Full transcript: Douglas Macgregor on London Real
3:24 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Colonel Douglas McGregor, the decorated combat veteran, author, and foreign policy expert. You are widely considered as one of the preeminent military strategists of our time, spending 28 years working at the highest levels of the U.S. armed forces.
3:53 You’ve been a regular commentator on Fox News, the BBC, and the Tucker Carlson show, and in 2020 Donald Trump appointed you as senior advisor to the Secretary of Defense. You have said that the U.S. is experiencing a moral collapse and believe that many Americans feel disconnected from their collective national identity. You believe the globalists who control the financial markets and mainstream media now control our governments with the goal to denationalize the United States. You also argue that Washington, and in particular those in the White House, have become increasingly concerned that they pushed Vladimir Putin too far to the brink of a major retaliation. While the continued support to Ukraine and Israel could lead to a regional conflict and potentially World War III, Colonel McGregor, welcome back to London Real.
4:43 Douglas Macgregor: Thank you very much. That’s quite a mouthful.
4:46 Brian Rose: We’ve got quite a lot to talk about and I definitely want to get your takes on the current events happening right now in Beirut and Lebanon and Israel, but I think I wanted to start and zoom out a bit and get your thoughts on what you believe is happening with the globalists. I think you recently said, quote, the goal of the globalist is painfully obvious. It is the denationalization of the United States, the fundamental destruction of national identity, and the social cohesion that supports it, unquote. Colonel, what did you mean by that?
5:23 Douglas Macgregor: I think you’re dealing with people today who are extraordinarily wealthy, that command enormous financial resources. They dominate the media, Hollywood, obviously, and I think they’re interested in changing the fundamental character of the Western civilization. When I talk about denationalization, what we’re dealing with are people that want to do effectively what Karl Marx mentions at the end of his famous treatise, where he said, we’re winning a new world.
5:55 In other words, we’re going to change it. We’re going to unburden ourselves of the past. We’re going to revise history. And with this, we will destroy or eliminate all national borders, any distinctions. All people will be fungible commodities who can be moved around at will and committed to whatever we want to do.
6:20 It’s strange, in my judgment, that in the year 2024, this kind of mentality that we thought had been fundamentally extinguished in the early 90s in the Soviet Union should come back with such ferocity. But I think it has. And that’s what we’re dealing with. And Americans are very confused because they look at the national institutions and they see them as completely unresponsive to them, no longer reflecting who and what they are. And of course, when you open your borders and you bring in millions and millions of people who are fundamentally different from the people that live in the country, and frankly, there is no expectation that they will ever become Americans.
7:05 There doesn’t seem to be any interest in that. Then you run the risk of having no country at all. You have this amorphous mass of people struggling to survive. And of course, all of this against the backdrop of an economy that is declining in terms of strength and power, standards of living that are falling, and wars overseas that seem to be unending and largely disconnected from the interests of the American people. That’s as quick a synopsis as I can provide.
7:36 Brian Rose: You know, Tucker is doing a tour across America, and I’ve been watching his broadcast. They’re very fascinating. And he goes, you know, to states like California where he grew up and he’s getting these massive audiences from places where you think people might not be interested in his point of view. But he just did a conversation with J.D. Vance, the VP candidate for Donald Trump.
7:57 And they were commenting on how the elected that go to Washington seemed to then pursue their own agendas and seem to forget that they’re representing the people in their jurisdictions and they seem to make decisions that are not in their interests. And that could mean immigration decisions, decisions to spend billions and billions of dollars in these wars overseas that no one wants to be involved in. Are these some of the things that you’re speaking of?
8:23 Douglas Macgregor: Well, that’s some of it. And clearly what you’ve just stated is indisputably true. I think there’s something else, though, going on, and that is that we’re in a fight for the soul of the nation. We’re asking the question that Sam Huntington did in his last book, Who Are We? We’re asking that question, Who Are We Indeed?
8:44 And, you know, when I speak to audiences, I point out that we must, if we’re going to survive this, we must be Americans. What is an American? Well, we have the Bill of Rights, the Constitution. We are part of Western civilization. We speak English.
9:02 We have to be one people. We cannot be tribalized, fragmented, because to move down that path spells doom and disaster for the United States. I think these messages are finding resonance now. They are resonating strongly with lots of people. So we’ve been through this long period that’s lasted, I would say, decades.
9:23 It’s just become much more intense within the last 15 to 20 years, where we have been divided against each other. And I think there’s a real longing in the United States to be united. And people are looking for this unification of purpose that has been missing. And it certainly is not conquering the world. I mean, that falls on deaf ears.
9:47 The old adage that we have to be everywhere all the time to prevent anything from changing, which is really what the globalists have been preaching, the neocons, all of them, that doesn’t find any support anymore. People are saying, wait a minute, the world has been around for thousands of years, long before we arrived. What about us? Where do we fit in? What about our prosperity?
10:08 What about our security? And you have the same problem in the court system, the judicial system. These things all seem to have broken down. You have policemen that are leaving the police establishments because they don’t want to be prosecuted and sent to jail for effectively doing their jobs. We can’t find enough men to man the armed forces.
10:30 Well, why should that surprise anybody? How many times do you have to go to places like Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria or somewhere else and discover that this is an enormous waste of time? You know, we can’t change these people, nor should we try. They have their own way of life, their own culture. We need to get out of here.
