Full transcript: Colonel Douglas Macgregor on London Real
2:47 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Colonel Douglas Macgregor, the decorated US Army combat veteran, military strategist, and former senior adviser to the Secretary of Defense.
4:05 You served more than three decades in uniform, earning distinction during the Gulf War before becoming one of America’s most respected and controversial voices on defense and foreign policy. You’ve long warned that Washington’s reckless interventions have drained US power, destabilized entire regions, and pushed the world to the edge of catastrophe. Today, as Gaza burns, Ukraine falls, and Venezuela plots its next move, you argue that America’s era of global dominance is ending, replaced by a multipolar world where the US influence is shrinking, alliances are fracturing, and rivals are rising.
4:40 Colonel, welcome back to London Real.
4:44 Douglas Macgregor: I’m happy to be there. Thanks.
4:45 Brian Rose: Colonel, I’d love to go to a section of the world that we haven’t been talking about in the last 6 months, and that’s what’s happening now in the Gulf. We’ve seen Venezuela now, uh, seem to be kicking off. Uh, there was an article in the FT that said its military was preparing for a US strike. We’re seeing these drug boats blown out of the water. We’re seeing Colombia’s president really calling out, I think, the President Trump, and now we’re seeing, I think, an aircraft carrier moved into the region.
5:15 I’m really curious what you see going on here and what are the potential implications for the US and the world.
5:22 Douglas Macgregor: Well, admittedly, it is very difficult for people outside the country as well as inside to follow everything that’s happening. Uh, Benjamin Franklin was asked by someone standing outside of Independence Hall in Philadelphia after the Constitutional Convention ended what sort of government we were going to have. And he said, “You’re going to have a republic if you can keep it.”
5:45 And right now I think we have probably a uh drama queen republic if we can keep it. Everything is theater. It’s unending. And President Trump seems to love this sort of thing. But the theater is confusing.
6:03 It sends people in the wrong directions. This is especially true in Moscow. You know, the Russians are very serious people. They take what’s happening on their borders very seriously. That’s why we have a war.
6:14 So, they don’t understand Trump. He’s, he suddenly expresses a willingness to meet, but then his uh sort of uh staff backtracks and says, “Well, we’ve got to go back to a ceasefire.” When he realized there would be no ceasefire until we had some sort of agreement hammered out. So, he calls up and says, “I’m not coming.” Well, the Russians interpret that as potentially threatening.
6:37 Then he imposes more sanctions. Again, more threats. Although these sanctions frankly don’t amount to a tinker’s dam. But having said that, simultaneously he’s withdrawing US forces from Romania and Bulgaria. And I expect he’ll withdraw the forces in Poland and probably Lithuania and elsewhere.
6:57 Why? Because we’re not postured to fight the Russians. No one in the United States has any interest in a war with Russia. I think we have a lot of saber rattling at the moment in Eastern Europe. That will probably continue.
7:10 But if you’re a Russian, you’re trying to figure out what does this man want? He’s pulling forces out, but he still threatens. He says he wants an agreement, but he goes back to this ceasefire, and when we say no for the 99th time until we have an agreement, he imposes more sanctions. So, this is a huge problem. You’re asking the right question, but there’s no easy answer because we have no coherent national security strategy.
7:39 None. Everything is impulse driven. So when you turn to the Middle East, what’s the policy? Well, the policy is that we’re going to do whatever Israel wants us to do. That’s no mystery.
7:52 You know, it’s very interesting to me that this woman Machado, who’s been named as the possible uh successor to Maduro if we succeed with regime change in Venezuela, she’s the new Nobel Peace Prize winner. She immediately says, “If I’m the president, if I take over, we will move our embassy to Jerusalem.” Well, why would somebody in Venezuela give a damn where the embassy was uh in Israel? I think she knows where the power lies. I think she understands the audience that she’s playing to.
8:31 So, that kind of informs us as to where we’re likely to go in the Middle East. And when we say likely to go, it’s wherever Israel wants us to go. And I think the Emirates understand that. I think Qatar understands it. Uh, I know Kuwait does.
8:46 I think Saudi Arabia understands it. Doesn’t mean they like it, but they know it.
8:52 And talking about Venezuela’s situation, I mean, an aircraft carrier there, that’s a pretty big show of force. Does it worry you what’s going on down there right now?
9:03 Douglas Macgregor: Well, it does, but perhaps not for the reasons that the administration would say. You know, we’ve been listening to this drug war rhetoric now for a very long time. It’s becoming increasingly difficult for many of us to take it seriously.
9:19 When you have an organization like the CIA that is well known for its involvement in drug trafficking. When you talk about the border, yes, the appearances are better, the optics are better, but illegal human and drug trafficking continues. In fact, a lot of it goes right through the legal ports of entry because the drug cartels are paying the customs officers to turn a blind eye to their material. So, they’re informed in advance that a truck’s coming through, going to someplace, let it through.
9:50 Don’t obstruct. And they get an extra $30,000 every month on top of their existing pay. Uh, we have a great deal of difficulty dealing with that. That’s why I had recommended a long time ago to the president. We need to put the military on the border and put it under military control and then rotate battalions on and off until the place is secure, because you can’t compete with the flood of money that cultivates corruption.
10:16 That’s a huge problem. It’s a huge problem inside the United States. So, right now, the drug cartels can continue to do a lot of damage to us regardless of what we do to Venezuela. I’ll be frank. All they need at the moment is a van with a map of the interstate highway to deliver their human or drug uh packages wherever they’re sending them for money.
10:39 That’s the problem. I don’t think this is going to solve that. But what it will do, and this is something I’m very concerned about, is it will once again remind the Latin American republics and peoples down there of just how threatening we are because we have a long track record of intervention down there. Whether it’s El Salvador or Nicaragua, uh, you know, you name it, we’ve been in and out of these places. And I’m already hearing people say, “Well, this will be like Panama, just like Noriega.”
