ISRAEL & IRAN: Why The Conflict Will Lead to WW3 (Uncut) 02-16-2025

ISRAEL & IRAN: Why The Conflict Will Lead to WW3, UKRAINE War Decided | Douglas MacGregor

If we’re not careful, we could be at war in March. It’s not just Israel versus most of the region, potentially, and they won’t all come in at once, but they all eventually will come in. And we are not prepared for that.

I don’t think we understand the ramifications. And I don’t think we can bully or bomb everybody into submission. Hello, and welcome to Soar Financially, a channel where we discuss the macro to understand the micro.

My name is Kai Hoffman. I’m the EdJRMiningGuy over on X and of course, your host of this channel. And I’m really looking forward to this discussion now with Colonel Douglas MacGregor, somebody I’ve been trying to get on the channel for a while.

Unfortunately, we missed each other in Vancouver due to my travel schedule. But now we have him here because I’m really interested and keen on talking geopolitics with him. Simon Hunts mentioned him in an interview with us about in December, and we’ve been trying to get him on since.

It’s an absolute pleasure to have him on join us, because he’s an absolute expert on geopolitics. I want to talk Middle East crisis. What is happening right now? What is happening in the Ukraine and in Russia? How far should we be concerned? Is this something we can solve in a day like the new president of the US once said? And what’s the role of Europe in all of this? Since I’m based in Germany, and we do get some comments on YouTube that we should talk more, perhaps from a European perspective.

I’m curious what the Colonel’s thoughts are on Europe, NATO and various other topics here. So before I switch over to my guest, hit that like and subscribe button helps us out tremendously. And it is a free way to support us.

So thank you so much for that. And now, without much further ado, Colonel MacGregor, it is a pleasure to have you on the program. Thank you so much for joining us.

Happy to be here. Yeah, absolutely. We have lots to talk about.

And you’re a foremost expert, of course, in geopolitics. So I do want to focus the conversation on this. And maybe we’ll start off with a very general question right now.

It’s like, how do you assess the current state of global security? How far or how close are we on the brink of a major disaster here? Well, I think if we’re going to discuss that, we have to include the United States, because in the absence of the United States right now, and I would add Israel, you take those two out, there’s almost no one out there interested in going to war with anybody. I mean, no one in Asia wants to fight anyone. Whenever you go to a conference, you know, I talk to friends in Singapore, talk to friends that are in Hong Kong, also Korea, Seoul, they all say the same thing.

The only people talking about war in Asia are Americans. We seem to be interested in cultivating tension and finding reasons to spend excessively on defense to counter enemies and forces that quite frankly aren’t aimed at us at all. I think you have a similar situation in the Middle East right now.

Were it not for Israel’s decision to move beyond simply responding to the 7 October attack, although now we’re seeing a lot of information that suggests the Israelis knew it was coming and allowed that attack to happen anyway, sadly, they turned this into a war for Jewish supremacy in the region, a war to expand the country and essentially subjugate its neighbors. Otherwise, it wouldn’t exist. You have a similar situation in Ukraine.

We built Ukraine up with the help of Europeans. We developed a large Ukrainian military establishment, trained and equipped it, aimed it at Russia, and we’re preparing to launch it. We had all of these biolabs engaged in very, very dangerous research with a bioweapon orientation towards the Russians.

Then on top of that, you had people that saw this as an opportunity to, quote unquote, harm Russia economically as well as socially. None of these things would have happened without us. I don’t think you would have had any problem at all had we not decided to do what we did in 2014 with the Maidan coup and then subsequently.

When you say, how close are we to disaster, you have to ask, how close is the United States to disaster? We can talk about that if you’d like. Yeah, no, absolutely. I think we’ll need to break down the topics by region almost.

My biggest question when I think about these situations is, what’s the motivation? That’s always like, where is everybody coming from, and why are they involved, and what are they getting out of it? Maybe we’ll start in the Middle East. You mentioned Jewish supremacy, Israel pushing its borders, but there are other players in that region as well. We have Turkey, Russia has some interests there.

I’m trying to figure out how it is all connected. Is it just one single aggressor, or are there more aggressors and one just acted out? I think we have to view each of them separately to understand their interests. The Turks are emerging from a 100-plus year sojourn out of the international system.

They literally, under Atatürk, after World War I, decided to fix their borders, defend them, turn inward, and develop the country. I think that’s over. I think you now have not just a leader at the top of the Turkish government, but also generations of Turks who want Turkey to act and behave like a great power.

They see themselves, especially those that are religious, as the leaders of the Sunni Islamic world, which of course they were for centuries. This plays into things. Turkey is developing economically.