10:49 We need to go home. And why aren’t we defending our literal waters? Why aren’t we defending our citizens against criminality? Why are we allowing 100,000 plus Americans to be killed every year by fentanyl poisoning? Why are we not stopping the human trafficking?
11:07 All of these things are now, what’s the right word, coalescing or coagulating into a mass of discontent inside the United States. And they look at the government and they realize, well, frankly, everybody comes to Washington and everybody is a normal human being in most cases, but they all leave as multimillionaires. Well, what’s happened, you know, this process of self-enrichment is well underway. And people are not voting in accordance with whatever they think is in the interest of the country, even if they know that, or even in the interest of their constituents in most cases, they’re voting along the lines that their quote unquote donors want them to.
11:48 So we have Washington that years ago, people said Washington was corporate occupied, which was true to some extent. But today, people talk in terms of donor occupation. Because the donors, the oligarchs with billions of dollars at their disposal can effectively buy whatever policy they want. And that’s what they’ve been doing. So everything is disconnected from what I would say constitutes the American people.
12:16 And the American people are bewildered. They don’t know what to do. And most people are not interested in civil war. This is all nonsense. People say, well, we’re going to have a civil war.
12:24 Nobody wants to do that. I haven’t seen any evidence for that at all. What they would like to see is the rule of law is reestablished. They’d like to see laws enforced. They’d like to see criminals punished, like to see the border secured.
12:38 They’d like to see free and fair elections in most cases. All of these things are very simple straightforward requests, but they’re not getting much support out of Washington for any of it.
12:49 Brian Rose: Another one of the observations Tucker made was that we’re not as divided as we’re being told that we are on all of our social networks. And Tucker says, if you look at America through your phone, then there is. We’re on the edge of civil war.
13:02 But he’s gone now to 13 cities across all swaths of America. And he came up with a completely opposite observation that actually, everybody really wants the same things. They want to raise their families. They want the fundamentals that the United States was founded on to stay the same. They want peace.
13:21 They want prosperity. It’s nothing like what we’re being sold on our socials. Is that ultimately that aim of this globalist to create that division, to create all of that so it’s kind of easier to control for their agenda?
13:36 Douglas Macgregor: Well, if you want to transform us into an amorphous mass of consumers who are willing to make ourselves dependent upon the largess of big government, and I think that’s really what the so-called globalists would like, while at the same time, the real wealth is concentrated in the hands of very few people, they are certainly doing a good job of building that structure right now.
14:01 Are they going to be successful? The question is, how much more do Americans take before they finally say enough? You mentioned earlier, we’re within 40, 45 days of an election. I hear people all the time say, well, you know, I don’t like so-and-so, I don’t like so-and-so. You know, I like or don’t like someone.
14:21 But many of them are also saying, what evidence is there that, regardless of who is elected, that anything will fundamentally change? That’s the real question. You know, we have an interest payment on the debt now that is larger than the national defense budget. We have failing infrastructure. No one questions whether or not our educational system is failing.
14:45 Everybody knows it is. And everybody knows that education needs to provide a path to employment. Well, that’s very different from the way we educate. You know, we’ve been educating people to go to college, and then they spend four years at college and they come out and people say, what did you learn? And the answer is usually, well, all these interesting things, but nothing that’s going to get me paid.
15:09 So, you know, everything is about to change in the United States. But I don’t think it’s going to change because of an election. I think it’s going to change because the population has reached a saturation point and is demanding fundamental change. And I don’t think either of the two parties right now is really in touch with that reality.
15:30 Brian Rose: You know, for the entire year, Colonel, you have been telling us that we might not make it to the election itself.
15:37 And I didn’t really understand what you were talking about. Since the last time we spoke, there’s been not only one, but two assassinations on President Trump. What do you make of that? What do you make of the last 90 days in this race and the reaction or lack of reaction thereof?
15:58 Douglas Macgregor: Well, let’s look at this so-called first assassination attempt.
16:03 And I have not studied it in great detail, but like most Americans, I’m very suspicious of the attempts underway to clarify what actually happened. And here we have this young man who comes out of nowhere, who’s obviously troubled. He shows up in broad daylight, takes up a position on top of a roof, and then supposedly takes a shot at the president. And supposedly that nearly kills the president and this from a young man who could not hit water falling out of a boat.
16:37 Then there are wild shots fired into the crowd. Within a couple of seconds, this young man is killed. Within a few days, his body disappears and is cremated. You can’t make this stuff up. And I look at that assassination attempt and I find it difficult to believe that he fired that round that grays the president’s cheek.
17:03 I also find it hard to believe that the intention was to kill the president because frankly, if you had a professional assassin out there who fired that round, there would have been another round within a second that would have gone straight through the president’s temple. But there was no second round. Suddenly there’s wild firing into the crowd. Was this meant to frighten the president? Was this meant to scare the Trump campaign?
17:29 I have no idea. So I have more questions and answers and then you go to this thing that happened in-
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18:29 Douglas Macgregor: I guess on the golf course in Florida, and you’ve got to ask yourself, this man was there for 12 hours with all this equipment, waiting, I just have enormous difficulty with all of this. And now people are saying, well, how did they find out?
