Full transcript: Colonel Douglas Macgregor on London Real
2:42 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Colonel Douglas McGregor, the decorated combat veteran, author and foreign policy expert. You are widely recognized as one of the preeminent military strategists of our time, spending 28 years working at the highest levels of the U.S. military.
3:11 You have been a regular commentator on Fox News, the BBC and the Tucker Carlson show. In 2020, Donald Trump appointed you as senior adviser to the Secretary of Defense. You believe that Washington’s continued support for both Israel and Ukraine is damaging the American brand globally and could lead to a major financial crisis as debt levels continue to rise. Meanwhile, radical protests continue on U.S. college campuses and a nuclear war feels closer than ever before.
3:39 Brian Rose: Colonel McGregor, welcome back to London Real.
3:42 Douglas Macgregor: I’m glad to be back after that introduction. Nuclear war is imminent.
3:47 Brian Rose: Well, I want to get your thoughts on that for sure. But you recently said that most Americans don’t realize that the 60 billion plus aid bill approved for Ukraine is actually not going to help defend that country.
4:01 And most of it is going to end up going straight back to congressional reelection campaigns. You went further to say that Washington is a donor occupied territory. It’s Epstein Island on stilts where everyone is rewarded for destroying their own society. Colonel, what did you mean by all of that?
4:22 Douglas Macgregor: Well, I’m glad we have an hour or two to discuss this because there’s a lot to it.
4:28 I think the first thing to understand is everything that happens in Washington is really a function of money. If you want to know why people do the things they do, in most cases, you have to follow the money. I wish I could tell the British people and the rest of the world that we are ruled by a class of people who are desperately devoted to their country and will always try to find the right answer. But that’s not the case. When it comes to Ukraine, Ukraine is an unmitigated catastrophe.
4:57 Our influence in that country, our insistence on this proxy war, our determination to make this Ukrainian puppet state fight to the bitter end for what ostensibly are our interests, even though I don’t agree with them, has produced a human tragedy. I think over a year ago, I was on with you and I said that we were up to approximately 500,000 Ukrainian dead, all sorts of people that attacked me saying that’s impossible. Well, today we’re up to at least 600,000 dead.
5:32 And within the last week or so, they’d lost 8,000 killed. This entire bill and everything associated with it is a travesty. It’s a travesty because there’s no one to utilize the weapons that we are sending. And the weapons that the Ukraine has been using recently as sort of revenge weapons, long range strike weapons against Russians on Russian territory, those are operated largely by NATO contractors, soldiers, officers. It needs to stop.
6:06 This war is over. This is not a question of Russia winning it, it’s over. There’s nothing left to fight with in Ukraine. There are no more people showing up. You can’t train anybody in a very short period of time to do very much.
6:20 And so, the humane thing to do in Washington and London is to say stop. Let’s sit down and we have to accept the fact that this is lost and find out what the Russians want and move forward from that point. But nobody wants to do that. The ruling class doesn’t want to admit that it’s been wrong. And Washington simply has a laundering machine when it comes to money.
6:44 You know, they constantly spend on defense. But much of that money goes into the pockets of contractors and these are the big donors and the corporations. It finds its way into political action committees for people’s reelection campaigns. It’s not just defense. It applies to the pharmaceutical industry.
7:04 It applies to foreign lobbies, any number of different things. The whole machinery of government right now is mired in this swap of corruption. Now, people will say, well, have they broken laws? Well, you can legalize corruption and that’s what we’ve done. So, I would call it a form of legalized corruption.
7:26 Now, how do you fix something like that? Well, barring anything short of a Cromwellian revolution, you can’t. And that’s the difficulty right now. People expect whoever wins in the next election, assuming we have an election in November, is supposed to rescue us. Well, I don’t think it’s going to happen because they have to deal with the Congress, with the Senate and the House.
7:50 And this is not a new development, by the way. It’s probably the worst that it’s ever been, but there was a time in the late 1800s, the turn of the century, when the railroads controlled the votes in Congress and people that owned mining interests and so forth. Then later on, we had Standard Oil, the largest corporation in the human history. But we then turned and we broke these things up. That’s what Teddy Roosevelt did, and breaking up those monopolies and forcing people into a different setting did have a positive impact on us.
8:26 We need something like that again. But at the moment, I think the Hill, that is the Congress, the Senate, and the House are far stronger in the bureaucracy that supports them than any president who comes into office. So I don’t know how we fix any of those things. So that’s the first thing that I think we need to keep in mind. And your second question was, Ukraine and Israel have hurt the American brand.
8:52 Well, I think our brand is probably worse off than it’s ever been in our history. You know, one of the things I’ve told people repeatedly, if you want to find a Muslim country where we’re popular, it’s because there are no Americans in it. No American military presence or anything else. In fact, I would not say that exclusively about a Muslim country. It’s in about any country.
