Col Douglas Macgregor LIVE on the Daniel Davis Deep Dive - Feb 10, 2026
Col. Douglas Macgregor warns Trump’s Iran strike plans with Netanyahu risk prolonged conflict due to Iran’s Russian S-300s and Chinese HQ-9-B missiles, which could neutralize 70–80% of U.S./Israeli forces. Pro-Israel advocates like Lindsey Graham push for action, but Epstein leaks may destabilize Trump’s political survival. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s war profiteering—10 new weapons export centers—and NATO’s stagnation expose Trump’s broken "America First" promises, fueling base frustration while Cold War-era think tanks block peace. His incremental foreign policy could backfire, escalating clashes with Russia and China. [Automatically generated summary]
Benjamin Netanyahu recently left Israel just hours ago, heading to the United States, where he'll land here in a little bit.
And tomorrow we'll have a very important meeting with Donald Trump, which could make the war and peace decision that we've been watching for for a long time.
A lot of things happened.
The last time he was in town in December, things happened almost immediately after that meeting.
Everybody's going to be watching to see if that happens this time.
We've had a lot of negotiations in the region, trying to find out if there's any room for any kind of a negotiated settlement.
At the same time, there's also negotiations going on between the Russian and the Ukraine war, or is there?
Is it actually just kind of looking to kick the can down the road?
Are either one of these negotiation sessions actually trying to find an end to the conflict, or are we just setting ourselves up for yet more?
You make the decision.
But try to figure out what this is and to try to answer those questions today.
We have the ever-popular Colonel Douglas McGregor, defense and foreign policy analyst, former secretary or advisor to the Secretary of Defense.
I wish you were actually present, Secretary of Defense, but that's for another day.
And a highly decorated combat veteran, friend of the show, Doug, welcome back as always.
Thanks, Dan.
Well, look, let's just jump right into this because I just, and I was telling you this a little bit before we came on the air here.
I just, the grin on Netanyahu's face as he was talking to reporters before he left to get on the plane to fly over to the United States, it just kind of set my teeth on edge.
We'll see what you think.
Here's what he said to his audience just before getting on the plane.
Seventh Trip, Excessive Expenditure00:08:06
Okay, President Trump has only been in office for 13 months.
This is the seventh trip that he's made here, and Trump already made one over there.
So, I mean, that seems a little excessive.
What do you make of that?
Not if you're President Netanyahu and you're committed to the Greater Israel Project.
It makes perfect sense.
You want to keep the United States and President Trump focused on what's really important.
And to them, what's really important is the Greater Israel Project.
That involves the destruction of Iran, expansion into Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and ultimately Egypt.
So, no, it's not surprising in the least.
Well, it's certainly not surprising from Benjamin Netanyahu's point of view, but in the event that we actually have an America first President Trump who campaigned on that, and look, everybody even said during the campaign that Israel was a close ally of the United States and a friend and all that kind of stuff.
But I mean, do you think that at any point, even the base of the MAGA will start to say, hey, this is a little too cozy?
Because you can see that Netanyahu and that was just buttering up Trump because he understands that Trump responds well to platitudes and to praise and public elevations, et cetera.
And he was just given all kinds of that.
Do you think that anybody on the American side will ever get that?
Or are we just going to be playing right in the hands of Netanyahu?
Well, let's set aside what Americans, you know, collectively think or don't think.
That's hard to know at this point.
I think what we need to understand is that when President Trump and the Congress are listening to Netanyahu, they understand they're not just listening to President Netanyahu.
They're listening to international Jewish capital.
In other words, the financial power that billionaires here and billionaires in Europe and other parts of the world represent.
And so they're going to pay close attention.
And they understand that all of them have been taking money for many, many years from this lobby called APAC, as well as other donors that are interested in the same thing.
And their job is to make the war happen.
So I don't think that's really the issue now.
The issue for President Trump is not, do I attack or not?
I think that decision is effectively made.
It's how do we do it?
What do we use?
How much do we use?
And a discussion of, you know, what ifs if this happens?
What do we do if that happens?
And what's the role that Israel is going to play?
I think Israel wants to finish off the people that live in Gaza.
I think Israel will have some action in Syria and Lebanon that they want to deal with.
So I, you know, I think there are a lot of things that will be under discussion, but there will also be this burden-sharing discussion of who's going to do the lion's share work of bombing and destroying Iran.
And, you know, it just boggles the mind to sit there and think that all those things you say are true, and they are self-evidently true.
That is by all accounts what's happening behind the scenes.
And then one would have to ask who benefits from this because only the wealthy people you just mentioned and certainly the state of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu personally, they benefit from this going on from this war, launching off or this attack here.
I think that they'll fail.
I think that it's a fool's errand.
I don't think that they'll succeed, but that is what they want.
But when you're talking about why is there even a conversation about the lion's share of anything falling to the United States, and it is not in our interest to have this war at all.
And I don't see anything, and you correct me if I'm wrong.
I don't even see any potential benefit for our country.
I do see us potentially losing troops and soldiers at the behest and for the purpose of that group of rich individuals and for Benjamin Netanyahu.
How does that work?
Well, the first point is that how much attention are Americans paying to all of this?
And you've got to take into consideration the psychological conditioning that's gone on for 30 years regarding Iran.
Americans have been propagandized to believe that Iran is the seed of all evil in the Middle East, that Iran is the source of instability, that tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost as a result of Iran, Iran, Iran.
Under those circumstances, you've got a lot of Americans who are going to say, sure, you know, I have no problem with that.
Let's just destroy Iran.
Sounds like a good idea.
I mean, there are plenty of Americans out there, particularly, Dan, in my generation.
You know, my generation has been going through this, certainly since you and I were in the deserts in 90 and 91.
They've signed on unconditionally for kill as many Muslims and Arabs and Iranians or anybody else that gets in the way.
They're all bad news.
So you've got the over 50 generation, or I would say the over 60 generation on your side.
Then as you move through the rest of the demographic breakdown of Americans, that's where it becomes less clear.
But I think much depends on how much damage is inflicted on us.