11:12 Well, Noriega was removed. I don’t think that ended drug trafficking permanently. I don’t see any evidence for that. Has it suppressed it? I’m sure somewhat, but there are always other ways to engage in this criminality.
11:24 So, the idea should be you stop it at the border and you stop it in your coastal waters. If you can’t do that, then you have to enforce law inside the United States and you’re not going to get very far unless you are harsh. And the man who demonstrated just how effective this is was Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore. If you come into Singapore and you are peddling drugs, you will face the death penalty. Sure, you’ll go to trial, you’ll have a jury trial, but that’s what you’re facing if you do this.
11:58 And you know, Mao used to say all the time to his party members, shoot one, educate a million. You never have to execute very many people to get the point across. It comes across pretty quick. But inside the United States, you people say, “Well, that’s not humane.” Well, how humane is it for hundreds of thousands of Americans to die of fentanyl?
12:18 Somehow or another, you don’t want to find the individuals who are responsible for distributing it and punishing them, even if it involves capital punishment. If you’re trying to save them, that’s what you have to do. Bombing Venezuela, attacking Colombia, if we marched into Mexico, that would not help our case. The last thing that we want to do south of the border is invade someone else’s country or start killing people. That’s just not a good idea.
12:47 And let’s look at Venezuela for a minute. If you look at the map and you superimpose Venezuela on the European land mass, it covers the area of Germany, France, Belgium, Switzerland, and part of Austria. You know, has a 1,700 mile coastline. 1,379 miles it shares with Brazil. 1,380 miles it shares with Colombia.
13:14 And we already know there are paramilitary organizations in Colombia, as many as a 100 thousand and also in, uh, Brazil, who are just anxious as hell to go into Venezuela and fight the Yankees. What are we accomplishing? And remember that just a few weeks ago, in fact, just last week, President Trump admitted in the Oval Office in an interview that Maduro had approached him and offered him a stake in the oil and gas industries. In fact, President Trump said he’s offered everything.
13:45 And the question was, well, is that not enough? No, that’s not enough. What? How often has regime change worked? How often has it benefited us?
13:56 I think the answer is not much. It’s very expensive. If we go into Venezuela, we remove the government, try to install a new one, there are people who will support it, but there are a lot of people who will fight it. So, what are we cultivating? A civil war, and then do we make Venezuela dependent upon us?
14:16 What a disaster. You know how many trillions have we lost in the Middle East? What did it cost us in Vietnam? We went off the gold standard in 1977. Why?
14:27 Because we were broke. So, you know, this doesn’t make any sense, but it’s more of this sort of drama queen behavior. And you get these same worn out arguments from people in Washington uh, who aren’t even qualified to run a Burger King. And at the same time, what are they doing? They’re advising on national brain surgery.
14:51 This is ridiculous. We don’t have a group of professionals, people that really understand anything, rooted in foreign policy, rooted in all the various areas of policy that are important to the American people. In the meantime, 70% of American families live paycheck to paycheck. How can this go on? This can’t.
15:13 Brian Rose: Colonel, does classifying the cartels as terrorist organizations, does that accomplish anything?
15:22 Douglas Macgregor: You know, that’s a good question. Legally, I suppose in some ways it does. I’m someone who always felt strongly if we were serious about this, we would effectively declare war on the cartels. But that war should be fought on our borders and inside our country, not overseas. And see, my concern is this is another exercise and diverting everybody’s attention into something that’s going to cost a lot of money.
15:47 It’s going to be damaging to us, and while at the same time at home, what are we doing?
15:51 Yeah.
15:51 Nothing. You know, as long as you have the cost of groceries rising and high inflation, as long as you continue to print money without restraint, ultimately what you do is you make long-term strategy planning and manufacturing, industry, science, technology, education impossible. How do you do that? The same thing’s true in the military. I keep trying to tell people, you know, if you exercise restraint, back away, shed these overseas commitments and focus on the military over the next 10 years with a strategy that is designed to adapt us to a new world, a new world, new technology, new societies.
16:34 You know, if you’ll exercise that restraint, you’ll have a lot of capability in 10 years. That’ll put you far ahead of everyone else. We won’t do it. We’re always back in there using what we have over and over and over again. And you’ve got families inside the military that are on food stamps.
16:53 You know, you can’t, they can’t feed themselves. They’re not paid enough. And everybody says, “Well, the military’s paid too much.” Well, we have to look at where the distribution of funds goes in the military. And it doesn’t go to the families of servicemen at the lowest level that have to man the ships, that man the equipment, that continuously deploy.
17:10 So, we got a lot of problems, but no one really wants to address them.
17:14 Brian Rose: Yeah. There’s many that say if we were still on the gold standard that we wouldn’t have all these, you know, forever wars everywhere because we literally couldn’t afford them. You’d actually have to choose between feeding your citizens and giving them protection and fighting overseas. But now when you can print money at will, you can go do a lot of things that maybe you shouldn’t be doing. Um,
17:34 Douglas Macgregor: Well, how do you persuade, uh, the government that energy security and food security are absolutely vital and essential? They should come before everything else. And we’re not doing that. You know, it we really are not. We need to focus on those things like a laser because the population is not going to sit around and take it forever.
17:56 You know, Lenin used to say every society is three meals away from a revolution. You know, let the supply chains break down for a short time or even a long time. You’d be surprised what will happen inside the United States when people aren’t certain that they can eat, when they can’t afford things, when they can’t pay for gasoline, which is quite high right now. It’s much lower in many places, but it’s very high in the United States, probably higher in Europe.