9:12 Now, we are not very popular right now because we’ve supported this disastrous war in Ukraine. The truth about the war is out there. It may not have reached everybody in the West and in the United States, but I think it has reached the rest of the world. The problem in Israel is very straightforward. People like me, I’ve supported Israel most of, well, frankly, all of my life.
9:33 But I can’t support the current policy in Gaza. And unfortunately, the Israel lobby, which is a very powerful entity with a lot of money, it is not strictly speaking a foreign lobby because the people contributing to it are in the United States. And that very powerful lobby can make or break people on the hill and candidates and politicians. And so now we’re in this unfortunate situation where if you object to the policy of mass expulsion and potentially mass murder, which I think is happening, then you’re an anti-Semite.
10:06 You know, well, that’s a quick turnaround, especially for millions of people like me who have always supported the Israeli state simply because we viewed it as this amazing concentration of talent and human capital that could play a very positive role, not just in the Middle East, but in the world. And I think after the 73 war with the resolution of that war with Egypt, a lot of us thought this is a wonderful development. You know, we’re going to eventually reach a point where people will view Israel as a conduit for economic prosperity and communication with the rest of the world.
10:40 I think that was beginning to happen. All of that’s now destroyed. I don’t know how you get it back if you ever do. And so this is the struggle that we have. And again, you know, this is part of our problem as this sort of declining hegemon.
10:56 You know, we are responsible for our own decline. It’s not because somebody defeated us in a war and drove us into ruin. It’s because we’ve overextended ourselves. We’ve meddled everywhere. And there’s been no strategy.
11:11 There’s still no strategy in the United States. If you ask somebody, what are your national interests? You’re going to get a hundred different answers. Most of them are raw. Our interests are actually quite simple.
11:22 And if you go back far enough in our history, our preeminent goal was to do business with everyone. We weren’t in the business of sanctioning people here or there. You know, somebody was reminding me the other day that the czar of Russia, at the end of the second, had a very important role to play in the American Civil War because the British and the French fleets presented a danger to us. So he told President Lincoln, would it be all right if I simply parked the Russian fleet in American ports during the winter, since they had very few ice-free ports?
11:54 And Lincoln, of course, was very grateful because once the Russian fleet was there, we knew the British and the French weren’t going to interfere with us. But something similar with the Germans, Bismarck, was probably the greatest single admirer of Lincoln. And he allowed hundreds of thousands of young Germans to enlist in the U.S. Army for the purpose of going to America, serving honorably for the duration of the war, and becoming American citizens. A lot of Germans didn’t like that, said, you’re letting too much German capital leave.
12:23 And he said, well, that may be true, but I support the cause. So here you have an example of Germans and Russians who are absolutely essential to our development as a great power. We’ve thrown all of that away. You know, I don’t think anyone would want to help us do much of anything, but at the same time, we are hostage to the interests of smaller countries. We’re hostage to Israel’s interests.
12:46 We’re hostage to Polish interests. Just go down the list. Any nation in the world that has become a quote unquote, a lie. That’s something we never wanted. We wanted to be a partner, potentially.
12:59 We wanted to be a business partner. We wanted to help and assist, but we did not want to become hostage to someone else’s interests and behavior. But that’s where we are right now. And as a result, we are now this broken, financially ruined hegemon. But where are we going to go from here?
13:18 Well, eventually it’s going to end. We’re going to have to pull out, retrench. We’re going to be in the same position the British Empire was after the Second World War. It’s only a matter of time. A lot of Americans since that.
13:30 I personally welcome that. I think we need to get out of other people’s business. But that’s not popular in Washington because the so-called empire that we refer to in those terms, it’s big business. I mean, if you compare the money that the Department of Defense receives for its overseas commitments and look at the money that it would probably receive if we simply defended our borders and our coastal waters and got out of the business of meddling everywhere, it would be minuscule.
14:00 So you’re not going to see anybody stand up inside the Pentagon and say, oh, let’s let’s defend America. Let’s defend the Western Hemisphere. But that’s really where we belong. And we’ve got to get out of the Eastern Hemisphere.
14:14 Brian Rose: And if there is a change in presidency and Trump is elected, you don’t necessarily see any of this changing.
14:20 I mean, to be clear, the recent Ukraine funding was bipartisan. And you’re saying that there’s only so much one president can do. And even in Trump’s administration, it’s filled with people that are part of this deep state that want business as usual or maybe for it to get worse.
14:37 Douglas Macgregor: Well, that’s true. Right now, the people that surround him are not people that I would want to serve with.
14:43 I don’t think they’re the kinds of people that really share. Donald Trump’s what I would call instinctual views. President Trump is someone who does fly on instinct. What I mean by that is that he has a strong sense of what’s right and what’s wrong. We avoided war with Iran in 2019 because he looked carefully at the situation he confronted with the shoot down of this global hawk, which is an unmanned reconnaissance plane.