I think that's really important.
Very few Americans question the rationale for fighting communism in South Vietnam when we started.
And that general consensus lasted for about three years.
And after three years and the rise in losses and casualties, people began to say, wait a minute, what is really happening?
What have we actually done?
That's when people began to take the whole thing seriously.
So I think President Trump is interested in something that will be short, sharp, and decisive.
And I think we should talk about why that may not be the case, but I think that's what he wants because he knows politically that's a winner.
You attack, you do what you're going to do, and get it over with before anybody notices.
I think they had very high expectations of what they could do in Venezuela.
And the truth is that this little raid that we pulled off that captured Maduro and his wife, that was not the ultimate end goal of that campaign.
We had much bigger and more elaborate plans for Venezuela and exploiting its resources.
Those things are not happening.
And I think he's declared victory down there for the moment and moved on.
And I don't see much evidence that we're going to go back down there again because we can't win that given the size of the population, the geographical location and so forth.
So when it comes to Iran, we need to talk a little bit about what can we reasonably expect and what are we going to see.
That depends on factors over which, frankly, we don't have much control at this point.
There are a lot of questions.
And all we can do is hope that somebody's asking them and they're being honestly answered in the White House.
Now, let's look at it from a second from the Iranian perspective.
I've been asked by a number of folks on some other media outlets that I've been on.
They say, well, President Trump has said in the past, recent past, like three or four weeks ago, that when he was asked whether or not Iran would respond, because they're claiming they're going to hit all the American bases in the region, they're going to hit Israel, et cetera.
And he said, well, they said that last time and they didn't do it.
And they better not do it again because we'll show them what's what.
But from the Iranian perspective, I argue, but I'd like your view on this, that this is different because in those other occasions, we said, hey, this is a narrow focus.
We're going after your regime.
I'm sorry, we're going after your nuclear stockpile or we're going to hit this target and then that's it.
But this time we're signaling, we're going for your throat.
We're going for the regime.
So now then it seems like that their calculations would be different.
So how do you see the likely Iranian reaction, whatever kind of strike package is chosen?
It's very important that you make that statement up front.
And I agree with you.
Iran's Arsenal Threatens Fleet Defenses00:12:11
I think this operation may or may not have much to do with removing the regime.
In other words, if they can attack and cause the regime itself to fall apart, killing key members of it, then that's fine.
But the larger goal of this operation is to induce the disintegration of Iran.
Now, this is a tall order.
And let's pause for a minute and reflect a little bit on air campaigns.
You know, before we landed in Normandy, we went through two and a half, almost three years of air campaign against Germany.
You know, during World War II, the U.S. and British air forces actually lost 18,000 bombers trying to penetrate German air defenses.
Now, during the Kosovo air campaign that was conducted in 1999, we didn't lose outright any aircraft, but they did damage a lot of aircraft.
They did manage to shoot down a stealth aircraft, as we know.
They did a lot of damage to cruise missiles.
Many of those were successfully engaged and destroyed.
But the point is that the air campaign took 78 days.
Now, ultimately, the air campaign did not end the war.
What ended the war was Strogue Talbot, who flew to Moscow, persuaded the Russians to abandon their support for the Serbs in return for things about which I know almost nothing, but I'm sure a lot of money and aid and assistance.
Whether or not that ever happened is another question.
But the Serbs concluded that without Russian aid, they were not going to make it through the winter.
And anybody who spent time in the Balkans knows what the winter is like down there.
It's pretty rough.
So that's the Kosovo air campaign, 78 days.
Now, more important, during that entire time, we in the West, that is the United States, its NATO allies, were never able to degrade Serbian air defenses below 83%.
Now, those, remember, that was technology that, strictly speaking, was 1970s vintage.
So at the time, we were not up against state-of-the-art air defenses by any means.
So if 78 days could not degrade that air defense below 83%, that brings us to the question of what can the Iranians do.
Now, the last time around, the Iranians thought they had prepared adequately their air defenses for action against the Israelis and the United States.
As it turned out, that was not the case.
And I think I mentioned this before, that when Pashkinian Pashkian went to Moscow to see President Putin after the war, or that I don't want to call it a war, but the 12 days of trading missile shots, President Putin said to him, and most people didn't pick it up, but said welcomed him and said, you know, you should have let us help you.
The Iranians apparently did not allow the Russians to help them to the extent that the Russians wanted to.
Well, I think that's changed.
So I would assume that the S-300, I guess they don't have an S-400 system, and whatever similar Russian systems exist will be pretty well integrated and as effective as they can be.
However, there's something else that they've got now.
It's called the HQ-9-B Chinese Air Defense System.
This is now part of the Iranian air defense complex.
Now, we don't know how well it will perform, but we know a little bit about it.
It's a long-range air defense missile.
It has a vertical launch system capable of engaging targets at ranges of 250 kilometers and altitudes of up to 50 kilometers.
So this is a significant improvement in its engagement envelope.
And it's reportedly capable of engaging so-called low-observable targets or stealth aircraft and missiles and defeating electronic countermeasures.
So what I'm trying to get across is whatever you think you're going to do, you have to take into account the possibility that you get at least 80% effectiveness, maybe 70% effectiveness out of all these Russian, Chinese, and Iranian systems.
And these are all only defensive systems.
We're not talking about the damage the Iranians can inflict.
And of course, the Serbs had very little in the way of capability of damaging us at the time with missiles or anybody in NATO.
But this time, Iran has quite an arsenal at its disposal.
So I guess my message is this.
What people think might last 10 days or two weeks could last a lot longer.
And what we don't know is how close we are to the bottom in terms of our supply of missiles, both air and missile defense missiles and strike missiles.
I think we're pretty close.
Now, President Trump and Secretary Hagseth have both sunk some money into improving the situation and producing missiles.
The problem is that takes a long time to have an effect.
And what they're doing is underway, but you're still dealing with complex instruments.
This is not like turning out artillery ammunition or tank ammunition.
These missiles are extremely complex.
So all in all, I think it's a very high-risk operation.
And I think that may have finally reached President Trump's ears.
