America’s Biggest Threat And Next Conflict (Uncut) 02-09-2025

Former Army Colonel On America’s Biggest Threat And Next Conflict | Douglas Macgregor

We’re speaking on the 20th of January. President Trump has now been sworn into office. We’re talking about what’s going to happen to the geopolitical landscape after inauguration.

Already a few hot spots have ignited in the last couple of days and on the 18th of January Russia hit Kiev with a ballistic missile. The diplomatic front the UK has signed a historic 100-year defense pact with Ukraine. The deal also offers Ukraine security in case of a ceasefire and recognizes Ukraine as a future NATO ally.

So what’s next for war and peace? We’re here with an esteemed guest, Colonel Douglas MacGregor. He served in the US Army from 76 to 2004, where he earned the Defense Superior Service Medal for his leadership during the 1999 Kosovo War. Welcome to the show.

Happy to be here. Colonel, an absolute pleasure, honor. Let’s talk about what’s going on currently in the world.

Donald Trump wants to end the war in Ukraine. Let’s start big picture. Can he achieve that in the first hundred days in your opinion? Well, I think he’s discovering it may not be in his power to determine the outcome.

That’s one of the problems that I think America is having increasingly. You know, historically we’ve always seen ourselves as the center of the universe. We aren’t.

The world has changed. And Russia has vital strategic interests in eastern Ukraine. We have none whatsoever in Ukraine at all.

No vital strategic interests. So the question is, what are we doing there? No strategic interest? There’s no incentive whatsoever or advantage to deter Russia? No. At least? Well, you’re presupposing that Russia is our enemy.

I don’t accept that. Okay. See, this is the problem with this what we call narrative.

We don’t have truth anymore. We just have narratives. So everyone says, well, Russia’s the enemy.

Really? Why? What have they done to us? Well, they tried to interfere in an election. Really? Are you sure? Have you seen evidence for that? Well, you know. Listen, Russia is not the enemy of the American people.

Russia is not the enemy of anybody in Europe per se. Who is the enemy of the American people right now? Probably, if I exclude the left in the United States, which runs everything, I would say our biggest single problem inside the United States and on our borders is with the drug cartels. They present an existential threat to the society.

And the millions of so-called migrants who have poured into our country, large numbers of them are here as a result of the drug cartels. It’s gotten so bad that all of our institutions are penetrated in one way or another by intelligence officers from the drug cartels. Well, we’re going to go back to Ukraine in just a minute.

But since you brought up the drug cartels, President Trump has said in several videos, especially during his campaign trail, that he wants to fight the drug cartels. Yes. He would take action in Mexico if needed.

How is this going to affect the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico? We have no relationship between the United States and Mexico other than on human terms, because we’re familiar with Mexicans and they’re familiar with us. The government is an empty facade. The drug cartels govern Mexico.

Mexico is an organized crime state. What do you mean by that? Exactly what I said. The country is controlled by drug cartels.

Depending upon where you are, where you live in Mexico, a drug cartel controls- So you’re not suggesting the government is working with the drug cartels? Oh, absolutely. Nothing is decided in the Mexican government without the approval of the drug cartels. The Mexican military itself is penetrated.

So are the police, local police, but especially the federal police. Is this a revelation for you? How do we start the cartels from entering America? Just higher border security or something else? No, there are two things that have to happen right away. You have to close the border and secure it properly.

That’s going to take military power. Police cannot do it alone. Because remember, you’re stopping potentially billions of dollars worth of trade from Mexico in terms of drugs.

Every year, we kill 110,000 Americans with fentanyl. Where does the fentanyl come from? It comes up from Mexico and pours into the country. We don’t only need to secure the border with Mexico, we also need to secure the border with Canada and the Great Lakes.

The Canadians are very familiar with the problem. They work well with us. So we can do that.

Our problem is the Mexican border. The Mexican military is no longer a reliable partner under any circumstances for us. So we have to shut down the border, then secure it.

