In a new interview with Greg Wilpert at The Real News, Lawrence Wilkerson, a College of William & Mary professor and former chief of staff for United States Secretary of State Colin Powell, challenged the US government pushing the arrest in Canada of Meng Wanzhou. The arrest of the chief financial officer of major Chinese company Huawei Technologies to facilitate her extradition to the US on a charge related to the US government’s Iran sanctions is “an incompetent and unprofessional act,” says Wilkerson, that arose from “the arrogance of power.”
It is “the arrogance of power” that Wilkerson argues makes the US government think it can “dictate, in unilateral sanctions,” what people in another country, such as China, can do in terms of trade.
As far as the Canada government’s involvement in the matter, Wilkerson comments that “our northern neighbor knows on which side its bread is buttered and who butters it, and, at the end of the day, Canada may stand up and seem to be bold in the face of the giant to its south’s wishes, but it rarely really is.” “It knows its economic future and present,” Wilkerson continues, “is pretty much dominated by the United States, and it knows that, if it doesn’t follow what the United States wants it to do, in most cases, it will be punished, and it does not wish to be punished the way we punish people these days.”
Wilkerson, who is an Academic Board member at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, also criticizes in the interview the US government’s abundant use of sanctions across the world. “I am very concerned about the way we wield the sanctions axe in the world,” says Wilkerson. He further states that these sanctions “are creating a lot of enemies in the world,” explaining:
I don’t know how many countries we have under sanctions right now, but it’s probably half the world in one way or another — individual states or parts of states or whatever. And there is a very powerful movement aborning in the world to dedollarize the world because of those sanctions and the arrogance with which we implement them. And our Congress is majorly guilty in this business. They think the best weapon to throw at everybody is “oh, sanction that person; sanction that state; oh, sanction them; put more sanctions on them” and so forth. Well, there’s a lot of people out there. We’ve got about 330 million in this country now. There’s about seven-plus billion in the world, and in polls about two and a half to three billion of those people say that the number one threat to the security of their state, of their country, of their children’s future is the United States of America. Part of the reason for that is our arrogance in the way we do this business with sanctions, and war.
Watch Wilkerson’s complete interview here:
