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Sept. 11, 2019 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
27:30
'National Security Without Constant Conflict' - Col. Douglas Macgregor

Decorated US combat veteran and author Col. Douglas Macgregor has some advice for President Trump if the president really means what he says about reducing US military presence across the globe. In this speech to the Ron Paul Institute's 2019 Washington conference, Macgregor makes a powerful case for returning to the foreign policy of our Founding Fathers.

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Time Text
Why We Left North Korea 00:13:11
Thank you very much.
First of all, I really want to express my gratitude to the man who is the reason for us being here today, this man of character and intelligence like virtually no one else, Dr. Ron Paul.
And the good news, I think, is that his son, the senator, has inherited those attributes.
Now, just before I came up here, Dr. Paul leaned over after the comment on the double espresso was made.
He said, well, I hope you're going to live up to that.
Which is kind of frightening because David Stockman, following that man, is sort of like walking down the hillside or running down the hillside of Mount Sinai behind Moses with two more commandments.
And by the time Rick Sanchez was finished, I felt like standing up and yelling, vivo sanchez, vivo sanches.
So I'll do the best I can.
First, having covered Moses, which you always need to mention whenever you talk politics in this country, I want to talk about the next man after Moses, and that's Donald Trump.
And I say that because in all seriousness, I voted for Donald Trump.
I support Donald Trump, and I will vote for him again.
And I will try to explain that in the course of my remarks.
Now, why would I have ever voted for Donald Trump?
Well, first of all, Donald Trump recognized a series of what I consider to be unambiguous truths that need to be repeated early and often.
First, we live in a multipolar world.
The so-called unipolar moment, which was exploited by various people in the 90s and the early part of this century to try and impose America's notions, or at least the notions of some people in Washington, of what the rest of the world should be like or look like, is over.
It ended relatively quickly.
We don't live in the Cold War.
We don't have a bipolar world.
There are no Russian armies massing on the borders of Europe ready to invade.
There are no Chinese armies ready to invade Southeast Asia.
There are no Chinese forces ready to invade the Korean Peninsula.
In fact, the Chinese have just spent an enormous amount of money to build a 1,100-mile wall between China, its border in Manchuria, and North Korea to prevent millions of starving North Koreans from pouring into China for food.
So there are no threats on the scale that you are hearing.
And everyone who has spoken this morning is absolutely, totally, and completely correct.
So what's wrong?
Why have we not made more progress?
Why is this defense budget still so large?
Well, ladies and gentlemen, part of the problem is personnel is policy.
And the president is surrounded by people who don't agree with him and have successfully persuaded him again and again and again that what he's tried to do should not be done, that what he wants to do is somehow or another wrong.
So I want to go over some of the areas and then talk a little bit about these obstacles to rationality.
Because ultimately what Donald Trump was doing, and sometimes I think of Donald Trump as the American id for those of you who have studied Freud, he simply blurts out the truth.
And I'm not sure that even he is aware of just how accurate he is from time to time.
He just returned, by the way, from a trip in Northeast Asia.
And while he was over there, he pointed out, he said, I don't know why we're defending Japan.
I don't know why we have forces here.
Japan is enormously prosperous and successful.
They can defend themselves.
People all over the White House and in the Senate, in the House, in the Department of Defense, and the State Department all had heart attacks.
Immediately, my God, this man is questioning the rationale for something that has existed for years.
He's pointed out routinely: it's 75 years after the end of the Second World War, and we have forces not only in Northeast Asia and Europe, but all over the Middle East.
And he's right.
And he has said, I think they should come out.
And he's correct.
But they aren't all out.
However, there is a good piece of news, and that is if you go back to 2010 and you look at not only the distribution of forces around the world, but the numbers, those numbers were up at about 250,000 overseas.
Those numbers have fallen dramatically.
Those of us who care and are interested think they should fall to zero in most cases, but we have to give credit where credit is due.
But let's go through the major issues because the president now has 14 months.
That's 14 months to execute some very important tasks, tasks that he set for himself and tasks that are within his reach.
The first is Afghanistan.
$1 trillion later, 2,300 American dead, thousands of Americans' lives who've been ruined in one way or another by routine deployments to this world-class money pit.
It's time to leave.
It's well overdue.
There is nothing in Afghanistan of importance to us anymore.
There really wasn't much there after the first few months.
Any attempt to try and mold this country into something that it simply is not and cannot become has failed.
It's analogous to sticking your hand into a bucket of water, then withdrawing it to discover that your impact on the bucket of water is zero.
Donald Trump can remove our forces from Afghanistan with the stroke of a pen.
That's the power he has in foreign and defense policy.
He needs to do it.
That's number one.
That's the first task.
Number two, Korea.
