Nov. 18, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
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COL. Douglas Macgregor : War Is Coming Soon
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Adjudging Freedom.
Today is Wednesday, November 19th, 2025.
Colonel Douglas McGregor joins us now.
Colonel, welcome here.
You're always welcome here, and we do appreciate your time and your accommodating my schedule.
Colonel, how reckless is it, or would it be, I should say it hasn't happened yet, for the United States to attack, invade, or attempt to decapitate the leadership of Venezuela?
I think it's hard to imagine anything like this happening easily or quickly.
You know, I always go back to our intervention in Vietnam, where people landed on the beach, the Marines went inland, the army eventually came in, and everyone asked immediately, what are we attacking?
What's our objective?
And after much confusion, they came up with one.
I look at Venezuela with a 1,700-mile coastline, 1,380-mile border with Brazil, and a similar border of about roughly 1,379 miles with Colombia.
And I ask the same question.
What are we going to do?
What are these 17,000 troops in Puerto Rico going to do?
How do they get there?
Once they arrive, what do they do?
I see nothing clear or unambiguous about the thinking or planning behind this thing they're calling Southern Spear.
And what would war look like?
I mean, would it be boots on the ground?
You mentioned an extraordinary number of American troops in Puerto Rico.
I believe, correct me if my belief is wrong, there are also 10,000 Marines off the coast of Venezuela in these various ships.
Well, I'd be surprised if they weren't, because the one thing that's easily seized is the International Airport, the Bolivar International Airport.
It's right on the coast.
A couple of thousand Marines should be able to secure that airport very, very easily.
Now, what happens after you secure the airport?
How do you bring in other troops?
Where do they go?
Caracas is a little further inland and it's surrounded by mountains and hills.
There are some tunnels that go through the mountains and hills into Caracas.
How do we get in there?
I guess we could fly.
I guess you could also have airborne drops.
I hear a lot from my friends on active duty about repeating Panama.
You know, one of the things that we did in Panama was we had this airborne assault.
You have all of these light infantry-centric generals at the top of the army that just can't wait to launch another airborne assault.
The problem is that Venezuela is not Panama, Judge.
Venezuela is huge.
You can get in, I think, fairly easily, particularly given the offshore presence that we've got.
But then what do you do when you get there and how do you plan to get out?
I mean, unless you can very rapidly install a new government that is friendly to you, that can maintain some level of order in the country, you face the possibility of total disintegration of public order.
That means that you have no control over what goes on inside the country and everyone and their brother can possibly take a shot at you.
They've got 30 million people.
How many of those will resist is anybody's guess?
But I just don't see how the Panamanian experience really informs us in Venezuela.
Now, there is also talk about getting into Venezuela, if for no other reason, to stop the supply of oil to Cuba, which has been an important lifeline.
That would align with Secretary of State Rubio's long-term goals in the Caribbean basin.
But again, we don't know where all the air and missile defense capabilities are on the ground that the Russians have provided.
And we're not even sure that what won't ensue is something similar to the proxy war we've been waging in Ukraine against Russia, that the Russians would turn around and effectively wage a similar proxy war against us in Venezuela, using Brazilian, Colombian, as well as Venezuela paramilitaries to attack us.
I mean, the whole thing is a disaster, in my judgment.
Two comments from what you said.
One is, good God, we've been starving the people of Cuba since 1962.
Now we're going to try and cut off their oil.
Why?
This doesn't change the regime.
It just impoverishes the population, and Rubio must know that.
Well, except that Rubio also knows that Cuba is probably weaker today than it has ever been in its history.
There's really nothing in Cuba anymore but poverty.
And he may regard this as a golden opportunity to knock off the regime in Cuba as well, especially once you've strangled the Maduro regime in Caracas.
I mean, this is all speculative.
You know, obviously neither you nor I nor any of us are invited to participate in any of these discussions or listen to any briefings.
But looking at the numbers of forces involved, looking at Venezuela's relationship with Cuba, one has to conclude that there's a lot more going on here than simply regime change in Venezuela.
But there has to be some, forgive me if I sound naive, Colonel, moral or legal basis for what the government does.
What kind of threat does Cuba pose to the United States of America?
They can barely feed their people.
Well, I certainly don't want to make us responsible for Cuba.