But then there's the other question.
And this is what you're going for.
What if these missiles work and we start losing aircraft?
What if the strikes hit some ships at sea?
And people want to sink a ship.
You don't need to sink these ships in order to make them irrelevant.
You put a big enough hole in the flight deck on an aircraft carrier, the aircraft carrier is finished.
You don't have to sink these things.
So we got to start thinking in terms of how much damage can they do to the fleet.
We don't know.
And now I think the Navy has responded by sailing 1,400 kilometers away from the Persian Gulf.
Smart move.
The problem is that limits your effectiveness.
We need to take that into consideration.
And we saw that during the Kosovo air campaign when the Navy discovered that there were two diesel subs, two diesel subs.
We summoned a British and an American nuclear attack submarine, two of these submarines that sat right outside the location where the two diesel subs were in harbor, and they watched that the entire time, but that was not enough.
The carrier battle group and surface action groups sailed far, far away from the coast of Yugoslavia or the coast of, not you can't say Serbia, so we'll just say Yugoslavia.
The Navy's not stupid.
They're aware of this and they understand that if they could hit one of these ships, particularly an aircraft carrier, people are going to say, well, geez, these are really vulnerable.
Oh, yes, they are.
And during the Kosovo air campaign, it was at one point, I think it was General Short who suggested it.
Could have been General Jumper.
General Clark certainly went along with it and said, let's make things easier.
Let's just bring all the aircraft from the aircraft carrier that has to sit down somewhere near Greece and Crete and bring them ashore in Italy and put them on airstrips.
Well, the Navy almost came unglued at that point because they said, if we do that, we're admitting there are limitations to what the carrier can do and how vulnerable it is.
Absolutely not.
All our aircraft have to stay at sea.
So these kinds of things undoubtedly are being discussed and considered.
And we haven't even talked about the missiles that have to be reloaded and how most of the ships have to go back to port to reload.
But you know, I mean, you say that surely those things are being discussed, and maybe they are behind the scenes, but in front of the scenes, in front of the cameras, you have these who have just been almost beside themselves of pleading with President Trump to not do any negotiations, no diplomacy, but to do the military option.
Jack Keene, I think it was yesterday, went out and said, hey, our best option is the military one.
The military option, the one that the president is in the planning and preparation stage of, is a preferred option here because it sets the conditions for regime collapse.
And it would likely be a combined operation with Israel and the United States.
And what we're seeing now, the pacing for this operation is being driven by being able to move resources into the region to do two things.
One, to help us defend as well as the Israelis against Iranian retaliation attack, but also to make certain that this operation would likely not be a limited operation in terms of a one-night operation or two nights.
This would be a comprehensive campaign combined with the stated purpose to set the conditions for a regime collapse.
So at least he's saying, you know, this is not going to be a one-off deal.
This is not just going to be like it was with Operation Midnight Hammer about a two-hour operation.
At least he's saying it's a campaign.
But what he didn't talk anything about, and what I would like you to ask, address, is what is the expected Iranian reaction?
And how are our defenses against that?
Well, two things.
First of all, the Iranian action has been stated very clearly.
If they are attacked at all, they will not exercise restraint as they have in the past.
In other words, they will respond with whatever they have that can reach the targets that are within range.
That means they will use their ballistic missile arsenal and they will attack bases where our aircraft are located, where we have radars, where we have air and missile defense.
They will look for command and control hubs, presumably in Qatar and other places in the Gulf.
They will attack ships if they think they can strike them.
They will do enormous damage, obviously, to Israel, which they see as the principal culprit and justifiably so in organizing the entire operation.
If it were not for Israel, would any of this happen?
I think the answer is certainly not.
So I think we know what the Iranians will do and how long can they do it?
I think that we'll run out of missiles long before they do.
So what are we going to do at the beginning?
You're going to have a massive, massive assault in the first 24 hours.
It's going to be unlike anything that we've seen, certainly since 1990 or 91, rather.
So that's what we're going to see on our side.
And they'll respond as best they can with whatever they have.
So I think it's short of the use of a nuclear weapon.
Everything is on the table and everything will be used.
Now, I did want to pause for a second and point out a couple of things.
First of all, there were people in Washington urging Eisenhower to consider not simply building up a larger army in Korea for the purpose of destroying the Chinese forces that were in front of us, but also to invade China and ultimately execute regime change in Beijing.
There were some who actually said we should consider the use of nuclear weapons.
Eisenhower rejected all of it.
And I think we can be grateful that he did.
He said, first of all, we don't want to be involved in another long war whose outcome is hard to measure, hard to control.
We may think we can destroy them, but we may discover that we can't.
He knew enough about China and its expanse to understand that the Chinese have strategic depth, have a large population.
They can fall back.
They can take the casualties.
They can wait you out to some extent.
And obviously, he worried about the inclusion of the Soviet Union in that equation.
Eisenhower's Nuclear Dilemma00:11:13
Then you have Kennedy in 1962, who is confronted by the Joint Chiefs.
And frankly, the large consensus inside the Joint Chiefs was, let's go invade Cuba.
Let's bomb it into the Stone Age and then we'll invade the place.
And of course, that's something that Kennedy considered.
And he decided, well, if we go to Cuba, we've been there before.
We're going to have to stay for some period of time.
It's going to cost us a lot of money.
We're going to end up killing large numbers of people that we probably don't want to kill.
We really don't want that.
We don't want a war in the Western Hemisphere if we can avoid it.
And so the rest is history.
So what I'm trying to get you to understand is that other presidents have been confronted with the kinds of arguments that General Keene is offering.
And they said, thanks, but no thanks.
I'm not going to go there.
Now, right now, I don't know what the, I haven't polled the people in the White House.
I don't know what they're suggesting.
I don't know what kind of operational review any of the plans for this coming campaign have been subjected to in the National Security Council staff and who's weighed in.
What we do know is that Israel first is the preeminent concern and that this is considered to be a unique opportunity, not in the history of the United States, but in the history of Israel, to essentially annihilate its most serious competition, strategic competition, and strategic opponent.
