Full transcript: Colonel Douglas Macgregor on London Real
2:49 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 recognized for your leadership in the Battle of 73 Easting during the Gulf War, where you orchestrated an offensive strike that destroyed 70 Iraqi armored vehicles with no U.S. casualties in 23 minutes in what was the largest tank battle since World War II.
3:12 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 on The Tucker Carlson Show. You have testified as an expert witness before the Senate and House Armed Services Committees, and in 2020 Donald Trump appointed you as Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Defense. You have written five books on military transformation, including Breaking the Phalanx and Transformation Under Fire.
3:37 You have argued that Ukraine is being destroyed and that Russia will win this war, while the media and government propagate false narratives to hide the true reality of the situation.
3:48 Brian Rose: Colonel Macgregor, welcome to London Real.
3:50 Douglas Macgregor: Well, good summation. I said that I served for 28 years, but that’s all right.
3:55 Brian Rose: All right, excellent stuff. I guess let’s jump right into it.
3:58 Brian Rose: The Ukraine War, there’s a reality and there’s a media narrative that I feel here in the U.K. and in the U.S. we get a heavy dose of. Why are those so different, in your opinion, and what is really going on on the ground in Ukraine versus what I just read at the Times in London or what I read in the New York Times on a regular basis?
4:18 Douglas Macgregor: Well, I think it’s more than just a narrative now.
4:21 I think the West, led primarily by Washington and London, has erected what I would call an empire of lies. It’s truly devastating and it’s shocking in its scale and impact. It’s something that, frankly, I was completely unprepared for. I’ve never seen anything quite like this, where systematically we have lied about everything involving Russia and Ukraine now for months, if not years. The truth of the matter is that people have never been told or are not being told, and you can find the truth, but you’ve got to look for it, obviously, on the Internet.
4:59 Is that Russia is by no means the evil aggressor in this thing. If anything, Russia launched an operation that it felt it had to to secure its country. We have been working tirelessly for at least the last 20 years to undermine and weaken Russia in whatever way possible. We decided we didn’t care much for Mr. Putin and his success at essentially retrieving Russia from the ash heap of history.
5:25 And then the Russians made it very clear that they would not accept NATO on its borders. I mean, effectively, they’d done that with Latvia and Estonia. They do have a border up there, but they made it very clear that Ukraine, which is roughly the size of Texas and the United States, could never be a member of NATO. That simply presented too much of a danger. They made that clear in 2008 at Budapest.
5:49 We ignored it, and then subsequently, Mr. Putin has given speeches reiterating the criticality of neutrality for Ukraine, unwilling to see NATO bases there. In 2014, one of the principal reasons that he intervened to seize Crimea was to prevent that naval base from falling into the hands of what he expected would be NATO forces. And remember, whatever he says NATO, he ultimately means the United States. It’s the United States Navy that would have gone into the ports in Crimea.
6:18 It’s the United States armed forces that is moving eastward towards the Russian border. And we’ve chosen not to discuss that. In 2014, you also had this coup that we helped to organize and implement, which put people in power that otherwise would never have gotten there. And these people were violently anti-Russian, hostile to Russian national security interests. We encouraged that. We cultivated it.
6:43 We began pouring money into this thing called the Ukrainian army. Really, it’s more the army than anything else. And in 2014, this fledgling Ukrainian army began immediately attacking the Russians in eastern Ukraine and the so-called provinces or oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk. And in the time between the first attacks by artillery in 2014 and the intervention by the Russians in February of 2022, they killed 14,000 people. And they fired thousands and thousands of rounds of artillery.
7:18 In fact, in the week or two just before the Russians finally moved in, they fired over 2,000 rounds of artillery ammunition. And these were all being fired at Russian civilians. Now, I notice I say Russian civilians. They were technically Ukrainian citizens. They just happened to be Russians.
7:36 And, of course, these Russians were being oppressed. They were effectively presented with a fait accompli. Either you become Ukrainian, you stop speaking Russian, you speak Ukrainian, you write in Ukrainian, and you adopt Ukrainian identity and culture and so forth, or we’re going to punish you. And so the Russians in eastern Ukraine have been second or third class citizens now for years. All of this did not go down well in Russia, as you can imagine.
8:01 Then, of course, we had this thing called the Minsk Accords, which was, in theory, presented to the Russians as a way to get past the conflict and maintain some measure of civility and peace in Ukraine. Well, it didn’t work, and it didn’t work, as we’ve discovered, because first Chancellor Merkel, who’s now retired, and then subsequently Mr. Macron, the President of France, both admitted the whole thing was a hoax. It was simply a device to buy time for the Ukrainians to build their forces up.
8:30 And it became very clear to the Russians that this large force, which is extremely well-equipped and, I would argue, reasonably well-drained, certainly by NATO standards, was poised to launch an attack at Russia with the goal of crushing the Russians into Luhansk and Donetsk and then ultimately retaking Crimea. So the Russians said, no, thank you. And they intervened. The big mistake they made is that they assumed that someone was willing to negotiate with them.
