Colonel Douglas Macgregor critiques U.S. foreign policy, arguing that post-1991 interventions driven by globalist ideology caused catastrophic deaths and trillions in costs while destabilizing nations from Bosnia to Yemen. He asserts the Ukraine war was steered by Washington, risking nuclear confrontation near NATO borders despite Putin's limited goals of neutrality and Donbass autonomy. Macgregor exposes contradictions in Biden's narrative, highlights Ukraine's lack of democracy since 2014, and warns that military spending alongside open borders threatens economic collapse akin to the French Revolution, urging listeners to read his book "Margin of Victory" for deeper strategic insight. [Automatically generated summary]
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Government Too Big00:12:49
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You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
Here's your host, James Smith.
Hello, everybody.
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am excited and thrilled to have our guest for today's show, which is retired Colonel Douglas McGregor.
Of course, he was also a senior advisor over there at the Department of Defense for under Donald, under President Trump.
Unfortunately, briefly, as he was put into that position after the 2020 election, we all wish he had been there maybe after the 2016 election, had a little bit more time to clean up that whole mess.
But we really appreciate you taking the time to join us, sir.
How are you today?
Great.
So we're big admirers of yours here on the show.
I've mentioned you several times.
We really appreciate that you have been one of the few people with your background who's been telling the American people the truth about our military strategy, about the wars, particularly over the last 20 years in the Middle East.
Of course, I want to talk a bunch about Ukraine today.
But first, I was curious, what led you to be this person who's out there ringing the alarm bell and telling the American people the truth?
Was there a change in your philosophical outlook or strategic outlook over the years that led you to feel that it was this important to talk about these things?
Well, I think, you know, this is an interesting question.
It probably deserves more time than we've got.
But just to quickly sum up, I changed my outlook a great deal when I was in the desert in 1991.
From my vantage point, the conduct of the operation on the ground, well, for that matter, in the air as well, but certainly on the ground, was very disappointing.
We were moved at an incredibly slow pace.
Ultimately, the general officers who were in command did not seem to understand the impact of technology on the army, the change in the quality of the soldiers, sergeants, lieutenants, and captains that had occurred over the previous 10 to 15 years.
And as a result, I think we snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in 1991.
We ended this campaign long before it should have been ended.
We took too long to attack.
So I kind of walked away from this whole thing and said, you know, we've got serious problems at high levels.
There was also no strategic thinking in terms of what did we want to really accomplish, this business of, oh, well, we just want to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait.
And whenever I would say to people subsequently, no, we really wanted to rid Iraq of Saddam Hussein, they would look at me, oh, no, no, no, that was not one of the objectives, which of course is a lot of nonsense because we spent all the time before, during, and then afterwards trying to assassinate him and kill him.
But no, we really didn't want to remove him.
Well, if you did want to remove him, then you should have made peace with him after the war and gotten on with things and done business, but we wouldn't do that either.
So I became very disenchanted there.
And then subsequently over the next succeeding, what, 10, 12 years, I saw increasing confusion.
I didn't see the evidence for any strategy.
I saw the evidence for a compulsion to intervene in places where we hadn't before on the grounds that somehow or another we were going to lead this great globalist revolution for democracy, all of which was nonsense.
So I went through the business in Bosnia, then subsequently in Kosovo.
And then, of course, in 2001, we had the Afghan business, and I was dragged in early about Iraq.
And it became clear to me that, contrary to the original plan, we wanted to stay in Iraq, at least as in perpetuity as far as I could sell, which made no sense to me at all.
Why would you stay there?
You only wanted to change out the government.
And then again, we went through this nonsense that we're going to democratize the place and make Iraq the first Israel-friendly Arab democracy in the world.
And the chances of those things happening were, you know, pretty low.
So I was very disenchanted.
And then when I saw stay there, it became clear to me it was going to be a catastrophe.
And I said, the best that I can do is tell people this is a very dumb idea.
But as you know, Americans are all too quick to become emotionally involved in a cause they know nothing about.
And they joined the sort of proverbial bombs away club.