Turkey has facilitated good relations with the Russians, even despite the recent developments in Syria. As you see, the Russians and the Turks have actually come to terms pretty quickly over what’s happened in Syria. The expansion into Syria was something that I think the Turks were always interested in, just as they are interested in northern Iraq, because northern Iraq and Syria were part of the Ottoman Empire.

If you talk to Turkish officers in Iraq over the last 20 years, they would frequently point to towns in certain areas, and they would say, Kirkuk is a Turkish city. And the American military commander would say, well, that’s an Iraqi town. The Turk would shake his head.

He said, you don’t understand. That is a Turkish city. So I think you’re dealing with that, but the Turks have been very restrained.

They could have attacked militarily and bested any number of people. Instead, they have moved very, very cautiously. And recently, Erdogan was talking to an audience of young Turkish men and women, and they began chanting, take us to Jerusalem, take us to Jerusalem, which gives you an idea of how the Turks feel about the Israelis right now.

And Mr. Erdogan said, please calm down. And then he said, patience will deliver victory. So I think you’re dealing with a power that is not in a hurry, sees itself as inevitably rising in the region as a dominant power.

Now, does that mean that it’s prepared to go to war with, say, Iran? Absolutely not. I see no evidence for that. I don’t think they want to go to war at all.

I think they’d like to be able to do what they’ve done in Syria. And that’s another issue. You have the Muslim Brotherhood, which is dominating more and more in much of the Arab world.

And that reports to Mr. Erdogan. He’s leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, and that’s particularly threatened to the Egyptians and threatening to the Jordanians. So they have felt Assad’s fall very acutely.

Assad was, despite whatever he’s accused of, and he’s constantly demonized, because that’s what we do when we decide we don’t like someone. He actually maintained minority rights, protected Christians, Druze, Shiites, Armenians, others, and he’s now gone. And horrific things are happening behind the scenes, although Putin has intervened with his Chechen allies to try and moderate that and persuade the Jelani and his friends to behave differently.

But then, as you see, the Israelis were anxious to benefit from the spoils of Syria, and they’ve moved into Syria, despite Mr. Erdogan’s insistence that they get out, that Syria must retain some integrity, even though historically Syria is a region, not really a nation. So that’s a problem. And the Israelis are now beginning to come to terms with the reality that the border to the north beyond the Golan Heights is not a border with this place called Syria.

It’s a border with the Turks. And that’s very frightening, because the Turks are the only ones in the region with the military power that would enable them to actually march into Israel. Remember, the Iranians don’t have much of an army.

They have this Revolutionary Guard Corps, but that’s designed for what we would call low-intensity conflict and defending, assisting Shiites wherever they are against their oppressors, who are usually Sunnis. But Iran is entirely reliant on this massive, massive arsenal of missiles, which is extremely dangerous. But they’re not about to move into Israel, whereas the Turks, yes, they could do that at some point.

And then I think you have to look at the Saudis and the Emirates, and I think they’ve changed their views. I think they feel betrayed by us. No one is happy with the most recent announcements by President Trump, where he intends to take over Gaza, where there’s no international right on his part to do so, and somehow or another magically remove the population that lives there, that doesn’t want to leave, and build some new Riviera on the Mediterranean.

He thinks it’s a great idea, and obviously the Israelis are very happy, but they’re the only ones, and everyone else is adamantly opposed. This has changed the tone in the region. You now have a willingness among all of the Muslims to coalesce together against Israel and potentially us, which was not there months ago.

Now it really is palpable. It’s indisputable. So I think if we’re not careful, we could be at war in March.

It’s not just Israel versus most of the region potentially, and they won’t all come in at once, but they all eventually will come in. And we are not prepared for that. I don’t think we understand the ramifications, and I don’t think we can bully or bomb everybody into submission.

Those days are over. And of course, you can’t view any of this in isolation from BRICS. Everyone’s tired of us bullying them financially.

And this leads on to discussions of de-dollarization, and that process is not going to happen immediately. But current events have certainly accelerated it. People are looking for ways to avoid us, avoid the Swiss system, avoid the large financial institutions.

And you don’t build those institutions overnight. They’ve been with us now since the end of the Second War, practically. But you can build them, and the Russians, the Chinese, the Indians, and others, Brazil, they’re all involved in this.

None of this really bodes well for us. And we are behaving, forgive the analogy, as a reactionary Austria-Hungary in 1848. In other words, instead of recognizing that things are changing and adapting, our first impulse is to beat down any evidence for real change.

And I think that’s a mistake, but I think that’s where we are. Now, that’s the Middle East. Of course, that’s also inextricably intertwined with oil, as you know.