8:57 And so they went in with a really small force, no more than 90,000 on the ground in terms of combat troops. And they discovered after two or three months, four months, even though they were not taking heavy casualties, as originally reported, they took very light casualties. It was the Ukrainians that had begun taking heavy casualties almost from the beginning. They discovered that they weren’t going to get a negotiated settlement. Finally, the generals met with Putin last summer and said, this is a war.
9:25 This is not what we bargained for. We miscalculated. The underlying assumptions were wrong. There is no one to talk to. And you’ll recall that shortly after your former prime minister’s visit in April to Mr. Zelensky, that any hope of talks was crushed.
9:40 And ultimately, they said, we’ve got to get ready for a real war. That meant mobilizing reserves, spanning the size of the army, training everybody up, re-equipping people, because the equipment they used initially was almost all obsolescent. So that was completed by Christmas. Then there was pressure to launch an offensive, but the weather didn’t cooperate, so the decision was made since we don’t have firm ground. And you recall that in that part of the world, you had this thing called the Rasta Pizza, which is effectively a sea of mud that makes it virtually impassable for armored fighting vehicles or wheeled vehicles.
10:19 If you leave the hard surface road, you’re in big trouble. If you go back to World War II, you find that the major offenses were either launched in the dead of winter when the ground was frozen, or they were launched in June, July, August, September timeframe. So the Russians then said, fine, we’ll build an impregnable defense, hold what we’ve got, and invite the Ukrainians to attack us. And in the meantime, the Ukrainians had taken terrible losses, and these losses have never been truthfully reported in the Western media, because I think Washington was very concerned that if it became clear that the Ukrainians were dying at great numbers, that their forces were being destroyed almost faster than they could be fielded, that support for this insane notion of waging a proxy war in the backs of Ukrainian people against Russia would no longer be supported in NATO.
11:08 So the easy solution was lie. And then you have a compliant media that is ideologically aligned with the globalist, neocon governments in the West, especially Washington and London, and it becomes very easy to tailor the message to somehow or another sustained support. And remember, Russia still has the legacy of the Cold War behind it, and what that means is it’s easy to convince people that Russians are bad, Russians are evil. After all, wasn’t the Soviet Union bad and evil?
11:39 Of course, this is not the Soviet Union. This country today is radically different. If anything, it is extremely religious, culturally conservative, and I think the Russian military, contrary to what’s being reported to the Western media, has behaved extraordinarily well, is not guilty of 90% of the war crimes of which it’s being accused. On the other hand, Ukrainian military has behaved atrociously and murdered people in large numbers and celebrated it in Nazi fashion.
12:09 So at the end of the day, this is an empire of lies. Now, here’s some good news. Empires of lies create truth bombs, and the truth bombs are beginning to explode. And I’m sure that you’re aware of the leaked documents, but also more and more information from the battlefield is slipping through. Reporters who are not part of the mainstream are there and they’re telling the truth.
12:36 So it’s harder and harder to maintain the fiction that the Ukrainians are winning, that the Ukrainians ever could win, that the Russians are losing and the Russians are incompetent and capable and stupid. Justice has become impossible to argue that the Russian economy has been harmed at all by the sanctions. On the contrary, the Russian economy is doing quite well. So I think that’s where we are right now. The Russian military is waiting for the ground to dry.
13:02 More Ukrainians are attacking. They’ve lost now at least 300,000 dead. I’ve seen higher estimates than that. The Russians are looking at perhaps 30,000 killed in action and perhaps 40,000, 50,000 wounded. But the difference between Russian wounded and Ukrainian wounded is that Russian wounded are quickly evacuated, their wounds are treated, and their return to duty, about 90% of them.
13:28 Whereas the Ukrainian side doesn’t do that as well, can’t do it as well, and large numbers of people are dying of wounds on the battlefield. So it’s a treacherous situation. I think it’s a humanitarian crisis. We haven’t even discussed the tens of millions of people whose lives are destroyed in Ukraine. What?
13:46 11 million plus have now left the country. I’ve seen estimates that suggest that they started with 34.5 million in the country. They’re down now to somewhere around 18 or 19 million. And the Ukrainians, they’re coming out now and have been coming out from the beginning of all report. They have no intention of going back.
14:06 And we haven’t even begun to address the child trafficking and trafficking of women that has gone on without a break and the black market for much of the material that we’ve set over there. And obviously, the squandering of cash that ends up in bank accounts in places like Cyprus belonging to people like Zelensky and the key figures in his operation, including generals in the Ukrainian army, even down to the battalion level. This is a disaster. We should put a stop to it right away and try to rescue as much of Ukraine as we can.
14:39 Brian Rose: Colonel, I think it was Sun Tzu that said all warfare is based on deception. And a lot of times the media has been co-opted into this and we saw that with Vietnam, et cetera. You just laughed out loud. I mean, how is this any different than any other military conflict? Is it the scale of the deception here?