They tend to think that if we're bombing someone somewhere, that our greatness is being expressed to the world.
You know, both assumptions are wrong.
And here we sit 20 years later.
And what have we got for our investment?
As Donald Trump said, whether you like him or not, what do we get for it?
How did we benefit?
And the answer, of course, was no.
We're going through something similar right now with Ukraine and Eastern Europe.
And we've involved ourselves in something we could have prevented very easily by simply steering Ukraine away from confrontation with Russia.
Instead, we did the opposite.
We steered this entire country, this nation of people, into a war with Russia.
We should have been interested in avoiding that, but we weren't.
And now we haven't shown much interest in bringing it to an end.
We seem to want to prolong it, although I'm not sure that's true for President Biden, but certainly for the rest of his administration and people on the Hill, it seems to be the case.
Again, I don't see any benefit to this for the Ukrainians.
I don't see anyone in Europe benefiting from it.
I don't think we benefit from it.
So, yeah, there's right.
Like you said, there's a ton there that we could expand on, but just in the time that we have, you know, I think one of the things you touched on, I talk about it a lot on this show, it really is there's tremendous hubris amongst the influential people, most of them unelected bureaucrats or think tanks, you know, funded by weapons companies and things like that.
There's tremendous hubris amongst them, but there's also just tremendous hubris, tremendous hubris amongst the American people, this feeling that, you know, they're all, I mean, 99% of the people you see putting Ukrainian flags up on their social media and going on about this stuff don't know anything about the region, the conflict, the history, and they don't feel a need to.
It's just like, well, we decided what side we're on.
That must be the good side.
And so let's just send weapons in.
That's enough to know.
And, you know, the point you made about the strategy not being there, I mean, after you retired, I think you left in 2004, I believe, right?
So after that, I mean, this became even more apparent where you have the, you know, where we fight a war under George W. Bush on behalf of the Shiites.
And then we're fighting a covert war in Syria to rein in the Shiites' control of the region.
At one point, we were fighting on opposite sides in Iraq and Syria, you know, where if you were, you know, one of the Sunni, you could have been a veteran of the insurgency in Iraq, cross the border over into Syria, and we'd be on your side there.
Of course, we're fighting as the air force, essentially, for al-Qaeda in Yemen right now.
We were their air force in Libya, and yet we still go on with these targeted strikes of al-Qaeda or ISIS suspected members.
I mean, there's just no, whether you're like, I'm a bleeding heart libertarian.
I don't like war unless my country is threatened.
You know, like that's my, I have an ideology here.
But even if you don't have that ideology, you could just look at this and say, there is no, like, what?
This makes no sense.
And so, of course, what do you have?
You have 20 years where there's been hundreds of thousands of people died on the opposite side, thousands of our own people.
Not to mention, I mean, if you add in the soldier suicides, the number starts to really climb high into the tens of thousands, not to mention the wounded, trillions of dollars blown.
And every single one of these countries where we've intervened, whether it's Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, all of them are far worse off than they were before the intervention started.
I mean, unless you have a gig with like a weapons company, I don't know what, who benefited from this.
Well, we've made millionaires out of lots of compliant three and four-star generals, obviously, who work tirelessly to keep us there.
But I do see evidence for a sea change.
I think Americans, as collectively, I'm just saying, let's take the belt way out of it.
Let's probably ignore New York City, probably Hollywood.
Leave them out of it.
But look at the rest of the country, and Americans are increasingly skeptical of what they hear.
I think the last 20 years have begun to have an impact.
That's a good thing.
People just don't believe everything that they're told any longer.
Now, secondly, I think there's another aspect that's beginning to hit home.
In the past, Washington was always able to insulate the public from any damage.
When I'm talking about damage, economic damage, human carnage, we went to this small volunteer force.
We didn't take very many casualties.
And, you know, people would assuage their guilt with lots of contributions to organizations there to help veterans.
But frankly, there was no real suffering inside the United States.
The second part of this, of course, is was no war tax.
You know, the first time we didn't have a war tax was under Harry Truman because he knew that if he had a war tax, the Korean War would end pretty quickly.