18:21 Eventually, that’s going to come home to haunt us as well. So, I think, uh, I think there’s no easy answer other than the hard answer. And when you mention this business about gold, let’s face it, the reserve currency today is gold. That’s where the world is heading for the first time. Nobody says this in the mainstream media.
18:44 I don’t know why Nassim Taleb brings it up from time to time, but right now all the countries, the central banks all over the world, collectively have more gold than the US Treasury. Now, if you aspire to be the great superpower that apparently people in Washington want to remain, that should give everybody pause. Now, maybe somebody thinks that we’re going to go down to Venezuela, march into the interior, seize the gold mines, and pull out gold. I don’t know.
19:16 I think the Viking age is over, so I’m not sure that’s a good plan. Uh, but you got a lot of people thinking in those terms.
19:23 Brian Rose: Yeah. And obviously we’ve seen the gold price spike recently and a lot of people doing that flight to quality. I was actually in Singapore a couple weeks ago and our taxi driver was boasting to us that somebody came in the other day with some marijuana and was going to be executed. And you know when you’re in Singapore, that’s just how it is. I think chewing gum is still illegal.
19:44 And they, you know, they really set up this regime and that country grew from a bunch of opium dens and pirates in ’65 to, you know, the fourth or sixth largest GDP in the world. It’s incredible what they built all by making the citizens accountable. I also spent a lot of time in Dubai. I’ll be there on Friday. And that’s another place where, you know, there’s, you know, maybe there’s drugs, but I don’t know.
20:07 I never seen them or heard about them. And I know they’ll deal with you. And you know, they’ve got that locked down. And uh, I’d prefer to be in places like that, but in the US, like you said, that would be inconceivable, I guess, to do that to population.
20:24 Douglas Macgregor: I think it is at the moment, but I think it’s going to get a lot worse in the future. And I think more and more Americans are going to demand that the law be enforced. We have a problem right now because President Trump, whether he likes it or not, is a lightning rod for many, many issues, even things for which he’s absolutely not responsible. Uh, so he’s an easy person to point to, mobilize discontent and hatred. And remember, you’ve got a lot of people out there.
20:52 Soros is one of many, but people out there who are willing to fund Antifa or fund anybody who is anti-Trump and resist the federal law, you know, and if you don’t enforce federal law, you don’t have a country, you know. We had a dispute over that in 1861 and it was brutal. We settled it. If you’re not going to in fact enforce federal law, you have a choice. You can change it or you can impose it.
21:22 Now Trump wants to impose it. I happen to agree with him. How he’s doing it, that’s another matter because everything goes back to this reality TV moment. And what we need from a president right now is not drama. We need explanations.
21:39 We need rationality. You know, FDR, and certainly not one of my favorite presidents, but FDR was very good at this sort of thing. And he had something called the fireside chats. I think there were only five or six of them, but he sat there quietly in the Oval Office. He was speaking over the radio.
21:54 And he said, “Well, I’m joining you this evening to explain why we need to extend lend-lease to our friends in Great Britain.” You know, and then he did very quietly and everybody tracked through the polling what happened and overnight the opposition to lend-lease to Britain dropped from something around 60 or 70% down to 30%. That’s kind of what we need right now. We need someone to stand in front of the map and say, “Let me show you where the drug trafficking is happening, where the illegal human trafficking has occurred and what we need to do to deal with these issues.”
22:33 This is our strategy. Now, I’m going to introduce you to the man I put in command of this effort. You know, and by the way, we’ve been through many, many exercises in the deportation of illegals. Everybody thinks this is new. After the stock market crash, President Herbert Hoover, who was by no means military in his bearing or thinking, deported 9 million Mexicans.
22:57 Now, did he deport them because he didn’t like Mexicans? Absolutely not. But these were people that had come here and stayed here. And he said, “I’ve got to open up the jobs that they are doing for Americans.” And you’ve heard this business.
23:09 Oh, Americans won’t do that. That’s why we have these people. Well, guess what? When the depression set in, Americans did all of those jobs. And so his real purpose was, let’s get these non-Americans out of here, or they’ll become targets.
23:24 People will say, what are you doing here in my country? Why are you getting this or that? And right now we’re treating all of these illegals as though they were our own citizens. In fact, in many cases, they’re being treated better. I think you have something similar in your country right now that’s aggravating and annoyed people.
23:43 You can’t ignore the vast base of your citizenry. You have to listen to them. And I think these issues are going to become more acute as our economic position worsens, as our financial position worsens.
23:57 Brian Rose: Colonel, I think, uh, Trump is meeting, I think, today with Xi in South Korea. And apparently he’s asking for them to, you know, block or limit some of those precursor chemicals going to Mexico, which maybe is involved in fentanyl.
24:13 Obviously, obviously trying to get a trade negotiation going there as well. What do you make of our relationships right now? Our relations with China, um, and that whole tour right now in Asia.
24:29 Douglas Macgregor: Well, let’s, before we go to China, let’s look at what just happened in Japan because he went there and he met with the new prime minister. The new prime minister is a hard right-wing nationalist. I have no problems with that. I salute everybody that wants to defend their country. You know, that’s fine with me.
24:48 But the point is, uh, she is, uh, very different from her predecessors. She was widely supported by the imperial bureaucracy because that bureaucracy still reports to the emperor, though nobody talks about it. And they are all professionals and they wanted her because they were tired of Abe sort of vacillating back and forth between what should or should not be done. And they absolutely did not want to bring in millions of people from the Middle East. They’re not interested in that kind of immigration.
25:18 So she meets with Donald Trump and she tells Donald Trump, “We’re with you. We’ll support you. Japan is already heavily invested in the United States. They’ve been invested here almost as long as the British.” Now, they talked about more investment.