And then there are these talks in the United States, we’re going to reinvigorate the oil industry. But you know, as a European, anybody educated man knows that that takes years. We have punished anyone who wanted to drill, who wanted to refine.

You know, there’s this obsession with carbon. It’s true in Germany. Germans have done it.

We’ve done it. So it’ll be a long time before you can get a lot of things online. And these oil companies are looking for investment.

They’re not going to do it on their own. They want some sort of signal from the United States government that they’re not going to be punished for what they do. But I do think we’re going to see a big explosion in oil.

I think we’re going to see an explosion in coal, especially the export markets from the United States. Everybody desperately needs coal. I’m talking now to Germans who want to import coal to Germany.

Inconceivable. But that’s what they want. They’re talking about a million tons on hand at every plant.

Well, we can do it. But again, our coal industry is lagging. You know, we need some investment in the coal industry to get these mines back up to full speed.

We have the rail, we have the infrastructure, we have a lot of people that know what they’re doing. But it takes investment. We haven’t seen it, you know.

And then when you go into things like rare earths, if we’re going to be isolated from the rest of the world because of our behavior, we’re going to have to find it on our own. And what we have discovered in the coal fields, particularly in southern Kentucky, is that the seams of the coal have a lot of rare earths in them. And you have some of these mines that have been mined for over 100 years.

Huge slag heaps, huge containment pools. Guess what? They’re full of rare earths. So in the past, it wasn’t deemed, what’s the right word, affordable.

There was no financial reward to it. It wasn’t economical. Well, I think that’s going to change.

So those kinds of things would be interesting to your audience. And again, I know the Egyptians, the Turks, others need coal, different kinds of coal. For their purposes.

So there’s a lot that can be done now. And I hope that we will back down from a lot of these tariffs, this whole attitude of punishment and bullying, because if we can get past that, I think we can do a lot of business. Very, very good business with the world because of the resources we have.

So that’s just the Middle East. Where do you want to go now? No, it’s a good question, because I got a couple of follow-ups as well. One of them is timing, of course.

We all knew, or at least in the West, Assad was portrayed as the evil aggressor in the Middle East there. Nobody liked him. And I was confused by the timing and why it went so fast.

So I’m curious if you could maybe unpeel that onion for us just a little bit on that topic, because that’s a personal interest of mine. Why did it happen now at that time? Why did it happen so fast? And who supported it? Well, you recall, we moved into Syria, I think in 2010, 2011. And the argument was to counter ISIS.

And we took over the oil production, the only oil production that Syria had. And that immediately deprived the Syrians of income that the government desperately needed. That was a serious hit.

That’s also the one area in Syria where you have some real agriculture that also was damaged. And then we encouraged the Kurds to seek autonomy in that part of Syria. These things all severely damaged Assad.

So one of the goals was on the part of the United States and Israel in their efforts to remove Assad. I did not support that because, frankly, I and others that have looked at the region thought that the alternative to Assad is what you see now, dangerous Islamist forces in power, and ultimately the Turks in power in Damascus. So that was the beginning of harm against Assad.

And then, of course, MI6, the Mossad, and the CIA were heavily involved in taking elements of the Islamic State and other jihadist organizations, including al Qaeda, repurposing them with the goal of once again attacking and destroying Assad. The Russians came to his rescue, and I think that’s the one reason that he’s still there. He also had the support of Hezbollah.

And that’s one of the reasons that so much damage was inflicted on Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, was to rob Assad of that backup that he had at his disposal. The 100,000 or so Hezbollah fighters were very competent. And then to break this link between Iran and Lebanon through Syria, which was always sort of characterized as the axis of resistance by the Muslims and the axis of evil by the Israelis and us, we finally brought this to fruition because Assad couldn’t pay his own forces.

He didn’t have the wherewithal to pay them. We could offer them much more money to essentially defect. And so I think what you saw was not this massive military campaign to take over.

You simply saw Assad’s forces either melt away or collapse because they’d all been paid off, or they simply weren’t being paid enough money to justify defending anything. And we now see what’s going on in Syria. And that’s going to be an interesting struggle to watch because the Turks absolutely want the Kurds out.

The PKK is there. They want them out. So that fight is coming.

And at the same time, now the Israelis want to expand this greater Israel, but their army is in pretty bad shape right now. It’s strung out all over the country. I don’t see how they can go in there and hold very much against a determined attack, unless, of course, we are going to provide the supporting military power.

And I think that’s the plan because we still have aircraft carrier battle groups, large air force elements on station, and of course, special operations forces. So that’s the answer to some extent. It’s a long I apologize, but that’s the answer on Assad.