Americans would say, I don't think we should be there anyhow.
And we'd have come home.
Well, you have a similar situation now, only instead of it being a war tax, the economy is extremely fragile.
You listen to Mohamed El Aryan, who I think is one of the better analysts that speaks publicly, a very smart man.
He pointed out that just a hundred base point increase in the interest rates would probably crash the American economy.
So it looks like we may get a 25 to 50 point increase, but we won't go to the 100-point increase because people know that it will tank us.
Well, what kind of an economy do we think we have if a 1% rise in the interest rate can crash the economy?
Well, the answer is we don't have much.
You know, everybody says, well, look what we did after the Depression.
Look how we roared back in the 80s after the big recession.
Well, we had a manufacturing base.
There were jobs, and we could put Americans into those jobs.
We're not even the same country today that we were 20 or 30 years ago.
We've changed radically, and that manufacturing base is largely gone.
So now, if the economy does, in fact, tank, and I think that's what's going to happen, and we can't run this debt finance consumption scam in perpetuity.
And even worse, if the Russians are successful with what they're going to do with their ruble contract, I mean, by the end of this month, everyone who buys oil and gas from Russia is going to have to pay for it in rubles.
Well, that's going to put a real kink into everybody's operation.
We thought we were going to once again bully Russia into submission as we had bullied Iraq and all the other states.
It's not working.
It's not going to work.
Look at the Peninsular Arabs, our good friends in the Arabian Peninsula who've said, Well, if you're going to go to Iran for more oil, then I guess we'll do business with the Chinese and yuan currency.
We won't even use dollars.
So the future of our reserve currency status is very much in doubt.
So you look at the way the pieces are coming together here, it spells disaster economically for us, which means we can't afford to execute these pointless, self-defeating interventions.
These wars of vanity will have to end.
That may be a good thing.
But at home, people are going to start saying, well, wait a minute.
I can't afford to buy the food.
I can't afford to buy the gas.
How are we going to fix that?
And everybody should remember that in 1789, the French Revolution broke out when the people of Paris could not afford to buy bread.
Yes, that's not being able to afford food is a different type of motivator for radical political change.
Quitting Smoking Habits00:02:52
But I think you're, I think that's absolutely right.
Everything you just said there.
And the fact that, you know, people can say we roared back in the 1980s.
Well, to rein in the inflation of the 1970s, the Fed fund rate hit 20%.
20%.
Can you imagine?
I mean, the idea is so laughable of our economy sustaining a 20% Fed fund rate, a 2% Fed fund rate would be enough to kill our economy.
But yes, so in order for that rollback, you needed to have very high interest rates.
And good luck with that with a $30 trillion debt and a trillion dollar empire that we're maintaining around the globe.
That's just impossible.
You have to pick one or the other.
And so that is going to be interesting to see how that develops.
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Ukraine War Propaganda00:06:10
All right, let's get back into the show.
Talking about the war in Ukraine right now, there has been, I mean, just a tremendous amount of propaganda over the last few weeks.
It's been unbelievable.
Of course, I've been called in my little circles a Putin apologist, you know, giving Vladimir Putin talking points.
It is one thing for me to be called that, but to see people call you that with your history and how decorated you are.
I mean, go for anyone who wants to, just go Google search how many service medals Colonel Douglas McGregor has won.
It's a short book of them.
The idea that these people, many of them who, the vast, vast, vast, vast majority, never seen service, never seen combat or anything like that, but are so quick to call someone else essentially a traitor to their country because what?
Because you're telling the truth about what's going on.
I suppose if I said in 2002 that Saddam Hussein doesn't have nuclear weapons and isn't working with Osama bin Laden, then I would be giving Saddam talking points.
Like it's, is that how simplistic and binary we're thinking about the world now?
But the propaganda is everywhere.
And I admire that you've been, even on like Fox News, when I think you're giving Stuart Varney a mild heart attack to just tell the truth, that it's like, you know, what we're hearing over and over on the news.