14:57 Douglas Macgregor: Yeah, I think so. And also the cooperation of the media. You know, I lived through the Vietnam era. In fact, I started out in the military in 1971 at Virginia Military Institute. That went on to West Point in 1972.
15:11 And we were still dealing with the Vietnam disaster. And it was very clear that at least until 1968, the media was giving the military a pass. They were essentially reporting figures for casualties that were not accurate. They were slow rolling our own casualties, increasing and inflating the casualties on the other side. And, of course, promoting the notion that we were winning.
15:34 And you had a massive campaign launched by the president and the senior four star at the time, Westmoreland, in 1967 to convince everybody we, quote unquote, turned the corner. We’re winning. Then, of course, we got the Tet Offensive in January and it was a disaster. And it became abundantly clear to everyone that the media could no longer pretend. And the media was less interested in pretending.
15:57 You still had a lot of people in the media with some sense of integrity and devotion to the country. They began to tell the truth. That made lots of people angry. These were the Americans that had believed the lies from the beginning. And, of course, we didn’t even discuss the fact that the whole war was based on a lie, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which really never occurred as it was reported.
16:17 It’s not the first time that we’d gone to war for a lie. We went to war in 1917 on the basis of lies as well. So the bottom line is that I think today what’s different is the willingness to lie, the willingness to deliberately deceive. And I listen to it every day, every morning, on every news channel. I read it all the time.
16:37 And you sort of shake your head and say, this is incredible. But the good news is the truth bombs, they’re beginning to detonate. And very shortly by, I would think, as soon as this ground dries to the point where hundreds of thousands of Russian forces can leave their defensive positions and attack, it’ll be very difficult to maintain the fiction anymore.
16:57 Brian Rose: It’s interesting. We had Seymour Hersh on the show last week, and he’s been on two times.
17:02 And he broke the Meilai massacre in Vietnam. And he was on the side of truth back then. He worked at the New York Times for a long time. Now they won’t print any of his articles about Nord Stream bombings, about the real situation on the ground. It’s just like everything has almost gone 180 degrees to where he’s looking for where are the journalists these days.
17:27 What do you make of that, the fact that it’s just turned that much? Or do you have any opinions on Seymour and some of the things that he puts out?
17:36 Douglas Macgregor: Well, Psy Hersh is a very brave man. And he does the best that he can to report the truth. Sometimes the minor details are inaccurate, but the larger truth that he disseminates is accurate and helpful.
17:49 And I think he’s telling the truth this time around about Nordstrom. But I have no way of knowing. I haven’t seen any classified material. He certainly told the truth in the past about Vietnam, told the truth about the Gulf War, too. There’s some incidents that involved people there.
18:06 I think right now you have a class of people in the West who have grown rich and comfortable from their participation in what I would call the globalist cabal. That ranges from everything including the massive printing of money as a substitute for productivity, to open borders, the systematic attacks on our culture, our identity, who we are, what we are, our history. And of course, many of these people are privately very sympathetic, I would say, to the thinking and behavior of the Bolsheviks, 1917 through 1920, 21, 22.
18:51 And much of what you see happening in the United States, particularly in this business about men and women and erasing the differences and pretending there are none also in business, that was all very prevalent and had a terrible impact in the Soviet Union to the point where Lenin had to put a stop to it. And then, of course, it largely died under Stalin who had a different agenda. But if you go back to the first people that were in the Bolshevik Party, these Trotskyites and others, what you’re hearing from a lot of these people is very similar.
19:20 You go back to Leo Strauss in the United States who led this whole neo-con crusade from the very beginning and he’s heart and soul with the Bolshevism that I was just describing. And he used to lecture people saying the day is going to arrive and we’ll realize there is no difference between the sexes. Well, none of this works. It will all collapse. And that’s what I mean about the empire of lies.
19:46 You build this empire and you tell people, and there are lots of well-meaning, gullible people who go along with it, but ultimately it fails, the truth will out. You can’t keep it going. And I think that’s happening very much so right now in Ukraine.
20:01 Brian Rose: And I think there’s a record of presidents getting reelected during war times. Is this war ultimately a tactic to get re-election for the current president?
20:10 Douglas Macgregor: I don’t think so. Now, we do have a problem in the United States with this notion of war. We are very similar to Britain before 1914. War was always something that happened on someone else’s soil. The result of this is that you develop an inflated view of yourself and your capabilities.
20:30 You know, if you go back before World War I, certainly before the poor war there was this attitude in Great Britain that they were the preeminent power. They were richer than everyone else. They could do pretty much what they wanted. The poor war certainly changed a lot of people’s views of the world, but even then it wasn’t enough. It took World War I to really make a dent.