25:33 Toyota has already stood up and said, “I don’t know what Donald Trump is talking about, saying we’re going to invest billions of dollars in the United States. We’re not going to do that.” So I think some of the assumptions that he made after he was there are false. But she said, “I will nominate you to be the next Nobel Peace Prize winner. And by the way, we bought you this wonderful set of golf clubs, probably the most expensive set of golf clubs in the world, and we so admire you and appreciate all that you’ve done.”
26:08 So he reduces the tariffs to 15%. Then he mentions oil and gas and says, “Well, we’re very sorry, but we’re very dependent on cheap energy here, and we will continue to buy our oil and gas from Russia, and oh, by the way, we’re going to sign a peace treaty with Russia because the Japanese never really did at the end of World War II. So 80 years later, they’re going to sign a peace treaty.” And he said, “Well, that’s great.” And he went on to Korea.
26:36 Now, what do you learn from that? You learn that the way you deal with President Trump is that you flatter him. You cultivate him. You reassure him. You make modest deals on the side and then tell him that you’re going to support him for the Nobel Peace Prize, and it looks like you can get pretty much what you want.
26:56 Now, he’s in South Korea, the new government in South Korea, which I like very much. They’re nationalists. They’re li- call, really, you would call them liberal nationalists, and they privately really want us off the peninsula because our presence on that peninsula is now no longer regarded as protection, is seen as a potential catalyst for war with China. Neither Japan nor Korea want any hostile relations with China. One of the reasons for all the wars that were fought between the Japanese and the Chinese was that the Chinese would not admit the Japanese to their markets unless the Japanese paid tribute to the imperial Chinese government.
27:39 And the Japanese were not going to pay tribute to the Chinese emperor. Well, that’s gone. Xi opened it up. Gave them full access to the Chinese economy. They don’t want that to change.
27:50 Neither does South Korea. Both Japan and South Korea, their biggest trading partner is China. Do they feel threatened by China? Not militarily. There’s no evidence that they see that the Chinese want to invade their countries.
28:04 And the Japanese have made it abundantly clear they have no intention of ever going back into China. That was the mistake that everybody made in Russia in World War II. Why do you want to go into the place? Big mistake. So, I don’t know what President Trump is going to get, but I think he’ll get the kind of treatment that he got in Tokyo.
28:22 And then he’ll come out and tell us, “Oh, this is great. This is wonderful. You’re 100% on board.” In Asia, everyone is waiting around patiently for us to leave.
28:36 It’s been 80 years since the end of the Second World War. What are we doing there?
28:40 Yeah. Yeah.
28:42 They want to do business with us, but they don’t want our military power all over the place. And in Washington, everyone will say, “Oh, no, that’s not true. They all fear China. They need us.” No, it’s not true.
28:53 Talk to the Indonesians, the Malays, the Vietnamese, everyone’s the same way. You want to sail through the neighborhood periodically, that’s fine. But we’re not interested in provoking any wars with the Chinese, and they know how to deal with the Chinese. All of these people have lived together for thousands of years.
29:11 Brian Rose: Let’s move over to the Middle East. What do you make of this historic peace deal? Obviously, Trump went there. He spoke at the Knesset. He met with the leaders of Qatar and all the people over there.
29:23 What do you make of the entire thing?
29:28 Douglas Macgregor: It’s another, uh, it’s another theatrical moment, uh, for Donald Trump. Within the last 24 hours, the Israelis killed, I think, 101,102 Palestinians in Gaza. Sudden air strikes supposedly in retribution for some alleged ceasefire violation or because the Palestinians have not given them the remains of Israelis uh that have died. Of course, finding anybody in that rubble is going to be enormously difficult from now. I’ve seen sources that say the Israelis have killed 68,000 people in Gaza.
30:05 I’ve seen other sources that say 400,000. We have no idea because the place has been reduced to ruins and rubble. Now the Israelis have increased their control from, I think, 53% of Gaza to 58% of Gaza. President Trump is in the White House because of wealthy Jewish oligarchs in the United States who paid for his victory, and they expect him to deliver on the promises he made to them. And those promises are very clear.
30:37 Gaza and ultimately the West Bank and the Greater Israel Project. So I see no evidence that anything they do will be taken as a contradiction by Trump. He’ll argue, well, you know, if these Palestinians won’t get along, then we’ll just have to go in and kill them all. He said that just a couple of weeks ago. Incredible.
31:01 What interest do we as Americans have in killing Palestinians? Now, sure, you can find people here in the United States who, many of whom served in the military, spent time in the Middle East, who may not like Muslims. I’ve run into that. Uh, that’s a different issue. But unfortunately, most Americans are just not terribly engaged.
31:22 It’s something that happens far from home. In other words, war is always something that happens on someone else’s territory, not ours. They’re back. They’re worried about food on the table, health care, transportation, a standard of living that provides for their families. That’s where they are.
31:39 They’re not focused on what we’re doing overseas. Not yet.
31:43 Brian Rose: Were you surprised that so many governments came together to sign that treaty, from Egypt to Indonesia to the Saudis and the Qataris and the Emirates? Were you surprised that all of that happened?
31:56 Douglas Macgregor: No. All of the ruling elites in the Middle East are for sale. Everybody knows that. Their populations know it. Just because they showed up doesn’t mean that there’s great love for us or Israel at the moment anywhere in the region.
32:13 You also have people like Sisi. Sisi is desperately dependent upon billions of dollars from the United States to hold things together in Egypt. I mean, why else would he let the Egyptian army sit idle while the Israelis murder Palestinians? It’s not just because, well, we don’t like Hamas. A lot of people don’t like Islamist radicals in the Middle East.
32:33 That’s not new. But he doesn’t want to risk a confrontation with us. Nobody in the region does. Nobody wants to go to war with us. But we’ve made it abundantly clear that if you don’t cooperate with what we want, and that specifically means with Israel’s project, then you’re going to be our enemy.