That's number one.
This is unique.
And right now, Mr. Netanyahu has absolute control over what we do, which is why you're going to see this air campaign commence in a few days.
So if you're an Israeli or if you are an Israeli firster inside the White House or in Congress, you've got to go.
You absolutely have to do this because this condition for Israel may not last and Israel's position in the world could change.
In other words, they have to consider the terrible possibility that the American people say, we're not going to do this in the future.
So now's the time to do it.
If you're ever going to do it, get it done now.
And I think that's really what's behind all of this.
Well, Doug, it's right on cue.
I mean, somebody provided evidence to validate what you just said there.
And I'm going to show you here what is on paper the U.S. ambassador to Israel.
But in practice, this sounds much more like the cheerleader-in-chief for Israel in the name of Mike Huckabee.
I think there's an extraordinary alignment between Israel and the United States.
Everyone would love to see something that would resolve without a war, but it'll be up to Iran.
If they insist on holding nuclear weaponry and enriched uranium, then I think the president's made it very clear that's not acceptable.
Yeah, they don't have nuclear weapons to get rid of.
And allegedly, we obliterated it last year, according to President Trump.
So it seems to me like Huckabee has just been going, I mean, over time, burning the midnight oil to just advocate for Israel and for this operation here.
And then he's, I think, putting some window dressing on it that, well, we'd like it to be resolved without war.
But if they do these things, which, by the way, there is no law on the planet that prevents them from having nuclear reprocessing capabilities, then he says that President Trump is going to go forward.
What do you make of this advocacy?
A German analyst suggested recently that there are two kinds of states in the world, or you could call them nation states.
One is sovereign, and the other is states with limited sovereignty.
And what makes a state in the world today sovereign?
Nuclear weapons.
If you have nuclear weapons, you are truly sovereign.
But if you don't, your sovereignty is actually limited.
That's the real message that we're sending to the Iranians and everybody else in the world.
If you don't have access to nuclear weapons that can deter an attack by the United States, you're not really a sovereign country.
So I think Huckabee is reinforcing that message.
And Huckabee is saying, as you pointed out, effectively the same thing that I did.
This condition may not last.
And as a result, you'd better attack now before other states in the region inevitably develop a nuclear deterrent.
Because I think that's where we're headed.
Anybody who is living in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America looks at what's going on and says, well, if you're going to keep the Americans out of your neighborhood, prevent them from changing your regime, altering your society, you've got to have a nuclear weapon that can reach them.
That's the sad part of all of this.
That's the world we are creating.
We're not stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
We're accelerating it.
Now, everything is going to come down, as you said earlier in this episode here, to what President Trump decides.
And that's why I think you have Huckabee making these statements.
That's why Benjamin Netanyahu is in the air on the way here right now to do it in person to try to convince him.
There have been a couple of other Israeli firsters that you alluded to by title.
Lindsey Graham and Mike Pompeo are really going after it to try and convince President Trump to say yes to this.
And they have been playing the Obama card, interestingly enough.
They're saying, hey, President Trump, you said that the Obama deal, the JCPOA, was this really awful thing.
And now it looks like you're trying to negotiate an Obama-like kind of thing.
And they literally both been throwing this card down.
Well, there was a, I think on France 24, one of their analysts said, look, he's looking at what's going on here.
And he's like, these guys know what they're doing.
And they're trying to get President Trump to take action.
Watch this.
He really hated Barack Obama.
This was the nuclear deal was President Barack Obama's signature international achievement during his presidency.
And he hated it from the beginning just because of that.
And as we've seen from the cartoons that he released earlier yesterday, what he thinks of Obama and Michelle Obama.
So we can see that this contempt led to the scrapping of this pretty decent deal, at least for the time being, and now basically trying to get Iran to reduce its enrichment, which it doesn't even appear that it's doing, and halt other nuclear activities, which were prompted by Trump himself.
And that really kind of feeds into what you just said also, is that a lot of the problems we're facing right now are self-induced.
The only reason Iran even has this position right now is because we got out of the other constraint that we already had on them.
Do you think that President Trump is going to give into this hatred of Obama that he prompted him to get out of the 2018 deal?
And then all of these people putting on him, do you see him being able to resist that and saying, no, we're not going to go to war with Iran?
No.
No.
In fact, I would go one step further and point out that there are many people right now.
I'm not one of them because I just don't know.
But I think there have been several people on with Judge Napolitana who've said they think that Trump's presence in the Epstein files, where I guess he and his wife are mentioned 38,000 times, suggests that there's always the possibility whatever is in there could be released at will by the Mossad and CIA, at which point in time, then President Trump's presidency would be very much at risk.
I don't know.
I mean, perhaps that's true.
I just don't know.
All I know is that I think the decision to attack is being made.
There will be a debate about the details, and there will be some discussion of what you do if this doesn't work in seven days, 10 days, 14 days, 21 days, whatever it turns out to be.
What do you do then?
I hope they're also considering the possibility that Iran is not really alone.
Russia and China are not going to watch Iran disappear and sink beneath the waves.
I think they'll stay on the sidelines to a certain point.
I don't know what that point is, but I suspect if they think Iran will disintegrate, if they think we're going to be successful, then I would expect that they will intervene to stop it.
By the way, I think the Turks are in a very similar mindset.
Turkey has no interest in seeing Iran disintegrate and flood the region and potentially Europe with more refugees.
And that's undoubtedly what would happen.
So there's opposition to us.
It may not all be visible immediately, but as this crisis deepens and expands, once we start bombing, I think you're going to see that opposition step into the light, at which point in time, the question is, what do we do?
If we think we're going to challenge all of these states and embroil ourselves in a long-term conflict, that's very dangerous and ill-advised.
So I hope people are thinking about all of those possibilities because all of those possibilities must be taken into account.
And as far as Huckabee is concerned, or the rest of these characters, urge everybody to check their bank accounts, find out how much money they've made, where it came from.
I wish people would, they would broadcast at the bottom of the slide, you know, so-and-so is employed by and has received this much in remuneration as a result of his performance on television.
