Retired U.S. Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson sits down with journalist Abby Martin to argue that American empire is collapsing under its own weight, and that the collapse is being engineered from inside the system that built it. Wilkerson has the résumé to back the claim: over a thousand combat missions flown in Vietnam, a stint as national security advisor under Ronald Reagan, and years as chief of staff to Colin Powell through two Bush administrations. In the interview he walks through the mechanics of a war economy, from the more than 800 U.S. military bases scattered across the globe to the arms manufacturers who, he says, recruit roughly 70 percent of retired generals as paid spokespeople to keep selling conflict to the public. Wilkerson describes foreign policy decisions made on business logic rather than humanitarian grounds, and wealth from these wars flowing upward rather than down into the working class. The conversation stays tightly focused on his firsthand account of how military, corporate, and political interests interlock, and on his own conclusion that the arrangement cannot hold.