Well, first off, the President Joe Biden said in his State of the Union that this invasion was a quote unprovoked attack.
And what we're hearing now over and over in the news is that while Vladimir Putin is, of course, Adolf Hitler and indistinguishable and the biggest threat ever, but he's also a weak, pathetic, puny leader who's falling on his face and they can't even win the war in Ukraine and they're just getting embarrassed, which are seemingly contradictory claims.
But what is really going on right now in the war in Ukraine?
I think people will discover over the next couple of weeks that the losses taken by Ukrainian forces have been enormous, much, much larger than anybody cares to admit.
I think we will also have a different view of Russian operations.
Now, remember, Russians are different from us.
We do things differently.
Many of us thought that when the Russian forces entered Ukraine, that they would come in like a sledgehammer.
In reality, they didn't do that at all.
And one of the principal reasons was that Putin made it very clear to his generals: he said, when this is over, we would like to live with the Ukrainians.
Remember, his goals were very straightforward.
Number one, neutrality for the Ukrainian state.
Number two, autonomy or independence for the Donbass republics that are Russian, as well as agreements that Russian-speaking citizens, people living in Ukraine who are Russian, will not be treated badly.
They will not be second-class citizens anymore, and they have been.
And that's something nobody ever talks about.
And then finally, renounce any further claim on Crimea.
Crimea was never Ukrainian, never part of Ukraine.
And they all go back to Khrushchev and his drinking bout in the 1950s, after which he awarded his buddies in Kiev, who were Russians, by the way, control of Crimea, all goes by the wayside.
Crimea has never been Ukrainian.
It's an ahistorical claim.
Those are the basic conditions.
And as far as I can tell, they have never changed.
There was never any interest in quote-unquote conquering Ukraine.
If you have an army of perhaps 450,000 or maybe a little larger, you're not going to be able to invest a country the size of Ukraine.
I mean, from one end of Ukraine to the other is sort of like Toronto all the way down to Charlotte, North Carolina.
I mean, it's just an enormous place.
But I think now things have changed because not so much because of this supposed Ukrainian resistance, although there have been some ugly events there.
I mean, some of these Ukrainian forces, to be frank, have behaved like ISIS and committed terrible atrocities against the Russians when it was never called for and never necessary.
Not that that is ever necessary, but it's just completely unjustified.
And we're not giving it any coverage or attention.
I think Tucker had something on very briefly, but that's the tip of an iceberg.
But I think now Putin is listening to Zelensky and his negotiators, but I'm not sure he's taking them seriously anymore.
That's unfortunate because this means he has to reassess what he wants to do.
And he may decide he's just going to hold on to everything east of the Dnieper River.
Much of that was not historically Ukrainian either.
Much of it was for hundreds and hundreds of years Mongolian and Tartar, then became Russian under Catherine the Great.
And some of it contains Ukrainians, but a lot of it contains people who are Russians.
And I think he may decide that, you know, he's going to have to do that.
We don't know.
I mean, I'm not privileged to those circles, but that is not an unreasonable conclusion for him to reach, particularly if he decides that he can't trust anything these Ukrainians say or do.
I mean, at this point, given Zelensky's behavior and resistance to any sort of reasonable outcome, maybe he decides, let Zelensky talk and we'll just end up doing what I just described, seizing the whole eastern side.
But there's another facet to this thing that's very dangerous.
And that is this constant stream of supplies, equipment, weapons coming in largely from Poland.
And I would not be surprised if he acts to stop it.
He's launched a lot of strikes with missiles on key installations where he knew that we were training Ukrainian forces and many foreign mercenaries where we might try to stage quote-unquote false flags and blame it on Russia.
This, you know, has happened in Syria.
So I think we may see something on the ground in Western Ukraine coming down out of Byel Russia that just launches from, if you know where Brest is in the part of Belorussia, look at that as a sort of center of gravity and then moving south down towards Lvov or Lviv.
Sanctions as Warfare00:13:20
We could see something like that to make it very clear that they are not going to tolerate any more resupply to opponents in Ukraine.