20:53 And that’s been one of my nightmares, that we would stupidly precipitate our involvement in something that could become a world war when there was no reason to. Just as I personally believe, as my family did and my ancestors on both sides, that there was no reason for the British to go to war with Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1914. Absolutely none. And I think it did more to destroy the British Empire, which on the whole I believe was a positive thing, not a negative thing, than anything else undertaken.
21:23 So I worry that we’re embarked on a similar course, but there’s good news. Our economy can’t keep up. The money printing is right behind us. You cannot substitute that in perpetuity for low productivity. So I think the whole financial lie is going to come home to roost just in time to prevent us from embarking on stupidity overseas.
21:47 The other thing is that our armed forces are in terrible condition. The army is in no position to fight the Russians. I don’t think the British army is either, sadly. I think everybody in Europe is aware of that privately. So what do you do if you’re a globalist and you’re losing?
22:03 This is the question. Do you do something really stupid? And that’s what I worry about. Do we suddenly send forces into western Ukraine once the Russians overrun everything in June and in an attempt to somehow or another hold back the inevitable and think that if we do this, this is going to somehow or another impress the Russians? The Russians are not impressed anymore.
22:24 The Russians, if anything, the Russian people are furious. We should be grateful that Mr. Putin has turned out to be someone capable of exercising restraint. This is not someone who’s given to emotion and ruled by emotion, thank God. But here we are ruled a lot by emotion.
22:43 And that worries me.
22:45 Brian Rose: Colonel, as a former military man, are people very surprised that when they first hear you speaking, you come off as anti-war? That must surprise people.
22:57 Douglas Macgregor: Yeah, I guess so. It depends.
22:59 I have a different point of view because of my own experience in the military. What I experienced in 1990 and 91 and what I saw develop in the 90s and the Balkans and so forth. And I was one of these people who was not pleased at the end of operations in 91. I thought that we should complete the job and remove the government and Baghdad. Simply place a new group of generals in charge, bring in the U.N. and get out of the country.
23:27 There was no reason to occupy anything. We should never have occupied anything. But the notion that we would bring all of these forces and then end it suddenly, prematurely, leaving essentially the strategic structure unchanged made no sense. Or if you’re going to do that, then say, fine, let’s do business with Saddam Hussein and make it clear to him if he’ll do business with us, he can stay. We wouldn’t do any of those things.
23:51 So we end up being dragged in again. Then in the Balkans, I mean, the demonization of Serbia when there was lots of guilt to go around, whether you were a Bosniak or a Krolat, this was an ugly civil war. We intervened in that. I think we ended up humiliating the Russians unnecessarily in the wake of the Kossing Luheir campaign, which I thought at the time was stupid and unnecessary. And I had worked with the Russians off and on, and I saw only interest in good things.
24:23 I did not see any hostility, and I think we blew it, frankly. We made terrible mistakes there. Then we walked into this thing in Iraq without understanding any of it. I mean, the idea was to drag in the U.S. Army into Iraq and keep it there.
24:39 I never saw any serious thought given to purpose, method, and end state. In other words, what do we really want to achieve long run? Somebody said, well, we’re going to have the first liberal democracy in the Arab world, and it will be friendly to Israel. Well, you might as well talk about all sorts of miracles occurring tomorrow morning that would cure every conceivable disease on the planet. That made no sense.
25:00 It was a lot of nonsense. And we’ve continued down this path, and now here we are, dealing with this troublesome business of expanding NATO, knowing full well that it would precipitate this crisis. Then we celebrate the war and decide this is our opportunity to destroy Russia. What? What’s the point of destroying Russia?
25:20 Look, I was a professional soldier, and I killed people in combat. I loved being a soldier. But you have to have a purpose in mind, something that makes sense, a rational, attainable objective. The use of military power for the sake of using it is disastrous. I think it’s killing us as a country.
25:42 I mean, everyone complains about China. If you look at China, they come in with lots of cash, and they offer to do things and expand their relations, but they’re not interested in involving themselves in the internal affairs of other societies. We seem to want to involve ourselves in everyone’s internal affairs. We don’t seem to want to respect other people’s cultures, other people’s way of doing business. We’re busy judging everyone else against an utterly meaningless standard because, quite frankly, things in the United States are not very good and haven’t been for a very long time.
26:18 One would think that given the destruction of our country, open borders, the ruination of our economy, I mean, everybody forgets that China did not come to the United States and invite everyone to come to China. They did not force us to export our industries, our side of the industrial base. You know, all of this was done in the 80s and the 90s in the early part of this century by people anxious to lie in their pockets. Once again, these elites, the elites have gotten us into real trouble.
26:47 The question is, what are we going to do about it? And I don’t know about a future election. I’m unconvinced that it would mean much. I see a lot of evidence that the left has now established itself in power as no intention under any circumstances of ever giving it up.
27:02 Brian Rose: In power, not just the presidency, you say, in all ways, shapes and forms.
27:06 Douglas Macgregor: Well, of course. I mean, if you look at the alleged Republicans with very few exceptions, there’s not much difference between them and the Democrats. They’re all on the same take. They’re all profiting from the same disaster. The only people suffering in the United States are Americans.
