Full transcript: Colonel Douglas Macgregor on London Real
2:55 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Colonel Douglas Macgregor, the decorated combat veteran, author and foreign policy expert. You are widely considered for your leadership during the Gulf War, where you orchestrated an offensive strike that destroyed 70 Iraqi armored vehicles in 23 minutes with no casualties, in what was the largest tank battle since World War II. You retired from the military in 2004 after 28 years of service and became a commentator on CNN, the BBC and Fox News, where you regularly appeared.
3:25 On the Tucker Carlson show in 2020, Donald Trump appointed you as senior advisor to the Secretary of Defense, and you’ve written five books on military transformation. Regarding the war, you have said that Ukraine cannot win and that Russia is now more powerful and unified than ever. You also believe that President Zelensky is getting desperate, and that supplying cruise missiles to Ukraine that can strike Russia is a quote-unquote invitation to disaster, one that could result in World War III.
3:53 Colonel Macgregor, welcome back to London Real.
3:57 Douglas Macgregor: Thanks. If I could just make one quick correction. We had six casualties in 1991, and one dead and five wounded, and we lost a Bradley Fighting Vehicle. So there is no cheap victory.
4:10 Everything costs something, and actually the fighting lasted for several hours. It was just the initial breakthrough that you described. Anyway, not because just people understand that.
4:21 Brian Rose: Yeah, I know. I appreciate those details, and they are important.
4:25 Um, I guess I wanted to start off with, um, what we saw a few weeks ago with the Wagner group and the quote-unquote coup that happened over this 48-hour period. We were trying to get news. There were Twitter Spaces involved, there were things coming up on Telegram, and I got to tell you, Colonel, I was watching it, and I, I just didn’t trust anything I was seeing or hearing. But at the same time, obviously something was happening, and I’m really curious on how you monitored it in real time, what you were thinking in real time, and did your conclusions change 24 hours, or even 48 hours, after that?
5:00 Douglas Macgregor: Well, first we have an old expression in the Army, uh, about battlefields, or anything, frankly: the first report is always wrong. So whatever you hear quickly is usually inaccurate. I think the second part is that you’re dealing with someone who is probably Russia’s answer to reality TV. In the United States, Prigozhin is an interesting character. He’s entertaining, but it was not a coup, it was not an uprising, it was not a rebellion.
5:30 And it was funny to watch, uh, all of the usual suspects in the West, the retired Army generals in the U.S. and Britain and elsewhere. “This is the end, Putin is finally going to be removed.” It’s all nonsense. This thing was never aimed at Putin in that sense. I think Prigozhin was giving voice to frustrations that are widespread in the senior ranks of the Russian military, and that is, look, this thing is taking too long.
5:58 It’s time for us to end this war, effectively, let’s attack and get this done. And that’s it. That’s not surprising. We felt that way in 1991. In fact, when we had information shortly before we attacked that there could be a peace negotiation, again, we were all disgusted and said, look, we’re here, we want to fight, let’s get this over with.
6:23 That’s not unusual in any force that’s been sitting for as long as the Russians have been sitting. Everywhere, we got a lot of troops that haven’t been employed yet, and they want to fight. But I think Prigozhin’s other agenda was to save the Wagner group. And the Wagner group is, uh, remember, it’s something more like the French Foreign Legion than anything else. We keep calling them mercenaries in an effort to diminish them or denigrate them.
6:47 They’re not mercenaries. It’s really much more like the French Foreign Legion, and the French Foreign Legion is sworn to defend the French national state. Same thing is true for Wagner. They absolutely are devoted to Russia and committed to it, and he did not want to see it dismembered and abandoned. Well, ultimately he kind of lost that battle, because out of the sort of 25,000 or so, only 8,000 remain, that have been moved, or will shortly be moved, to Belarus.
7:16 They were last in Luhansk. He bloviated as soon as it became clear that this was being mistaken for something else. And we have a lot of evidence to suggest that the air force commander who committed attack helicopters against his, uh, small continuum of three or four thousand did so on his own initiative, that that was not ordered by Putin. But as soon as that happened, he said, look, this is not what we came for. And I think he was trying to make a point that he doesn’t like the minister of defense, which is fine, but he really, really, really dislikes General Gerasimov, who is the chief of the general staff, who’s now currently the theater commander.
7:59 Well, that happens at war, and I’m sure he’s not alone, as I’ve said. But beyond that, there was nothing much more to it. And I think we will see Wagner again in a different form, operating out of, uh, Belarus.
8:13 Brian Rose: Has the group itself disbanded? Is it still there?
8:16 What is the status of that elite?
8:18 Douglas Macgregor: About two-thirds of it was offered the opportunity to sign contracts with the Russian army, and they’ve done so. The other 8,000, as I said, are getting ready to move up to Belarus as soon as the facilities to house them are finished. And Prigozhin has gone in and out of Moscow and back to St. Petersburg. Now, what happens with him at this point, whether or not he’ll show up again, who knows.
8:42 But he’s certainly not the traitor that people thought he was initially, and that wasn’t his intent. He’s enormously popular in Russia, as is the Wagner group. I mean, these people are seen as heroes, and there was considerable justification for the fighting that they’d done in places like Bakhmut. But the Russian population itself wants this war to be fought and won. They’re sick of this long wait, but that has much to do with Vladimir Putin’s view of things in the West, and his desire to avoid a larger war with NATO and the United States.
9:17 Brian Rose: And so what is the state of the union of this war? We’re in July now. I guess there’s not a huge window of actual fighting in this type of territory because of the winter, and then the mud, etc. Where are we right now? Because again, I referenced in the intro the possibility of cruise missiles being offered.
9:35 We’ve seen, um, some of these old weapons being supplied by the U.S., but what kind of the state right now? Where, where, how do you read the war at this point?