That means everything stops, nothing gets in, nothing goes out until you have a secure system in place. Now, that can be done relatively quickly when I say a secure system, but you’re going to need probably 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 U.S. troops augmenting the border patrol on the border. That has to happen.

Well, how do we do this without outright declaring war on the Mexican military? Well, you can absolutely declare war on the drug cartels. I think that would be a good idea. Would this impact NAFTA? It’s going to impact everything.

It’s going to have a huge impact on Mexico and a huge impact inside the United States because the criminal gangs that operate in all the major cities that have now proliferated into the countryside, they’re going to attack us from the inside because we’re cutting off the income. And it’s not just on land. We also have to bring the Coast Guard back from places like the South China Sea and the Persian Gulf and put them into the littoral waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific and stop the massive infusion of drugs that comes through that traffic.

Have you seen the submersibles that come up from Colombia and Central America and Mexico? Have you seen those? They’re like small submarines. They carry tons of illicit drugs as well as illegal migrants that enter the country. Trump also wants Canada to fix the financial problem coming from the Canadian side.

So what’s going to change for Canada and the U.S. in the next four years? Well, I think the Canadians are going to have to crack down on their borders the same way we’re going to have to crack down on ours. The good news is that if you’re talking to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police or any of the border officials, you’re talking to honest people. They’re representatives of their government.

They’ll inform us of what they’re finding. We will inform them of what we’ve got. The problem that we have in Mexico is anything you tell the government, anything you tell the Mexican military goes instantly to the cartels.

Okay. Well, let’s go back to the Eastern European situation. Suppose Trump were committed to ending the war in Ukraine.

Putin already said on inauguration day today that he’s open to talks. He congratulated Trump. What do you think this negotiation is going to look like? Well, first of all, negotiation is a misleading term.

The Russians have made it very clear that what they want is an all-encompassing, all-embracing agreement for security for them as well as their European neighbors. In other words, they’re not looking for a ceasefire that results in some sort of temporary solution. They’re not interested in a Korean-style division in Ukraine between one side and the other.

They want an end to the fighting. They want an end to a belligerent, dangerous, criminal Ukraine that is attacking their country. And that’s the problem.

That has been the problem from the beginning. What do you mean, dangerous, criminal Ukraine? In what sense? Ukraine is a criminal state. It is riddled with organized crime.

50% of all the cash we’ve sent there, practically 50% of all the military equipment disappears and is resold or goes into foreign banks. Everyone is on the payroll. Why do the people in the Ukrainian parliament stand up and clap? Because they’re all being paid with Western hard currency.

Why does the military continue to operate? Because the officers, the commanders are all being paid heavily in Western currency to keep fighting. They don’t care about the soldiers. You’ve had 1.2 to 1.5 million casualties that are Ukrainian.

Of that number, at least 600,000 are dead, dead Ukrainian soldiers. Everything that has been reported that’s bad about Russia is true about Ukraine, not Russia. Russian casualties have been comparatively light.

The exchange ratio has been generally 1 to 6. And now over the last several months, it’s become 1 to 7 or 1 to 8. But do you think if Trump makes a deal with Putin somehow, that makes somehow America look weak? There’s no hell with that. There’s no question about our strength and power as a great nation. This is nonsense that people preach in order to tie the hands of presidents.

The most dangerous thing in Europe today is the war in Ukraine, because the war in Ukraine could spread unless we put a stop to it. It has to stop now. And the Russians are not interested in conquering Europe.

They’re not interested in crossing the Dnieper River into Western Ukraine. They know their own history. They don’t want to rule Ukrainians.

Ukrainians don’t want to be ruled by them. But Eastern Ukraine, most of what you see on that map where the Russians are presently, is Russian and has been Russian for hundreds of years. Now, the problem that we face is to recognize the legitimate security interests of Russia in what happens on its borders.