32:52 And if you’re our enemy, it’s going to get tough. Now, at the same time, let’s not kid ourselves. Back to the gold issue. The Chinese have opened gold vaults. One is in Hong Kong and one is in Riyadh.
33:08 And this is literally a warehouse where hard gold will be stored. And the idea is that ultimately gold replaces the petrodollar, that when you make purchases in energy and other things, uh, they’re going to do business with you in yuan. Right now Saudi Arabia does all its business with China in yuan. And China is probably the top partner for purchase of oil and gas. Uh, that’s very important.
33:36 We’re moving into a different world now where you’re going to end up with a divergence between the United States and Europe and the rest of the world simply because BRICS is growing and building a parallel financial system.
33:52 Right?
33:52 Along with parallel institutions. Now, we all said just 5, 10 years ago sitting here in the United States, because I sat around and listened to people in the government say it, well, this is true, but they’ll never get there very fast. You know, we’ll be king of everything for at least two more decades, maybe more. Uh, they can’t threaten the dollar, blah, blah, blah. Everyone is now saying, “Wow, look how far they have come.”
34:17 Now, the Japanese, or excuse me, the Chinese will tell you flat out, “Our banking system is not nearly as sophisticated as yours. So, it’s going to take a lot longer to get there.” And they admit that. But it’s clear they’re working on it, and they’re doing very well. They have the equivalent of the SWIFT system that is actually easier to use and easier to exploit for cross-border purchases and transfers than our own SWIFT system.
34:44 So we’re moving into this new world and gold is at the center of it for the rest of the world. I don’t know what we’re going to do. I mean, some people talk about Bitcoin or something else. I have no idea. But I do know that for the rest of the world they’re moving increasingly in this direction of gold.
35:01 So we have to take that into consideration. This is not a, this is not a I have a bigger army than you do. This is not I have a bigger air force than you do. And this is the final point. We don’t seem to understand that economic prosperity and strength are the foundation for military power.
35:19 And we’re losing on the economic prosperity and production and strength side of the equation right now. We don’t understand that that’s what made us so powerful during and after World War II. You know, our greatest period of expansion as a scientific industrial power came between 1920 and 1970. Now, why is that important? Well, it’s important because we had almost no immigration.
35:45 We shut it down. We had something called the Exceptional Skills Act that was designed to bring people in who were exceptional, who could immediately assimilate and make important contributions. By the way, that’s how Einstein came into the United States. But otherwise, we shut it down. We assimilated the people that were there and all of the inventions that had been devised in the previous century, in the first part of the 20th century, were assimilated.
36:13 So suddenly electricity, you know, central heating, I mean, we go down the list. It’s endless. Nylon, take your pick. Uh, you know, we went from a world where most people grew up on a farm with an outhouse to a world where we had central heating, indoor plumbing. Our whole standard of living skyrocketed.
36:35 And the building of the manufacturing process that just expanded overnight during World War II was then rapidly transformed into commercial use. We deliberately did that because we didn’t want, as Eisenhower put it, the large military-industrial complex. That’s why he warned against it. And he was instrumental in keeping military spending down and working to find ways to get along at the time with the Soviet Union. Now today, nobody mentions that anymore, but Eisenhower understood what war really meant.
37:12 It meant that it disrupted your entire society and your economy. And though we were able to benefit from it, fortunately, he knew that would not necessarily be the truth in the future. And that at some point we could become a target if we were stupid. And we’ve been very stupid since 1965. And I think right now we’re in a very dangerous place.
37:33 Most Americans don’t get it. They don’t understand it. But we are.
37:38 Brian Rose: You know, part of that BRICS nation is Russia. And you started off the broadcast making reference to them and these sanctions. You know, people have long time said that sanctions really don’t affect countries. They don’t really affect the elite, the central government. But it looked like these recent ones to block oil and to get India to stop oil were more severe than before.
38:00 Maybe first speak on the sanctions and then maybe speak on Zelensky, his relationship with the president, this lack of, you know, supporting with long-term missiles and where you think this goes next.
38:13 Douglas Macgregor: Well, if India, and thus far, this is my impression, has no intention of halting its purchases of Russian oil and gas, why do we think anybody else will be important? India buys enormous quantities. Rosneft, the Russian corporation, owns the largest refinery in the world in India. So I see no evidence that India is now going to turn against Russia, its strategic partner for decades. They have been
38:46 Brian Rose: Trump said, Trump said Modi said he wouldn’t. But again, you’re saying that’s more theater.
38:51 Douglas Macgregor: I don’t think that’s going to happen. And in fact, a spokesman for Modi just a couple of days later said, “We have no intention of stopping our purchase of Russian oil and gas.”
38:59 Brian Rose: I also heard it was like 6 months, 12 months phasing out. I heard other details that made it look like if it was, it was in the future.
39:08 Douglas Macgregor: Well, what about Japan? Japan’s not going to stop. China’s not going to stop. The other thing is China is the biggest market in the world. You know, in terms of purchasing power, China is now the biggest economy in the world.
39:22 Who is going to cut their own throat or their own wrists and walk away from China? You know, who’s partnered with China? This hasn’t really hit the news in a big way in the United States. People don’t understand what’s happening. But Trump is meeting with the five leaders of the five Central Asian republics.
39:42 These are the places like Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, so that we call the stans. He’s invited them to the White House. He wants to talk about commercial relations. Well, this is a direct affront to Moscow. People don’t remember that there was an attempted coup in Central Asia just at the point in time before the Russians intervened in Ukraine, organized by the CIA and that other wonderful organization, the National, uh, Endowment for Democracy, which is the National Endowment for Anarchy wherever you send them.
40:15 They work closely with the CIA.
40:17 Moscow has not forgotten that. We pour a lot of money through the CIA into trying to destabilize Central Asia. Why? There are large numbers of Islamists that if they are not suppressed by the governments can cause real havoc. Then there’s something else.