9:46 Douglas Macgregor: Let’s look at the Russian side first. The Russians are actually attacking up in the northeastern corner of this long line of defense that is sort of shaped like a banana in southern Ukraine. And they’ve made a lot of progress, aiming in the direction generally speaking of Lyman in eastern Ukraine, but really towards Sloviansk, and those are road networks that would lead Russian forces on the offensive to go all the way to Kharkiv very quickly, and actually to strike even further west and north towards Kharkiv, or to swing around behind the Ukrainian forces that are down south.
10:27 Those forces came out of the Belgorod area. There’s always been a tank army down there, along with a lot of other Russian forces that have yet to really be employed. And this offensive is being very successful right now. At the same time, the Ukrainians, in small numbers, all up and down the line have continued to launch attacks, all with no success at all, catastrophic losses. So the Russians are in good shape.
10:54 They’ve taken some losses, but their losses are perhaps in the hundreds, maybe a thousand wounded total. Nothing significant or severe that the Russians cannot absorb. The Ukrainian side is in a very different position. They were built up and pushed, I think, to launch these counteroffensives or counterattacks up and down the line, to prove that there was still life in Ukraine, to attract more support. I think the rationale for it was much more political than military.
11:26 And the losses they’ve sustained are horrific. The latest figures I’ve seen somewhere is between 24 and 26,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died just within the last month as a result of these counterattacks. How many thousands of wounded have been added to the numbers that already exist, we don’t know. I recently listened to someone talk about the numbers of dead lying all over eastern Ukraine, mostly Ukrainian soldiers, some civilians, a few Russians, but overwhelmingly Ukrainian.
12:00 I think the Ukrainian force is desperate, and frankly on the point of disintegration. The morale over there is at an all-time low. I continue to hear these reports of there’s low morale in the Russian side. I see no evidence for it, can’t find any. As I said before, the only thing that I see is this desire to attack, win and get this over with.
12:21 But the Ukrainians, they’ve suffered terribly, and the Poles that are working in Ukrainian uniform as part of the Ukrainian army, along with a few other units, are the only ones left that are willing to attack. Everyone else has said this is preposterous. They do not have the ability to punch through the security zone, which ranges from 15 to 25 kilometers in front of the main defensive belts. They’ve never reached the main defensive belts, and this is not a surprise.
12:50 From the very beginning, people thought that you could build an army for high-end conventional warfare on the fly. It can’t be done. Armies take years to develop. Their culture has to evolve. They have to have an officer corps that evolves into a professional force.
13:10 They need institutions that support the training, the equipping and the organization. None of these things were in place, and now throwing new pieces of equipment, whether they’re obsolete or relatively modern, the Storm Shadow missiles, I think is what is called for the British. Those are very effective, and some of them have penetrated, though others are being shot down. But on the other hand, we’ve just announced that we’re purchasing HAWK anti-aircraft missiles from Taiwan and shipping them to Ukraine.
13:43 Well, I guess the threat to Taiwan isn’t as nearly as great as we thought it was, so now we’re taking equipment that we’ve already sold to the Taiwanese, they’re selling it back to us Chevy. Ukraine, it’s not going to make any difference, it’s obsolete anyway. Uh, the Russian air defenses are superb. Is the best way that I can come up with. There is no such thing as perfect integrated air defenses.
14:07 Something we’ll always get through, but overwhelmingly they managed to shoot down HAWKs and all sorts of missiles. This isn’t going to change anything, and I think that’s the frustration that we saw in Mr Zelensky. He was furious, angry, distraught. He thought that he was going to be embraced, that we were going to extend the nuclear umbrella per se to him by making him part of NATO, although I personally don’t, don’t have any faith in extended nuclear deterrence, but nevertheless there are a lot of people that think it’s still meaningful.
14:40 Uh, he didn’t get what he wanted. He’s bitter, he’s angry. The losses inside the country are horrific. It’s only American cash that really sustains this Ukrainian state. It’s on life support, and the humane thing would be to put an end to it and negotiate, but it’s not going to happen.
15:01 And I think that’s really what is next on the agenda, is in Moscow and in the discussions at high levels. I think they’re going to finally say, unless we finish this, an attack, go on the offensive, there will be no end, because sitting here in the South and killing large numbers of Ukrainians has not persuaded the West, certainly not Washington, to abandon this folly.
15:28 Brian Rose: You said before that Putin is concerned about how the world views this. I found this interesting.
15:35 From China to Africa to nations all around the world, he’s, he’s concerned of the optics of this. And again, a lot of people would be surprised, because here in Britain and in America, 90% of the mainstream media has already chosen its position on the Ukraine war. It doesn’t even matter what happens on a day-to-day basis. We get fed just a sinner narrative. If there’s any successes, they are multiplied, and if there’s any failures, they are hidden.
16:04 Um, and so to explain why Putin cares of the optics of this, because we’re also taught that he’s this evil dictator that doesn’t have any cares for anything. Explain both of those narratives in your mind, and that might be a surprise to a lot of people who get their news from newspapers and television channels.
16:24 Douglas Macgregor: Well, remember that he’s also conducting warfare against us on the financial level. Remember that he represents, in the minds of many people around the world, someone who has decided to challenge not just American military and political hegemony, but American and Western financial hegemony.
16:42 The World Bank and associated institutions have effectively been puppets for U.S. and allied foreign policy. We have been in the business for decades of telling people in Nicaragua or Cameroon what kind of crops to grow, and if you don’t do what we tell you to do, then we won’t lend you the money that you want. We talk all the time about the Chinese supposedly blackmailing people by lending them lots of money and then holding them accountable. Well, we do the same thing, only we do it in more subtle ways that are actually more damaging to the society, because we’re very intrusive.
17:25 We’re not just interested in the specific project. We’re trying to restructure people’s societies, change their, their cultures. So you have people in Africa, Latin America, much of Asia, who are very sympathetic to the Russians, who are seen as standing up to this, and you know that they’re trying to develop a new currency. It’s going to take some years. It’s not going to happen overnight.