18:49 People are accusing the Department of Homeland Security or the Justice Department or whoever of leaking information, who knows? I think that the nation looks at this and is stunned. The average American is saying, what’s happened to us? Nothing works. Everything is corrupted.
19:09 We can’t trust anything that is said. And then of course you have the problem with freedom of speech, which is fundamental to us. And if you raise too many questions, if you question what the current government wants to do overseas or here, you’re being tarred as some sort of criminal as someone who is a fascist or pick your epithet. It doesn’t make any difference. It’s a very strange environment.
19:38 So I can’t help but wonder whether or not we are going to get to that election and whether or not it’s actually going to come off and produce anything. But I think that’s what a lot of Americans are looking at.
19:52 Brian Rose: What do you think will be worse for fallout if Harris wins or Trump wins? Because neither side is going to be satisfied and both sides are going to, I think, put up hell for months afterwards. How do you think that happens?
20:06 Because one of them is going to, quote unquote, win. What do you expect to happen? And is it going to be, quote unquote, worse one way or the other?
20:14 Douglas Macgregor: You know, it’s hard to tell right now. I mean, I guess one good piece of news is it happens in the winter.
20:20 And that means it’s cold and most people will stay home and not go outside and do stupid things. On the other hand, you know, you’re raising a very valid question. Will anybody be satisfied with the result? I don’t know. I mean, we have a few examples in history where there were compromises reached, where you ended up with a president from one party and a vice president from another.
20:44 We had a problem in 1876. It looked as though the nation could descend once again into civil war. And there was a compromise reach where President Grant ended the union occupation of the South. We had the U.S. Army down there, ended that occupation, ended what we called reconstruction.
21:03 And the Democrats in return said, all right, then we’ll accept your president, your Republican president. But in reality, the Republican candidate really hadn’t won. And you had people standing around who had fought in the civil war said we’re not going to allow the Democrats to win at the ballot box, but they could not win on the battlefield. So I mean, we’ve been through some of these things in the past. Can we get through this?
21:29 I hope so. I don’t know. And then of course, you have the wars overseas that are headed in very dangerous directions right now in my judgment. And we haven’t even talked about this perilous financial system that no one really addresses very much. And the solution is always the same, create more money.
21:51 But creating more money is becoming difficult because we had this thing called BRICS now emerging, which is developing very rapidly into an alternative to the US dominated global financial system. And I think the global South, along with the principal BRICS members are all fed up with us. Americans don’t understand how often and how frequently we have sanctioned other people’s economies and countries. They don’t understand how we have weaponized the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in order to impose our will.
22:30 So I think there are a lot of things happening that Americans have no idea why. And they’re really frustrated because no one is explaining anything to them. What they’re hearing instead is, well, vote for me, I’m America first. Well, if you’re really America first, get us out of Ukraine and put an end to this nonsense in the Middle East that risks metastasizing into a regional conflict that frankly, no one is going to win. It’ll be disastrous for everyone, but no one seems to be remotely interested in that.
23:06 And then you have the open borders issue. Well, if you’re gonna close the borders, you might as well get ready for a war inside the United States. Not only it won’t be a civil war, per se, it’ll be a war against the drug cartels because once you cut off the drugs, you’re gonna have lots of unhappy drug mafias in Mexico, Central America, and inside the United States. We’re gonna want to reopen these borders in order to sustain their sales and income. We got a lot of things out there that people don’t understand right now.
23:38 So I think we’re frankly looking in the wrong direction. And at the same time, you have people that are saying, well, elect so-and-so, elect Donald Trump or someone else and that person will save us. And one of the things I keep trying to tell Americans is stop waiting around for someone to save you. You’ve got to save yourselves. You have to become informed.
24:00 You have to act accordingly. That’s difficult because Americans, let’s face it, most Americans don’t pay very much attention to what happens beyond their borders, number one.
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25:09 Douglas Macgregor: And they don’t even pay very much attention to what happens in the neighboring town or city. They’re really very locally focused. I mean, that’s not a bad thing, by the way. I see that as inherently positive.
25:22 We used to regard that as positive. But now, unfortunately, we can’t afford to do that any longer.
25:28 Brian Rose: You mentioned that the people in Washington are becoming wealthier and wealthier with these policies, probably usually linked to the defense contracts that are getting printed by sending things overseas. I think someone told me recently on an episode that the highest concentration of millionaires in the world as a city, which shocked me, it wasn’t Silicon Valley, it wasn’t Tehran, it was DC.
25:51 And now Trump is assembling this team of Elon Musk to cut back on government excess, Bobby Kennedy to go in and clean out some of these departments. Do you think that because this machine of money-making is so big, will it find some way to stop that from happening?
26:12 Douglas Macgregor: They’re certainly gonna try very hard. But the question is, does the financial engine seize up? In other words, this is the question everybody doesn’t really want to answer.
26:25 Who was it? Ben Stein said, everything tends to go on until it can’t. In other words, things run to the point where they can’t run anymore. I think that’s where we are with the financial system, with our economy, with the government. When you’re dealing with these interest rates that are being artificially suppressed, how much longer can that go on?
26:46 But nobody really wants to go into that and discuss it. No one wants to consider the possibility that we really do have to deal with debt. We keep sort of shoving that aside. I guess nothing’s going to happen until it does. And I think a lot of people are gonna be shocked at just what ultimately occurs.