27:20 The Americans are the ones who don’t have the protection of the police. The Americans are the ones who don’t enjoy the Bill of Rights and the protections under it as they once did. The Americans are the ones that don’t have freedom of speech. So it’s hard for me to imagine an election working at this stage, especially with those absentee ballot nonsense. I mean, the opportunity is there for corruption or an ending.
27:45 I mean, the French tried it, didn’t work. Several countries in Europe have tried these things and threw it out. And then treating the requirement to prove your citizenship as some sort of evil action that’s designed to harm various racial groups is absurd. Makes no sense at all. So we’ve got real problems.
28:06 And we’ll see what happens over the next few months, but as things fall apart in Ukraine, that’s going to be difficult to disguise and conceal. But the opportunity then exists for stupid actions by us. Which could mean World War III, nuclear missiles being deployed.
28:23 Brian Rose: Do you think about some of those downsides? I mean, I always think of that documentary, Fog of War, where McNamara talks about how close we were.
28:32 And I think he had had a conversation 20, 30 years later with Castro himself. And he said, would you have really deployed, you know, nuclear missiles, even knowing that the death and destruction, and they said, yes, I would have. And I think that was his final warning in that movie, that this is the biggest existential threat to humankind that no one pays attention to.
28:52 Douglas Macgregor: Well, I think you’re right. And I do think people are paying attention.
28:56 The Chinese announced a long time ago no first use. I think Mr. Putin has made it very clear that he will not use or employ a nuclear weapon unless there is evidence for our use of it, or someone else’s use of it against them, or the imminent readiness on airport to use nuclear weapons. Now, we had effectively what was a no first use doctrine. And in March of last year, President Biden announced that he was changing it, and said that we now reserve the use, you know, the right to use nuclear weapons at will, against someone who uses chemical weapons, biological weapons, or even very large and powerful conventional weapons.
29:41 In other words, he’s opened Pandora’s box, which I think is sheer unadultery lunacy. Again, this is a manufactured war, a manufactured crisis, a manufactured conflict. This is not something that Russia set out to execute. If that had been the case, what you would have seen on 22 February of last year would have been a massive offensive by a million Russian troops that would have rolled right through Ukraine without regard to the loss of human life or the loss of property or anything else that ended up immediately on the Polish border.
30:18 That didn’t happen, because it was never the intention. It’s sort of interesting, the same people who insist, well, Putin wants to rebuild the Soviet Empire, are the same people saying, well, the Russians are incompetent, stupid, and unprepared to fight. So, which is it? Which position are you going to take? Now, I don’t think the Russians are stupid and incompetent, but I do think they had no intention of fighting a major war, and they only maintained the military power they needed for defense, and that turned out to be inadequate.
30:48 So, now we really are going to see reemerge, it’s already begun, a powerful Russian military establishment on the European continent in Eurasia. Far more powerful and far more capable than the Chinese forces. We keep talking about China, but the Chinese militarily are midgets compared to the Russians, and the Chinese will admit that. That’s one of the reasons the Chinese are there at an end to try and buy the technology and the capabilities the Russians produce.
31:16 So, we’ve created the very thing we said we didn’t want, and there’s the danger. Do we have some fool who thinks, well, we can use just a tactical nuclear weapon. I always love that. What’s a tactical nuclear weapon? Well, it’s five kilotons or less.
31:34 What does this suggest? Well, it suggests that, you know, we just want to use a small weapon to make a point. This is insane. Because your opponent is going to say, well, they’re using a nuclear weapon, that means we better use our arsenal quick, or we risk losing it. The use of any nuclear weapon, under any circumstances, it will produce Armageddon.
31:57 We need to understand that. And I don’t see any evidence for that on Mr. Putin’s agenda at all. But I hear people in Washington say stupid things about it regularly. There are still foolish, deranged people here who believe you can fight and win a nuclear war.
32:15 Impossible. It’s not going to happen.
32:17 Brian Rose: Yeah, I appreciate those insights. Colonel, you talk about how we vilified Russia for decades, and I grew up in that Cold War. I grew up watching that television movie the day after, and I literally would have bad dreams when I was a kid, worried about the Russians and, you know, Rocky III and all that.
32:34 Are we doing the same to the Chinese? Because you talk about China in a way I don’t hear anyone talking about. A very real way. Being honest about their military capability, even their intentions. I was actually in Austin, Texas last week, and I bumped into a Chinese man who was a venture capitalist, and he said, Brian, I know your show, and I want you to know that what people say about China isn’t true.
32:59 He’s like, we want to do business where people just like you, and I just wanted to come up and talk to you, and hopefully we can start a relationship. And I found it really interesting, because that’s not the narrative I get from all of my news. So what is really happening in China, in your opinion?
33:17 Douglas Macgregor: Well, the short answer to your initial question is yes, we’re demonizing China, I think quite unnecessarily. But the second part, in response to what that Chinese businessman told you, is no, the Chinese are not like us at all.