17:47 That is pegging to gold, and India, China and Russia probably are sitting on the largest uh concentration of gold in the world right now, and a lot of us are beginning to wonder how much gold we’ve actually got under the streets in New York, uh, London, and Fort Knox. We’ll have to find out at some point, but the bottom line is, this is a new era that is coming, and they’ve already got 40 plus nations willing to join this new currency. India, China and Russia, of course, are at the center of this, at the core of it.
18:22 And this is seen as a rebellion against our financial dominance that has been, so I would say, from their standpoint, certainly destructive on so many, in so many ways, for so long. So that’s part of it. The second part of it is he has given very, very specific orders to the Russian army in terms of how he wants them to behave. And if you’re looking for a model, you’ve got to go back to tsarist Russia, because the Czar and the tsarist forces, whatever they were, however imperfect they were, were a club of humanitarians compared to the evil Bolsheviks that replaced them.
19:01 He has done everything he can to divorce the behavior and the attitudes and the culture of today’s Russia from the Soviet Union and that evil past. I mean, he’s not interested in slaughtering Ukrainians. He’s been opposed to that from the very beginning, and he’s always kept his eye on the ball in terms of, I want to live with everyone when this is over. And I think he’s adopted Charles de Gaulle’s position, which is, uh, Americans don’t live in Europe. Britain is an island, and we’re Europeans, and I think his assumption is that, uh, London and New York City and Washington will eventually give up and go away.
19:40 He wants to get along with everybody else. He doesn’t really need us. And see, this is the other problem. We never thought through very carefully. No one sat down and, we, we try to do this in the military.
19:52 We try to, we, we don’t succeed very much on the strategic level, but we try to ask the question of what is the purpose of our operation, how are we going to do it, and what do we want things to look like when it’s over? That’s an important question. We didn’t do that this time. We just said we want to harm Russia. We want to remove Putin.
20:13 We want to destroy Russia. We want to ultimately dismember it. If you, if you read the things that people are saying, and strip it of resources. What are Putin’s goals? Putin’s goals are much more limited, and always happy.
20:28 He moved into Ukraine with about 90,000 troops. There were another hundred thousand outside of it, but as far as going into Ukraine itself with 90,000, we were all shocked. I was one of them. What is he doing? I didn’t understand what his point was.
20:42 Well, his point was, I don’t really want to wage war. I just want to signal to you that I’m serious. We’re not going to tolerate this platform for the projection of, uh, dangerous military power against my country. It’s not going to happen. We won’t tolerate it.
20:59 And so we all said, well, look how bad the Russians are, they don’t know what they’re doing, and look how small this army is. Well, all that’s been corrected. They’ve got 750,000 troops in and around Ukraine now. Most of them are outside of Ukraine, over 300,000 sitting in strategic reserve, ready to launch. Why?
21:16 Because he doesn’t want a war with NATO, and if we intervene, he’s going to need all of those troops. So he’s been holding back, and holding back, and holding back, in the hopes that someone would sober up, wise up and negotiate. Well, it’s not going to happen. He found that out the hard way in the summer, which is why you got the large military buildup. I think he’s discovering it again, and this is unfortunate, because I think things are changing in Europe faster than they are changing here, because let’s be frank, most Americans could care less what happens in Ukraine.
21:51 They don’t even know where it is, half of them. But for you, not so much, perhaps the British, but certainly for the Europeans this is next door. This is quite close, and once you move past the Poles and Lithuanians, there isn’t much stomach among the Europeans for a major war with Russia, for the simple reason that they don’t see the need for it. So eventually I think we’re going to see governments change. I think Macron will be gone.
22:17 I think Scholz will be gone. That will certainly help, and the real question is what happens in Britain, the other leading power in NATO. And I suspect that that may change too, especially if you look at your bond market. We don’t want to talk about that right now, but nevertheless, that’s a real danger, I think, to the current British government. So I think he’s betting that the Europeans will sober up faster than we will.
22:43 We’re just going to continue to throw coal on the fire, just keep it going, on the assumption that somehow or another this benefits us. It doesn’t benefit us in any way, shape or form, but that’s the attitude in Washington, and no one is going to stand up and say, by the way, we didn’t do our jobs. There was no purpose, no method in state thinking. There is no strategy. We don’t know what to do.
23:05 We can’t do much anymore. We’re just going to continue to shovel obsolescent equipment at Ukrainians.
23:11 Brian Rose: Well, I mean, right now, the Biden White House has to continue on this. If anything, it maybe helps him to get a chance of re-election, but that’s the only reason they’re funding this. They can’t walk it back, and so that’s going to continue until the elections next year.
23:28 You mentioned in a recent interview that, uh, you mentioned the fools in London, and you said that Island could become a death trap for them. You also talked about how Boris Johnson was sent over, maybe from the Biden White House, to talk to Zelensky. Tell me about what we’re doing here, wrongly or rightly, in London?
23:48 Douglas Macgregor: Well, I don’t remember saying death trap, but I may have. Uh, I think the British are on a very dangerous path.
23:55 I mean, if you look at your own armed forces, I mean, it breaks my heart to look at the British army. Uh, it’s a shadow of its former self, and the British army, even though it was always smaller than the U.S. and German armies, for instance, was usually regarded as a very professional and competent organization. I think today it’s just a skeletal framework of what’s needed. You’ve got two aircraft carriers that you’ve invested heavily in, no aircraft to put on them.
24:25 They’re not manned. I don’t know what you’re going to do with them, but no one bothered to think through carefully, what are we going to do with aircraft carriers? I mean, that’s the current white elephant of the new era. It’s analogous to the battleships that we once had in great numbers. Those things are easily, easy to pinpoint and easy to sync.