This is dangerous because that comes very close to our borders, to NATO's borders, and you could see something happen there that may not be planned, may not be wanted, but occurs, an accident of some kind.
Then you find that the war has widened very, very dramatically.
That would be disastrous.
Yeah, well, these things, right?
This is a very risky game to play.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
One of the things that's just been kind of really mind-boggling about this whole conflict just over the last few weeks is that, you know, as against all the terror wars and the regime change wars, as I've been, it's like, this is a different game.
This is Russia.
And the number one priority in the history of humanity is that the U.S. and Russia do not go to war.
That's the most important thing ever.
And to just see so many people so haphazardly just pushing these provocations.
I mean, you know, if we were involved in some conflict with Mexico City and Russia was sending in, you know, weapons, we would see that as quite a provocation, probably an act of war.
If they were training people in the fight against our people, we'd probably see that as an act of war.
Why shouldn't they see it that way from their perspective?
It's a very strange or an incredibly dangerous game.
Hopefully it does not come to something like that.
But this is as high stakes as a conflict could be.
Well, so this morning, I think it was on MSNBC, one of the more prominent neocons, and I can't recall his name, dismissed out of hand any concern about the use of nuclear weapons.
And the commentator on MSNBC impressed me because this man said, stop paying attention to what Putin said he may or may not do.
And forget that, that's not a threat.
And the man said to him, well, thus far, Putin has done everything he said he would do when everyone here in the United States, and as far as I can tell in Western Europe, said, oh, no, he'll never go in.
The Russians will never go into Ukraine.
That's too risky and so forth.
Once again, no understanding that for the Russians, what happens in Ukraine is existential.
Yes, what happens for us in Mexico is existential.
Unfortunately, we're doing nothing about it.
Our borders are open.
The drug cartels now control the borders.
We don't.
Millions of people are marching into this country.
We don't know where they're from.
Well, we know generally, but they're not coming with skills or abilities that we necessarily need.
And more important, I don't see much evidence these people are remotely interested in becoming Americans.
I mean, that used to be the principal motivation.
If you go back 100 years, everybody's trying to get here desperately to become an American.
How often do you hear that?
I never hear it at all.
So, you know, the whole thing is on its head.
And we're worried about what's happening in Ukraine.
What we should be doing is worrying about how do we forge or craft a solution that both sides can live with.
Let's go back to what Putin said at the beginning, see what he's still willing to do.
Because at this point, remember, he's done a lot of damage to the Ukrainians.
How much willingness is there to stick with those original objectives, or is he going to demand more?
But we've got to end this thing before it gets out of control.
And as you move closer to the Polish border, as I'm afraid something like that is going to happen, the more likely you are to have that accident that brings everyone into a war that no one in their right mind wants.
And I include, by the way, President Biden in that.
I just don't think he knew what he was doing when he made his speech in Warsaw.
He looks foolish and stupid.
But I guess, again, what you're going to see is more and more Europeans say, well, we didn't sign on for a regime change war.
We haven't signed on for a potential nuclear confrontation in Europe.
I mean, I think Europeans, the support base that we're characterizing as strong and unambiguously unified is nonsense.
That's going to crumble.
And the same thing is true when you look at the sanctions.
Sanctions are another form of warfare.
And that's why this ruble contract is a wonderful riposte, if you will, by the Russians.
They're turning it right around because the Europeans can't go for a month or two months or three months right now without Russian petroleum products and energy.
It's impossible.
The Germans have said so.
Others have said so.
So they know if they do, they're going to have hundreds of thousands of their citizens, if not millions, in the streets.
They're going to have a 1789 experience.
So the bottom line is I think all of this is going to crumble, but this is kind of the last gasp of the globalist elite.
Because if Russia is allowed to be successful in what it set out to do in Ukraine, it gets a neutral state, or you get a territorial arrangement with a neutral state that's different.
Then the message is clear and unambiguous to the world.
The unipolar moment is over.
The United States cannot bully everyone everywhere all the time.
Russia is not Iraq.
Yeah.