We are the ones that have provoked them in Georgia. We have provoked them in Kazakhstan. We’ve provoked them all along their border repeatedly.

These are the color revolutions that you’ve heard about. We’ve been pushing this under the guise of democracy. The Russians have had it.

They’re not going to put up with it anymore. And they’ve said so. The problem for us is that we tried to turn Eastern Ukraine as a platform for attack against Russia.

What do you think Putin’s endgame is? The endgame is what I just described. He wants an agreement that straightens out once and for all the borders between Ukraine and Russia. And secondly, he wants an overarching security arrangement between NATO and the European nations that are members of NATO and Russia.

Now, we’ve had things like this before. We had something called the mutual balance force reduction talks. We had them in the 70s, 80s and 90s.

And they came to a conclusion, ultimately, when everything fell apart. But the idea was always the same. You don’t move any forces beyond this line.

We don’t move any beyond this line. We inform you. Whenever we are going to move forces, you inform us.

It worked very effectively. And we worked with the Russians on these things in the past. I have dealt with the Russian military in my position in Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe.

Very reliable, very straightforward, no nonsense. And what they want to do is they want whatever emerges in the form of this thing we call Ukraine to be a neutral state. So the first steps that have to be taken, and this is what I would advise President Trump to do immediately, is suspend all further military aid to Ukraine immediately.

As soon as that happens, the war is going to stop. Because the Russians aren’t interested in advancing any further than they already have. And the Ukrainians will say, fine, and they’ll go home because they have nothing left to fight with.

Somebody says to you, Colonel, the Biden administration has pledged to help the Ukrainians win this war. The military and financial aid that the Americans gave Ukraine was not successful in pushing out Russian forces out of the east. They’ve occupied the Donbas and other regions.

How would you respond to that? Why were the military aid and financial assistance not enough to do this? Well, I just told you that 50 percent of everything that we gave them was stolen. So it’s not a factor of American equipment and aid not being sufficient. Much of the American and European equipment did not perform to the standards that people had anticipated.

And it turned out that the Russian equipment in many cases was much better. That’s not surprising. I mean, those things happen in wars.

Is there a shortage of ammunition? A terrible shortage. We have essentially gone into our war stocks to the point where if we had to fight a war against another major power, we will be unable to do so. This is particularly true for missiles and rockets.

We have no surge capacity in the scientific industrial base for the military. In other words, we can’t do what was done in 1941 or 42 and tell Ford Motor Company, stop building cars, you’re going to start building tanks, artillery and so forth. We don’t have that ability.

And it’s particularly true in missiles. Missiles are very complex devices. We don’t have assembly lines set up with thousands of people that can rapidly turn these missiles out.

The Russians do. The Russians have reinvigorated their industries that were left fallow after the Soviet Union fell apart. The difference is they didn’t dismantle them.

They just shuttered them, whereas we effectively dismantled our capability. So we don’t have a surge capacity. So if we challenge the Russians on a purely conventional level, we will lose.

We cannot replenish the stocks issue at sea. We cannot replenish the stocks for the Air Force. We’re limited.

30 days and we’re done. Do you think the next great war will be conventional in nature? I certainly hope so, because if it’s nuclear, it’ll be the last war. It could be cyber, it could be with drones.

You’re going to have everything you can imagine, but nuclear. Nuclear, biological and chemical weapons are off the table. Those things cannot be controlled.

Anyone who tells you that a tactical nuclear weapon can somehow or another work because it’s a small nuclear explosion is insane. Once that’s detected, everyone will escalate quickly, because the assumption is if I don’t use my inventory, my arsenal, then he’ll destroy it before I get to use it. So you don’t even want to go down that road.

You don’t even want to think about a nuclear weapon under any circumstances. There were talks of a nuclear risk after Ukraine struck Russia with intermediate range missiles. They struck the Kursk region and that obviously didn’t materialize.