24:45 And I think the British, for some reason, well, I guess it’s quite clear the British people have chosen not to really question very thoroughly what their politicians say and do about Russia, which is astonishing to me, because Russia is not the Soviet Union. It’s not remotely like it. There is no Communist Party running the show. You don’t have the NKVD rounding up thousands of people and imprisoning them or executing them every day, although I’d say the Zelensky regime is probably closer to that in reality than anything happening in Putin’s Russia.
25:19 And so the British have worked themselves into a corner, much like ourselves, and there’s no way out. So what could happen, and then the possibility that the SAS, which has always been very, very good but seems to have been very, very active in Ukraine, could go too far and provoke the Russians in ways that I think could be catastrophic for Great Britain. We forget that there is a, so a Russian submarine fleet, and that fleet is large and capable. Britain could face another potential embargo that could put it through real serious strains internally.
25:59 I wouldn’t exclude anything right now. The Russians are going to end this, and they’re going to end it on their terms. They don’t want this, this war to spread to a regional level, but if we insist on it, they’re going to, they’re going to fight it and win it. What are we going to send to fight this? That’s the question all the time.
26:20 Where’s our ammunition? We don’t have it anymore. We’ve given it up. It’ll take us years to replenish those stocks. Well, there are no shortages of ammunition of any kind on the Russian side.
26:28 Remember all those months we heard, oh, the Russians are running out of missiles, running out of this, running out of that. It’s all crazy. Their factories are running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And by the way, the Chinese stocks of older ammunitions, such as 152-millimeter artillery shells, are almost endless. They’re being shipped to Russia, no doubt.
26:48 Russians aren’t going to run out of anything, and this is the other part that’s important for not just Britain but Europe and the United States to understand. China is firmly in the Russian camp. It’s going to stand by Russia, and why wouldn’t it? All we do is talk about our intention to destroy China. We talk about this mythological force, it’s about to invade Taiwan, doesn’t exist.
27:13 Chinese aren’t interested in a war with Taiwan. Chinese want to do business. They know what would happen if they tried to invade Taiwan. You’d have most of Asia walk away from them. They’re not interested in that.
27:24 We’re the ones that keep provoking it. We keep sending our forces through the Taiwan Straits. What would we do if the Russian fleet or the Chinese fleet decided to sail through the Caribbean between Florida and Cuba? We’d, we’d go crazy. People in this country would be furious.
27:42 They’d want the Air Force to sink everything in sight. You know, we’re, we’re, we have lost touch with reality in our own world. We don’t understand it. While we may be very powerful, we’re not the only game in town. And I think the British have encouraged this, unfortunately.
27:59 I think, uh, Boris Johnson was not just acting as a proxy for Washington with Kiev. I think he was doing more than that. I think he was actively pushing the notion that, first of all, Mr Zelensky, we will give you everything you will have, all that you will need, all the cash and all the support. You’re going to win this war. Russia can’t stand up to us.
28:23 I think you believed it.
28:24 Brian Rose: Yeah, he’s also a politician, and I think he just saw which way the winds were blowing, and he knew he could use it as leverage to keep him in office a little bit longer.
28:34 Douglas Macgregor: Uh, yeah, it probably was a lot of that.
28:36 Brian Rose: You know, you talk about some of these darker end games, Colonel. You talk about maybe an embargo here in the UK.
28:42 You’ve also talked about potentially Russia and China moving in to the cartels in Mexico and empowering them, and you said we could, looking, be looking at a scenario that, like the Cuban Missile Crisis on steroids, where there’s, you know, locations very close to America that are now being backed by all these foreign regimes. Can you talk about what you mean by that, and how that would happen?
29:09 Douglas Macgregor: Well, remember, the Ukrainians have already managed to sell Riso, let us say, weapons from the United States, including Javelin missile systems and others, through the arms bazaars that are run out of places like Kosovo to various bad actors, if you will, and we’ve seen them now show up in Mexico.
29:30 We’ve seen people walk around with Javelin missiles. They’re the Mexican cartels. Frankly, are better armed in most cases than the Mexican armed forces. Uh, this is not a good thing. The cartels, and we’ve seen this so many times in the past, where political forces and criminal elements, organized crime, come together in an alliance for, for temporary benefit.
29:54 We saw the IRA work closely with various Islamist groups and actually find their way into the Caribbean as well. We have in Mexico right now not only Hamas. We’ve also got Hezbollah down there, and a large, a large and growing population of Muslim Arabs, many of whom are radicalized, not all of them by any means, but many. The drug cartels are in it for the money now. They don’t really want to attack us, but if you offer them enough money and create the incentive, particularly in view of the fact that we are not defending our borders, we are allowing millions of people we don’t know to walk into our country and then receive benefits that our own citizens don’t get.
30:38 It’s not very going to believe that that’s a open gaping wound into which a great deal of salt can be poured quickly. We haven’t even talked about Cuba and Venezuela, or perhaps other countries in Central America that are anti-American, hostile to us for a whole range of reasons, some of which, by the way, are legitimate if you go back far enough. But nevertheless, those are opportunities for the Russians to start multiple fronts that we have to deal with.
31:08 We seem to have ignored that. And then, of course, you have our favorite friend in North Korea. North Korea has always been much closer to Moscow than to Beijing. To be frank with you, Xi in Beijing doesn’t like North Korea. Most Chinese don’t like North Koreans.
31:25 They don’t even like Koreans, but they certainly don’t like North Koreans. It is seen as a destabilizing element. The Chinese would like to get rid of it. That’s why there was an opportunity under Donald Trump, before he left office, to come to an arrangement to denuclearize North Korea, with the goal ultimately of making the South, the Republic of Korea, the caretaker for the North, and the Chinese would be quite happy to do that. They do a land office business with South Korea.
31:55 South Korea, Japan, China, all do a land office business in Taiwan with the micro circuitry industry. I mean, that Asia is a different place from where we live. Asians don’t think like us. They’re not interested in any major wars right now. Nobody wants one, but that doesn’t mean that the arrival of new rocket bodies inside a new rocket engines inside North Korea would not spark a crisis.