I don't want to make the United States and the American people responsible for Venezuela.
Now, again, we've discussed this before.
Let's set aside any altruistic motives whatsoever.
I mean, I think it was Reinhold Niebuhr paraphrased Lincoln's comments when Lincoln said the challenge in U.S. foreign policy is to link the contingencies of power with the principles of justice.
I don't think the principles of justice mean anything anymore in Washington, D.C.
They haven't for a very long time.
So you're looking at finding a way to collateralize all of these mineral resources, oil, gas, emeralds, gold, rare earths, all that sort of thing.
And people that are in the banking industry have privately told me, well, I guess if you can go in there and you could exert absolute authority over the country and you can exploit its resources without interruption, that could conceivably lead to a massive reduction in our national sovereign debt because you could pull 19 trillion in wealth out of Venezuela.
That would roughly cut our national sovereign debt in half.
In other words, this is a good old exercise at pillaging and exploiting other people's resources.
Are the same Zionist billionaires behind Trump's dalliances and threats of war against Iran behind this invasion of Venezuela?
Well, I suspect so because they have a lot more at risk right now.
They're fighting tooth and nail to maintain the dollar's dominance.
And that's a story that just doesn't reach the American public.
We are in a state of decline in terms of economic strength, military power, prosperity, you name it across the boards, internal cohesion.
The Russians, the Chinese, Indians, and others are viewing us as a potentially dangerous and irrational actor on the world stage.
I'm sure you've heard Jeffrey Sachs say something similar.
And they're trying to manage us by managing.
I mean, they want to manage their way through what they think is our decline by avoiding a war.
It becomes more and more difficult.
But we've failed in Russia.
We wanted to go in there, break the country up, rape it for its resources.
That's failed miserably.
We have not destroyed the national cohesion or unity of Iran.
We don't have control of its oil and gas resources.
And now we have China, which imports roughly 80% of Iran's oil, very interested in ensuring the Straits of Hormuz stay open.
So how far can you press this war with Iran?
That leads you to new places, new locations where you can get at the resources that you need to boost the American economy and deal with this enormous sovereign national debt.
So yes, I imagine some of the same billionaires who are involved in both the war with Russia and the war with Iran, the Greater Israel Project, are also very interested in Venezuela because it may be that the other two projects are going to fail.
One can argue that it's already failed in Russia.
Now the next one is, are we ever going to make any progress in the Middle East?
Doesn't look very encouraging right now.
So Venezuela then becomes an attractive goal or object in some people's minds.
The Venezuelans have millions of members of militias.
I don't know what kind of a central command they have or what these militias would do, but let's say we're bogged down in a land war.
Would that delay the Israeli-likely invasion of Iran?
Well, first of all, the Israelis aren't going to invade Iran.
The Israelis just want to destroy Iran.
What they would like to do, though, is capture its oil resources.
And in that sense, the Israelis are the beachhead for international finance in New York City and London.
They too want to capture those resources.
But the possibility that you can do that seems less and less likely in the current environment.
It's not necessarily impossible at this stage, but it's not very encouraging.
And that's why Venezuela seems like low-hanging fruit compared with everything else.
The problem is, what if this does turn into a long-term insurgent war that we frankly have no interest in fighting, especially if it's orchestrated at least partially and supported partially by the Russians?
If you were a Russian, looking at the damage we've been trying to inflict on Russia for the past three and a half plus years, would that not occur to you to exact some retribution against us?
I think it probably does.
Yeah, I think you're right.
Before we jump over to Ukraine and Russia in some depth, should Japan host U.S. nuclear weapons?
And should the prime minister of Japan be threatening to attack China if it exercises more dominion over Taiwan than she thinks is appropriate?
Well, the Japanese have reined in the prime minister on this topic.
Remember that in Japan, the government, its foreign and defense policy are really run by the imperial bureaucracy.
Now, I'm saying imperial bureaucracy because the Japanese bureaucracy is staffed with lots of historic aristocrats, families that have controlled elite thinking and culture in Japan for hundreds of years.
They are loyal to the emperor.
They tend to define what that foreign and defense policy is going to look like.
They also have a big impact on what happens internally.
She went a little too far.
The Japanese have already sent delegations to China.
They're patching up the hurt feelings.