Yeah, that would be illuminating, shall we say.
Let me ask you another question here.
In terms of the MAGA base, if President Trump launches this and if their best case scenario works out and within this 14-day potential window, there is a sharp, clear, and decisive victory.
Iran regime falls and everybody can clap and say good, then that's going to help President Trump in the midterms because he'll be able to say, see, I did this, great thing.
We helped Israel and it was over with and I look really strong.
That seems to be pretty unlikely, but I'm sure it's what he's hoping for.
But let's look at the alternative.
If it doesn't, if we get to the end of that 14-day, 21-day, whatever period, and there is no decisive end at all, and the thing is just languishing, that's not going to play well for President Trump, who's already in huge trouble for the midterms just because of economic issues.
And we've already seen lots of evidence of special elections going to the Democrat side and lots of evidence suggesting that's going to be a bigger swamp when it comes time for the congressional elections.
If you add on top of that a military failure where Trump has said he's almost impervious, how much trouble do you see his base staying with it when it comes time for elections?
Well, first of all, you've got to talk to people that are political experts on how much will or will not the base put up with.
Failure To Enforce Law00:02:49
I try to sort of skim the internet and look at various findings.
I try to listen to some of the things that are posted.
My impression is I think more and more people are discovering that MAGA is an illusion.
The war, the war to make America great again is not overseas.
It's here at home.
And I don't think anybody expected Donald Trump to reverse what's been going on financially and economically in this country, but he's not really addressing it at all from the standpoint of most of the people that voted for him.
You know, we all support.
I certainly have always supported the enforcement of law, of federal law.
Watching the clown show up in Minnesota was very disturbing.
It was disturbing to me because anyone who interferes with the conduct of a policeman in the execution of his duties should be arrested.
You don't interfere with the police when they're executing their duties.
When people come up to you, get in your face, try to take pictures of you, hurl insults at you, throw things at you, they should be arrested.
What have we done?
We've backed off.
Backed off.
Now, that's far more important to the base than anything that happens in Iran.
And what's the problem with the Epstein files?
The problem is that people are looking for some evidence that there will be accountability.
Nobody cares about people's sexual antics.
Nobody cared about Bill Clinton's piccadillos with Monica Lewinsky.
That's his business.
I mean, most Americans just are not terribly interested in that.
But they are interested when children are involved.
That's outrageous.
That's unacceptable.
Where is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States?
He lives in the White House.
He has an obligation.
He is under oath to enforce law.
So that's what people are upset about.
So I think you're right, but I think your last comment is most accurate.
If this goes south and this air campaign creates more troubles and problems than it solves, which I think is practically inevitable, that will be a kind of last straw.
It's not going to be the cause of his downfall.
But you add that to the failure to enforce the law, the failure to execute the things that he said he was going to do, the failure to deal with the requirement to cut spending, to demonstrate to our creditors that we're serious about reigning in government and managing effectively.
Those are the things that he ran on.
He did not run on more war, a $1.5 trillion defense budget.
Major Issues Loomed00:15:35
Right.
Most of which we have no idea where all the money in defense goes.
We know that.
Can't even audit the damn budget.
So where is the MAGA president?
See, I think it's an illusion, and I think MAGA is dead.
I talk to people whenever I talk about America first.
That's what's important.
Our country, what happens here, that's number one.
Everything else takes a back seat.
And all of these optional military adventures need to be cut.
That's it.
End of story.
He ran on that.
You can go back and find his statements.
I'm going to put an end to the endless wars.
Everybody, everybody cheered.
Great.
What we're seeing is not only the extension, but the worsening of the whole damn thing.
And I'm sure we're going to get to Ukraine, so I will, you know, hold my tongue.
Yeah, that's exactly where I was going to go.
If it was only this one, it would be a huge major issue.
But it's not only this one with Iran, which could be about to start.
It's about the one that we haven't ended yet.
And by all evidence, it's, you know, this is not, now we have to add in the Europeans as well as the Ukrainians and dealing with the Russians as well.
So this gets a lot more messy, but we still have agency on where this one goes, although we haven't used it.
And I want to take a look at what's going on.
First of all, there is a lot of issues here about, I don't know what you even call this, kind of tinkering around the edges and doing stuff that seems like it's going to agitate the Russians, but it's not going to actually hurt them.
And that is when we have been seizing a lot of these vessels on the open sea, whether it's ones with Russian oil, Iranian oil, Venezuelan oil.
We seem to be picking and choosing and doing stuff that doesn't help.
But when you look at some of the statements by some of those closest to Trump, they think it's a wonderful thing.
This is what we did during the first Trump term.
And this is what the Biden people didn't do for four long years.
They didn't hunt any of these ships, the Iranian ships, the Russian ships, the Venezuelan ships that are moving this illicit oil around the planet, the so-called shadow fleet.
President Trump's going after all of them.
And they're learning that even if you get yourself all the way to the Indian Ocean, the long reach of the United States Navy and Coast Guard is going to find you.
And so you can do everything down to calling the captains of these ships on their cell phones and telling them it is time for you to surrender.
And if you do that, you cut off the illicit oil.
We get to export more.
And it's bad for our enemies and good for us and for our allies.
So that last part she said there, I think, was a little bit more illuminating.
She goes, yeah, so we get to steal all these ships and then we get to export more oil.
So it sounds like it's more about our economics than it is about any kind of alleged stopping the money coming to the Russian war machine.
How do you see it?
Well, the problem with that assertion is the fraction of the oil that's produced that she is talking about isn't going to change much in terms of what's available or isn't available to Russia or anybody else.
It's not going to necessarily dramatically increase income to the United States.
Let's be frank.
You're not capturing oil wells.
You're not occupying the oil and gas producing region.
If that's really what you want, then tell everybody and tell everybody to suit up and march to war.
This is not going to change the larger equation, if you understand what I'm saying.
It's just fractional.
What's the point then?
Why deal with fractional stuff that's not going to make any difference, but take the risk of annoying and aggravating Russia?
Well, I agree with you.