27:07 We talk about this thing called the petrodollar. You eliminate the petrodollar and the reserve currency is in a lot of danger. And suddenly, we find that gold and silver and these other precious metals are pouring into other countries around the world, whether it’s China, India, Russia, whatever. All of these things are sort of being brushed aside or glossed over. And now you’re asking the right questions and I don’t have good answers except to point out that I think we’re on the road to Armageddon.
27:41 Not necessarily nuclear Armageddon, but financial Armageddon. And that may ultimately overwhelm us.
27:47 Brian Rose: Colonel, when it comes to immigration, how much do you think that will affect the vote for the next president of the United States? I actually had Rudy Giuliani here in my studio a few weeks ago. And he was the first person ever that described to me in detail some of the election fraud that went on last time and how he couldn’t even get these cases heard.
28:10 He was a very accomplished attorney for many, many years. And he said some of the precedents he had never even heard of in his legal career of these cases not even coming to court whatsoever. Now, I was recently in California, Colonel, and my dad told me that anybody can walk into the DMV and get a driver’s license, regardless of proof of citizenship. And you’re automatically added to be able to vote. Now, people say, oh, it’s illegal to do that and nobody would dare doing that.
28:38 But it seemed to me that anyone can then go vote without any proof of citizenship. Now, you might threaten to them that that’s a felony and you’re gonna be in big trouble, but it shocked me that it was even a possibility without proving citizenship. Now, I don’t know the details in the other states. Is this something that you think could affect this election, the recent immigration influx?
29:01 Douglas Macgregor: Oh, absolutely, no question about it.
29:03 And in those states that we refer to casually as blue, in other words, as democratic states, I think we have to expect hundreds of thousands of people that are not citizens to vote. There will be no effort to stop that at all. On the contrary, I think you’re also gonna see a big push to confer citizenship on people very rapidly as well. This is why the republic is on its last legs. I’m working on a book right now.
29:34 And the title of the book is, you know, The Next American Republic. Because all of these things have to be addressed if we’re going to survive. And right now we have this split in the country between those who want the laws enforced and obeyed and those who don’t. And if you raise this issue and you say, well, what is wrong with demanding that someone prove their citizenship? Well, then you’re a racist.
30:03 But I can tell you without hesitation that large numbers of people who are not white, who are of other races feel exactly that way. They don’t understand it. Why are we not enforcing our own laws? This is, we’re at the end of this sort of long period of complacency when we took everything for granted. In other words, when we actually started exporting much of our manufacturing base in the late eighties under Reagan, where a few people even noticed.
30:37 Then it became acute in the nineties and people began to panic. But then we were distracted in the first sort of 20 years of this century by other events. No one has ever come to terms with reality that this was a long-term project to hollow us out. Who hollowed us out? Who betrayed American workers?
30:56 Well, it wasn’t the Chinese. It wasn’t the Indians or the Melees or anybody else. We did it to ourselves. Well, who is we? Well, this is the ruling class, right?
31:08 The billionaires, the oligarchs, they’ve done it. This hasn’t completely sunk in yet, but we’re getting there. And people say, well, when do you think something will happen? And my standard comment is things were very bad in France for a long time, but until the population of Paris could not afford to buy bread, there was no revolution. That’s a daunting, daunting comparison in history there.
31:35 Brian Rose: Moving overseas, what are your thoughts on the relationship with Putin and where he is right now? He recently made some comment where I think as he was laughing, he endorsed Harris for presidency. I also still wonder what the Russians really think of America when they look at kind of some of the decisions they make, or if they even can understand what we’re all about. Do you believe that even the White House is now worried they might’ve pushed this too far?
32:03 Where do you think Putin is as far as head space? We’ve also got hypersonic missiles that are on the table. What are your thoughts there, Colonel?
32:13 Douglas Macgregor: I think there’s a realization in the White House that they’ve put everything at risk. The survival of NATO, the European Union, all of these things are at risk of going under.
32:24 In fact, I predicted in January of 2022 that if the Russians went in and we responded with great hostility and threats of war, that ultimately it would result in the destruction of NATO. And I think that’s underway. You also have this globalist class that has emerged in the post-war era that is on the verge of being removed from office. It’s gonna take a little longer, but I think the handwriting is on the wall, certainly in Germany. I think to some extent in France, Italy.
32:57 I can’t speak for Great Britain right now. I’m not sure what’s happening there, but I think there’s a great deal of tension there as well. So I think there is an awareness that we pushed this too far. Secondly, we’re bluffing, which is always a bad thing. We’re pretending that we are the country of 1991, that we have overwhelming military power, that we control events, we don’t.
33:25 And Russia that began this process with a relatively weak army, a small defense establishment by our standards, now has an enormous military establishment that’s quite capable. The good news for us, I think, is that Vladimir Putin is absolutely opposed to war with NATO or the United States. And he has also gone all over the Middle East and privately counseled everyone there who listens to him not to overreact to Israel. Now, can that go on much longer? Well, it’s hard to tell.
34:00 I think in Ukraine, his counsel is still to exercise patience and restraint on the assumption that the governments in Berlin will fall and probably also Paris and clearly also in Washington. And I think he’s saying, we are gonna get something new after the election. And I think the Russians don’t understand our system. And I don’t blame them. I don’t think most Europeans understand us either.