I think what we need to understand is that Japan and China, just like Korea and China, in my judgment, will never be allied with each other.
However, they're also well aware that a war between them would be singularly stupid and counterproductive.
So her remarks have been walked back.
The issue for Japan right now is as follows.
They are waiting, like the Koreans, for us to leave.
Now, that may seem strange to Americans, but people in Northeast Asia are nothing if not extremely polite.
They would like us to get out.
We have served their purpose long enough.
Japan profited enormously from America's military shield against any potential adversary.
But now Japan doesn't need that, doesn't want it.
Japan can build its own nuclear capability.
It's been able to do that now for many years.
It could become a nuclear power overnight.
And it has an interest in that, not because it wants to use any nuclear weapons against anyone, but it wants to be a free agent.
It doesn't want to be dependent upon us.
It wants to interact with Russia and China and other countries as it sees fit.
I mean, remember when President Trump was over there, they made it very clear to him in private, yes, we like you very much and we'll support you, but we're not going to join your embargo on Russia.
It's not going to happen.
We're going to continue to purchase oil and gas from Russia.
And a Japanese parliamentarian stood up and very bluntly stated in parliament in public, we can't reach an arrangement with the Russians because the Russians are concerned that if they sign a peace treaty with us and they give us these islands back that they took at the end of the Second World War, then we'll turn around to the United States and let American military installations pop up on those islands.
Well, that is a legitimate Russian fear.
Of course it is.
But it's also a legitimate interest in Japan to not let that happen.
Right.
So you've got to, you know, the Japanese want to be independent free agents.
It's 80 years since the end of the Second World War.
They want to be cut loose.
But again, they're being polite.
They don't want to run us out of town.
They would prefer that we read the handwriting on the wall and simply left.
The same thing is true in Korea.
The liberal nationalist government in Korea that's taken over wants us to leave.
They know there will never be peace on that peninsula that they can depend upon as long as we are there.
We are no longer a shield.
We're now a catalyst for conflict with North Korea.
And the Chinese want nothing to do with North Korea.
They want to do business with South Korea.
Think of the Koreas as similar to East and West Germany at the end of the Cold War.
Moscow had to make a choice.
With whom do you want to do business?
What's the long-term future for Germany?
It's not the GDR.
It was not the German Democratic Republic.
It was West Germany.
And that's happening in Beijing.
Beijing looks at the peninsula and says the future is the Republic of Korea.
The problem is we're still in the midst of all of this.
And we're always trying to pull people into a position of hostility to anybody we don't like.
And they don't want to be in a hostile position with Russia or China.
So the prime minister has been severely reprimanded, told to sit down and shut up.
That's being patched up with China.
There will be no more of that.
But the Chinese, you know, fear Japan.
In fact, I think we've talked about this before when I wrote in Margin of Victory in the last concluding chapter, try to make it clear that the Chinese are a lot more afraid of Japan, frankly, than they are of us.
Japan is right offshore, and Japan is the sleeping superpower.
Everybody keeps deriding the Japanese.
Well, they haven't spent enough on defense.
They need to do more of this.
They need to do more of that.
Their population is not growing enough.
Stand by.
Get out.
And the Japanese will fill the requirement that we keep trying to fill ourselves at great expense to the American people of quote unquote containing China.
Everything from the water's edge in Asia, from the Chinese coast south or west or east, will be controlled by Japan.
That doesn't mean the Japanese armies will be there or the Japanese Navy necessarily needs to be everywhere.
It's simply a fact that Japan is dominant at sea.
China will be dominant on land.
It's accepted.
That's where things are headed.
We are holding up the train because we want to live permanently in the afterglow of World War II.
It's not possible.
We can't afford it.
We don't need it.
I want to jump to Ukraine, but before we do, I have to say that your analysis is so astute, so profound.
I can't imagine Marco Rubio or Pete Hegseth speaking this way to the president of the United States.
They just don't have the knowledge, understanding, analytical skills, or will to talk to him this way.
But boy, if more people spoke as you do, be a lot safer and more free world.
Okay, just my editorial, not because we're friends, because I'm moved by what you said.
Yeah, but remember, Judge, there was a statement.
I think it was in The Art of the Deal.
And President Trump had told the man that authored the book for him: you know, I've learned never hire anyone who is smarter than you.