It’s a very interesting topic. And maybe we’ll get to more current news here. As you mentioned, Trump talking about Gaza, making it a US Rivera, or maybe the 51st state.

He’s been using that term loosely lately, right? In a different context. But Gaza is an interesting one because by Saturday, and we’re recording this on February 12th, so just to give some timing context, what do you think will happen if they don’t deliver the hostages? Will the US actually step in? Israel would be happy about that. Well, he says all hell is going to break loose.

We just shipped large numbers or whatever remaining heavy bombs to Israel. These are these things they call the mother of all bombs. You’ve seen pictures of it.

It delivers the equivalent of a 10 kiloton warhead. Now, I don’t know how the Israelis plan to deliver it. We have great difficulty delivering it.

It’s just so huge, so heavy. And if you’re going to try and fly through integrated air defenses, which is the case with Iran, you risk being shot down with that thing. I don’t know, perhaps they plan on using it against Gaza, because the president has now also said that the West Bank is also going to be annexed by Israel.

So presumably, that is also going to be subject to a campaign of mass murder, expulsion, and ethnic cleansing, as Gaza has been. In addition to that, he released all of these 2,000-pound bombs that we had previously said we weren’t going to provide to the Israelis under Biden. All of that’s very ominous, because frankly, with those kinds of munitions, you could erase Gaza within the space of a few days.

But I think if that were to happen, that’s where I think the rest of the region is likely to erupt. You have Jordan that has already said, if you try to force all these refugees on us, we will declare war. The Egyptians have said absolutely not, and they have moved their army into the Sinai.

Are we going to assist the Israelis against the Egyptian army and Egypt itself? I don’t know. And King Abdullah is in a terrible position. He’s very weak.

His state is not capable of withstanding too much stress. They have 11.2 million Palestinians living in Jordan, far more than we normally admit to. Very dangerous.

And then you have Syria, which is still in turmoil, but could become a highway for the Turkish army. And that’s, of course, a nightmare on steroids if you’re an Israeli right now. And then there’s Iran.

Will the Israelis still insist on war with Iran? Now, we’ve said we won’t participate or join in it. But I wouldn’t put it past Mr. Netanyahu to find a way to provoke a conflict with Iran, even if it requires a false flag to get us into the fight. We saw these false flags.

They were organized by MI6 in Syria when the Syrians were accused of using chemical weapons against their own people. It was all nonsense. It never happened.

We launched cruise missiles, you’ll remember, twice. All false flag. So we’re capable of doing stupid things without seriously examining what’s actually going on down there.

And I wouldn’t put it past the president. The president is emotional, and he can be very impulsive. I was going to ask you about your opinion of the new president in a second.

There are so many angles we can take this now from. But you touched on Iran and BRICS as well. So I want to throw the China connection in there as well and see how they fit in.

How are they playing a role? It comes also down to the global balance of power a little bit. And how do they see their role developing over recent months here as well? And if Iran were to be attacked and the oil fields in Iran were to be attacked, would China step in? Well, I think the Chinese would do everything in their power to support Iran. I don’t think they would intervene militarily unless provoked.

They have increased the size of the small flotilla of ships that they maintain in the Indian Ocean, because they have obviously a very keen interest in the Persian Gulf. We purchase almost nothing coming out of the Persian Gulf now. But they purchase huge quantities of oil and natural gas, or the Japanese and the Koreans.

Access to those resources are very important to China. And the Chinese will do everything in their power to avoid seeing that Strait of Hormuz blocked. Now, it may be impossible to do so.

The Israelis have repeatedly threatened to destroy, or certainly attack and hope to destroy the oil infrastructure in Iran. I hope not, because that would sort of make all-out war unavoidable between Iran and Israel. And that’s a game changer.

You also have the Russians, and they’re much more likely to intervene in a conflict on the side of Iran to persuade us to back out, to stay out. That would be their goal. The Russians don’t want to fight us, neither do the Chinese.

But if they’re compelled, they might intervene to demonstrate their ability to harm us, if for no other reason, just say, stay out of this. And I think we should wise up, because a lot of our equipment and material has not performed well in Ukraine. And I think all the assertions of Russian weakness have turned out to be utterly false.

So I would not provoke the Russians if I were in the White House. I don’t think President Trump wants to. But there are forces in motion now that are going to be hard to contain.

And I don’t know how much influence the president’s able to exert to contain them, particularly with Mr. Netanyahu, who really seems to be playing president, while increasingly Mr. Trump looks like vice president. Yeah, no, definitely. That’s the question.