32:22 You know, whatever they have in North Korea has come from Russia when it comes to rocket technology, weapons technology. It hasn’t come from China.
32:30 Brian Rose: You mentioned the borders. You know, I saw, I think, uh, presidential candidate Robert Kennedy down at the borders recently, and Colonel, I was shocked. I grew up on the border in San Diego, and back then it was probably Mexicans coming over the border, then later we saw Central Americans coming over the border.
32:48 I think when Kennedy was there, it was like a cornucopia of the United Nations, Africans and Muslims and people from the Middle East. And I, I was, I was shocked. I didn’t realize that people were traveling to Mexico from all over the world just to get into America. Uh, what does that mean for the longer-term, uh, breakdown of the U.S. and security, and all that?
33:11 Douglas Macgregor: Well, let’s, let’s look at it carefully.
33:13 I’ve always liked the law that the Austrians passed years ago, that said until every Austrian who wants to work and can work, we will not admit anyone else to the country. So they’ve done a better job of managing that issue than I think almost anybody else has in Europe. And I, I would tell you they’re not perfect, and they know that, but nevertheless that’s a logical step, if you look at the United States today. If you, if you look hard at our economy, the underlying fundamentals are not good why would you introduce millions of people into an uncertain future inside the United States, with an economy that probably can’t employ them?
33:54 And who’s coming in? We’re already complaining about the terrible quality of American education in public schools. Well, if we’re not providing adequate education for our own population, so that it can find employment in the future, why are we bringing all of these people in? We don’t know who they are or what they want, and we probably can’t employ most of them. Now, you do have thousands of Chinese, thousands of Russians, thousands of Ukrainians that have managed to come in.
34:24 In some of those cases, they may be employable, but we don’t know we also don’t know why they’re here at all, other than, well, we’d like to come in and live in the, in the great consumption machine. Well, I understand that, but where are we going to put them? What are they going to do? Our nuclear power plants are not all perfectly secure. It would not be very difficult for someone inside the United States to sabotage a nuclear power plant.
34:48 Imagine the level of emergency and alarm that would provoke inside American society. We haven’t had that problem yet, but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t have it. We don’t know who’s here, and this is the stupidity of saying, well, we have to, we have to be prepared to fight the Chinese. Really? People ten thousand miles away.
35:07 You want to go to war with them? Why don’t you close the border? Why are you admitting thousands of Chinese to our universities, to our laboratories, to our production facilities? I mean, it would be logical in my judgment, if you’re worried about the theft of your intellectual property, to stop that, but why would you want to go to war instead? It’s sheer lunacy.
35:30 Makes no sense at all. And as my Japanese and Korean business partners have told me in the past, Chinese are not doing anything today that they have not done for centuries. The diaspora has always sent back whatever they could find that might be useful to the home country. See, what a surprise. But we don’t need to make it easy for them, and we have.
35:54 Brian Rose: Speaking of, uh, domestic concerns, you’ve said that you don’t think Biden’s going to even make it to the election. You’ve also talked about banking crises, and you, you’ve said, and you kind of alluded to that now, that internally America has serious problems in the next 12 months. Can you expand on that?
36:15 Douglas Macgregor: Some of your viewers will know who he is. Very brilliant man.
36:19 Yeah, he was the man that developed this whole concept of the Black Swan event that is mentioned routinely these days. And just a couple of days ago, he was asked, uh, similar questions, and he talked about the financial, the, the potential for financial instability and collapse, another return to what happened in 2008, only worse, because we could not necessarily bail out everyone 100 on the dollar, as we did back in 2008. He talked about the fact that we’ve been using monetary policy to address serious structural problems.
36:57 You know, if you’ve exported your manufacturing base, and you’ve walked away from systematically exploiting and developing agriculture to the extent that we can, if you’ve abandoned the energy sector and leaded atrophy, so that we’ve got a handful of refineries, whereas years ago we had several hundred, then you’re setting yourself up for an inevitable failure. And somebody said, well, when is this all going to happen? When will it happen? You said, I don’t know.
37:25 They said, well, this could go on for five years or another ten years before the end. He said, well, that seems unlikely. He said, I think it’s in front of us. I think he’s right. You know, he pointed out that if you look at the Federal Reserve in structural terms, and in terms of what it has on its balance sheets, it looks a lot like the Silicon Valley Bank that just went out of existence.
37:47 Now the Federal Reserve moved quickly on that, and I’m glad they did. They forestalled a wider emergency, at least for the moment, but I think more of that is likely to come, and remember, all of our our banks, small and large, and I think you’ve got this problem as well as many of our friends around the world and partners. We’ve sold a lot of people Treasuries, which were always considered a good hedge at very low interest rates, the interest rates are rising and are likely to continue to rise.
38:17 People say, well, though, if it gets out of hand, the Fed can suppress it, but there’s a growing chorus of people warning that that may not be possible. So then suddenly you’re, you’re paying exorbitant prices to service your debt. I always point out that, you know, the British left India in 1947 when their debt-to-GDP ratio was 240 percent. That was largely because we bankrupted Great Britain during World War II, because the British essentially sold everything in order to participate in this war against, uh, Nazi Germany, that ultimately turned out to be a great victory for Soviet Russia, but not for Great Britain.
39:01 Well, the point is that the British experienced this, and they took, took in the facts, and they made a prudent decision. We’ve got to get out, and they got out. Well, that’s what you’re going to see happen to us, I think, in the near term. That’s why I kind of referred to this business of adding Sweden and Finland, or anybody else, to NATO as well. You’re, you’re buying a ticket, uh, or a berth, if you will, on the Titanic, and it’s already struck an iceberg.
39:29 And they don’t seem to get it, but we can’t fund it all. We can’t afford it all. Europeans can’t either, or they won’t in many cases, so that everything is going to change, but somebody said the other day, you know, nothing matters until it does. You know, it’s back to the, something goes on until it can’t. I mean, that’s where we are at the moment.