I mean, stop and consider that.
That's catastrophic.
Yes, yes, it is catastrophic.
It should be, of course, the other way around.
Colonel, in the past week, the length and breadth of corruption and President Zelensky's government has become a public conversation in Kiev and elsewhere.
We know how bad it is.
How is it, if at all, likely to affect what remains of the war?
Well, I think it affects the war very much and has from the very beginning and continues to do so.
I think our friend Zelensky is on very fragile ground, as is his inner circle.
They see the handwriting on the wall.
What is stopping Putin and the Russian military establishment from launching straight to the Dnieper River and then ultimately crossing and seizing Kiev?
Well, I can tell you what's stopping it, and it's President Putin.
Putin from the very beginning has always wanted desperately to avoid a war with us or NATO.
And what President Putin wanted as soon as we met with him and his team in Saudi Arabia, you'll recall that Secretary Rubio went over there, a whole host of people from the cabinet.
And what the Russians wanted to do was restore relations with us, do business with us.
So that's always been in the forefront of his strategic thinking.
Now, what does that mean?
That means that he doesn't want to cross that river.
He doesn't want to take responsibility for the disaster in Ukraine, at least not under the current circumstances.
That may be why we're now in discussions with him.
Maybe someone's finally figured that out and walked away from the stupidity that Putin wants to conquer Ukraine.
That's crazy.
No one in their right mind wants the place at this point.
But the tragedy with corruption is so bad that, you know, for some time now, you've had people wounded on the battlefield, Ukrainian soldiers and officers who had to pay someone to take them to a hospital.
I mean, stop and consider that.
The widows and orphans of the Ukrainian soldiers that are being killed, they're not being paid anything.
The checks that would have otherwise gone to them are being pocketed by battalion brigade commanders in the Ukrainian army.
Everyone is involved in this giant grift.
Now we've seen these two people that are apparently accused of sort of taking hundreds of millions of dollars.
And of course, the funny thing is that my friends in Europe that are intimately familiar with this that operate out of Switzerland, they all laughed and they said, well, Zelensky's got at least a billion in cash.
Most people have stolen billions.
These people are small fry.
I think that's beginning to sink in in Europe.
The problem is the globalists there can't admit that because then they have to admit that they've been wrong from the beginning, frankly.
Russia doesn't present this threat.
And then how do they stay in power?
Because they are all about maintaining themselves in power.
And the situation in Europe economically, socially, politically is catastrophic right now, as you know.
So they're not going to take any chances.
They're going to hold fast against anything we want to do to end that war.
So recently, Reuters has reported on secret negotiations between Steve Witkoff and Kirill Dmitriev, sort of his opposite number in the Kremlin,
an outside well-to-do businessman who happens to have been educated at Stanford University, about new and extensive United States Russia talks about peace in Ukraine and a reset of relations between the United States and Russia.
This morning, I was given the opportunity to question Maria Zakharova, who's the official spokesperson for the Russian foreign ministry.
And I posed this question to her and she flat out denied it.
I don't know if these conversations are so secret that she doesn't know about them, that her boss doesn't know about them, or she just didn't want to reveal it on international television.
But again, President Trump bypassing Secretary of State Rubio to use Steve Witkoff to try and solve one of the world's most intractable problems.
Question.
Whatever it is, whatever the solution is, whatever Witkoff has offered, it can't be less than what President Putin's demands have consistently been from day one.
Am I right?
Yeah, I think so.
Again, first of all, you and I haven't seen the 28 points.
We haven't been briefed on any of this.
You and I know about as much as you've just discussed.
Right.
Now, President Putin did make a remark saying that he was pleased that at least at this point, for the first time, Russian interests were being taken into account, something along those lines.
That's encouraging.
But we got to be careful.
You know, we've been through all of these convulsive phases that they change from, what is it, euphoria to depression within the space of a few days.
I am someone that would love to see peace come to Ukraine.
I mean, that's the best thing that could happen for the people that live in that country.
I think that it's appropriate that President Trump and President Putin sit down with their respective teams and draw a new map.
That's the way wars have been ended in Europe for hundreds of years.
You draw a new map.
You change the borders to meet people's legitimate national security concerns.
So that should happen.
I don't know what the terms will be and so forth.
But at the same time, who takes over in Ukraine?