I suppose there are people in the White House who say, well, this is great photo coverage for you, Mr. President.
This shows the people that voted for you that you're getting the job done and doing great things.
I don't think Americans are quite that stupid.
I think they look at this and say, that's fine, but that hasn't changed anything in my life.
It hasn't altered the conditions here at home.
So, you know, fine, you captured a couple of oil tankers and you say this is illicit oil.
Okay, now you're going to take it and sell it, you know, arguably illegally.
And where do you put the money?
It's a waste of time, in my judgment.
It's not a major, major issue.
And as you point out, you know, what do you want to do with Moscow?
Are you really interested in perpetual hostility to Moscow?
Is that what you want?
I think that's insane.
I don't see any need for it.
But, you know, we're dealing the same people that want war with Moscow are, for the most part, the same people who want to destroy Iran.
Yeah, well, yeah, we've actually shown Victoria Coates lobbying exactly for that here recently.
But you know, this gets to the bigger issue of do we actually want the war in Ukraine to end?
President Trump campaigned on it, guaranteed and promised everybody one day and all that.
And we know what happened with that 13 months later.
He didn't take the effort you said where he should have on day one about how he could have brought this to an end at that time.
He didn't give anybody an ultimatum.
Allegedly, he's now said June is an ultimatum.
We've kind of walked that back a little bit, but not all the way.
We'll see if he actually does anything on that.
But then there's also the Europeans and the Ukrainians, and they have been taking action recently, which to my eyes sounds like that they want the war to go on.
They don't want Ukraine to have a negotiated settlement.
They don't even want the war to come to an end.
Somehow, they just want it to be perpetuated.
Case in point is that there was a German newspaper that ran a simulation that actually claims that it's not 2029 that we have to worry about, like Mark Ruza has said, where maybe Russia will attack into Western Europe, but it's actually this October.
The simulation conducted by a German newspaper shows how Russia could seize NATO territory in days using minimal forces before the alliance has time to invoke Article 5 for its collective defense.
The message from Washington in the war game was that the president was not interested in getting involved in another European war and believed that Putin wanted peace.
For years, NATO assumed Russia could not threaten Europe militarily before 2029, given the losses in Ukraine.
But this simulation found it could happen as soon as October if a ceasefire in Ukraine is signed, freeing up Russian forces.
Would Russia look at Lithuania with 1,000 plus American troops with a robust and well-exercised Lithuanian military and say, well, I think it's going to be a piece of cake in the way that it seemed in this war game.
So two things there.
I want to look at the second one in a minute.
But the first one is it was very subtle what the Fox anchor was saying there that according to the German newspaper, that this war could happen in October if there is a peace settlement between Russia and Ukraine, freeing up the Russian military, that they're just looking to come into the Baltics.
What do you say to that?
I don't know.
I think they've invested heavily in hallucinogenics.
It's just absurd.
It's unworthy of serious comment.
It's just nonsense.
I think the problem was if we tell them that 2029 is the critical year, they won't pay any attention to us.
So we have to advance the timetable and say, oh, no, they're coming sooner.
They could be in Paris by October of 2026 or something or 27.
It's absurd.
It's nonsensical.
I think what you're really seeing is a poverty of imagination, a lack of thought, desperation.
What do we do now?
The European publics aren't buying this.
I mean, they just aren't.
And I know that in Germany in particular, they've rigged the elections to keep the AFD out, but the AFD just grows stronger and stronger with each passing month because more and more Germans have said, this is crazy.
We don't have anything to do with this.
I haven't talked to anyone, any civilian in Germany who thinks it makes any sense to contemplate war in Ukraine against Russia.
And nobody really believes the Russians are coming.
Look, when I was over there as a lieutenant in the late 70s, most of the German population would just shake their heads and said, the Russians aren't coming.
Haven't you figured that out?
The Soviets aren't coming.
As it turns out, they were right, but they were a little premature.
That became very clear after 1980.
But through the 1970s, there was very real danger that something could happen.
But nevertheless, that's the way it was.
So now we've turned this on its head.
At this point in human history, there is less interest in Moscow than there has ever been in moving West.
There just isn't much interest in it.
Look at Western Ukraine.
Russians don't want it.
You know, they joke.
Well, ask Warsaw if they want it.
They've done so well with the Ukrainians.
Let the Poles go back in there.
I mean, seriously, this is absurd.
The whole thing is unworthy of serious comment.
And let me ask you your thought on the subject.
It works to some extent with stupid people.
Unfortunately, there's a lot of those.
I want to ask you about the last part because that last woman expert there was, I believe it was from the Marshall Fund.
And she was actually saying, if these Russians think that it would be easy to come in with 1,000 Americans and all these other folks in Lithuania and it would be a cakewalk, I mean, what are they thinking?
And of course, as she was saying that, I thought she was at first going to say it would be a cakewalk with the Russian military 700,000 in Ukraine by itself and now with a lot of direct combat experience and capabilities that nobody in the West even has.
And yet she was saying the opposite that because there will be a thousand Americans there and apparently some Germans as well.
I mean, what do you think of that?
Would it be a cakewalk or would they stop?
President Putin has said more than once, you need to understand, those of you in the West, that we are waging war in Ukraine differently from the way we would wage war against you.
Because ultimately, we Orthodox Christian Solves, Slavs, have no particular incentive to kill large numbers of Ukrainian Christian Slavs.
In other words, from their vantage point, this is like the war between Austria and Germany in 1866 when the Prussians fought the Austrians.
It was called the War of Brothers.
In other words, and so it ended quickly.
They negotiated an end to it because neither side had an interest in punishing the other.
Well, that's true for President Putin.
He looks upon these Ukrainian Slavs as misguided, but he's not interested in systematic annihilation, in contrast to Kerensky, or not Kerensky, Zelensky, who wants to murder as many Russians as he possibly can, or Muslims, or anybody else that's on the other side.
So it's just nonsense.
And that poor woman, she has no idea what the hell she's talking about.
And the Baltic literal has been there for centuries, and it's been fought over repeatedly over many, many times.
Holding that place against the Russians ultimately proved impossible.