15:15 And he said, well, listen, we were right on the ragged edge of their air defense identification zone under international law and a military aircraft that does not identify itself and flies on the edge of someone else’s air defense identification zone can be legally shot down. And that zone ran right through the middle of the Straits of Hormuz, right up the middle of the Persian Gulf. Our air defense identification zone, if you look at the Atlantic and the Pacific, is more than half of the two oceans.
15:49 I mean, we reach out great distance. And, you know, I understand why and our feelings about that sort of thing, but the Iranians really didn’t have much margin. And he ultimately avoided that war, which I think was a good thing. But the strike packages involving the Air Force and the Navy, they were set to go. Everything was arranged.
16:09 He was presented essentially with a fait accompli. We can go and we can punish these evil Iranians for shooting down our unmanned aircraft. And he looked at it and he said, well, how many people are we going to kill? They said, well, perhaps five, six, seven hundred. Well, how many people have we lost? None.
16:27 Then he said, I’m not comfortable with this. That was his public reason. But the real reason was, what do we gain by going to war with Iran? Can we destroy Iran? Yes, we can probably destroy Iran, unless, of course, the Russians intervene, along with the Chinese to prevent that, which would be even more disastrous.
16:46 But, yeah, we probably could. But how does that help us? You destroy this major power of, what, 89 million? And what kind of flood of refugees heads north to Europe at this point? Because they’re certainly not going to head into the open deserts of the Middle East.
17:02 There’s nothing there. You know, so he thought this through. He said, no, this is a bad thing. So he has good instincts on things. The problem is that he surrounds himself with people that appear to be supporters and they’re not.
17:16 And it’s too late once they’re in the in the jobs. And at that point in time, there were people, I think it was Pompeo in the State Department, Bolton as a national security adviser, General McKenzie and the U.S. Central Command. These people were all, you know, hell bent to go to war. And of course, it’s not their decision.
17:38 It’s really a congressional decision, but we’ve long since abandoned that formality. So things rest for the president. So in that sense, I think we’re fortunate that Donald Trump acted the way he did. Now, what can he do about what’s happening now? Well, he signed on for this terrible Ukrainian bill that sends 61 billion more dollars over there that will end up in foreign bank accounts subsidizing Zelensky and his crooked crew.
18:01 How much of it will do anything for Ukraine is beyond, you know, my understanding. I don’t think it will do much of anything. And at the same time, we’re pouring more salt into the old wound that we’ve inflicted on the Russians, treating them like the enemy when, quite frankly, that’s not a necessity under any circumstances. So how badly have we poisoned the well with Russia? I think probably for at least a decade or more.
18:27 That’s not a good thing. That’s not in the interest of stability and world peace. And we just had Blinken who flew to Beijing. And at the same time, we’re voting for money to go to Taiwan. He makes the demand of the president of China that the Chinese not provide any support to Russia.
18:49 Well, first of all, the Russians didn’t need any Chinese support to do what they’ve done. That’s a lot of nonsense. But the Chinese and the Russians have a very healthy economic relationship. Russia has the resources and the minerals that China needs. China can rapidly produce the goods that Russia needs.
19:06 In other words, it’s a healthy and positive exchange between two parts of the world that historically didn’t get along very well. But to go there and at the same time, you’re arguing for money to build up a potential adversary on Taiwan that we want to cultivate and develop and ask the Chinese to stop overproducing, stop helping Russia. And I’m sure Yellen was probably there saying, please don’t dump our treasuries. You know, if they dump these long term treasuries that are all worth almost nothing now, that could bring us down financially.
19:42 It doesn’t make any sense, does it? This is just insane. There is no coherent strategy and there is no sense of mutual respect. We don’t seem to respect the interests of anyone but ourselves. And if you disagree with us, well, then you deserve to.
19:58 You sit in the closet over here with all the other evil authoritarians the world has ever known. It’s nonsensical. It’s got to end. But I think it’s only bankruptcy that will end it now.
20:11 Brian Rose: And just focusing on Trump, you know, how do you think his election is going?
20:16 Will this trial he’s in right now have any long term consequences? And if he is elected and he asks you to come and help, would you ultimately?
20:25 Douglas Macgregor: Well, first of all, when any president asks you to serve in any position, it’s an honor and a privilege. At least that’s what I think. So I would take that very seriously.
20:36 You know, Donald Trump supported Speaker Johnson on this, which I think was a very serious mistake. People on the Hill finally developed some measure of courage for a change and said, this has got to end in Ukraine. It’s over. We failed and prolonging this agony kills more Ukrainians but changes nothing. And ultimately, you know, Johnson sided with Schumer and McConnell and the usual war party and the foreign interests and decided to go ahead and support the bill.
21:07 Unfortunately, Donald Trump signed on for it. I think it was a very serious mistake. He threw his principles overboard and he threw a lot of his supporters under the bus. Now, he takes the view that it doesn’t matter what he does and people are going to vote for him because they like him and they believe in him and he represents them. I wouldn’t sign on for that.