Is that risk still on the table, Colonel, in 2025, in January, a nuclear escalation? First and most important, you have to understand that you’re getting translations of Russian statements and doctrinal statements that are translated just as we do the same thing with Chinese that’s translated in Taiwan. You get an interpretation that’s designed to reflect badly on the Chinese, and we do the same thing with the Russians. What has been said is very simply this.

If a nation, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Germany, Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria, any of those nations should host a weapon of mass destruction, i.e. a nuclear weapon that comes from us, from the United States, then the Russians reserve the right to respond to them with a nuclear strike because they have offered their country as a platform for the projection of nuclear weapons against them. That’s what was said. And they have moved nuclear weapons forward in white Russia and forward in the western, northwestern military district from St. Petersburg to make it very clear that they’re not kidding.

They’re very serious. That’s what he said, not necessarily what is reported in the American press. Like I mentioned in the introduction, the UK has gone ahead and made a deal with Ukraine recently, a hundred-year peace deal with Ukraine.

Starmer’s office consolidated this historic partnership, they called it. The partnership is expected to bolster military collaboration. I think the terms are still under development.

But suppose after this war is over, if Russia ever invades Ukraine, the UK would be obliged to provide military assistance. How does this complicate or change NATO? First of all, the military capability and potential of the United Kingdom is irrelevant. Okay, what do you mean by that, Colonel? In 1939, the Poles flew to London to secure a guarantee from the British that they would be supported in the event that they were invaded by the Germans or the Soviets.

Okay. And the British signed it. What happened? Nothing.

Because the British could not reach Poland, could not influence anything that happened on the ground in Poland. The British, the French, the other European powers today do not have the ability to influence anything on the ground in Ukraine. So why still have NATO? Don’t need it.

I don’t think we haven’t needed NATO in my judgment since 1994. And most of us that were serving over there at the time said, well, let’s go home. The argument was, you have to find a new mission for NATO to keep it intact.

But if other NATO nations like the UK are making this deal with Ukraine, does it make it harder for Putin and Trump to come to terms? I don’t think so. Because I can tell you from personal experience, President Trump knows that NATO is an empty vessel when it comes to military power. You take us out of the equation, there’s not much there.

The NATO countries, the European countries maintain what I would call boutique forces. These are little armies designed to go into Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America. They’re designed for, quote unquote, low intensity conflict.

They have no chance whatsoever to survive contact with the Russian military establishment. And the revelation that everyone should understand that the Russians have demonstrated in Ukraine is that they can link all of the terrestrial and space-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance collectors, assets, to strike weapons from mortars all the way up to theater ballistic missiles. And that these weapons can be launched with great precision at any target that can be identified anywhere in Ukraine.

Yes. And secondly, those missiles in many cases are now hypersonic. In other words, exceeding Mach 5. We cannot shoot them down.

We have no means of doing so. None. Laser weapons? What laser weapons? Where are the laser weapons? Where are the Star Wars beams? They don’t exist.

On the naval ships that they’re using, the new ones? Good luck. A shiny surface, a silver shiny surface that you would see on the side of an aircraft will reflect the laser beam. Remember, this is just light.

Concentrated light. It’ll bounce right off of it. Lasers are not where we think they are.

Directed energy weapons are not. The other problem is powering them. One of the reasons we started at sea was because you needed a nuclear reactor to power the weapon.

And as it moves out, it disperses. So you move beyond a mile, half a mile, mile and a half, it has no effect at all. So the bottom line is no.

All this Star Wars nonsense does not work. You said earlier that the cartel in Mexico is probably America’s most dangerous threat. Well, can you evaluate the threats posed by Iran and China? Kamala Harris, during her campaign, verbalized that Iran is America’s biggest threat.

Well, that’s what the Israel lobby paid for. Iran poses no threat to the United States. It can do nothing to us.