39:51 We know that we’re crossing this rickety old bridge, and that the bridge is destined to collapse, but everybody says, well, listen, it’s held up this long, let’s continue to use it. It’s going to be god-awful when that collapses.
40:06 Brian Rose: You mentioned NATO. Like, what kind of implications are going on there now? You’ve also mentioned that the Poles and Lithuanians are kind of fired up to take this fight, um, but nobody else is at this point.
40:20 You also mentioned the cruise missiles, and in a desperate Zelensky’s hands, firing those into Russia could be his last-ditch move, and if you do that, Russia has to respond, and then everything, everything gets escalated and gets more and more dangerous.
40:35 Douglas Macgregor: Well, first of all, the Russians will not use a nuclear weapon unless someone uses a nuclear weapon against them.
40:41 Brian Rose: Explain that, because you said that’s a, a sign of weakness, to use the nuclear weapon, and they’re not in a weak position, right?
40:49 Douglas Macgregor: I mean, there’s no reason for them to use a nuclear weapon. They have right now the advantage of overwhelming high-end conventional combat capability. The reason Ukraine still has forces fighting is because the Russians have not decided to attack and annihilate them. That’s, that’s the thing that will likely happen if these cruise missiles that were promised to Zelensky fall into his hands. His regime is so desperate that they will attack targets inside Russia.
41:21 Now, I’m sure the Russians will shoot down most of them, maybe, maybe only half of them, who knows. How many cruise missiles have to hit Moscow, or Belgorod, or Rostov, or any other Russian cities before somebody says to President Putin, why haven’t you stopped this? And then it’s over. Absolutely, it will end. As I said, you’ve got hundreds of thousands of troops in reserve.
41:46 They are brilliantly equipped. They’re very well trained. Now you’re not talking about the U.S. Army National Guard, or the, or the militia, or the Saturday night soldiers that people used to joke about in Great Britain. These people are trained.
42:00 They’ve been in the military. They’re not foreign to it. Now they’re assimilated. They’re ready to go, so I think that would happen, and that would escalate. Now, the question is, what do we do, and that’s the question that has always plagued Putin, because Putin again doesn’t want a long-term state of war with the West.
42:19 China doesn’t either. China wants to extend this One Belt, One Road all the way to Europe as long as Ukraine is disintegrating and in chaos, it can’t do it. Everybody wants to get back to that. On the other side, I think there are Europeans who are privately saying, look, this is crazy, we’ve got to get back to normal too, we can’t go on much longer. You know, you see demonstrations in Bulgaria, in Moldova, in Romania, all against this notion of war with Russia over Ukraine.
42:51 It’s not because they hate Ukrainians or love Ukrainians, or hate Russians or love Russians. They want to get back to normal. They want this to be over. I think, if I look at the polls right now in Poland, I think it’s roughly 52 percent have expressed a desire to avoid war with Russia. Now, I don’t know where their government is, because the government seems to be disconnected from that viewpoint.
43:15 And you’re right, the Poles and Lithuanians could field a force. I don’t know what size it would be that could conceivably intervene in Western Ukraine. And I’ve tried to tell them when they’ve asked me. I’ve had people call from Poland and say what do you think will happen? And I said, well, even though your governments stand up and say we’re doing this on our own, this is not a NATO event, the Russians are going to say this is a Trojan horse for NATO.
43:39 These people are in NATO. And so again, when the alliance expanded, there were voices inside NATO that said, you know, Eastern Europe is a different place. There are people there with agendas, because the outcome of the war did not suit them in Poland and Lithuania. They used to be great powers. They controlled vast strips of territory.
44:07 Romania lost territory, Hungary lost territory. I mean, the, the World War I was bad. World War II was worse. So you have all these anti-status quo powers that join NATO, and then what do they want to do? They want to leverage us, the United States and its allies, to pursue their agenda.
44:27 This is Wag the Dog on an international scale. It’s crazy. We have no interest in restoring the Polish-Lithuanian Empire that existed from 1459 until 1794. At least I don’t see anybody willing to suit up in Great Britain or Germany or France. Let’s go rebuild it.
44:50 These people want to do that. That’s their privilege. They should get out of the alliance, leave NATO, fly to Moscow. I mean, frankly, Putin, Putin knows his history well. He has spoken publicly and said repeatedly, we know that the people in Western Ukraine do not want to be ruled by us.
45:10 We don’t want to rule them. That’s not the issue. And then he said they’d probably be happier with the Poles. Well, maybe, maybe not. There’s not a perfect history of harmony and love there between the Poles and Ukrainians either, but he understands, but right now that’s not the issue for him.
45:29 The issue is, if Ukraine becomes a member of NATO, I’ve got a permanent enemy camp right across the street on my border. I’ve got missiles minutes away from all my major cities and my military capabilities and my deterrent. That’s unacceptable. We won’t listen. We refuse to listen to the man.
45:48 We refused to accept the fact that Russia has legitimate security interests, and until we do that, this will go on. Russia won’t stop. So it’s really back to where we started. This is the ball back in the European court, because I don’t see any evidence right now that anyone in London is going to diverge in their opinion from us. In fact, London may be more vociferous in its advocacy for war than Washington in many ways.
46:17 Brian Rose: Why is that?
46:18 Douglas Macgregor: I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense to me. I mean, we used to have really sober-minded leaders in London. You know, you had people like Palmerston, Disraeli, even Gladstone, all these people that would have said, look, we certainly care about the Ukrainians.
46:36 We would like to see it, into the war, but we’re not going to commit British armies to the field to throw out the Russians. So we have to deal with desire and find other ways to reconcile this. I mean, this was the point of the 1879 Congress of Berlin, where Disraeli and Bismarck plotted together and avoided a war that would have resulted, basically, in the Russian capture of Constantinople. And they certainly understood why the Russians wanted to capture Constantinople.