21:29 I think people are actually paying attention to what people do right now. I think that’s also true for Bobby Kennedy. Bobby Kennedy shares a lot of the same views as Donald Trump. Both of them, I think, have to sit back and carefully re-examine what it is that they stand for and then stand by those things for a change. There’s too much readiness to do something you don’t really believe in and don’t agree with because, well, I’m trying to get elected.
21:58 I have to satisfy this or that lobby. I need money. Without money, I can’t win. It’s a catastrophe and I think both of them are decent human beings. Don’t get me wrong.
22:10 But I think they both need to confront that. And I think if they do, then we have a better shot. Now, who shows up on the other side? I’m still unconvinced that President Biden will be the man that runs the game. I mean, I don’t think he’s in very good physical shape.
22:26 I think it’s unrealistic to put an 80-year-old man into that job in any case. I mean, we might as well re-elect Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary who dragged Austria sadly into a war that he didn’t really understand and then tried desperately to stop it. That’s not what we need in the future. So, I don’t know who shows up. Soon it’ll be somebody else.
22:51 But why would anybody trust anybody? That’s the first question. Remember that when Donald Trump ran at every rally, and I remember this vividly in 2016 watching, people would chant collectively, build the wall, build the wall, build the wall. In other words, close the border, get control of immigration, stop what’s happening. As soon as he was elected, what did he do?
23:19 He went after Obamacare. What? What happened to the border? People remember that. And that can’t happen again.
23:34 You cannot say one thing and then do another. And people remember that. So, I think he’s got to carefully consider what he says and what he does.
23:45 Brian Rose: And as we stay stateside, you know, over here in the UK, we look at all these protests happening on college campuses at Columbia, Austin, I think down in North Carolina as well. They seem to be coming a really big deal there.
24:01 They’re canceling graduations. What do you make of this? Is this Hamas winning the social media war, or is it really not that well planned? Is this just the youth reacting in a way? Will this have long-term consequences?
24:16 And does it say something about America’s current state?
24:21 Douglas Macgregor: Well, I remember vividly the demonstrations that went on during the Vietnam War. Right. And they really got off the ground, I would say, in 67, 68, 69. I concluded at the time that there were two kinds of people involved.
24:40 On the one or maybe three. On the one hand, you had a lot of young men who said, I don’t want to go to Vietnam. So, I opposed the draft. And I’m out here demonstrating because I don’t want to go to Vietnam. I think there were a lot of people like that because when the draft was ended, these big demonstrations stopped.
25:03 Secondly, there were some people with political agendas that were fundamentally anti-American. There’s no question about it. Your usual collection of Marxist revolutionaries, these black power types that had nothing to do with, you know, the interests of black people that were inspired by communism and Maoism and so forth. And then, of course, you did have people that were very legitimately and very solidly opposed to the war. And, you know, I was a teenager.
25:35 I didn’t understand much about it. In 1971, I went off to the Virginia Military Institute a year later off to West Point. I was raised to be very patriotic. And so, you know, I listened to people who said, well, you know, we can’t have these demonstrations. We have to support the troops.
25:55 What I didn’t realize at the time, Brian, is that the best thing we could have done for the troops was to get them out of Vietnam. So when I look at the demonstrations now, I see something similar. You’re always going to have people taking advantage of the opportunity to tear down things. But I’m a real believer in free speech. I think the people that opposed Vietnam helped us.
26:21 I think there are lots of serious people who are opposed to what the Israelis are doing in Gaza. They’re not opposed to Israel. They’re not necessarily pro anything. They see what they believe is something wrong. And I agree with them. It is wrong.
26:39 How many mass graves do you have to discover? How many thousands of people are lying under the rubble? All of this is designed to destroy a loss. Well, we understand that, but that hasn’t worked very well. And even the Israelis think that there are at least 20,000 Hamas fighters left.
26:56 In fact, there are Israelis who are telling many of us that Hamas has made good on some of its losses because people are joining it. Hamas has turned itself into something of a rock star in the Middle East because it’s standing up to something that everybody thinks is evil. Now, these are not people that wanted to join Hamas to begin with. These are not people that are joining Hamas because they want to kill Israelis. They’re joining Hamas because they oppose what the Israelis are doing in Gaza.
27:26 So I think we have to recognize that. And I think we ought to have a standard in the United States for free speech. If there’s no vandalism, if there’s no violence, then it should be permitted. If there’s vandalism and violence, shut it down. That’s absolutely unacceptable.
27:42 We didn’t shut anybody down in 2020, as you’ll recollect during these terrible riots across the country that caused several billion dollars worth of damage. People were killed. People were injured. Police were killed. Police were injured.
27:57 We didn’t shut it down. We should have. It was wrong. So you can’t have double standards. You can’t say, this is good, this is bad, because you like one cause and dislike another.
28:09 And as I said, after having watched the Vietnam disaster unfold and learned more about it, I wish I had understood more of what was happening in the 60s than I did. But I didn’t. But now I have a different view of demonstrations. I think they can be positive. They don’t have to be negative.