The Swedes and the Germans tried it.
They couldn't do it.
It's sort of along the lines of holding the Baja against us.
If we wanted to seize the Baja Peninsula, what in the hell are the Mexicans going to do?
There's not a lot they can do.
It's a waste of time.
Well, that's the Baltic.
If the Russians want it, they'll take it.
And there's nothing we can do.
Now, the good news is the Russians don't want it.
They just don't.
They'd much rather do business.
But this is something that, you know, you said she was from the Marshall Fund.
If you look at the Marshall Fund or the Wilson Center or the Atlantic Council, these are all Cold War dinosaurs.
You know, they need money.
They want to exist.
They want to sustain themselves.
You have phalanxes of professors and academics and want to be politicians and retired politicians and diplomats who are all crowding into these things.
And what are they arguing for?
Please don't change anything.
That's the real argument.
Because if you change these things, we won't have anything to talk about.
We'll go out of business.
I mean, that's one of the reasons I ultimately gave up on all of these think tanks.
Of course, think tank is an oxymoron.
You know, there's nobody thinking in that tank.
There was more thinking bought in 1991.
So, you know, it's all nonsense.
We need to forget it.
These people are, you know, like King Lear raging in the storm.
There's no future for that.
It's all going to stop at some point.
The bad news is that the president of the United States has great difficulty sorting truth from nonsense.
Now, his instincts are pretty solid.
I've said this before.
If he followed his basic instincts, none of this crap would be happening.
I'm sure of that.
But he doesn't.
No, he doesn't.
And one of his, I guess, greatest failures in that regard of what he's not willing to do is with Zelensky himself.
So we're coming up on also the one-year anniversary of that explosion in the Oval Office that I thought was going to signal the end where Trump's patience had run out.
And unfortunately, it didn't.
And he allowed him back in the orbit after that.
And in fact, a couple of days ago, just to think if he had given him the RIADAG back then, a couple of days ago, Zelensky announces that they're going to open 10 weapons export centers in Europe in this year in a major wartime policy shift.
So instead of saying, hey, we're going to want Europeans to come into set up factories in our country, which of course never really made sense to me because it's all under Russian domination, they said, no, let's do it over there.
Well, now then, this analysis by the Kiev Independent today gives us some understanding about why that is.
And according to this article here, Ukraine's defense ministry buys a rank-and-file FPV drone for roughly $400 with add-ons like thermal cameras or AI modules, bumping that figure up, typically a few hundred more.
International makers are charging multiple orders of magnitude more.
For example, in January, the U.S. Marines paid nearly $40,000 a unit for Andril's Bolt-M drones and the kits to fly them.
While recent news is a far cry from an open weapons market, total value that even the tentative opening of export that Zelensky is touting would be a major cash influx for the industry.
Logistical Challenges in Treaty Zones00:11:23
I'd be conservative, says this one expert, up to $2 billion in controlled exports once the system is actually operating and up and functioning.
So it looks like instead of trying to find a way to end this war, instead of looking for ways to have a negotiated settlement on the best terms available for the Ukraine side, Zelensky now, when he can't even keep the lights on in Kiev and hundreds of thousands have fled the capital and that and four other major cities have similar dynamics in here, and the front line continues to shrink.
In light of all that, he's looking to start 10 new export centers to make a lot of money.
What does that tell you about where the focus is, both in Ukraine and in Europe, on this war?
Well, you know, we've talked about the tragic profiteering that has gone on during this war.
It happens in every war.
It's probably worse in Ukraine than we've ever seen in history because it's the most corrupt place probably in the world at this stage.
Anytime you flood a place with American cash, you breed corruption.
We're experts at doing this sort of thing.
I would say the following, though, if I were sitting in Moscow, I would simply make it clear that once these centers are identified, that we would regard all of them as legitimate military targets as long as the war continues.
And that's all I would say.
And I think that that would do a great deal to halt investment.
And if it persisted for any length of time, all you would have to do is destroy one or two of these things.
It's one of those deals where shoot one, educate a million.
And you can do that in many ways.
The FSB can do it.
It can be done remotely by missile.
There are any number of different ways to do it.
I would just say, you know, if you do this, you're a target.
And I think people will back down as soon as it becomes clear that's real.
Well, one thing we do know about the Russian response to this and many other things is that their patience is starting to really run thin.
I heard from a source just this morning that there is more and more friction in the inside of the Kremlin against Putin for dragging his feet on this and not moving faster than he has been doing and not putting more pressure on the Ukraine side militarily to make good on some of these things.
And we'll see what that's going to come in.
Also in the open space, in the open source, this was in the RIA Novosti, the Russian media today says Russia has sharply strengthened its position in negotiations with the United States and there will be no bargaining on Ukraine.
Says, and if you accidentally forgot what we originally agreed on, it's just talking about what was agreed between Putin and Trump in Anchorage, Alaska.
Now, or frankly, do you not want to keep your word?
Then, our more than generous proposals for Ukraine are no longer valid either.
And now there are no self-restrictions in the Donbas.
Now, the whole of Novorossiya will be protected.
And if anybody's not clear about what that means, in this map, you can see here this red line running down the middle, everything to the right of that, that basically is the line of contact right now.
That's where the fighting is.
And the four oblasts that were part of the June 2024 offer by Putin for negotiated settlement are on the right.
But on the left of that, in the other gray pink-shaded area, that's all of what Russia considers Novorossiya.
And they're saying, and you see that goes up beyond the Dnieper River.
It includes all of Odessa in the south, Kharkiv in the north.
And if it goes further enough, it could even go up to Kiev.
But that is what Russia's, at least in public, are saying, and apparently behind the scenes, are going to.
Do you think that Russia may actually take this much more territory?
Yes, I think as time goes on, the criticality of seizing that terrain cannot be overestimated.
You know, if, by the way, when you look at that map, I would like to bring everybody's attention to it.
If you look at the white area where you've got Kiev and the word Ukraine, what you see is historic Ukraine.
That is historically Ukraine, not the areas that you see in pink.