33:31 If you spend time in Northeast Asia, as I have, you very quickly discover that the Chinese on Taiwan, the Chinese in China, and for that matter, to a larger extent, I would argue the Japanese and Koreans, although they have their own version, all admire and want to imitate Singapore. Now, if anyone’s been to Singapore, Singapore is a place where I personally would be very unhappy, or I think most Americans would be unhappy. It’s wonderfully clean, it’s heavily policed, the government controls and owns virtually everything, and everyone scrupulously obeys the laws because everyone is there for one reason, make money.
34:16 So the things that we worry about, our personal freedoms, this notion of republicanism or democracy, as people like to call it, that’s foreign to the Chinese. The Chinese are not interested in that. They want to be crime-free, they want to be able to make money, improve their living standards, to live as much as possible without interference, but they’re willing to tolerate a level of government influence and power that we never would. That doesn’t make them bad, it’s a fact of life.
34:48 And if Xi is compared with anyone, I would compare him to a Chinese emperor. And the Chinese emperor had the mission that Xi has, which is you’ve got to feed everyone, very important for a nation of 1.4 billion, you’ve got to clothe everyone, protect everyone, that is put them under shelter, and then you have to defend the country. And remember, that was China’s enormous weakness over the last couple of hundred years, they couldn’t defend themselves. They were overwhelmed, not only by Western powers, but by the Japanese.
35:20 And they had been overwhelmed previously by the Mongols. We also forget that, out of the last thousand years, China has only been under Chinese government for about 350 of those years. In the intervening periods, they were ruled by foreigners. So, that’s what Xi is worried about. He wakes up every morning and says, what am I going to do to prevent dynastic change?
35:43 What if something goes wrong out there, and people don’t get enough to eat? What if they can’t find employment? One out of every four Chinese men between the ages of 18 and 30 is currently unemployed. That number is growing. The shadow banking structure was destroyed because it was corrupt.
36:01 Xi has been trying to crush corruption everywhere, in the shipyards, in the military. People are being jailed and executed. That’s the only way to get anybody’s attention over there. Xi has a tough problem. He wakes up every morning worried about all of those things.
36:16 And, yeah, I think he worries about the United States Navy and Air Force doing damage to him. But you’ve got to step back and ask the question, if you were going to use military power against China, just exactly what would you do? You know, Michael Farbar, the famous industrialist and financier, says, well, inside China, there are at least four or five versions of the United States in terms of size and population. I mean, who are we kidding? What do you expect to achieve with military power?
36:45 Nothing. Are there Chinese armies preparing to march into Southeast Asia? No. Are there Chinese armies preparing to invade the Korean Peninsula? No.
36:55 Are there masses of Chinese building little rubber boats to float over to Taiwan? No. And anybody who knows anything about Taiwan would have a terrible place to invade. It’s 100 miles across open water, and once you get there, most of the island is mountainous. There are only a couple of beaches you can land on.
37:12 And why would they do that? They don’t want to do that, because the Chinese on Taiwan and the Chinese in Beijing generally share similar goals. They all want to live in the end state that I described, which is why you may well see the old party, the KMT, that was created by Shanghai Shek win the next election. They’re sweeping the local and regional elections right now because nobody really wants to go to war under any circumstances with China. They want to do business with China.
37:40 And that government has said, we will unify with the mainland. We’ll do it gradually. And that’s what Xi wants. He said, well, maybe 2045. You know, here we are.
37:55 Well, there’s an invasion coming next week. It’s all nonsense. It’s just untrue. And you have to ask yourself if some of this is just to justify more wasteful spending on a whole range of things of defense that are obsolete.
38:10 Brian Rose: I appreciate that insight.
38:12 I want to ask you about what’s happening on our borders with the cartel wars as well. You’ve said a few things about this, and I just wanted to get your thoughts on the dangers there and what you think is actually happening.
38:24 Douglas Macgregor: Well, what’s actually happening is you can watch it on television. There are, we’ve had up until this point, three or four million people come into the country illegally. We’ve always had a problem with it.
38:35 We’ve always been invaded by illegals. But we just frankly opened the border and invited everyone in. We don’t know who’s coming. Last year, they had 20,000 Russians. They had at least that many Chinese that came over.
38:48 Of course, it was the hundreds of thousands of people from Latin America. We had large numbers of people from Africa. Now, these people are, in most cases, coming because they want a better life. There’s no question about it. But you have to look at the United States, and I would argue most of the Western world, as a rowboat, or not a rowboat, I think the, what’s the right word for these boats that we have on ships that we pile into in the event that the ship sinks?
39:15 I can’t remember the correct term. Lifeboat. Lifeboat, that’s right. I’m not a naval officer. So, thank God.
39:21 Anyway, the bottom line is that we’re a lifeboat, and you can swap the lifeboat and sink it. And we are in danger of that. People say, oh, well, you’ve got plenty of room. That’s not the point. Not all of it is arable.