We can pulverize Iran if that turns out to be what President Trump decides to do. So Iran poses no threat to us at all. Iran has been presented in this form to us by the Israel lobby, which effectively owns and operates the United States government.

They control Congress. They control the Senate. They control the House.

Listen to Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders, who’s a Democrat, put forward legislation to stop aid going into Israel because he said, this is ridiculous. We’re killing tens of thousands of women and children.

This is not a legitimate war. This is mass murder and slaughter. And he got 15 votes.

And after it was over, senators came in and said, oh, Bernie, you’re right. I’d love to support you, but I can’t. If I do that, the Israel lobby will destroy me.

But you don’t think that Iran could potentially destabilize peace in the Middle East? I’m just playing devil’s advocate here. In the Middle East, thereby complicating America’s power projection in that region. Our power projection into all these regions is being curtailed because of new technology.

We’re not going to be able to project power as we have for 50 years in the future. We’re a legacy military force. Aircraft carriers, surface ships, we can’t do it anymore.

Because if you come within range of these missiles that you’ve seen used in Russia, they’re going to sink us. America still has the biggest military budget in the world. How should that budget, in your opinion, be used to modernize the military? Well, the budget is too big.

And almost half of it, if you start looking at where the money goes, results in a redistribution of income to various constituents and donors. In other words, you’re not buying a trillion dollars of military power. You might be buying a half of 500 billion in real military power.

The rest of it, it’s a wash. The whole budget is a catastrophe. That’s why you can’t audit the Pentagon.

They keep trying to audit the Department of Defense. It can’t be done. You have an acquisition system that Alexis de Tocqueville, who lived in the 1840s, would wonder at how complex and problematic it is.

The whole system is defunct. We are operating under the 1947 national security legislation. That was designed to enshrine the way we fought World War II for the future.

At the time, Eisenhower and many of his peers said, this is a disaster. We don’t want to refight the Second World War. We want to do things differently.

But we did it anyway. So you’re looking at a force structure that’s designed for a war that will not be fought. You’re not going to fight in the future the way you have in the past.

That’s very obvious from what’s happening in Ukraine. We’re completely unprepared for that. The Ukrainians were trained by us and equipped by us and did everything we told them to do.

They’ve suffered horrific losses. They have no chance of winning whatsoever. They couldn’t win because our industrial base could never keep up with Russia’s.

If we move to China, China’s manufacturing base is equal to America’s and Europe’s combined. And their military industrial production is enormous. We can’t keep up with that.

If we try to build more surface ships, which would be an enormous waste of money, the Chinese will build far more than we have. I’m very happy the Chinese have wasted their time, money, and resources on aircraft carriers. That’s a great place to waste money.

Those things are defunct. In other words, we’re still living in the past and we’re building for the past. And we’re doing everything that we think worked in the past.

We refuse to see what’s right in front of us in Ukraine. Let’s talk about China for just a minute since you brought that up. The argument that China’s military capacity and manufacturing capacity is tremendous, but quantity doesn’t speak to the whole story.

They might have produced a lot of ships, a lot of tanks. The quality is not up to par with the West. And certainly they don’t have the same experience as the U.S. Army and military.

How would you respond to that? Frederick the Great of Prussia, a brilliant military commander, was stopped by one of his senior officers. He said, I see that you promoted this colonel to general. He doesn’t have the kind of experience that I have.

How could he possibly succeed? And Frederick the Great said, well, if I was promoting on the basis of experience, I would promote my have seen more action on campaign than anyone. Listen, experience is overrated. We thought we were superior to everybody in both wars.

And then we got an education from the Imperial Japanese Navy and from the Germans. I think that’s the wrong way to go. What I’m trying to tell you is that we need to retrench.

We need overhaul. And as far as China is concerned, setting aside, first of all, whether or not they’re building this, that, or the next thing, this obsession with the Chinese attack makes no sense. Where’s the evidence in Chinese history for all of these offensive wars that they’re prepared to wage? You know, when I was doing business in South Korea, the Koreans took me to their museums.