34:28 But I think he’s aware that whoever is elected the day after the election, there will be a different world. And there will be a willingness to do things differently. We’re in this unfortunate sort of stage, pre-election stage when no one wants to say very much of anything substantively. As anyone stood up and said, it’s in the interest of the American people that immigration be halted until we can find out who’s actually in our country. We know that at least 52 million people are living inside the United States who were not born in the United States.
35:04 Well, you would say under those circumstances, we’ve got to close it off, stop. You got to find out who’s here. No one will stand up and say that. But privately, I hear that all the time in Washington, DC. People actually privately say, we don’t know who’s here.
35:19 We need to find out. So that’s one example. When you start talking about the events in Ukraine, there’s a readiness to admit privately, Americans don’t want to be involved in a war with Russia in Ukraine. But no one wants to stand up and say, you know, we had no strategy when we began this. We still have no strategy.
35:39 We have no attainable objectives. Everything we said we were going to do has failed. And our desire to destroy Russia, to harm it, and then ultimately to fragment it, divide it, destroy it, has no chance of happening. We, on the other hand, are in a lot of trouble. No one wants to stand up and say that, but privately, people are beginning to figure it out.
36:01 So I think Putin is right. He’s saying, well, let’s press ahead, but let’s not overreact. Because he doesn’t want to go to war, and he figures if I cross the Niempa River right now and march west, which is what a lot of Russians want. I mean, public opinion in Russia is rabidly anti-Western now. They say, let’s go all the way to the Polish border and end this thing once and for all.
36:28 He doesn’t want to do that. He wants to come up with an Austrian style solution for Ukraine. He still thinks that’s achievable. And he wants to exercise patience. He wants to get through the election cycle.
36:39 And then hopefully something new will occur and he’ll have a better shot at ending it. He doesn’t want a war. Iran doesn’t want a war in the Middle East. Nobody in the Middle East wants a war right now except the populations, the Turkish population, the Arab populations, they are furious. They want to kill every Israeli on the planet, but not the governments, because they see all of this as destructive and unnecessary.
37:08 So it’s a strange set of circumstances, but I do think inside the White House, it’s understood. But no courageous, intelligent decisions can possibly be made before the election.
37:21 Brian Rose: Do you think Putin is hoping or banking on Trump getting elected and that does he believe that that war can be resolved quickly if Trump is the next president?
37:32 Douglas Macgregor: I don’t know that he believes that. I think his experience with Donald Trump is as follows, and he said this publicly.
37:40 Yes, I like Donald Trump. Donald Trump says many things, but he doesn’t deliver. And there’s no reason why we should bank heavily on him. If he’s banking on anything, I think he’s banking on the aftermath of the election. In other words, that once this is behind us, we will have to move in new directions whether we like it or not.
38:02 And that will create opportunities for peace and stability in Eastern Europe. And he also sees the potential for changes even in a government like Poland, where the Polish public opinion is swinging very much against this war in Ukraine. And that’s very important, and he knows that. Again, the population in Europe, at least as far as I can tell, is not interested in going to war with Russia. This is another elite consensus that is divorced from reality.
38:32 Brian Rose: Yeah, definitely. All right, moving to more recent events in the Middle East. I think over the weekend, over the past few days, we saw this detonation of these Pedro devices and then these walkie-talkie devices that seemed to protract some very surgical destruction of the Hezbollah senior elites. Now, on top of that, Israel’s now sent in missile strikes. I think there’s 180 dead, and now China has asked for its citizens to leave Israel.
39:05 Colonel, this seems like it’s heating up in a significant way. Can you dissect maybe some of the events of the past seven days, why they happened, maybe why they happened now, and what do you think is really going on here?
39:22 Douglas Macgregor: In order for Prime Minister Netanyahu and his government to quote-unquote be successful in their minds, the war has to expand, and the United States must be drawn into it. So that has been on the table, I would say, for the last eight or nine months.
39:42 He now has essentially what he wanted. We have assembled thousands of aircraft, bombers. We have hundreds of ships, multiple carrier battle groups all over the place. And we have actually privately communicated to him as far as I can tell in the Department of Defense saying, look, if you’re gonna do this, you better get going because we cannot maintain all these forces indefinitely floating at sea or sitting around in bases inside or around the Middle East.
40:13 Either do it or don’t. So I think what you’re seeing now is the beginning of do
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41:13 Douglas Macgregor: it. Now, what happened with Hezbollah? First of all, I don’t think that this had nearly the effect on Hezbollah that is popular, popularized in the West. A lot of these people may have had some connection to Hezbollah, but it looks like they’ve harmed lots of civilian operatives as opposed to real fighters. And there’s always this assumption that if you get a few senior people, that that’s going to cripple the organization.
41:43 This was the assumption that Hitler made in 1941 before they went into Russia, that the Soviet armed forces had been crippled because thousands of officers had been killed. Well, it certainly had an effect, but not quite what he had hoped for. In fact, what you usually end up seeing, new blood surfaces, new people come up through the ranks. They turn out to frequently be better than who was there to begin with. So I don’t think that it had the desired effect.