28:27 But I haven’t participated in any lately. Neither am I likely to ever do so. And I can’t comment on what people claim is or is not true about them. So my standard is no violence, no vandalism. Knock yourselves out.
28:44 Yeah. Ultimately, free speech must prevail. It always must prevail. And that’s something we always need to fight for.
28:52 Brian Rose: You know, our mutual friend, Sai Hirsch, just penned an article on his substack where he talked about a comparison of Vietnam and what’s happening right now in Israel and Gaza.
29:03 And he was talking about this phenomenon that seems to happen to leaders like Lyndon Johnson and Netanyahu when they’re trying to preserve their own power. And what seemed like could be reasonable men will not hesitate to sacrifice lives to hold on to that power. And it happened in Vietnam knowing that countless people were being killed in the south and the north in neighboring countries. And it’s happening probably right now in Gaza. And yet these leaders will go to no end to preserve that power.
29:37 And I think that’s what we’re seeing right now as even surprising to me, Israel is now shutting off the Rafa closing and considering going in there when most of the international community is saying, please stop, including Trump, is saying they need to wrap it up. What are your thoughts on that when you look at Bibi? Is he a guy that’s trying to hold on to that power and will do anything to hold it, including not realistically looking at human lives being lost?
30:08 Douglas Macgregor: Well, keep in mind that I have not personally met nor do I know Mr. Netanyahu. I do think there, I understand Cy’s point and I agree with him to a certain extent, but I would divorce Netanyahu from Lyndon Johnson. Lyndon Johnson was a corrupt political figure all of his life. And then he was ultimately in over his head.
30:32 He didn’t know what he was doing. And to quote Bill Clinton, he didn’t understand that if you’re digging yourself into a whole stop, he never understood that. He was another politician that made stupid statements that people told him were right, that we have to fight communism in Vietnam and if we don’t fight it there, we’ll end up fighting it in Los Angeles. We weren’t fighting communism in Vietnam per se. I mean, everyone will say we did, but the truth is Vietnam made absolutely no strategic difference to us whatsoever.
31:05 And had we never gone, we’d have been better off and we killed two million Vietnamese who didn’t deserve to die any more than the 58,000 American soldier, sailors, airmen and marines. I think Mr. Netanyahu is different. First of all, I think he’s a highly intelligent man, much more intelligent than LBJ. I think he believes in his heart of hearts that he is standing up for him defending the Jewish nation.
31:30 And he feels that this is a moment of truth for Jews and the world. He has turned this into an existential fight for the survival of Israel. It wasn’t on the 7th of October. And I have serious questions about what happened on the 7th of October because I visited part of the Gaza Front in 2020, in February 2020, on a visit to Israel. And I thought they had a brilliant operation.
32:00 They knew as soon as a cell phone lit up or a phone of any kind, any communication whatsoever, they know who was talking to whom. They knew the history and the background of everybody. And someone, you know, we had an Israeli soldier who was wounded by a sniper. And within minutes, they knew who had done it, where he came from. They had brilliant electronic technology and surveillance technology and barriers.
32:29 So I really questioned what happened on the 7th of October. Why was the response so slow? Why was there nobody there? Why did they position this music festival, for God’s sakes, in such close proximity to it? None of it makes sense to me.
32:46 So I have real questions there. And I hope at some point somebody digs into that. But having said that, what turned into a short object lesson to demonstrate that you don’t kill Jews at your leisure has become something much greater. And it’s become something that he and his colleagues and others in Israel talked about for a long time. And that has purged the Israeli state of its Arabs once and for all.
33:13 Get them out. Well, getting them out is one thing, but purging is another. You’re not just getting them out. You’re killing them in great numbers. And most of these people are what you would expect to find in any number of Arab countries.
33:27 They’re people that are trying to keep their families together, feed people, sustain themselves. They’re not particularly involved in anything except trying to live. I think that’s what’s upsetting people now. He takes a position. They’re all part of the problem.
33:45 And I think in taking this position, he has created a pool of hatred and animosity and distrust, not just in the region, but worldwide, that is going to haunt Israel for a very long time, if Israel survives. Because remember, you’re talking about a little more than 6 million Jews and 1.2, 1.3 million Arabs living in that country. We’re not even including Gaza and the West Bank in that discussion. And what do they do? What can they look forward to in the future now?
34:22 Who is going to do business with them? What kind of a tourist trade are they going to get? Are they going to live eternally on the income provided to them by the diaspora? And is it possible that they could have so seriously poisoned the well that they will lose the kind of support that they’ve historically enjoyed from us and from other countries in the West? I think it’s all bad.
34:47 And I don’t see anything good coming out of this for Israel. But he’s committed, and he can’t turn back. And we need to understand that when the Gaza operation is completed, that he will turn on the rest of the people on the West Bank and he will turn against Hezbollah. This is not going to end. This is going to go on.
35:08 That sort of mentality could very well result in the destruction of the Israeli state.