I saw what they had done. They said, we fought 70 wars against the Chinese. We only lost three of them.

Now, how could the Koreans do that? Because the Koreans are Mongols. The Mongolian peoples are warlike and vicious and dangerous if you arouse them. China is not a threat to us unless we provoke China.

And if you look at their investment in military power, it’s designed to keep us out. We call this anti-access. They’ve got it.

Is Taiwan, the Asian Ukraine, is there any strategic interest from the U.S. to protect Taiwan whatsoever? No. We settled that issue, the one China issue, a long time ago. The Chinese on the mainland do not want to invade Taiwan.

They do not want a war. What would it do to China’s business interests around the world and across Asia if they suddenly decided we’re invading Taiwan and dragging these bastards into China? It would be catastrophic. What are the Chinese better at than we are? Business.

So let’s get real. That’s not something they want to do. However, if we put missiles from the United States on Taiwan, the Chinese will attack, but they won’t invade it.

They’ll destroy it. And that’s what happened in Cuba. And the Russians withdrew it.

The Soviets did. We need to stop this. That’s 6,000 miles away from us.

We cannot sustain a major war against a great continental power like China. It can’t be done. Final question, Colonel.

Trump has indicated that he wants to purchase Greenland. He wants to take over the Panama Canal. He’s joked on several occasions that Canada should be the 51st state.

But I think he might be serious about Greenland. What’s your take on this? We already have a base in Greenland, a military base. Greenland obviously figures prominently in the Northwest Passage between the various countries like Russia and Sweden, Norway, Canada, and so forth.

I think he’s concerned about securing our access to the Northwest Passage. And he’s got his naval strategist telling him, we have to choke this off, make sure the Chinese can’t use it. We don’t live in the 19th century.

We live in the 21st century. We need treaties outlining access rights and where we can sail and so forth. That’s what needs to happen.

We don’t need to go to war with Russia over it to keep the Chinese out. That’s a lot of nonsense. Now, as far as Canada is concerned, we were originally British North America.

All of us were together. The English speaking people in Canada have had great difficulty dealing with the French speaking people in Quebec. The Quebecois are French.

What are the English speakers in Canada? And when you ask them, what are you? You start chipping away and they’re not quite sure. It may well be that at some point in the future, they will voluntarily opt to join us in some confederation of some kind, but we’re not marching into Canada. Nobody’s going to do that.

Nobody wants to do that. And I think something else you’ve got to keep in mind about President Trump, he is a marketing genius and no one knows better than he how to manipulate the media. And so he throws out red meat to journalists and they go, and they scuffle off in various directions.

And he says, that’s fine. I would be much more focused right now on Ukraine. He should be willing to host a conference, but he should insist that the Europeans step forward and resolve this and offer to back it, but not try to lead this because we have done everything in our power to harm Russia.

That needs to stop. We cannot live in this world that way any longer. Okay.

Well, thank you for your service, Colonel. Where can we learn more about you? And what are you working on these days? I’m the CEO for Our Country, Our Choice. Okay.

It’s a growing organization of people who are sick of voting for Republicans and Democrats and getting the same outcome regardless for whom they voted. Okay. And they want an end to these endless wars.

They want the border secured. They want criminality halted. They want immigration control, very straightforward things.

And of course, they’d like to see an end to other things. They’d like to see new tax codes. But the point is, there’s a growing movement now for a third party.

The United States has never responded favorably to third parties. So we’ll see how this goes. But I think depending upon what President Trump does, there may be a great future for this.

Because President Trump listed a lot of things that he wants to do. But we know from experience that no president can do more than one, two, or three things in an administration. And he needs to understand the priority is not in Ukraine.

It’s not in the Middle East. It’s here. What happens here determines everything for us.

Okay. Excellent talk. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Stu. Thank you for watching. Don’t forget to like and subscribe.