42:10 What it did is it’s probably hardened the hearts and attitudes of people around the world towards Israel because they see this as tantamount to a war crime. Of course, you know, when people say, do you think this is a war crime? I said, well, I’ve been to war and war is a crime. So, you know, you can mince words on this, but war is all about killing and maiming and destroying. So the Israelis are now interested in dragging us in.
42:39 How do they get the United States involved? Since we are all sitting there waiting to attack. Well, you’ve got to go into Lebanon. If you don’t go into Lebanon, and I mean on the ground, you’re not gonna get the Iranians to engage. Hezbollah is suffered, but Hezbollah is still in very strong shape.
42:59 It has enormous missiles and rockets in its arsenal. Its fighters are battle hardened. It’s ready to fight. So you can drop bombs on it to your heart’s content, but the only way to really fight and win against Hezbollah is to go in on the ground. Now the Israelis have a problem.
43:18 They don’t have a very large ground force. Most of their reservists are now tied down in Gaza and on the West Bank. And that’s very dangerous because in Jordan and Egypt, those governments are hanging on by a thread. Abdullah’s government walked out on him. Sisi, I think is scheduled for removal.
43:35 It’s just a question of when. We continue to bribe him and Abdullah and everybody else in the region to stay out, but the population’s one action. So you’ve got about 11.2 million Palestinians living in Jordan. What’s to stop them from engaging with the West Bank? So it’s a very dangerous situation that Israel is in and they’ve moved all their regular troops, their best troops north to deal with Lebanon.
44:03 But they’re not fools. If they take heavy casualties as they have in the past when they went into Saudi and Lebanon, they’re not going to continue north. They’re going to back up. And I think when that happens, they’re going to turn to us and say, you’ve got to help us. What are you going to do now?
44:21 In other words, they have to go into Lebanon and they have to take losses and they have to be weakened before we will engage. And at that point, what does Iran do? Does Iran sit quietly or does Iran feel compelled to intervene and support Hezbollah? I don’t know the exact answer, but I think moving in on the ground into Lebanon is the strategic game changer in the region. That’s when you have a very high probability of engaging us and Iran in the war.
44:53 Then it becomes a regional war. And anything is possible at that stage. Now, there are thousands of Russians on the ground in Iran building air and missile defenses. That’s not because the Iranians can’t do it. They have a lot of very well-trained and intelligent people, but they’re trying to do things very, very rapidly that would have otherwise taken years.
45:15 They also have given the Iranians some additional weaponry. Certainly they have access to hypersonic missiles. And if we’ve learned anything, a hypersonic missile that flies at least 4,500 miles per hour, all the way up to 7,600 miles per hour, cannot be shot down. We know that. How many missiles do they have and how many of these can they fire and what will they target?
45:40 Well, we know that Hezbollah has managed to fly its unmanned aircraft all over Israel. They have taken extensive footage so they know where everything is. So do the Iranians. Iranians have satellites and access to satellites. And I think the Russians are gonna provide them with the data just as we provided exceptional data to both the Ukrainians and to the Israelis.
46:05 So one wonders, how do you get through this without a major war? I’m not sure we can. Something’s going to go wrong. Something is going to blow up on our faces. And I don’t know what that means for us.
46:20 I’m very worried, I’ll be frank with you, I’m most concerned about the 7,000 to 10,000 U.S. soldiers on the ground in Iraq, in Syria, in Jordan. We don’t have the means to evacuate severely wounded quickly. We don’t have the means to get them out of where they are quickly. So if this blows up, how many of those soldiers do we lose?
46:47 They’ve already come under attack in Northeastern Syria. We’re not being told how many were killed or wounded. Those numbers are suppressed. Just as the Israelis are suppressing news, our news media suppresses this kind of information. But I’m very worried about them.
47:04 And if the American people discover that we have lost significant numbers of American soldiers because they’re sitting there like bait, there’s gonna be hell to pay here in the United States. When I was in the Pentagon briefly, I asked at the time, because President Trump was interested in getting out of Iraq and Syria, I asked at the time, what are we doing there? And they said, well, we’re there to deter Iran. I said, well, how’s that work? Has it made any difference to the Iraqi militias or to the Syrian militias and the rest of these people?
47:40 And they said, well, no, no, well, they’re a tripwire. I said, a tripwire for what? To bring us into war. Well, the tripwires are risky because they could be exterminated very quickly. And if that happens, I think there’ll be people that will say, well, we have to take action, but there are gonna be a lot of other people who are gonna say, what were they doing there to begin with?
48:06 Why were we there? What are we defending that we can’t live without? And somebody said to me in the building, well, we have to be there as early warning for the Israelis. And I laughed in his face, having been Israel many times. If there’s one government, one military organization that knows more about what’s happening in the Middle East than anybody else in the world, it’s the Israelis.
48:26 Now, that doesn’t mean they can’t make mistakes and they have, they’ve miscalculated. I think strategically right now, they’re in trouble. But the point is the notion that a few thousand American soldiers are going to somehow or another provide early warning or deter somebody is absurd, it’s not gonna happen. So that’s my greatest concern. What do we do about these thousands of troops that are at very, very severe risk of losing their lives?
48:50 And then I think we’re going to watch as Hezbollah is already doing, if you look at what’s happening in Haifa right now in Tel Aviv, they can destroy those cities in short order. They’ll burn everything down. Hezbollah has actually said they’ll move into Galilee, they’ll invade Israel if the Israelis try to go into southern Lebanon. And now we haven’t even talked about Iran and what’s at their disposal. And then people point out, well, the Israelis have nuclear weapons.