And I think one of the things that this is something I try to really try to persuade people of is that I think there's this unipolar moment or American dominance, America is number one kind of attitude in our culture, has it's been so intertwined with the American identity that I try to remind people that the unipolar moment has not been good for the average American.
This has not helped you at all.
There's no evidence that there was any benefit to the world or to the average American person in the idea that we run the world and we have global hegemony or whatever they want to call something that to me kind of looks a lot more like a world empire, but okay.
What does this do?
What does this do for the average American that's supposed to be benefiting from this?
And I think that, and one of the things to go back to, you know, you saying that there is this kind of encouraging sign that people are waking up to some degree.
You know, Tucker Carlson is really the only guy on TV who's been talking about this and telling the truth, or at least parts of it.
And he's the number one show in cable news.
And there is something to that, that the one guy kind of telling the truth, the people like the most.
And that's all this is.
I mean, look, whatever it is, the American people are just being lied to about what's going on here.
You know, the idea that we're supporting Ukraine because they're such a democracy.
That's the, just because we love democracy so much, even though, you know, they overthrew a democratically elected government way back in 2014, even though they've banned other political parties and imprisoned political opponents and absorbed, you know, news outlets into under the state apparatus.
This is still some thriving democracy.
Oh, and by the way, don't focus on how the Donbass region and Crimea in 2015 voted to be ruled by Russia, not Ukraine.
Don't worry about that.
Democracy doesn't apply to that.
And by the way, the people who love democracy so much and just have such bleeding hearts for the loss of life, we're happy to partner with the Saudis to conduct a war in Yemen.
But we don't seem to have any concern about a war there where far more people have been dying for quite a bit longer in a much poorer country.
You know, it's just, there's just so much that if you just look at it objectively, the official narrative collapses under the weight of even a little bit of truth, like just that little bit of truth right there.
The official narrative collapses.
So hopefully people like you keep getting out there and telling the American people the truth and they wake up about some of this stuff.
I grew up in the 1960s while the Vietnam War was in full swing and there was a split in my family at the time.
My mother was always insisting that we have to support the troops in Vietnam.
And she didn't like Lyndon Johnson.
She didn't like what was going on, but she said, we have an obligation.
We have to support this.
We don't want to, quote unquote, lose.
Well, her father had served in the First World War.
And he said, well, if you're concerned about the troops, bring them home.
Because his conclusion at the end of World War I was that we had involved ourselves in a war where we should never have fought, that we caused Western civilization to fragment and fall apart.
And then subsequently, we installed Bolshevism in Russia and helped bring National Socialism to power in Germany.
And had we stayed out, we might have avoided those things.
Well, that's kind of the way I look at what's happening right now in Eastern Europe.
There are all sorts of really bad potential outcomes from this.
But I think Americans are now finally beginning to look at the whole business and be skeptical.
Remember, we were told in Vietnam, victory or defeat in Vietnam will tell whether or not the Western world and the free world prevails in its struggle with communism.
Didn't make any difference at all.
Never did.
It was irrelevant.
And that's not to say that anyone who dies anywhere is irrelevant, but that doesn't necessarily justify our intervention.
And again, why can't we go back to the kind of country that we were 100 years ago, which in most cases was interested in intervening to end conflicts, not with military power, but to offer its services as an objective partner, as someone who could bring two sides together and avoid a larger, more destructive conflict?
We could do that.
We have a lot of power still.
We still have a great economy in many respects.
We're destroying it with our debt finance consumption and shipping our jobs overseas.
We know that.
But the point is we could do a lot of good as opposed to all the disastrous wrongs that we've been engaged in.
But as you know, if you say those things, you're a traitor, you're a Putin agent, you're an enemy of everything good, and that's the game that's played in Washington.
I don't think it resonates very strongly outside the Beltway, but certainly in the Beltway, that plays very well.
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Free Market Economy00:05:25
People in the Beltway are living in a bubble.
Yeah, they sure are.
They don't see any problem with anything happening in our country.
Well, your view is what difference does it make if the borders are open?
What difference does it make if there's criminality raging unchecked in all of our cities?