39:36 Not all of it, do we want to despoil and destroy? And that’s not where people are going anyway. They’re migrating. It’s big cities where they can get access to free services and free money and free this, free that. That’s part of the problem.
39:50 The larger part is also criminality. We don’t know who’s coming in, and we see the crime rising everywhere. And a lot of it is illegal, not all of it. We just had a terrible tragedy where one illegal killed several illegals, shooting people, men, women, and children at point-blank rage. And then we have this government that refuses to enforce the law.
40:12 These are the George Soros appointees, as they’re called, because they were backed with enormous money from George Soros to put people in power who, frankly, want to weaponize criminality in the government against people like me and you. We’re now the enemy in our own country. So it’s disastrous. And I wonder how much longer this can continue before something breaks in a big way. The population is angry.
40:41 And we’re not French. We don’t immediately go into the streets and destroy the things. And I wish in some cases we were. We’re somewhere between the French and the Germans. We’re law-abiding by nature.
40:55 We want to make the system work. But increasingly it’s becoming obvious that the system doesn’t work. It’s broken. And, you know, you’ve got a government that was designed in the 1780s for a very different population, a much smaller country. We shouldn’t be surprised that it’s not working.
41:13 But we’re being overwhelmed for all these reasons with the collusion of our own government and media in ways that are leading to our destruction.
41:24 Brian Rose: Will Trump win next year? And if he wins, could he change the course of some of this? And lastly, would you ever work for him again?
41:34 Douglas Macgregor: First of all, I’m sure he wants to run.
41:37 That’s not the issue. Will he be able to? I think there is enormous effort invested in convicting him as a felon. If you’re a convicted felon, you cannot run for office. And I think that’s where the left is working.
41:52 Remember, the Justice Department is weaponized against us, and it’s being used against him. They’re very particular about whom they prosecute and he’s at the top of their list for things that I think in most cases would be ignored or the cost of doing business. But that’s another story. Again, I’m wondering if we get to that election before things really begin to fall apart. And what do you do if you discover that out of your electorate of, say, 150, 160 million, that more than half of that electorate doesn’t think the system works?
42:30 You know, everything is a function of confidence. People say, well, when do you think the financial system will collapse? Well, when people lose confidence. What happens with banks when people lose confidence? You get bank runs.
42:43 What happens when people around the world lose confidence in our economic strength and the viability of our financial system? Well, they dump treasuries. What happens when you get fire sales on U.S. treasuries? Armageddon.
42:59 So these are things that no one can predict, and I can’t predict when Americans finally say enough is enough and we won’t go any further with this. But I just don’t know if we’ll get that far. If we do, again, the problems… I grew up in a city in North Philadelphia where there hasn’t been a free, fair election in 50, 60 years. And I won’t go over the history.
43:23 That’s a problem in all the large cities. So you just write them off. The only way that you can run a free and fair election would be to declare martial law. And then you’d have to confirm the validity of people’s identity and their citizenship. You might get a different outcome.
43:41 You probably would. But that’s not going to happen. So what happens? Everyone that lives everywhere else, it’s a different world. They have two worlds.
43:53 It’s almost rural versus urban in some ways, reminiscent of what I saw in Bosnia-Herzegovina. But it’s worse because the urban areas, they’re being emptied of American citizens and replaced by large numbers of recent arrivals or what I would call the disgruntled minorities that are convinced that they live in a state of perpetual oppression and therefore deserve special privileges.
44:21 Brian Rose: Yeah, watching the election last cycle from over here was like watching a train wreck.
44:27 I couldn’t even believe it was happening or it was my country with the mail-in ballots, et cetera. Last question, Colonel. Is there anything you’re optimistic about? And I’m wondering if one of those things is independent media, because people are listening to Seymour Hirsch. People are listening to you.
44:46 People are actually able to consume a lot of these alternate points of view. And three years ago, we famously got in a big fight here with YouTube as far as freedom of speech and very hard to get messages out there. But these days, it’s easier. And I’m wondering if that’s something you’re optimistic about or anything else.
45:10 Douglas Macgregor: I am optimistic that the current tragedy will end, but I don’t know that the crisis we’re in will be resolved quickly.
45:19 I just don’t know. I think the inevitable collapse of Ukraine will be helpful because it will put all of these people in the position that LBJ and his friends were in in 1968. In other words, you lied. This hasn’t worked. So that will be helpful.
45:38 But we’ve got to get control of our borders. We have to enforce the law. We have to have effective police forces, and we need effective armed forces. Maintaining these illusions, fiction, that, you know, people’s gender is fluid or worse that it doesn’t matter so that you have women all over the place on the ground in the Army and the Marine Corps where they absolutely should not be in the event of a war. I mean, there are places where women can be employed effectively, where their talents can be put to use, where they’re protected.