Donald Trump had the wisdom to understand after his initial meeting with President Xi from China to recognize that there was no threat in North Korea anymore.
President Xi was very honest with him and made it abundantly clear that China wants nothing to do with a war in Asia, period.
Least of all on the Korean Peninsula, which is a dagger pointed at the heart of China.
Wants nothing to do with it.
And he said to President Trump, We want peace on the peninsula, and I will support you in that effort.
And President Trump went about doing things in ways that nobody expected.
The first thing he did, realizing that North Korea was isolated, isolated from China, and isolated from the help and assistance that China might otherwise provide, he also understood that North Korea economically was circling the drain.
There is no gross domestic product or gross national product in North Korea.
Somebody compared it to Ethiopia.
Wrong.
Ethiopia is light years ahead.
There's nothing there.
The armed forces are in ruins.
The latest missiles this man Kim fired were gifts from Mr. Putin, new Asconder missiles.
They weren't developed in North Korea, and they were used to create the illusion, the illusion of some capability.
Wisely, Donald Trump has dismissed these and said, no, this is ridiculous.
There's nothing there.
We can reach an agreement.
But he did it by first demonstrating that he was actually quite willing to attack North Korea.
This was not a boast.
It was not a bluff.
It was real.
And that had the desired effect because Mr. Kim went to Beijing, he knelt before the emperor, and the emperor said, No help from us.
Do business with Mr. Trump.
And so Mr. Kim went to do business with Mr. Trump.
He went to Hanoi to sign an agreement, an agreement that had been carefully studied and previously agreed to, that should have been signed.
That would have marked the beginning of the dismantling of the nuclear capability.
Unfortunately, he was accompanied by individuals who were determined to prevent that from happening, and they succeeded.
And that set us back, but it's not over.
So task number two is first: go to Korea and sign an end-of-war declaration.
That's number one.
Now, why do we sign the end of war declaration?
We sign it because it's a renunciation of the use of force on the peninsula to change anything.
And if you live in Beijing or Pyongyang, you have this suspicion that someone may come along in the future and pursue regime change.
I wonder why they would worry about that.
So when Donald Trump signs the agreement and renounces the use of force, that is the critical aspect of the whole deal.
Then they know we are finally serious.
Then he announces that the operational control of military power on the Korean Peninsula is now President Moon's.
We are no longer treating South Korea as a military satellite, as a colony, that South Korea is a sovereign state that controls its own destiny.
When he does that, that will be the second most important signal, which means that President Moon is now in charge of the destiny of his country, not us.
And then he needs to direct the team to sit down with the South Koreans and work out a timetable that North Korea agrees to for the dismantlement of the nuclear capabilities.
and that each step will be matched by the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Korea.
That must happen.
There is nothing for those men to do there anymore.
And there hasn't been for a long time.
And we can repurpose them.
I'm sure that instead of the demilitarized zone, which is effectively out of business at this point, they'd be much happier on the Texas border.
They'd at least be closer to home and could commute to work.
And then finally, once these things are accomplished, what President Trump mentioned while he was in Japan will come to fruition.
Because you see, Japan has been waiting for us to go to war with China.
And when it becomes abundantly clear that we're leaving Korea, the Chinese know there is no threat to them any longer.
There will be no massive march north and into Manchuria.
There is no threat against which they must defend.
And that means there's no rationale or reason for 20,000 Marines on Okinawa, an island which is smaller than Loudoun County, Virginia.
And we will withdraw from Japan.
Suddenly, Japan, which is one of the most powerful economic forces in the world, will reassert itself as a great power, which it must and needs to in Asia, for good reasons, not bad ones.
China has already welcomed the Japanese into their markets, which has been the principal reason for Sino-Japanese hostility over many, many centuries.
There will be no war between Japan and China.
The Japanese invaded it.
They know there's no point, and they're not going to repeat that mistake.
And Korea, well, President Moon is going to have to manage the North to extinction.
And everybody in South Korea, and increasingly most of the population in the North, knows that the more contact the North and the South have, the sooner North Korea will vanish.
There will be no war, and it will be over.
And that part of the world doesn't need American military power.
In fact, we need to move decisively to demilitarize our relationship with Asia.
Our relationship needs to be a business relationship.
The president knows that.
He wants to do that.
He may or may not have taken the right route, although I do sign on for his views of bad policy in the past vis-a-vis China and their economy.
But if we're going to have disputes with the Chinese, then let those disputes be on the business level, the economic level, and put away this nonsense about an aggressive Imperial China.
Disengagement from the Gulf 00:08:05
It's nonsense.
It's wrong.
It doesn't exist.
China has already adopted the no-first use pledge.
That's very important.
They don't even mount nuclear warheads on their intercontinental ballistic missiles or medium-range ballistic missiles.