47:06 It was the center of Orthodox Christianity for a thousand years. They wanted to throw the Muslims out. That’s fine, we understand that, but that’s not in everybody’s interest in Europe, and you’re going to create, you know, a conflagration on an international level when we’re trying to maintain peace, stability and prosperity. So the two of them worked together and it was avoided. We don’t seem to have anybody willing to do that.
47:30 No one’s willing to say, look, this is really not in our interest. You know, what is important to Britain? What’s important to Germany? I think the Germans know there’s nothing happening in eastern Ukraine that is a vital strategic interest to the German nation. Sorry, it’s not there.
47:47 The French certainly know that. So what is happening in Britain? I don’t understand this. It seems as though this globalist mindset, that the entire world has to be brought to heal and be assimilated into this world of no national borders, no national identity, uh, world government and so forth, is driving these people. Well, you know that those things are not going to go away.
48:12 You know, the big joke historically was on the day that the Soviet Union fell, everybody stood around in Moscow and said, well, what happened to all of the Soviet men? And somebody from the United States said, what are you talking about? I said, well, the Soviet man. This was the ideal. We were going to build the new Soviet man, who had no identity, no cultural identity, no ethnic identity, no religious identity.
48:36 And they turned around and said, but that didn’t happen. Instead, after 70 years of communism, we have Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Lithuanians, Latvians. You know, the key to peace and prosperity is, Disraeli and Bismarck understood, and I think many understood for many years in Europe, is to accept those things, respect those things, then you can get along and you come to arrangements, and they may not be perfect, but at least they end the bloodletting, and it gives you an opportunity over time to perhaps fashion something better that was Metternich.
49:13 You know, all the men of the past, Telluride, oh, everybody go back and look at these people that put an end to the Napoleonic Wars, and then fashion new peace agreements. They all thought in those terms. You can’t ignore those things. So you accommodate them, you live with them. And what have we learned in Europe?
49:31 Once people were secure inside their borders, and they were relatively homogeneous after World War II, so that Frenchmen were not at risk in France, and Germans were not at risk in Germany, and Poles were not at risk inside Poland. People were secure. The borders didn’t mean a great deal, did they?
49:50 Brian Rose: Yeah, no, that’s the more intelligent approach. We’ve lost an appreciation for it.
49:55 Douglas Macgregor: I don’t know where we got lost, but we’re very definitely lost at this point.
49:59 Brian Rose: Yeah, it is that globalist mindset and trend. Uh, Colonel, just a couple final things. Both President Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., both running for president, have said they could end this war in a phone call.
50:11 They would make a phone call to Putin, and they would end this war. Could they, in your opinion?
50:18 Douglas Macgregor: It would depend on the phone call. The phone call would have to say the following. First, we have suspended any further aid to Kiev.
50:27 No more aid is being sent. Secondly, we are withdrawing all American personnel, clandestine or otherwise, from Ukraine, and we are standing down the forces that are in Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia. That would be the precondition. You’d have to say that right up front, and we are dropping our objections to neutrality for whatever Ukrainian state emerges from the talks. Then the Russians will talk to you.
51:01 Then we can put an end to this, and again, it may not be what everybody wants, but we will have an end to it, and a new arrangement will emerge, and that arrangement will probably work for some period of time, maybe not permanently, but for some period of time, may have to be adjusted down the line. I find it, I think that has to happen.
51:23 Brian Rose: I find it shocking and tragic that a phone call could end something, or it could continue at this rate. With, I think, you estimated 250 to 300,000 casualties in the Ukrainian, 300 to 350,000 dead Ukrainian soldiers.
51:37 Wow.
51:37 Douglas Macgregor: That’s what people have to understand: dead, hundreds of thousands of wounded. I don’t know how many, but I know that some of the wounds are so severe these people will never return to active duty. I know the hospitals are full. This is a tragedy that needs to end.
51:54 It makes no sense. Even people on the battlefield are figuring this out, and you know, one Russian commander suggested the war will end because someone in the Ukrainian army who’s in command somewhere will step forward and say, enough’s enough. He may be right, because we’ve seen the desertions from the Ukrainian camp rise precipitously. They’re not reported in the Western press, but we’ve seen platoons and companies, and remember, most of the people on both sides of this divide in southern Ukraine are speaking virtually the same language.
52:26 And it just calls up and says to a Russian counterpart, I can’t evacuate my wounded, but my commanders won’t support it. They won’t evacuate anybody. They say we have to fight here and die here. I don’t want my men to die. I don’t want the wounded to die, so I’m surrendering, and they say, fine, leave your weapons, put everything on safe, drive over here.
52:49 One of the things that Putin has done, his army has done, is to treat the Ukrainian soldiers very well. So they know they’re not going to be abused, they’re not going to be killed, and that has not been the case on the Ukrainian side with regard to the Russian troops. And again, no one’s being told that truth. The Russians are always blamed for everything. What I’ve seen the Ukrainians do, it’s tragic.
53:11 And I’m not, when I say Ukrainian, instead of saying all, but too many units, too many forces out there, motivated by mind-numbing hatred, have done terrible things to Russian prisoners and to their own people. You know, these press gangs are now running around in Western Ukraine, all the way to the Carpathians, trying to scoop up manpower and force it to the front. They’re having a tough time. People are throwing things at them. They won’t help them.
53:39 They won’t support them. This, this war inside Ukraine has become a catastrophe. I don’t think Zelensky really has the support that we impute to him. I don’t think he has the legitimacy anymore either, and there are lots of things that keep coming out of the radio transmissions and postings on Telegram and other things to suggest that there are many Ukrainians who would like to remove him. So why doesn’t the West recognize the bloodletting should stop?
54:07 Because no one wants to stand up and say, you know, we were wrong. We were wrong. We made a mistake. The assumptions were wrong. We admit that this, this has to end.