Now, having said that, I think if you're sitting in Moscow right now, you are figuring out that entering negotiations with the United States and for that matter, our European allies, but certainly principally with us, is sort of like a trip into the Bermuda Triangle.
You sail in, you go around in circles, you see that there's nothing happening, nothing there, and you finally decide to sail out again.
You take a different route out from the one that you took in, but it's still the Bermuda Triangle.
I think that's the way they look at it at this point.
This is going nowhere, and it will have to be settled on the battlefield.
And the map that you showed is a pretty good demonstration of the limits of Russian interest.
They're not interested in going into the areas that are historically Ukrainian where Ukrainians live.
That was never the objective.
It's never had that.
But they do want a cordon sanitaire.
In other words, they want a stretch of neutral territory.
They want strategic depth.
They don't want NATO forces anywhere on their borders.
And that is absolutely unconditional.
You've got to sign up for that.
And since we refuse to, Europeans refuse to, and the Ukrainians, who are theoretically represented by the crooks in Kiev, refuse to, then they've got to seize what you showed there.
And then the rest of it becomes a no-man's land.
What are you going to do with the rest of it?
Are you going to build a factory there?
Are you going to move in and cultivate it?
Really?
If you think you're living under almost immediate precision strike for the rest of your life, it doesn't seem like it makes a lot of sense.
That's why the answer to this was always, always the Austrian state treaty.
People should go back and look at the provisions of the Austrian state treaty.
That's what has to exist for that thing that you saw up there, which is the historic Ukraine.
And what do you say to those in the West that say, well, what Zelensky's talking about was setting up these 10 things?
That actually makes sense because look how long it took Russia to take that area on the right of that dark red line, the majority of those oblasts there, and not even all of them completely.
And they're saying, you know, it would take years, many years more for Russia to go to the other side.
And who knows if they would even succeed.
What do you say to those who say that the Russian army really can't capture all that area?
No, I think that's misleading because the Russian army today bears no resemblance to what went into Ukraine in February of 2022.
It took President Putin some time to finally listen to the general staff, and they just told him, We don't have enough men under arms, we're not geared up for this.
And that's when they went into Sorovikin's strategic defense.
We've talked about that.
And that was to buy time to field the force that exists now.
The force that exists now is large enough, and it's very easy under these circumstances to mobilize war and bring back veterans because what's in those areas up against the river, the Dnieper River, all the way up to Kharkov Oblast, there are very few people left there.
This is not going to be the kind of fighting that you saw in the Donbass defensive works, which were created over many, many years.
These areas are largely undefended now.
Putting up resistance to that forward movement is going to be extremely difficult.
So, no, I think the Russians can definitely do that without question.
And it could happen this time around much, much faster.
But remember, this part of the world, you also have to have the logistical infrastructure.
You have to advance the railheads, improve the roads so that you can move all the equipment and supplies and everything else.
I get the feeling that's happening.
I don't know on what scale, but if you want to move all the way to, say, Dnipro, which I think is inevitable, they'll take Dnipro and then they'll turn south to Odessa.
You want to have that logistical infrastructure intact to sustain your effort.
So I think we're going to see more logistical development, if you will, behind the forces in the future.
So, you know, again, President Trump is the one person who has the ability to end all of this quickly.
All he has to do is say, that's it.
I'm not supporting you any longer.
I don't support your goals.
I want this war to end.
So give me a call when there's a new government in Kiev, and I'll reconsider pulling all of my support.
But right now, as long as you're there, Mr. Zelensky, and you're friends, I'm out.
And you get everything and everybody out of the place.
That would end the war.
And it's in our interest to do so.
We don't want confrontation or war with the Russians.
And we're doing everything within our power to cultivate that.
It's stupid.
And you know, Doug, and I know, I know we're about out of time here, but let me ask you before you run off here.
We talked about the Israeli situation at the beginning and how all the pressure, both internally and externally, on President Trump to do something that's really in Israel's interest, not ours, is so great that he may not be able to say no.
You think he probably won't.
But that's not the case over here.
You have the Europeans that are trying to push Trump to do more.
And the Ukrainians are trying, but they don't have the kind of sway over him.
Why will Trump not do what makes sense here when he should?
Because it's in America's interest and he doesn't have those counteravailing forces.
Because the same people that are pushing the war in Iran are also pushing war with Russia.
I think we have to understand that.
So I would not suggest that he can easily jettison Ukraine without running into opposition from his donors, the people that have contributed so much to his personal wealth as well as to the government and to his election and to his position in the White House.
I certainly wish he would do that, but I, you know, I have my doubts.
President Trump is someone who's like every other politician I've ever met.
They all want to be a little bit pregnant.
None of them want to bring the child to term.
So instead of doing what's right, which is either halt completely or bring the child to term, one of the two, they're in the middle.
Oh, well, it's a little bit pregnant now, and that's fine.
It seems things are getting better.
No, they're not.
They're actually getting much worse.
The Russians are edging closer and closer in terms of their frustration and anger to direct confrontation.
By the way, so are the Chinese.
Yeah, that's yeah, we need to have you back on to talking about the Chinese part there because we don't talk enough about that.
There's been some activity there, which you've referred to earlier.
But we'll have to leave it there for the time being, though.
Provide Clarity on Conflict00:00:47
Thank you so much for coming on today, Doug.
It's always a pleasure to have you on and provide such clarity so people can really see what's going on in both of these potential war that could be about to start and this one that's languishing seemingly forever.
Thank you very much.
Sure thanks Step, and we always appreciate you guys too.
Uh, be sure, and if you'd like to get your uh information via a podcast, we're there too.
This is not just on the Youtube and Rumble that we you may be watching us on right now.
You can go to POD, Apple podcast Spotify, podcast Addict, uh any place that you get your podcast, and type in there and Share this with your friend.
We are unintimidated and uncompromised to bring you the truth, just like what you saw here.
We need you to help us out and share that with your friends.
Thanks very much, folks, and we'll see you tomorrow on the Daniel Davis Deep Dive.
You know, we don't have sponsors because we hate to hit you over the head with ads.