35:15 Brian Rose: How does that happen? Because that’s a bold statement. Is it because the retaliation from people like Iran in the end, they push it one step too far?
35:27 Douglas Macgregor: The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia within the last, what, 36 hours was almost killed, blown to pieces.
35:35 Why? Because he talked about normalizing relations with Israel again while Gaza is underway. The ruling elites in the region are in the words that you will find in the Quran, fact and corrupt. The population knows it. King Abdullah and Jordan aligned his forces with the United States, Great Britain, and Israel to protect the Israelis against this sort of bizarre attack from Iran.
36:11 He didn’t need to do that. He could have simply declared his neutrality. He too is now a very serious target for removal. General Sisi is in a difficult position. The Israelis have now moved into Rafah.
36:24 They’ve taken control of what we call the Philadelphia Corridor. The Egyptians have treated that as a potential act of war in the past. His population is watching him and wondering, when are you going to act? What are you going to do? It’s bad enough that you’re tolerating the mass murder of our brothers in Gaza.
36:42 Now what? I think the whole region is going to turn over in terms of its leadership and its elites. Then you have Mr. Erdogan, who had very bad election results quite recently. Why?
36:56 Well, people said, well, the economy isn’t good enough. The Turks are furious. They’re ferociously angry at the Israelis for what they are doing. If it were up to a referendum, the Turks would vote themselves into war. Erdogan has now had to essentially suspend all trade with Israel, stop everything.
37:16 Until he did that, he was selling the Israelis oil and gas, lots of food and other products that they really need. That’s over. He can’t do that. He’s in the same position as the rest of them. And then, of course, is Iran.
37:29 Iran doesn’t want a full-fledged war because it assumes that we will inevitably be drawn into it and they will be destroyed. But they do have options now, and that option includes Russia. It also includes China as a backup. The Chinese are very dependent upon the Strait of Hormuz. They’re dependent upon the oil and gas that comes out of the Persian Gulf.
37:51 They’re not the only ones, so do the Japanese and the Koreans. But the Chinese have made it very clear they’re not going to stand by and allow this to go sideways. They are going to step in. They will support Iran. This sets us up for a very difficult position, but it really sets up Israel for destruction.
38:10 And eventually the Turks will come out of hiding. The Turks are the leading power in the region and have been for hundreds of years. Remember, initially it was Persia, but then the Persian Empire was driven out and then you had the Caliphates that emerged, and finally you had the Turks, the Seljuk Turks and the Ottoman Turks. They are the power. They can field millions of troops and they have a population that is at least 60 plus percent under the age of 30.
38:40 And they are furious and they want to fight. I think this is very bad for Israel. I see nothing good coming of it. So my point is that he’s on a track from which he cannot retreat. That much is true.
38:56 He’s very much like LBJ. He’s made a lot of statements and a lot of promises, but there’s something else going on here. He has the support of 80, 85 percent of the population. When I say he does, his policy is supported. They may not like that in Yahoo, but they certainly support the policy.
39:14 That wasn’t true for LBJ. By the time tent happened, people said this is ridiculous because in the year before tent, you had General Westmoreland, much like a lot of our generals did in Iraq and Afghanistan, run all over the country and tell everyone, wow, we have turned the corner. We are winning in Vietnam. No, I’m very optimistic. No, tent.
39:36 So I think he’s in a different position from the Americans. The Americans at the time had already decided we’ve had enough. That’s why LBJ didn’t run again. That’s not true in Israel yet. They have not had enough yet because they have been attacking people that quite frankly don’t have much to defend themselves.
39:56 It’s the same thing that we did in Iraq and Syria. We’ve attacked at Afghanistan. We attacked people with no air defenses, no armies, no air forces. What could they do to us? Almost nothing.
40:10 Well, Israel is about to cross that Rubicon, I’m afraid, and end up in war, in a war with more nation states, more people than they ever had before. And that’s what worries me most because I don’t think Israel should be sacrificed for this policy. That’s what I fear Mr. Netanyahu is doing unwittingly.
40:30 Brian Rose: And then you’ve been talking about the Turks, you know, ever since this invasion happened.
40:36 You’re one of the few people that is constantly warning us that they are there and waiting. And when they make a move, it’s something that’s going to change the entire situation. So I appreciate you bringing that up. You know, I wanted to finish on Russia. You know, you mentioned putting salt in the wounds and the fact this could be a decade long of damage.
40:55 You know, recently we saw a former prime minister here, David Cameron, say that if UK weapons were used on Russian territory, that would be okay with him. And then again, more talk of this nuclear war, where I think you commented about this saying, quote, the point we need to understand in a nuclear exchange with the Russians, we’d lose 90 million plus people within an hour. Why would we want to contemplate something that utterly ridiculous and stupid? You went on to say, I think we’re playing with fire.