40:35 Both China and Russia share an interest in stabilizing Central Asia. This One Belt, One Road can really benefit the people of Central Asia, but only if there is order, not if there is instability. So they’re interested in order. The second thing is there was this organization, uh, it was called the Mongolian Empire that played havoc with the world for 3 to 400 years. Neither China nor Russia want to relive that experience.
41:05 So any hint of extremism such as Islamism that could be exploited somehow to unite that area and then hurl it against Russia or China is unacceptable. So why are we doing this? Well, I think in Trump’s mind or in the minds of the people that advise him, well, we’re strategically checkmating them, boss, you know, we’re going to get in there and show them we can make trouble for them if they don’t get on board with us in Venezuela. What kind of stupid thinking is that?
41:35 You know, that’s back to Ukraine. Why are we involving ourselves in a country on Russia’s doorstep? That makes no sense at all. The best that we can do is try to alleviate the suffering. You know, Ukraine is a big graveyard.
41:51 That’s all it is. That’s a dead country. Now, just within the last 48 hours, the Russians have surrendered a total of 10,000 Ukrainian troops. I think 5,000 in one area, 5,000 another. And the Russians sent a message to them, surrender or you will be annihilated.
42:11 And Zelensky ordered them to fight. They haven’t got a snowball’s chance in hell. Ukrainian military is decimated. Most of our technology did not perform to expectation. We wasted lives.
42:26 The great men of NATO, the leading generals who gave all the wonderful advice, primarily American and British, to execute a series of offensives that bled Ukraine white. Ukraine is finished militarily. The humane thing is to go in there, recognize the facts, and tell Zelensky to either get out of town or shut up, and come up with an arrangement that will end this war as soon as possible on the most humane terms that we can get. But what have we done? Nothing.
42:58 We walked away. If it can’t be this theatrical moment, the great moment on the stage, then Donald Trump doesn’t like it.
43:08 Brian Rose: Now, he came in on the side, maybe more so, of Russia and basically dressing down Zelensky, saying, “You have no cards. You better make a deal.” And it seemed to me that behind the scenes when he got no modicum of cooperation from Putin, he turned 180 degrees to where now you said he’s cancelling meetings in Budapest and saying, you know, they don’t want to deal with us and he’s putting sanctions on them. I mean, is part of that Putin not being willing to compromise whatsoever?
43:38 Also, is it under Putin’s control or is it his generals? And then lastly, can he stay in control more if the war continues?
43:45 Douglas Macgregor: Oh, Putin isn’t going anywhere. You can throw the would-be Kremlinologists out and forget them. Those people, oh well, he could be overthrown. They’re out of their minds. He is very solid.
43:58 He is in control. Don’t kid yourself. If anything, the Russians would like him to be a lot tougher than he’s been. He has been seen and has been from the beginning as this semi-westernized Russian who believes that Russia has a future with the West. I happen to agree with him.
44:17 But then again, you know, I’m from a different background from the people running the show right now. They seem to think that Russia is permanently stuck in the Cold War. It isn’t. It is no longer a Soviet state. It has no territorial ambitions.
44:30 It was forced into what it has done for its own security’s sake. But we refuse to recognize Russia’s legitimate national security interests. You know, we can argue that we have national security interests in the Caribbean. We do. We have very strong interests in Mexico.
44:47 Now, the question is, how do you pursue it? And the last thing that we need to do is invade somebody that just isn’t necessary. There’s no great army armed to the teeth with by the Chinese and the Russians preparing to invade the United States. There are no batteries or cruise missiles and theater ballistic missiles sitting in Mexico ready to be fired at us. So let’s not get into this nonsense of invading Mexico.
45:12 Hopefully people will, you know, maintain their composure over that. But that wasn’t true for Putin. He was looking at this metastasizing cancer. That’s something that he absolutely underestimated. He did not understand what was really happening in Ukraine.
45:28 He thought that he could go in with a small force, send a s and people would understand. Then he discovered, I’m not fighting Ukraine. I’m fighting NATO and Washington and they want to kill us. They want to destroy us. So that, you know, under those circumstances, what could he do?
45:47 He stops at the beginning of the summer of 2022. The senior military leadership says, “Look, if we’re going to do this, we need to do it right. We need a pause. We need to build up our forces and then we need to orchestrate this thing very carefully to achieve the aims and goals that you’ve set.” And so you have a pause, and this man Surovikin, General Surovikin, who I think will ultimately go down in Russian history as one of the heroes because he was the man that built this strategic defense.
46:18 And then NATO generals utilizing vast quantities of Ukrainian manpower threw hundreds of thousands of lives away month after month after month trying to penetrate this strategic defense. Now, we don’t want to go into detail about why and how that happened. But you would have thought somebody would have wakened up and say, “Wait a minute. We’re up against something very different. This is a new way of war.”
46:42 It didn’t happen. And so now we’re looking at about close to 1.8 million Ukrainian soldiers dead. And we’re still talking about sending weapons. Who’s going to use them? Now Macron wants to send the French Foreign Legion, 2,000 men.
46:57 I don’t see that doing anything. But the bottom line is that if I were a Ukrainian, I’d get rid of Zelensky. And I think there are probably large numbers of surviving Ukrainian soldiers that would like to do that because this has no point anymore. This has no purpose. And we got to get off this train that says, “Well, you invaded Crimea.”
47:19 Well, the Russians controlled Crimea from 1776 onward. And the enemy they defeated was one of the greatest enemies in the world. It was the Golden Horde, the Tartar Khanate that had plagued Russia for hundreds of years and stolen women and children as slaves. I mean, that nobody knows any of this in the West. And here’s the worst part, nobody cares.