Remember, the Russians take the position, and I'm sympathetic to them because we felt this way too on more than one occasion in the history of the United States.
They don't want to fight this war again.
In other words, they don't want this peace to come about that doesn't fundamentally change Ukraine into a neutral state with a government that is completely divorced from Zelensky and company.
They want that.
If they can't get that, quite frankly, it doesn't make any difference where they draw the lines and what promises are made.
They'll end up going to war again in a few years.
So that's the crux of the thing.
I don't know that this will work.
I want to be optimistic, but as you said before we got on the program, you know, we've been down this road before and the war was going to end in 24 hours and we all know what's happened.
Right, right, right.
Back to President Zelensky.
I mean, he really, really is in a bind between the nationalist Bandarists who seem to control him and have apparently threatened him and the public that has got to be disgusted with the palpable corruption and the fact that he's not even the legal head of state, which makes you wonder how he could agree to anything.
But how can he possibly agree to surrender land, which historically has been Russian and 90% of which is now dominated by the Russian military due to the special military operation, but which the Bandarists, the hardline nationalists around him, would never concede and would rather die before they concede.
Well, that could be arranged for the Bandarists.
I think the Russians would be happy to arrange that.
The issue for Zelensky is, can he be given some sort of out?
In other words, is someone from the CIA going to sit down with him or MI6 or both and say, game is up.
You need to leave.
This arrangement is going to be made in Washington and Moscow.
You can express your hopes for it, but you don't necessarily have to be part of it.
And we'll fly you out of here.
And he can go where his two Friends who have stolen the hundreds of millions of dollars have gone to Israel.
He too is Jewish.
He can go there.
He will not be extradited.
He will be safe from any prosecution in Netanyahu's Israel.
And that may be the best solution for him.
I mean, there was discussion when he went to Greece that he might just leave from Greece to Israel or somewhere else.
I think the game is up for him.
It's up to somebody to explain it to him and find an out for him.
Then somebody else is going to step forward.
Whether or not that person is acceptable to the Russians is open to debate, but somebody else will step forward.
And the Russians will probably tolerate that if it brings this travesty of a war to an end.
The real problem here then is our European allies.
And, you know, I think President Putin assumed that President Trump was the de facto leader of NATO.
And that if President Trump said as the leader of NATO, we're going to do the following, that his allies would get into line and follow.
I mean, that certainly was true 30 years ago.
It was true 40 years ago, 50 years ago.
But that doesn't seem to be the case right now.
So that's problematic.
But Putin, I think, is willing to compartmentalize to the extent that he would like good relations with us.
He wants to do business with us.
So you could see an agreement emerge ultimately that gives Trump at least some optically pleasing moment where relations between Moscow and Washington are restored.
While that may not necessarily be true for our so-called NATO allies, at least not initially.
And remember that President Trump has to be seen as having crafted something good, and he has to have responsibility in a historical sense for having done something good.
He needs the optics.
That's part of what he demands.
I think the Russians will accommodate that.
They accommodated him in Alaska.
I mean, they chuckled over all the aircraft that were out there on the tarmac and, you know, these displays of military power.
I mean, I know that for a fact.
They kind of laughed and said, okay, fine.
They want an end to this.
So they'll accommodate him to the extent that they can, provided he recognizes the facts as we've described them for Ukraine.
But it's up to President Trump to drag the Europeans along.
And that may be difficult, at least at the moment, at least until those governments go away.
And they will go away, perhaps not as fast as we would all like, but they're on the path to extinction.
One of the things I said to Maria Zakharova this morning was: what will it take for me to be able to fly from JFK to Moscow in nine hours instead of through Istanbul?
She roared, Istanbul or Doha taking 20 hours.
She looked at me and she goes, ask Mr. Trump.
These are his sanctions, not ours.
Yes, that's absolutely right.
And, you know, this business of bullying everything, I think President Trump, again, wants to be seen as the strong guy who pushed this agreement, whatever it turns out to be, that President Putin is willing to sign.
He has to be seen in those terms.
And I think the Russians will accommodate it because they're just sick of the whole thing.
And they know that the Ukrainian people have had it.
I mean, you talk to German journalists and others that have been to western Ukraine, and they report the population is ready to throw in the towel.