41:23 We need to wake up. This is not something they want. It is something we seem to be insisting upon. Can you comment on that? You know, Colonel, I’ve seen more podcasts talking about nuclear war and its ramifications than I’ve ever seen in the past 20 years happen in the last two months.
41:40 So this is on people’s minds.
41:42 Douglas Macgregor: Well, first of all, I think it’s good that people are talking about it because again, when I was growing up in the sixties, that never left anybody’s mind. Everyone was acutely sensitive to it. And the one thing that we all accepted was that Russia exists. The Soviet Union is the Soviet Union.
42:00 We may not like it, but it exists. So we have to find a way to get along with them because the alternative is Armageddon. Everybody understood that. That’s a good thing. Russia is not the Soviet Union.
42:13 Russia is infinitely better and more humane than the Soviet Union ever was. Instead of applauding that, we seem now to want to destroy it. So that baffles me beyond belief, but there are other issues here. I think we need to at least welcome some good news. The French and Mr. Macron in particular, who was the first to open his mouth and talk about, we cannot allow Mr. Putin to win.
42:38 We cannot allow the Russians to win. And I will commit troops and I will send 20,000 troops. They’ve all walked it back. The spokesman for the French foreign ministry said, no, no, no, we don’t support that. And now they’ve said we have no troops in Ukraine.
42:53 Well, they have some French soldiers and officers in Ukraine. So do we. So do other NATO countries that have been there as advisors and have operated on a, you know, like contractors supporting them with intelligence and advice. But he’s made it very clear there will be no French force marching east into Russia, under Ukraine, under any circumstances. So that’s good.
43:16 And I think Lavrov did the right thing when he summoned both of them and laid down the law. Now, in the meantime, our spokesman have reiterated that we will not put troops into Ukraine. I think that’s a good thing. Nothing has been heard from London. And I think that the British people need to understand that the Russians are quite serious.
43:43 If in fact they supply these strike weapons in great numbers to the Ukrainians so that the Ukrainians can destroy Russian infrastructure and kill Russian citizens, the British will pay a price for that. British citizens will be killed. British troops will be killed. British installations will be destroyed. That’s not an idle threat.
44:05 Everyone needs to understand that the Russians with the missile arsenal at their disposal, you know, the Iskander, the Kinshaw, these things are very precise with great range. In fact, they can target everything from the Arctic Circle on the northern end of Norway all the way to southern Portugal. Last time I looked at the targeting capability, the range, there was a small piece of southern Portugal in the very south where the Atlantic sort of swims around into the Gibraltar area that could not be reached.
44:37 That’s it. And they don’t have to hit that much. The Germans need to wake up. And I think they’ve begun to. I think Schulz has said this war has to end one way or the other.
44:48 That’s good news because this business of having demonized your opponent or the people that you don’t like, beyond all rationality, by the way, makes it impossible under normal circumstances for you to suddenly do business with someone you said was the devil himself. And if we go back to World War II, there were large numbers of people, general staff, if you read the memoirs of Alan Brooke, the unexpregated memoirs, by the way, not the ones that were made to sound nice so that people would not read the truth about Churchill. The imperial general staff was very concerned about Soviet Union and communism and the power that lived there and kept arguing over and over and over again.
45:36 We don’t want to replace Hitler with Stalin. We don’t want to destroy Nazi Germany and then end up with Stalin and communism in short. We all know how the war ended, but they at least were reasonable and thinking these things through. We never did. The point I’m trying to make is that there needs to be some clear-headed thinking right now at the top.
45:58 We cannot impose our value system, whatever it is, because I think we’re terrible hypocrites, on everyone else. And yet, that seems to be the obsession of people like Blinken and Biden and others in that administration. You know, either you measure up to us in what we think a good little Anglo-Saxon Democrat is supposed to be, or you deserve the worst. This is all nonsense. As I told somebody the other day, I said, we keep talking about free and fair elections where I grew up in Philadelphia.
46:29 We haven’t had a free and fair election in 60 years, so stop talking to me about how lily white and pure we are. It’s nonsense.
46:38 Brian Rose: Colonel, if you had to fast forward four years from now, what do you think the situation looks like in Ukraine? What do you think the situation looks like in Israel?
46:50 Douglas Macgregor: I think a lot depends on the financial system and on the economic conditions.
46:55 I think that by the end of this year, something we have been anticipating will have begun to happen. I always go back to Nasig Talib. He’s the brilliant financial analyst, market analyst who talked about black swans. And in recent interviews, when he was pressed, they said, you’ve talked, you said we’re unsustainable. We can’t continue to go on as we have, but we’ve been doing it for years.
47:21 And he says Armageddon is just over the horizon. So then the people questioning him on MSNBC said, well, what’s that mean? When is this going to happen? In other words, you’re the fortune teller. Tell us what day everything collapses so we can all run to the back and get our money or something.
47:38 He says, look, I can’t pinpoint the date, but it’s closer than it’s ever been. It’s just over the horizon. I think he’s right. Debt finance consumption is a dead end. It is.
