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In a stark and unsettling conversation on The Chris Hedges Report, journalist Chris Hedges sits down with retired Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson to confront a question now hanging over Washington’s war planning: Is the United States preparing to send ground forces into Iran?
The interview arrives at a moment when the American-Israeli war on Iran has already burned through massive military resources, destabilized global markets, and failed to produce anything resembling a clear strategic victory. More than a month into the conflict, the central warning from Wilkerson is blunt: if Washington commits troops on Iranian soil, the result could be a military disaster on a scale policymakers appear unwilling to acknowledge.
Rather than describing the conflict as an isolated confrontation, Wilkerson places it inside a much larger geopolitical struggle — one tied to declining American economic leverage and the attempt to preserve dominance over global trade routes increasingly shaped by China. In his view, the war cannot be understood simply through the language of retaliation or deterrence; it reflects deeper anxieties inside an empire confronting limits it no longer knows how to manage.
That argument gives the interview its sharpest edge: the possibility that military escalation is being driven less by coherent strategy than by a collapsing political imagination in Washington.
Wilkerson, whose long military career included service under Colin Powell, argues that planners inside the Pentagon have historically understood the risks of a direct ground confrontation with Iran. Unlike previous wars launched under assumptions of rapid dominance, Iran presents terrain, manpower, regional alliances, and retaliatory capacity that could quickly turn invasion into prolonged attrition.
The concern is not only battlefield cost. The interview points repeatedly to how the war is already redrawing global alignments. Iranian retaliation, regional uncertainty, and threats to energy routes through the Persian Gulf have intensified fears of wider economic shock, with Wilkerson warning that continued escalation could accelerate conditions for a global depression.
One of the most alarming moments in the discussion centers on Israel. Both Hedges and Wilkerson raise concern that if Israeli leadership sees conventional military objectives slipping away, pressure could mount for far more extreme measures — including actions that would permanently transform the conflict and likely push Iran toward openly pursuing nuclear weapons.
That possibility exposes a contradiction running through Western war rhetoric: a campaign supposedly justified in the name of preventing escalation may instead be creating exactly the conditions for irreversible escalation.
Wilkerson’s proposed exit is politically simple but strategically difficult: declare victory and withdraw. Frame retreat as success before the conflict hardens into another generational war.
But he openly doubts whether the current administration possesses either the discipline or independence to do that. His most cutting remark suggests that many driving policy are not fully directing events themselves, but acting under pressures they neither control nor clearly explain.
The interview leaves viewers with a grim historical echo. From Vietnam War to Iraq War, American military history is crowded with conflicts entered under promises of control and exited under the weight of miscalculation.
What makes this moment especially dangerous is that many of those lessons appear visible — and ignored.
The central force of the discussion is not prediction but warning: once a ground war begins, political leaders often lose the ability to shape where it ends.