I don't know how much more obvious they can be in terms of their disinterest in going to war.
It would be wonderful if President Trump, who has privately expressed an interest in announcing no first use, would do so and do so jointly with President Putin.
then maybe we can get back to some useful arms control instead of this perilous and stupid course of spending billions on armaments we don't need.
Three, Iran, Iran, Iran, Iran, Iran.
Iran spends $15 billion annually on its national defense establishment.
That's about what we spend right now to stand up, fully equip, fully man a carrier battle group, and equip it with carriers and escorts and submarines.
15 billion.
That's what Iran spends annually.
Yet Iran has become the cause celeb for military power and aggressive military action in the United States.
Let's look carefully at what needs to happen.
It needs to happen soon.
First, in the Gulf, we need a new arrangement with Iran.
We don't need to escort vessels that are really not under threat.
We don't need to do anything that would disrupt shipping, especially the movement of vital oil and natural gas from the Middle East, from Iran, from the Persian Gulf to China, Japan, Korea, and other nations that do business with us.
That would be a disaster.
So we need to begin disengaging our forces in the Gulf.
But to do that, we've got to sit down and talk with and to the Iranians.
And it's not a question of talking to them.
You're going to have to sit and listen to them.
That's something we don't do.
This may come as a real shock in Washington, D.C.
But Iran, like Russia, like China, like Turkey, like France, actually has legitimate security interests.
We need to identify those.
And once we've identified those, and we stipulate very clearly what ours are, we might be able to come to an arrangement.
In fact, I would go beyond it and say with absolute certainty.
We also have 5,000 troops sitting in Iraq and another 2,000 in Syria.
And this is a very hazardous place for them to be for two reasons.
First of all, there's always the danger that a third country like Israel or Saudi Arabia or the Emirates take action in these areas that is somehow or another mistaken for action by us, and that we end up becoming the target of retaliation that would then involve us in a regional war that neither we nor Iran, nor for that matter any sane human being in the world today wants.
They've got to come out.
But before we pull them out, they too have to be part of this discussion.
The other problem is that we have forces right now in the path of the Turkish army.
The Turks are not the Turks of 30 or 40 years ago.
Ataturk is dead.
Secular Turkey is dead.
Mr. Erdogan is leading a Sunni Islamist revolution that very few people have been paying attention to.
And unlike Iran, where the population is 100% disinterested in going to war with anybody and ultimately dislikes this government that they're ruled by, in Turkey, he has the support of millions.
And his armed forces are far, far more substantial.
He can mobilize and put into the field 2 million men in a very short period of time.
And for those of you who have never been in the Middle East, I can tell you, the drive from the Syrian-Turkish border to the Golan Heights is a quick one.
And if you're planning on using nuclear weapons to deter the Turks, that becomes extraordinarily difficult when there are 1 million of them sitting across from you in the Golan Heights.
The Israelis who have obsessed for so long about Iran need to rethink some of their assumptions and consider the possibility that as in the past, there may be some commonality of interest with Iran that they have neglected and that Turkey rather than Iran is the real existential threat to Israel because it's already very clear that Mr. Erdogan is violently anti-Christian, he is anti-Jewish, he's anti-European.
Those are facts.
They are indisputable.
That is something else we have to take very seriously.
And putting 2,000 lightly armed soldiers in the path of this juggernaut that is only waiting for the opportunity to move into Syria is a very dangerous thing.
And again, with the stroke of a pen, he can remove them.
And if someone tells him we have to keep soldiers in Iraq to keep an eye on Iran, we should remind the president that our space-based surveillance and intelligence and reconnaissance is second to none.
And that if we really want to know what the mullah thought last night in bed, we can probably find out.
Although I doubt seriously, it would be very interesting.
So we need this arrangement with Iran.
And it needs to be done quickly.
It needs to be done in secret.
In secret, not publicly.
Why would you want to do it publicly and give the opportunity to the hundreds of thousands of your enemies all over the Beltway in New York City, in Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, or Miami to take shots at you?
We need to talk quietly in a third country and sort this out.
And in the meantime, begin disengaging our forces to ensure there are no accidents.
This brings me to number four that has to happen just about as quickly.
Venezuela.
You know, when I listened to Rick Sanchez go down the litany of American misfortunes and stupidities in Latin America, I was so excited I almost stood up and said, Viva Sanchez!
Viva Sanchez!
Well, I'm not ready to do that yet, Rick, but it is time for us to re-examine what we've been doing.
The president has resisted the use of force in Iran.
He's resisted the use of force in Venezuela.
He does not want a war.
And yet he's been ambushed into precisely that kind of action.
He's being told that if nothing changes, nothing changes that suits us, he will have to resort to military power to quote unquote remove the regime.
Well, here's another solution.