In fact, Ukrainians living in the West, west of the Upper River, have actually said, we don't want another war.
And the best way to avoid another war is to make sure the government in Kiev is friendly to Moscow.
They know that.
They understand that.
So there's hope, but we have to scale back our expectations or suppress them right now, Judge.
It's very iffy.
Before we finish, and I appreciate you staying with us for so long, Colonel, you mentioned Germany.
Is Germany going to leave NATO and the EU in order to become independent again?
It will have to.
It doesn't have any choice.
The globalists are a legacy of the Second World War.
Remember the famous statement, everybody used to chuckle over it.
NATO exists to keep the Russians out and the Germans down?
You know, in the 1990s, when I would hear that crap, I was furious because here the Germans were probably the single most reliable and loyal component of the NATO alliance.
And people continue to recite that insulting nonsense.
I think the Germans have had it.
When this government goes, whatever government replaces them will be a nationalist government.
And that will continue.
It may be that you get the AFD, but they're not the final answer.
You're going to see a succession of governments in all of these countries, all of which are going to be nationalist.
And when I say nationalists, they're all going to be France first, Britain first, Germany first.
In fact, in Germany, the Germans may go one step further and the population may say, how about Germany only?
Because the Germans are sick to death of being treated as a cash cow.
You go to Italy or you go to France and they blame everything that's wrong on the Germans.
It's absurd.
It's nonsense.
But the Germans have been the cash cow.
The Germans have walked into the room full of other Europeans and they walk in with their heads down and bowed and very solemn.
We know we're Germans.
We know we're bad.
We've done terrible things.
How much money do you want?
I mean, that's what it amounts to.
I mean, the Austrians have escaped a lot of this, you know, because the Austrians are famous for having convinced the world that Beethoven was Austrian and Hitler was German.
In fact, the opposite is the.
The opposite is true.
They've escaped all that.
So, oh, the nice Austrians, we never did bad things.
Well, that's a lot of crap.
Let me tell you, if I want to go back over it, because I spent my life studying that, 40% of all your concentration camp commanders were Austrians, a disproportionately large number compared with what should have been the case.
You start looking at all the SS formations and the names, and they're all South German and Austrian names.
I mean, we can go on and on and on.
My point, you know, I'm not saying the Austrians ought to be whipped and punished today either.
That's all over with.
That's nonsense that needs to go away.
But I think that we have done this to the Germans for so long that they've lived in kind of a Stockholm syndrome, you know, where they enjoy having the whip hand held over their heads and they have willingly pled guilty to every charge.
I think that's over.
The younger generation wants nothing to do with it.
And they're tired of being exploited for the European Union.
They have been effectively deindustrialized with plunging the country into near poverty because of the European Union.
They're looking at NATO and they're saying, how is NATO providing for our security?
You know, back when there was a Soviet Union, it was arguable, but today, no.
What have we done?
Remember, you're either NATO is either out of area or out of business.
In other words, either NATO gets dragged into our imperial adventures or we don't need it.
Well, the Germans have never wanted to be involved in any of the imperial adventures that we were part of.
And they have scrupulously avoided most of them.
And when they've gotten involved, as they did, for instance, in Afghanistan, they spent most of their time inside the wire in their little sort of garrison.
And the best thing about Afghanistan for the Germans was all the great beer that was shipped in from Germany.
They ran over to the German compound to drink beer.
But the point is, it's over.
Germany will leave NATO.
Germany will leave the EU.
And when it does that, It will not only regain its former position in Europe, it will restore its relations with Russia.
Over the last 400 years, with the exception of two world wars that could have been avoided and should have been avoided, were very good.
And we have always looked at any potential reconciliation or rapprochement between Germany and Russia as dangerous to us.
It's not.
It's not dangerous to us at all.
What it does, though, in Europe is it diminishes France.
It diminishes Britain.
They become largely irrelevant strategically because that axis between Germany and Russia economically is huge and very, very powerful.
And it's something the Russians would like to see restored.
But right now, they don't think it's possible.
And so they've turned all of their attention to Eurasia.
All you have to do is listen to this man, Alexander Dugan and others.
They talk about Russia's future in Eurasia.
But that's misleading because Russia has real interests in Europe and those interests are largely with Germany.
And can I add a footnote?
