Trump Is Trapped by His Own CharacterCol. Lawrence Wilkerson on the worst national security team since 1945, obsolete aircraft carriers, and why decision-making has collapsed
I was pleased to catch up with Colonel Lawrence (Larry) Wilkerson — former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, on my Peacemonger channel. The Peacemonger is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Larry offered one of the clearest diagnoses yet of America’s current strategic dysfunction. His central argument was simple and devastating: the most important factor in national security decision-making is not process, intelligence, or even domestic politics. It is character. And the character at the top of the American system is deeply flawed. “Man’s fate is his character.” In the case of Donald Trump, that character demands success at all costs. When reality refuses to cooperate, the response is not adjustment but denial and fabrication. The result, Larry argued, is the worst national security decision-making team the United States has assembled since 1945. The practical consequences are already visible. The military has ill-served the president. Aircraft carriers — still treated as the capital ships of American power — are obsolete in an age of hypersonic missiles. One or two of them sailing within range of Iran could be severely damaged or sunk. Worse, the Navy no longer has enough escort vessels with the capacity to rescue the thousands of sailors who would end up in the water. “There aren’t enough escort ships… to rescue the people in the water because they don’t have the berthing space.” The United States is flirting with a catastrophe it does not fully understand.This recklessness is made possible by a deeper cultural problem: the generational forgetting of war. No American has experienced bombs in their own cities since 1865. In Europe the living memory of the Second World War has largely faded. When leaders no longer carry that experiential weight, the threshold for risk drops dramatically. Colin Powell himself foresaw this danger decades ago, predicting that once the last European leaders with childhood memories of the war left office, the entire strategic culture would change. Larry was equally unsparing about the bureaucracies that surround decision-makers. Drawing on Phillip Knightley’s classic study of intelligence services, he described agencies that exist primarily to preserve themselves. They need permanent enemies, inflate threats, and lie when necessary. The same logic, he noted, applies to NATO and the broader national security state on both sides of the Atlantic. On the immediate crisis with Iran, Larry saw limited off-ramps — particularly around the Strait of Hormuz and a return to some form of nuclear restraint — but remained pessimistic that they would be taken. The decisive obstacle, in his view, remains the Israeli government under Benjamin Netanyahu, whose political survival appears tied to continued confrontation. The conversation returned repeatedly to the human cost of these failures. Ordinary Americans feel the economic pressure but lack a clear understanding of its causes. They are left with an inchoate anxiety that political elites on all sides are only too ready to exploit. Meanwhile, a narrow stratum of the ultra-wealthy appears largely indifferent to the risks being run with other people’s lives and futures. What emerges from Larry’s analysis is not a partisan attack but a structural one. When character is malformed at the top, when institutions prioritise their own survival over truth, and when societies forget what real war feels like, the path of least resistance leads toward escalation. The United States, he suggested, is currently walking that path with its eyes only half open. The full conversation is available here: You're currently a free subscriber to The Peacemonger. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. © 2026 ian |