little tiny parcel called England and every body else being independent but that's history! That's the way the world works. That's the way life goes.
R.K.: Now you're talking as the Chief of Staff to the former Secretary of State so when you talk about nations, you know what you're talking about. Do you see big changes in other places? Like Europe or Russia or Africa or China? Or India?
L.W.: I see some tremendous changes coming and at one point as I was telling two of my grandchildren the other day, who are getting old enough to understand, I thought they would be the ones who would be, however you want to say it, reaping the havoc or the rewards, whatever it turns out to be for their particular cases of this massive change that's coming but I am no longer convinced of that. I've been to enough briefings of late that I am convinced I, if I live another ten or fifteen years which I hope I do, I'm going to see some of this.
And what I'm talking about, of course, is the massive change that's going to brought about and it's just cyclical but that cycle is being aided and abetted by fossil fuel burning, by climate change. Climate change is going to present Africa with a desert from the northern rim of the Sahara all the way down to South Africa probably in the next seventy five to a hundred years. It's going to force massive migrations.
Why do we really think we created Africa Command? The military command in the Unified Command Plan that finally after fifty years of arguing over this and everything got done. That is to say we now have a military man, a four star general in charge of the region of Africa. We fought that in the military, we didn't want to do that, it's not the right approach to Africa and so forth but there are three reasons why that change came about.
The first reason, I won't rank these reasons, I'll just say they're equal. The first reason is the massive migrations that are going to take place, indeed are already taking place if you've watched Israel lately and seen them, how cruelly they are dealing with the black refugees that are flowing in the Sinai, this is a first.
The mass migrations are going to take place because of the disappearing water, the disappearing arable land, and so forth and the military needs to be there to control that because those people are going to go where those people need to go to find water to drink, food to eat, and so forth.
The second reason is because that movement is going to be predominantly south to north and it's going to destabilize, massively so eventually. Everything from Morocco over to Egypt and that's not what we want. It's going to destabilize the southern rim of Europe too as they flow out of Algeria and Libya and Egypt and into Marseilles and Genoa and other places on the southern framework of Europe on the northern rim of the Mediterranean
And then the third reason is the massive amount of resources that still remain, especially esoteric resources in Africa. Principally in the central part where the Belgians made such a mess of what used to be the Congo, the Central African Republic and so forth. So that's why we have suddenly decided that the military is the main instrument of policy vis-a-vis Africa for the United States. We want those resources, we want to stop that migration or control it as much as possible, stop the destabilization of the north.
All of these things are humongous challenges that basically, other than the lip service President Obama gave to it recently, no one is really taking a hard look at and they're going to eat our lunch and they're going to eat China's lunch and India's lunch and Germany's lunch, everybody's lunch.
And we're all going to be sitting on the other side of them, if we survive and there's going to be I think few of us that do, wondering why the hell we didn't take it more seriously and do something about it in time to at least mitigate, adapt, rather than accelerate and extenuate and deepen these problems that are coming.
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