54:18 No one will do that, at least not yet, certainly not in Washington.
54:22 Brian Rose: Yeah. Colonel, final question. The election next year, what do you expect? That we need to be prepared for to happen?
54:29 I mean, we’re probably going to have some of those candidates I just mentioned in the mix, whether it’s Trump or DeSantis, Kennedy, Biden. You know, if you look back three, four years ago, we had a lot of repressed information technology platforms compromised. You know, mail-in ballots coming forward. We’re going to have artificial intelligence to deal with deep fakes, misinformation, technology platform hijacking. What do you think this is going to be like, October, November next year?
54:57 Douglas Macgregor: Uh, your description fits the coming election, assuming we get there and have one. The problem right now is as follows. What happens to President Biden? We don’t know. He could suddenly be removed.
55:15 In other words, he could simply decide, in consultation with his advisors, it’s time for me to retire, in which case, uh, this, this person Harris becomes the vice president, in whom no one reposes any trust or confidence. Uh, then I think the left will try to insinuate this man, Governor Newsom from California, who is an advocate for everything that the rest of us want to stop: open borders, no standards of any kind. I mean, remember, the left has now become the place where no standards for anything, no standards in the military.
55:49 No standards in society. Uh, everything is either racially oriented or culturally oriented in some way. There’s no test for competence anymore. No respect for character, competence and intelligence in the military. That’s a catastrophe, and it’s getting worse with each passing day.
56:11 We’re about to get a chairman of the so-called Joint Chiefs who is openly, openly hates white people and wants to drive white officers out of the armed forces. He’s trying to drive them out of the Air Force. This is ludicrous nonsense. This is insane. And I guess there are large numbers of self-loathing white people who have joined this bandwagon, but that doesn’t apply to the majority of Americans by any means.
56:34 Most Americans want confidence-based, merit-based selection for schooling, for advancement, for promotion, for whatever it is, in and out of uniform. So I, I think there are a lot of things that could go wrong, and the problem with the whole electoral process, and people don’t understand this, our Constitution, which was written in the 1780s, 1787, says the states are responsible for elections. Why would the federal government give them power to decide these things?
57:04 Because at the time, our federal government was almost non-existent. All the power, money and authority was at the state level. Well, here we sit. This is a different world. There are no standards again.
57:17 How do you uniformly manage voting? How do you deal with all the issues that you just mentioned? Mass, uh, write-in ballots, uh, mail-in ballots, absentee ballots. All of this is an opportunity for corruption on steroids, and then you have these areas, these cities, in the world where, cities like Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Los Angeles, the corruption there is reached the point of institutionalization. How do you, how do you, you know, the joke has been for a long time, you know, that’s the, the day of the resurrection, because all the dead come out of the cemeteries and vote.
58:00 I think it’s all true. It’s terrible, but it’s true. So how do you get a free and fair election? You know, this is a terrible thing to say about my country, but I’m afraid it’s true. We’re not all stupid.
58:12 We know this now. That’s, that’s one set of problems. What happens on the financial economic side is that’s another factor, and then finally, what happens overseas in Ukraine? Americans may not be paying much attention to what’s happening on a day-to-day basis in Ukraine, but when it collapses and it becomes unambiguously clear that we have poured hundreds of billions into this project, that most of the people that we’ve been supporting are corrupt and criminals, everything goes to hell in a handbasket quickly in the United States.
58:44 I think it’s the convergence, or confluence, of these factors. It could lead to violence and disorder in America. We already have a big problem with the rule of law, which used to be one of the most attractive features of American society.
58:59 Brian Rose: Yeah, yeah, it’s, uh, it’s hard to believe that you’re actually saying this. It’s hard to watch this, because that’s not the America I grew up in, where we were doubtful of our own elections, doubtful of our own integrity, of our own democracy, doubtful of our own safety and rule of law.
59:18 I mean, yeah, well, then you have these two candidates who you mentioned.
59:22 Douglas Macgregor: Yeah, you know, there are lots of people that dislike Donald Trump. I mean, Donald Trump is an archetypal New Yorker who says a lot of things and has behaviors that people don’t like, but he’s widely supported because he points these things out. He’s always been very blunt. People like that, they like the truth.
59:40 Then you have RFK Jr. comes along. He’s a little more polished in the way he delivers, but he’s essentially acknowledging the same truth, and he’s coming out of the Democratic Party, the real Democratic Party. So what happened there is, no, bipartisan anything. What you’ve got really is a uniparty. Everybody’s busy stuffing their pockets full of cash.
1:00:03 This is the problem, and they’re looking at the nation and they say, well, we’ll manage, we’ll muddle through, we’ll get through it, it’ll be all right. No, it won’t.
1:00:12 Brian Rose: Yeah, and when that doesn’t happen, it’s going to be some dark, dark days. Uh, Colonel, I very much appreciate your insights on this, and thank you for wrapping everything from our foreign policy right back to domestic, and showing how it’s all interrelated. Uh, it’s going to be a very interesting year.
1:00:28 All I can say is, uh, please keep talking, and please keep letting people know your opinion is very respected. And uh, we appreciate the time here once again.
1:00:37 Douglas Macgregor: Well, thank you for inviting me.
1:00:39 Brian Rose: All right, we appreciate you. Thank you so much for watching us, and uh, next time maybe we’ll do this in London, sir.
1:00:45 Douglas Macgregor: Thank you so much.
1:00:46 Brian Rose: Right, and we’ll see you. You haven’t been to London since 2005. Yeah, it’s changed quite a bit, hopefully for the better, uh, but who knows. I’m like, so I’m told.
1:00:55 Yeah, I might send you a ticket. All right, thank you so much, Colonel. We appreciate you, and uh, we look forward to seeing you next time. Thank you everybody. We’ll see you next time on London Real.
1:01:03 Douglas Macgregor: Take care, bye-bye. Thank you.