Doesn't affect us in Washington.
We live in gated communities and luxury apartment buildings.
We're well paid.
Because you can't get a good job.
That's your problem.
Well, it was the same during the lockdowns that they all advocated for.
They all kept their seven-figure salaries.
So, I mean, why not advocate for lockdowns?
It's no problem for you.
Now, if you, you know, if you're a family of, you know, a father of four and you own a restaurant, that's a really big problem for you.
But, you know, for somebody on MSNBC, it's no issue.
I'll say this and I'll let you go in a minute because I know you had given us a time window here.
But so my good friend and somebody who I love very much, Scott Horton, who's over at antiwar.com and he's written a couple of great books on the terror wars.
So he, I don't know if you saw this, but he had a debate, an Oxford-style debate with Bill Crystal.
And it was really entertaining to watch.
Scott just mopped the floor with him.
But there was a question and answer segment from the audience.
This really stuck out to me at one point where one of the people got to ask a question of Bill Crystal, who's been one of the most famous neocon supposed intellectuals over the last three or four decades.
And he asked him, since he's a supporter of military interventionism and regime change wars and all this, and he said, what would you say was the last American military intervention that was successful?
And Bill Kristol paused for a moment and then he said, Kosovo.
Now, however you feel about Kosovo, forget even, because what Scott ended up doing was just arguing how that wasn't actually successful and getting into a whole thing about that.
But my thing was just like, it really is something to listen to that even head neocon number one can't point to one military intervention in the 21st century that he believes wasn't a disaster.
He can't even argue it.
And the point is that the same way that they call you all of these names when you're against one of these interventions, that was true for all of those.
They would call you all of these names.
But then in hindsight, looking back at it, even they'll admit that they were all disasters.
So the idea that you're somehow anti-American for advocating policies that would make America richer and stronger and safer and more prosperous is one of the most, I mean, it's like we're living in an upside-down funhouse mirror time where that is considered to be un-American.
Yes, I'm so un-American because I'd like to have a free market economy and not one run out of Washington, D.C., not have a central planning than, you know, something that actually makes us rich and strong.
That's how much I hate the country.
Well, the sad part is, and Scott can certainly tell you this, Bill Crystal's donors have very deep pockets.
And in Washington, donors count, voters don't.
And that's why someone like Scott Horton is a very heroic figure because he's raging against the storm and there's no one rushing out to donate to him.
There are no institutions, think tanks, funds springing up to advocate for the things that Scott advocates or that I do.
Absolutely not.
But there is an endless stream of cash moving into these neocon circles.
I mean, if you look at somebody like Bolton, who in my judgment is a terrible failure in every sense of the word, never wants for cash, always has someone give him a position and keep him in cash.
He's rolled out repeatedly as a weapon to use against those of us who advocate no war or staying home or a true strategy that is designed to protect our real strategic interests as opposed to the imaginary ones who don't want to die and endless crusades for democracy that are always fraudulent nonsense.
And that's what's happening right now in Ukraine, unfortunately.
We're involving ourselves for reasons that sound great in theory, but in practice are disastrous.
So, you know, Scott deserves a lot of credit.
His most recent book, by the way, enough already, is really good.
And everybody should pick that up and read it.
Yep, it's right here behind me.
It's phenomenal.
If you want to understand what's been going on in the terror wars, if you were looking for one thing to pick up to get started, that would be the number one book that I would recommend.
All right.
Well, thank you so much for taking the time today.
I really enjoyed it.
I hope we get to do it again sometime.
And thank you for telling the American people the truth.
Keep it up.
Colonel Douglas McGregor, everybody, is there anything that you'd like to promote or where people can look for you and find more of your stuff?
Well, look, for those who may want to understand military affairs and where things have been going now for the last 25, 30, 40 years, they might want to look at my most recent book, Margin of Victory.
They would find the examples in that book.
I look at five battles over the 20th century, and then I try to look at what the future holds.
And I think they'd enjoy reading about it.
It would help them to understand what is being discussed.
Because remember, nobody spends more money on defense than we do.