47:42 And so we blunder and say, “Well, we have to have a ceasefire.” Why would you grant a ceasefire so that your friend Zelensky can try to piece things back together and inflict more damage on Russia? Impossible. Now, does Trump understand this? I thought he did, but for reasons that I’m not familiar with, the same people advising us to go into Venezuela, the same people who are advising to support the Israelis to the bitter end, even if it means war with Iran, are still there and they are inhibiting him from doing what makes sense.
48:20 Now, he has no excuse for that. He’s the president, you know. So, I’m not here to make excuses for him. I’m just speculating because if you look at the individuals, you know, I go back to the Burger King, you know, they’re not qualified to run a Burger King. They’re not qualified to advise on brain surgery, and I don’t think they know what the hell they’re doing at the top of the country because our position inside the United States is fragile.
48:47 We need to fix it. That’s where our focus needs to be. What we really need more than anything else is peace.
48:57 Brian Rose: Amen to that. Colonel, maybe just, I want to finish on China. You know, you mentioned that it’s like the single biggest trading partner for everybody in that region and pretty much the world. Um, 10 years from now, what does the US look like in comparison to China? And is that dependent on a few strands, on a few turns here and there?
49:18 You know, they say that their real estate industry is really hurting. They say their economy is under pressure, but it’s really hard to tell what’s actually true about China versus what’s actually true about the United States and, like you said, the Trump show. Um, a lot of it is theater. And so I’m curious what you see as maybe some of the important decisions the United States has to make about where that rivalry ends up in 10 years.
49:42 Douglas Macgregor: Uh, I think we had to understand China, you need to know its history and, except for the Mongolian dynasty in the 13th century, um, China has not attacked anybody else. I mean, China, the Chinese have always viewed their civilization as the center of the universe. There’s no real interest in going anywhere else. Now they may go elsewhere to cultivate business and they’re very good at that, and ultimately they annoy and irritate the countries in which they reside and they’re thrown out.
50:17 That happened in Indonesia. It’s happened in Malaysia. It’s happened in Vietnam. You know, the Koreans and the Japanese are very, very sensitive to the numbers of Chinese in their countries. When I was last over there, I talked to some Japanese businessmen.
50:33 This goes back 10 years. And they said, “You Americans make no sense.” I said, “I said, ‘What do you mean?'” Obviously, I agreed, but I wanted to know what his reason was. And he said, “Do you see any Chinese in our laboratories, in our universities involved in anything remotely important to the Japanese nation in terms of engineering, science, and technology?” I said, “Well, I suppose not.”
50:56 He said, “Of course not.” He said, “For 2,000 years, the Chinese that left China to do business elsewhere were always given instructions that if they find anything of value or use, send it home to China. That’s what they do.” China is not a military threat. If you look at their investments in military power, all of it is designed to do what?
51:20 Deny us, the United States armed forces, access. They want us to be driven away from their shores. Not our commercial shipping. The Chinese have never stopped a commercial vessel. Never stopped any of our commercial ships.
51:35 On the contrary, they want them to get in and get out. That’s business. But they don’t want the United States Navy sailing into their harbors. And again, you’ve got to go back and look at what happened to them in the past. There was this organization that was the greatest and most powerful navy in the world.
51:51 It was called the Royal Navy. And for hundreds of years, it ruled the South China Sea. It ruled the waves everywhere. They don’t want to go through that again. Then there was another organization called the Imperial Japanese Navy that replaced the Royal Navy.
52:07 And ultimately, thanks to its control of Taiwan that it received under a treaty in the 1890s, Taiwan became the permanent aircraft carrier for the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy. They don’t want to repeat that experience. They certainly don’t want our missiles on Taiwan. We’ve already put missiles that can threaten China, theater ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, into the Philippines. Nobody ever talks about it.
52:32 We have batteries sitting there aimed at China. For what? Are the Chinese preparing to invade the Philippines? Only if they’ve lost their minds. They’re not interested in that.
52:44 They don’t want to invade Taiwan. What would that do to China’s business prospects if Asia woke up to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan? They’d be in the doghouse. They don’t want to risk that. They do want a peaceful reunification, and that can be negotiated because they don’t want it to be somebody else’s permanent aircraft carrier.
53:05 So, let’s understand that about the Chinese. Now, you said where are we going to be in 10 years? Well, the Chinese know where they want to be. They want to be as independent as possible of us. And I think increasingly that’s true for the Russians and most of the world.
53:22 That’s the One Belt, One Road. What does China not want? It doesn’t want to have to fight the United States Navy over the Straits of Mala or the Straits of Hormuz or anywhere else. So it’s built the One Belt One Road, vast networks of high-speed rail, highways where trucks and trains can move billions of dollars worth of merchandise products back and forth across Eurasia. In other words, they’re doing what happened under the Mongolian Empire.
53:52 They want to secure trade, commercial trade system. It reaches all the way down into Iran. Iran has wonderful oil. It’s one of the best you could get. It’s a light crude.
54:04 It’s the oil, by the way, in Venezuela, though it’s very plentiful, is heavy, has a lot of sulfur content. So, it costs you a little bit more to refine it. Refining the crude that comes out of Iran or for that matter out of Libya, it’s very inexpensive. So the cost of refining the Venezuelan oil is probably two times to three times more less expens- or excuse me, the cost of refining oil in the United States is probably two to three times more expensive than Venezuela and even more expensive than Iran.
54:37 Now there’s still interest in gaining control of Iran’s oil fields. We’ve already subjugated the Emirates and Saudi Arabia. We stick a gun in their chest and they’re going to get out of the way and do what we tell them. Iran’s not going to do that. So the bankers in London, the bankers in New York City, along with their friends in Washington DC, want to reverse that.