These dramatic changes, which would be for the betterment of everybody in Germany, will probably not happen under Chancellor Mertz.
No, no.
He has to be retired quickly from active duty on a permanent basis.
And he's had his run.
He's the, you know, we go back to when Kohl departed as Chancellor of Germany.
Then you ended up with Schlesinger.
He understood these dynamics very well.
He's succeeded by Merkel, who did understand them, but was never willing to stand up and defend them.
You know, Merkel was the one that stood up in Munich after Trump during Trump's first term and said, we can no longer depend on the United States.
Europe must find its own way forward.
Shortly thereafter, you had Macron talk about NATO as being brain dead.
But what happened?
Nothing.
In other words, the Europeans went back to sitting on their rear ends and doing nothing, and the Germans were equally complacent.
Those days are over.
Everyone is going to have to get up in their corner and get to work because Germany is in a lot of trouble economically and socially.
All these countries are overrun with people from North Africa and the Middle East that they never asked for and don't want.
They're dealing with incredible criminality that they're unaccustomed to.
I mean, Germany used to be probably one of the safest countries in the world, as was Sweden, as was Norway and Denmark.
All of a sudden, that's gone.
That's not the case anymore.
The Germans don't like it, but they're afraid to do anything about it because they're part of this European community where they are constantly told they're bad.
They're bad.
Germans are bad.
Germans are Nazis and so forth.
They've had it.
It's like everything else.
Eventually, people do wake up and react, and they're tired of being humiliated.
So Metz, I think, is somebody who's going to culminate and go away.
And then all bets are off.
It'll take Germany time to do all of these things, but it's not hard to see the handwriting on the wall.
And we should welcome this.
We should say, look, it's time for you to be on your own and we want to help you.
The biggest mistake we can make is to insist, no, we want you to remain our vassal state.
That would be catastrophic.
And we need to not do that.
Colonel, just to end on a lighter note, I wonder what you think the Russians, the Chinese, the Japanese, the South Koreans think of a president of the United States when he behaves like this.
Cut number one.
What did Jeffrey Epstein mean in his emails when he said you knew about the girls?
I know nothing about that.
Jeffrey Epstein and I had a very bad relationship for many years.
Is there something incriminating in the files, sir?
Quiet, quiet.
Mr. President, why wait for Congress to release the Epstein files?
Why not just do it now?
I think you are a terrible reporter.
You're a terrible person and a terrible reporter.
What the Epstein is, is a Democrat hoax.
Your crappy company is one of the perpetrators.
And I'll tell you something.
Add to that that Mohammed bin Salman knew nothing about the slaughter of Jamal Khashoggi, even though Trump's CIA said bin Salman planned and ordered it.
And peace has broken out in Gaza.
Right.
Everything is improving dramatically there.
Palestinians are dying.
Infrastructure is being destroyed.
But we have peace in Gaza.
I mean, one of the worst things that I've heard anybody say is that this current arrangement with Russia, this 28-point proposal, is modeled on the successful ceasefire in Gaza.
What successful ceasefire?
Well, for God's sakes, I mean, if that's the model, we can write this thing off now.
He has a bad habit of shooting from the hip.
He's guided too much by his emotions.
But here's the rest of the story.
When these Epstein files come out, what are we going to get?
Are we going to get page after page after page that's just black?
Sorry, we redacted.
Probably.
We redacted.
If he had said, well, Epstein proves that, yes, I like girls.
Okay.
If he'd said that, a lot of people would have giggled and he might have gotten away with it, at least temporarily.
But I think his reaction is condemnation.
It's tragic.
And someone said a long time ago to me, and I was really skeptical of it.
This is months ago.
Said Epstein is going to bring down Donald Trump.
And that may well turn out to be the case, tragically.
Colonel McGregor, thank you very much.
This has been an extraordinary interview.
The audience has been enormous.
And shortly before we came on air, judging freedom reached 650,000 subscribers, a great milestone for us.
We started out four years ago with 93.
And of course, you are principally responsible for that, my dear friend.
Thank you very much for your time.
Thanks for your analysis.
Thanks for all the gifts you've shared with us.
Next week's a short week, but I hope you can join us again.
Right.
See you next week.
Thank you, George.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Colonel.
All the best.
Wow.
An absolutely marvelous man and a terrific interview.