49:17 Well, that’s true. And what happens if they use one?
49:25 Whatever legitimacy they may have ever had, I think at that point will be completely gone. That’s the danger. Israel is the legacy of the Second World War. It’s a legacy of the Holocaust. So many of us, I’m one of them, always viewed Israel as this morally righteous place it deserves to exist.
49:50 It has to set an example. It has to be more than most states. Well, if you use this nuclear weapon, whatever reputation for goodness or morality they may have ever had is gone. And the other thing is that you then legitimate the use of nuclear weapons against yourself. And anybody who doesn’t think that nuclear weapons could arrive in short order in the hands of Israel’s enemies is foolish.
50:18 The Pakistanis have always offered the nuclear weapons to the Turks because they’re both largely Sunni Muslims. And I don’t know what the Iranians would do, but I think the Iranians could then decide that they have no choice. They’ve got to actually finish the job and build the weapon. So it’s a terrible situation and we don’t have anybody leading us anywhere that makes sense. No one has stepped forward as you know, and if you go back to Eisenhower, go Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, all of these presidents, Carter, everybody intervened at some point in time to say enough.
51:03 Let’s look for another way out of this. There’s nobody doing that now. And it looks like Mr. Netanyahu is firmly in command of the US armed forces, at least those that are poised to attack in the Middle East. It’s very dangerous.
51:19 Brian Rose: Yeah, and he’s running that playbook that is in his best interest, which is like you said, to engage Hezbollah to keep the conflict going. And he’s doing it probably at the perfect time, 40 some days before an election, because post election, especially with a Trump victory, he’s gonna have to get by in. But if there’s engagement already, maybe it’ll be harder to undo that even if Trump does get in. And Trump has said before, look, they better get this finished soon.
51:47 I think that was his communication there. But like you said, Netanyahu seems to be in charge of everything and he’s running that playbook in the perfect manner. And in that sense, even if Trump does get elected, it’s probably difficult for him to undo this start January 20th, because that’s months and months from now will involve a lot more parties and maybe a lot more damage that’s irreversible at that point.
52:13 Douglas Macgregor: Well, the acme of national strategy, particularly national military strategy, is that your first priority is the preservation of your state and the state’s power.
52:23 I think Netanyahu is cast that aside. I think he’s running the risk that he could lose everything. Israel might not survive this depending upon what happens now in Lebanon and the spreading of this conflict. And I don’t hear enough people raise that issue. You know, we were very fortunate in the Second World War because we were sufficiently remote that our principal opponents couldn’t touch us.
52:50 And even in the Cold War, with mutual assured destruction, plus the fact that I don’t think the Soviet Union was ever quite as strong as we said it was. And it had suffered grievously during the Second World War. And so the appetite for more of it was really not there. So we escaped a lot of this. He is in a position where he cannot escape consequences geographically.
53:18 And we can do many things, but I’m not sure we could ensure the survival of that state if the regional actors decide to destroy it. And why this never comes up for discussion, I don’t understand.
53:30 Brian Rose: Colonel, there’s one major global power that we’ve not even mentioned in this conversation, and that’s China. Do you think they are happy to just sit back and watch all of this happen and play out? Because ultimately everything going on now is in their interests?
53:47 Or do you think they’ve got some other levers to pull or buttons to push here?
53:52 Douglas Macgregor: Well, if you look at the Chinese historically, and I mean this in all sincerity, the Chinese are largely disinterested in going to war. The Chinese are preeminently about business. You know, I keep laughing every time somebody says, well, the Chinese Communist Party said the following. Come on, give me a break.
54:11 There aren’t any communists in China. These people are the biggest capitalists in the history of mankind. The Chinese are not interested in a war at all. Their great fear is that the oil and natural gas and other things are gonna be cut off from the Persian Gulf. We’ve already seen what’s happened to the Suez Canal because we’re unable to maintain that.
54:32 What happens when the Straits and Formus are closed? They’re not interested in a war at all. They would very much like to see peace. They actually worked very hard to broker agreements between Iran and Saudi Arabia and others because they have an interest in building this Belt and Road system. And part of that, of course, is with Russia.
54:52 It goes from the Indian Ocean on the coast of Southern Iran, up through the Caucasus, through Azerbaijan and Armenia and down into Russia that could conceivably avoid the transport of anything through the Suez. Remember, we built the Suez to avoid rounding the Cape of Africa. Now we’re talking about a Belt and Road system that could avoid using the Persian Gulf and the Suez Canal completely. And the Saudis are now invested in this as well. They’ve been brought on board.
55:27 No, I think when you look at Moscow and Beijing, they’re very focused on economic infrastructure and prosperity and building that. We’re the ones that are relying overwhelmingly on military power to bully our way into what we think we want. And we regard their success in terms of economic prosperity as a threat to us. Now, my own view is that that’s a dumb idea. We should be just as interested in economic prosperity as they are.
55:57 But I don’t see much evidence for that right now. So I think the Chinese would very much like this whole thing to go away. Now, what happens if it doesn’t? Well, then I think they’re going to, they will engage, not militarily initially, but from behind, they’ll try to support Iran, they’ll support Russia, they’ll support Turkey, they’ll support all the various actors. And they’ll also promise them aid and assistance in rebuilding whatever is destroyed as a result of the war.