47:50 Either you manufacture and produce or you don’t. Either your currency is worth something or it’s not. We could spend hours and you’ll have lots of people who come on and tell you that the unsustainable status quo can go on for another decade. I don’t think so. And the other thing that we’ve learned is that the rest of the world can get along without us.
48:12 We took the position that if we sanction you and you’re financially straggled by us, you have no chance of survival. That was the expectation of Russia. How’s that worked out? It hasn’t. So I think the Chinese, the Russians, the Indians, if you just look at the bricks, look at the other 70 countries lined up to join them, I think the handwriting’s on the wall.
48:35 Our old system, our old way of doing business is about to go away. We’re going to have to make change, but we don’t want to. This is the problem when you have been, for a long time, a regional hegemon. We were always a regional hegemon, almost from the beginning, when we became a country. We were always stronger than the rest of the people in North America.
49:01 And we were happy as a regional hegemon. And being a regional hegemon frankly was enough. But then we decided to dabble in other people’s wars and eventually we developed this ambition to be a global hegemon. And that ambition seemed to come to fruition in 1992. And we swallowed the illusion.
49:21 Then we had finally taken over. The world was ours. Or as I think Hitler said in Vienna, I am the pearl and Vienna is my setting. Something ridiculous like that. It’s the same sort of stupidity.
49:37 It’s what got Trotsky in trouble. And one of the reasons that he lost power, because Stalin said the world doesn’t really want communism. If we’re going to spread it, it’ll have to be spread by the bayonet. And you know, they learned the hard way. Trotsky said, oh, the Poles will come over to us.
49:55 The working class of Poland will join us in the global Bolshevik crusade. Didn’t work out. You know, we’ve reached the land of fantasy. And we don’t want to let that fantasy go. And you’ve got a lot of people that depend upon the fantasy for their income, their station.
50:13 They’ve talked themselves into the fantasy world and you’re asking them to suddenly wake up and tell the truth. Not going to happen. So between now and the end of the year, I think things could get very, very dicey. Just imagine the impact that it will have when it becomes abundantly clear to everyone to the point where you cannot conceal it that we have failed miserably in Ukraine. And we did essentially what Mr. Netanyahu has done.
50:41 We turned Ukraine into this existential threat, this war with the evil Russians, this nonsense. Netanyahu has done that in Israel. When you do that, you put everything at risk. You sort of roll the dice. And that’s not how you govern.
50:58 That’s not how anybody should go.
51:00 Brian Rose: Last question, Colonel. It seems like nowadays you are getting more exposure for your ideas, whereas say a year ago, a lot of networks wouldn’t air what you were saying. Do you think more and more Americans and more and more people globally are now opening their mind to some of the things that you’re talking about? Does it feel like it’s moving that way or not?
51:25 Douglas Macgregor: Yes and no. If you go to the mainstream media outlets, no. They remain firmly in the grip of the globalist, neocon community, whatever you want to call it or however you want to characterize it. The people that are controlling finance and the media are still not willing to admit anything at all now. Good news.
51:48 There are alternatives. There are people like you. You know, you’re a perfect example of how you drive a stake through the heart of the mainstream media because you show up, you command a huge audience, and you entertain views that will not be entertained anywhere else. Somebody asked me the other day, what happens to Bitcoin if they try to end digital currency or they try to find some other reason to stop Bitcoin? I said, everybody will run out and invest in more Bitcoin.
52:20 In other words, we’re going to get the opposite of what the status quo wants. You know, you’re on the leading edge of that. And I’m not saying that to make you feel good. I’m telling you the truth. So I think yes.
52:33 I think more people are paying attention because they have to. Remember, the biggest problem we’ve always had in the United States, Brian, is that the average American pays no attention to what happens overseas. And historically, if you reported to somebody, well, they’re bombing Country X. Everybody goes, we’re showing we’re great. We’re powerful.
52:53 Suddenly, people are saying, wait a minute. You know, bombing Country X doesn’t help us. It doesn’t help them. And it’s probably a bad idea. Well, it’s taken a long time, but they’re right.
53:03 Just because you can bomb some appless opponent doesn’t make you a great power. People are starting to refocus their attention. And of course, a lot is helped by the fact that inflation has hurt us badly here as it’s hurting people elsewhere. And there’s concern about supply chains, things we never worried about before. And I think we’re going to see more worry about that in the future.
53:27 Brian Rose: I love your point about Bitcoin. Every single time China banned Bitcoin, the price went up. Every single time. And so, yeah, I hope that that freedom continues to exist for media, and I think it will. And we’ll keep trying.
53:41 Brian Rose: Colonel McGregor, thank you so much. Always really appreciate your insights. We’ll definitely have you back on soon. It’s going to be a very interesting six months as we go up to the election. So again, thank you.
53:50 Douglas Macgregor: Look forward to talking to you again. Thank you, Brad. All right. And thank you all in London Real. We’ll see you next time.
53:56 Bye.