54:58 So the point is, what I’m trying to say is that Venezuela and Iran cannot be seen in isolation from these interests, nor can what’s going on in the Persian Gulf. Now, where are we going to be in 10 years? That’s our biggest problem because nobody in Washington is thinking about that. America is the microwave society. Stick it in the microwave, hit the button, and two minutes later, you’ve got your meal.
55:27 That’s not the way the Chinese think. That’s why they’ve invested a couple of trillion dollars in infrastructure development while we were wasting trillions in the Middle East on these pointless occupations that were never needed or never necessary. I mean, a friend of mine likes to say, “Doug, you Americans are so dumb. Don’t you understand that you can get all the oil you want without parking a tank on top of the oil well?” He’s right.
55:53 We can do business with Maduro. And so he said, “Well, he’s a communist.” Well, we’ve done business with communists, with Nazis, with fascists, you name. We’ve done business with everybody from time to time. So don’t be hypocritical.
56:07 You know, we can reform these people later. Maybe. But the problem that we always find is the same one. You go into a country and you say, “I want to change it.” How do you change a thousand years of experience, history, and culture?
56:22 How do you change geography? You can’t do any of those things.
56:25 Yeah. Yeah.
56:25 So, that’s our. So, to answer your question, I don’t know where we’ll be. I know where I think we should be, but we’re back to what I said at the beginning. It’s time to pull inside, shed these overseas commitments, focus here at home. We need a strategy that’s industrial, technological, scientific, agrarian.
56:46 We used to be the biggest food producer in the world. We’ve shot ourselves in the foot routinely. Now people are saying, “Well, the Trump tariffs have killed soybeans and we slaughtered a million cattle, head of cattle, within the last couple of years, so now we’re going to buy beef from Argentina.” Why? We should be interested in feeding ourselves first.
57:07 Why are we not doing these things? Well, we’re too busy intervening around the world pursuing other agendas that frankly are irrelevant to the average American.
57:15 Brian Rose: Colonel, can you finish by talking about freedom of speech and where we are today in America and some of the work that you’re doing on that?
57:23 Douglas Macgregor: Yeah, as we were talking before this began, I brought up the fact that I and a group of other people have gotten together and founded something called the National Conversation.org. And that’s the website if you want to go to it, all one word, the National Conversation.org, and the idea was that we want to go every roughly 90 to 120 days to a different location in the United States. We want a forum where we’re going to hopefully interested people. We’re going to have a panel of people who are experts.
57:54 This last time around we had Natalie Brunell, who’s very good on digital currency and especially Bitcoin, understanding it, to people explaining it to people, where it fits. And then we had Judge Napolitano, and I rely heavily on him because he’s a constitutional scholar. He understands the law and he points to the obvious problems and contradictions we have, and then I have tried to take on the foreign and defense policy issues primarily. We’re all interested in the same thing.
58:21 We want the country to be successful. So this was the first panel. We plan to have future panels. They’re not always going to be the same. They may be larger.
58:30 And the audience, it’s not a question of us lecturing the audience. We’ll all speak on the topics and then the audience will have the chance to engage with us, express their opinions, and I’m sure some of the people in the audience will disagree with us because we really want to know what people think. We think change in the United States cannot be driven from the top down. They’ve been doing that to us for decades. So, we need a bottom-up effort that is not constrained by wealthy donors who want to be sure that no one ever secures the borders, that we all buy oil and gas forever, whatever the lobby happens to be, or and certainly no foreign lobbies that put a foreign country’s interest ahead of our own.
59:16 That’s really the point. And uh, we’re going to pick a new target destination soon and I think this will be successful. The first meeting was very, very good in Dallas, Texas. Uh, we had great, we had people that flew in from all over the country. So we’ll probably need a bigger auditorium and a lot more time.
59:35 I think it will be worthwhile. I am not running for office, but I think we need a new movement. We need an alternative to what we call in Washington the Uniparty, because we’re tired of voting for the Democrats or the Republicans and what do you get? The same outcome.
59:53 Brian Rose: I applaud you doing that and I think it all does start by having conversations. So, I really like the name of it because it’s something I don’t think people do anymore. We don’t. We kind of clip up our favorite representative and shove those social media pieces down people’s throats. But I’m a firm believer, Colonel, that if you get people with differing views in the same room and you lock the door for an hour, they’re going to leave with a compromise.
1:00:16 And it’s just something we don’t do anymore. We don’t engage. We don’t understand each other’s point of view. We don’t seek that. So, um, I really think it’s a great idea.
1:00:24 We’ve actually got Natalie on the show, I think, in two weeks to talk about her new Bitcoin book. So, we’re familiar with her. She’s very good. And, um, yeah, please keep us posted. The National Conversation.org.
1:00:34 Is that right?
1:00:35 Douglas Macgregor: Correct. Yeah. I’ll make sure that we send you the link.
1:00:38 Brian Rose: Okay. Fantastic. Colonel, we really appreciate your time. Always appreciate your perspective. I love checking in here because I see something even different than I know the news is lying to me about.
1:00:51 And so when I read the newspapers here in London and I read the ones out of Washington and New York City, I know that’s not true. But sometimes believing the opposite is also not true. And so I love talking to you because it just gives me another uh, perspective on what’s going on and all of the links, as you mentioned, how everything is global and how what we see happening in Iran and Venezuela is linked to China and Russia and what the US is doing. So thank you.
1:01:17 I appreciate you continuing to be outspoken and we want to really have these conversations where everyone can listen to it and, uh, and start having the conversations, too. So thank you so much and until next time.
1:01:28 Douglas Macgregor: Sure. Thank you for all that you’re doing for free speech.
1:01:30 Brian Rose: All right, it’s our pleasure. We’re back on YouTube and we’re excited to be. So, thank you everybody. If you enjoyed this, please follow this man and please share this conversation. We’ll see you next time on London Real.