46:12 But again, this is back to the problem of understanding what war is really like. Winston Churchill used to say, War is the absence of moral restraint. Well, he was right. War is barbarism. And that’s why you want it to end as soon as you can end it, because the longer it lasts, the worse the barbarism becomes.
46:36 We’ve forgotten all of that. We see too much on television. This artificial world where Buffy and John and Jim go to war together and everything works out all right, maybe a couple of scratches, and one person’s killed, and that’s it. It’s a lot of nonsense. War is barbarism and involves killing on the industrial scale.
46:55 That’s what you’re seeing happen today. In Ukraine, the Russians have perfected this connection between overhead surveillance, intelligence surveillance reconnaissance, and strike systems. Artillery, rockets, missiles, borders, everything. And within minutes, they can bring anything in front of them under effective attack to the point where the attacking force will be destroyed long before it ever comes to close with the Russian forces defending underground.
47:23 That’s industrial-scale warfare involving huge quantities of munitions. We’re not prepared for that. The Russians are, and they’re making it work for them. So I think, for instance, right now in Ukraine, all the air defenses are gone for all intents and purposes, so casualties will simply go up because the advances in precision munitions, everything from glide bombs and cruise missiles to conventional artillery that is now accurate and precise, put it all together, concentrate it, and you’re killing thousands and thousands of people within a few hours.
48:01 And that’s why this war needs to stop. The Ukrainians can win it, and we have a moral obligation as Americans to intervene and put an end to this and find a way forward. The problem is I don’t think we have any credibility with the Russians any longer. I don’t think any of the governments in Western Europe do. Now, if the governments in Western Europe change, then there’s a possibility something could occur.
48:25 If the German government and the French governments were to change, then potentially they could negotiate an end to this tragedy with Moscow. But I don’t see any possibility that that could happen for us in Washington. And I don’t know what you think about London, but I don’t think much is going to change there immediately.
48:46 Brian Rose: No. And how do you fight the wokeness?
48:49 Douglas Macgregor: Well, you’ve got to stand up and tell the truth. I mean, this is, you know, the Russians have an old expression, tell the truth and shame the devil. We’ve got to do that. We’ve got to simply say it’s a lot of nonsense. And when someone says, well, you’re a bigot, you’re a racist, you’re an anti-Semite, you’re a homophobe, all these ridiculous assertions, all of which are nonsense, to say, fine, so be it.
49:17 But this is true, and this is not. And we cannot do what you want to do, and we will not tolerate it. But we’ve been complacent for a long time, and now we find that we’re on very shaky ground, because we’ve allowed it to erode out from under us. We have attorney generals all over the country that are ready to release the criminals onto the streets to kill us. And that’s got to stop.
49:43 And if the president, who is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States, will not enforce the law, then we’ve got to send him packing. And I hope that we do. I just don’t know if we can last, you know, in the current setting as we are living in right now for another, what is it, year and a half almost. And then again, if you don’t believe in the system, if you don’t have any confidence in it, what happens? I mean, you’re going to get the equivalent, politically, of a bank run.
50:14 And we already know that more banks are falling apart. More bank runs are inevitable. And at some point, you know, you push the button, how much more money can you print? Well, you can’t. There are limits.
50:28 And that’s where you get into the treasury probe. And once people in China and Japan and the Middle East start dumping our treasuries, we are in a lot of trouble.
50:39 Brian Rose: Colonel, I appreciate it. Any more good news? No, I love some straight talk as well.
50:44 That’s actually good news because it’s refreshing. So, Colonel, I very much appreciate your insight and thank you for your service. What’s the best way for people to contact you or follow you, any social media, et cetera?
50:56 Douglas Macgregor: Well, I have a website, douglasmcgregor.com. I’ve stayed off the social media because I think it’s an opportunity to be stupid, say dumb things quickly without thinking.
51:06 But you’re going to stick my name in, Colonel Douglas Macgregor. Just spell it properly, M-A-C, small G-R-E-G-O-R. And, you know, you’ll get whatever you need. And my books are on Amazon and elsewhere. At some point, I’ll write again.
51:20 But right now, there’s a lot of work to be done. We all have to get involved as Americans. We cannot wait for someone to rescue us from this disaster. We’ve got to do the work ourselves. By the way, I wish the British people all the best and I sincerely hope that King Charles III will assert himself.
51:40 If you have a king, then he should be a king. And I would urge him to consult with people other than those in his government who have been feeding him lies about what’s happening in Europe and NATO. And I imagine they’ve been feeding him some about what’s happening in Britain as well, though I’m not as familiar with your society as I am with my own.
52:02 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s not far behind over here. Let’s just say that.
52:05 So, Colonel, thank you very much. I hope we can have you back on again in the future and go even deeper on some of these topics. Really appreciate your time and wishing you all the best.
52:16 Douglas Macgregor: Same to you. Bye-bye.
52:17 Brian Rose: All right, bye-bye. Thank you, everybody. We’ll see you next time on London Real.