56:24 But the Chinese Navy for all the attention showered on it is really not in a position to operate that far from China and challenge us. About a third of the Chinese Navy, some people would say even larger amounts to a coast guard. So I think the answer to your question is the Chinese don’t want any of this to happen, but they will back everybody else who’s in it against us and against Israel. Because if the Chinese keep business as usual and you project out 20, 30, 40, 50 years, their GDP starts to become multiples of the United States.
57:01 So for them, business as usual has just huge ramifications for them and they would prefer that. Well, you have historians undoubtedly in your audience and anybody who has studied world history knows that for most of the last, certainly 2000 years, some people would say for the last 3000, China has been the richest country in the world. That’s why everybody invaded it. That’s why the Mongols, the Manchus, the Huns, Uyghurs, all these people have invaded China to steal what they could not produce.
57:38 So I don’t understand why people are so shocked by the reality that China once again for reasons of population and positioning in the world geographically are poised to be the richest country in the world again. I don’t see that as a danger to us. I just think it’s something that we can work with. But again, this is not a popular view in Washington. They look at what you’ve described and they see this as inherently dangerous.
58:08 Now, the interesting thing is that China’s number one trading partner right now is Germany and the Germans have to climb out of this terrible, terrible chasm that they’ve dug for themselves in this stupid war in Ukraine. How are they gonna get out of it? I think the Chinese are gonna play a role in that. Ultimately, once they get rid of this government, they’re gonna restore relations with Russia. They have an interest in doing so.
58:36 That’s gonna be a game changer in Europe. And we’re all going to stand around and say, well, this is the worst thing that could happen, the Russians and the Germans. Well, you should have thought about that before you engaged in this stupid policy. But that’s where we are. People are foolish and they’ll blame everything on everyone but ourselves.
59:00 Brian Rose: Colonel, I wanna close with asking you one final question about an enemy we haven’t spoken of. And this one could be an enemy of all parties we discussed. And that’s artificial intelligence. Do you think this is something that can threaten the human condition or all of humanity potentially equally in the next three to five to 10 years and one that we’re not paying enough attention to?
59:24 Douglas Macgregor: I think we need to be careful with these terms, artificial intelligence.
59:28 People focus on intelligence and tend to miss the artificial part. We are not yet at the point where you can replicate human intelligence in terms of reasoning and understanding. Now, that doesn’t mean that at some point it could not be achieved. I’m not prepared to say that’s impossible. Although there are many scientists who insist it is impossible, who knows?
59:52 AI can be destructive. The Israelis have employed AI in order to find targets. It hasn’t worked very well. AI is what you get out is a function of what you put into it. You’re still dealing with algorithms and multivariate equations.
1:00:12 So it is dangerous, but on the other hand, it’s not the solution to our problems either. I think it’s with us permanently. We’re gonna see it used in many ways that can be positive, but I don’t see it as the Frankenstein’s monster at this point. In other words, everyone, when you say artificial intelligence, and I’m sure you’re aware of this, they think of HAL, the computer in 2001. Well, we’re not near HAL at all.
1:00:40 That’s a long, long, long way off in the distance, I think. So I don’t see this as a life or death for us. I think it is gonna be on the whole more positive than negative. But if you employ it, as the Israelis have in places like Gaza, and I’m told they’re doing the same thing in Southern Lebanon, you may not get the results you want. Things may actually turn out disastrously for you.
1:01:05 So that’s the best I could do for you. And I admit that when I was a cadet at West Point, I was not someone that enjoyed thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, and all these other things. I went to entropy fairly early when it came to that sort of thing. So I’m glad I survived it, but I didn’t wanna study it. But I’m sure you can bring on people that are better informed than I am on this subject.
1:01:30 Brian Rose: Yeah, I took thermodynamics at MIT in 1990, and it kicked my butt, that’s for sure. Some tough concepts there. Colonel, can you tell us a little bit more about the book? Do we have a title yet, or when it’s gonna come out, or how people can pre-order, or a little more about it?
1:01:45 Douglas Macgregor: Well, I’m writing it, and it’s taking time, and the title that I’ve selected for it is, you know, The Next American Republic.
1:01:51 My assumption is that we’re gonna go through something similar to what the French went through in the 50s. You know, we’re gonna have to have a new republic. And nobody really wants to go there. Everybody is very comfortable, wants to cling to the past, but I don’t think the past is sustainable. So the book is really trying to explore where do we go from here?
1:02:14 And I think if I can get this done and it comes out by the middle of next year, by then, we should have a glimpse of what the future holds. Because between now and I would say the summer of next year, a lot of things are going to change.
1:02:29 Brian Rose: I think you’re right. Colonel McGregor, thank you so much for your insights. Always incredible to really listen to you.
1:02:36 You’ve got incredible perspective, not just from a military standpoint, but also society at large. So we appreciate you. Perhaps we’ll help see you before the election, if not wishing you all the best there in the United States.
1:02:48 Douglas Macgregor: My best to you as well. Thanks very much.
1:02:50 Brian Rose: All right, thank you. And thanks to everybody at London Real. We’ll see you next time, take care.