These sanctions, which are so destructive and so debilitating, have never changed a regime anywhere.
But they've done enormous harm and damage to the populations in many, many countries.
That is happening in Venezuela.
And if we do not lighten up on these sanctions, another 8 million people will leave that country and there will be no opposition to Mr. Maduro and his cabal that is running the country.
That would be a disaster.
So the sanctions need to be lifted to the extent that we can to ensure that the population is no longer punished and penalized in Venezuela.
We need to do the same thing in Korea and we need to do the same thing in Iran.
And we may be surprised at the very positive response that we get from these countries if in fact we do that.
Sanctions and Their Consequences 00:06:09
Now there's a second problem that Mr. Trump is dealing with that doesn't get much attention.
And that's the problem with the senior officers who command America's armed forces.
They are products of the last 20 to 30 years of government that has rewarded the wrong kind of behavior and the wrong kind of thinking.
Let me tell you, when I was a commander, I kept in my office a little G.I. Joe doll.
And I would bring it out periodically for my troops when I would talk to them, especially when I had newcomers, because I said, it's important that you understand what this doll means.
If you're like this doll, we don't need you in my squadron because I need soldiers who can think and act without orders.
Because when combat comes from personal experience, there's not going to be anybody there to micromanage you across the battlefield.
And so I would bring out this doll, and this doll, G.I. Joe, could say two words.
Yes, sir.
So I would look at this thing and I'd say, you see what this thing says?
Yes, sir.
Yes, sir.
I said, let's see if this doll is anatomically correct.
And I would pull down the trousers and I would say, see, no genitalia.
And then I would pull off the head, plastic head, and I'd say, look at this.
No brain.
If that's you, we don't want you in the cavalry.
We want you out of here.
The troops loved it.
Unfortunately, President Trump doesn't seem to understand that that's what he's got now for four stars.
And they got where they are by saying, yes, sir, yes, sir.
Whatever it was that came down, because everybody else who stood up and said, you know, occupying a Muslim country with a Western army is a prescription for disaster.
Thank you very much.
You can find employment in the private sector.
Or turned around and said, if you occupy this country and you begin banging down doors in your conduct of counterinsurgency, you will cultivate millions of enemies.
Thank you.
may seek employment in the private sector.
And so what you have left are people who have been part of failure after failure after failure and they have been rewarded.
Churchill once said that the secret to success was moving from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
Well, there are a lot of four stars out there who are living proof.
That's the problem.
He's got to get rid of them.
Mao said one day when somebody said, how do we persuade people to adopt our way of life?
Chairman, what is the secret?
And he said, shoot one, educate a million.
He was right.
Donald Trump doesn't have to remove very many of these people.
This is a group of people that always have their fingers in the air.
They want to stay on.
They want to be promoted.
They want jobs and industry.
They want to enrich themselves.
If the wind changes, they'll change.
Donald just needs to fire a few.
One who comes to mind is a CENTCOM commander who helped to set up the ambush with other people that nearly triggered a war in the Persian Gulf that Donald Trump walked away from.
Those things don't happen by accident.
You don't move hundreds of aircraft, thousands of troops, and hundreds of ships into an area by accident.
You don't do it unless you're being told to do it.
And Donald Trump did not tell anybody to do it.
And then he was walked into the ambush and he said, no.
Who are those people?
They need to be fired.
What about this admiral down in Southcom, Fallon?
I think that's his name, or Fowler.
He keeps talking about the requirement for a naval blockade to bring Venezuela to its knees.
He openly makes these statements.
Where are these people from?
What would Eisenhower have done with these people?
What would Truman or FDR have done with them?
They would have been fired so fast, their heads would have spun right off their bodies.
These people are out of control.
These people need to be removed.
And he needs to get started as soon as possible.
Because unless he takes these actions, he's going to find more and more and more opposition to what he needs and wants to do.
Finally, I want to talk about the election that's coming, because the election is not just about Donald Trump.
This election next year is almost a spiritual battle, as someone pointed out to me last night.
Because on one side, you have these globalists caught up in the international finance arena, people that are for open borders, people who are absolutely committed to a continuation of our overseas entanglements.
And in addition to that, we have growing ranks of nihilists, Marxists, who are committed to the destruction of the very country we live in.
On the other side are Americans.
And Donald needs to remember that when he got elected, he was elected by Republicans and Democrats who voted for him because he was the id, because he said things nobody else would say.
And he said he would do things that nobody else would do.
He's got to get started.
I've given him a list.
He needs to do it as soon as possible.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much.
The last comment I just want to leave you with this is that Washington and Hamilton used to say that America's mission in the world is to be its engine of prosperity.
We need to stop being the engine of destruction and go back to being the engine of prosperity.
And we will be surprised at how many friends and allies and supporters we find everywhere.
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