Can Russia even retaliate? That’s the question. The media and the reporting, of course, is quite muddied. And maybe we will stay on that for a second, because I asked about the balance of power in the world right now.

How strong is Russia? And are they still a power to be reckoned with? Well, keep in mind that any power, a continental power like Russia or China, is most powerful within their neighborhood. In other words, we would have no chance against the Russians in Eastern Europe or Ukraine. Absolutely impossible.

Their army is arguably now the best in the world. Battle hardened. All the weak leaders have been run out.

The corrupt ones have been arrested, jailed, or shot. So I think the Russian military is in a very good position. Now, our air force is certainly technologically superior, but that may not make the difference it has historically simply because of integrated air defenses.

Integrated air and missile defense is something we’ve ignored. Oh, yes, we built Patriot, and we built a few other systems. But the idea of integrating something on a regional level, on the large scale with a whole variety of systems that overlap, that can benefit from each other’s radar, cross sections, and so forth, that’s something we haven’t done very well.

I see an emphasis now finally beginning to happen, but not in time for us to best the Russians in Europe, and potentially not in time for us to best them in the Middle East. So I think if Iran is attacked brutally by us, the Russians will weigh in. And of course, we fought them before.

We don’t talk about it, but we fought Russian pilots in Korea, and we fought Russian pilots in Vietnam. And they’re very good pilots. And they have good aircraft.

The equivalent of our F-35 is now on the ground in Iran. But more important are the missiles, the long-range and medium-range strike missiles, as well as the air defenses. They are substantial.

The Iranians have not wasted their time. There are thousands of Russian technicians on the ground in Iran. I think Iran would be a very tough nut to crack, particularly with Russia standing behind it.

Now, I appreciate you, you know, explaining that and running us through that. You know, there’s, again, lots of topics we have to cover. We only have a little bit of time left here.

You know, you touched on President Trump, and I’m sort of guessing your opinion here, but we have a new president in the White House. Is that an opportunity, or is that more of a risk that you’re seeing right now? I’m curious what your thoughts are here. Well, I think there’s a little of both.

Having met President Trump, and I worked for him, I liked him, and his instincts are very good. This is a man who does not want war. But not wanting war is not enough.

You have to pursue courses of action that are designed to avoid war. Now, I think he’s coming around right now to that in Ukraine. I listened to remarks by the new Secretary of Defense, and I would give him out of the four remarks, one was another rehash of what we heard from Biden, but the other three were very encouraging.

And he simply said, you know, the map is going to change. The Russians are not going to retreat from Ukraine. That’s a fact of life.

Ukraine is going to be neutral. That’s good. It’s a fact of life.

NATO has no role in Ukraine. Good. U.S. forces will not be in Ukraine.

Good. I wish you’d them out right now. So I think we’re on at least a promising path right now with Ukraine.

Could we still screw it up? Of course. If we go over there and try to beat our chests and act as though we’re in charge, we’ll fail. Because we’re not.

We have no leverage over the Russians in Europe at all now. They hold all the cards, and they’ve won this war unambiguously. And they have the force.

We do not. Our army is pitiful. It’s a shadow of its former self.

It’s not trained well. It’s not ready to fight anybody in most cases. We need to get it out, bring it home, and build a new army, not rebuild it.

I think that’s true for a lot of the Europeans as well. The Russians are in a very strong position. So what we ought to seek is something they’ve mentioned, which is a new security architecture in Europe.

And that would allow us to dramatically reduce our footprint over there, which is something President Trump wants, to change how we interact, and to become more transparent on all sides, and permanently put these hostilities behind us. Because there’s no reason for them. Russia is not our sworn enemy.

We are not Russia’s sworn enemy. This is all artificial, created by a small minority of people in Washington who hijacked the government. Now, when we go to the Middle East, that same minority has hijacked things and is driving us into confrontation with everybody in the region.

I think our position in the Middle East is maybe not permanently destroyed, but destroyed for decades. I don’t know how we recover from that. But he’s got to come up with a way to avoid conflict.

This Gaza business is inflammatory. It’s enraged hundreds of millions of Muslims. It’s off the rails.

It has to be discarded. Everyone has said the same thing. If you won’t consider another Palestinian state, we’re out.

Either you put up or shut up. I don’t think we can bully or beat them into submission. And what I think we’re doing unconsciously is challenging everyone to fight us.

Because let’s be frank, if you separate us from Israel, they’re not afraid of Israel. They’re afraid of us. So we have to determine how far do we want to go.

And historically, we have always set limits to how far we were willing to go with Israel. This time, we seem to have breached all limits, seem to be ready to underwrite unconditionally anything. I think that’s very dangerous.

I don’t think it’s necessary. Now, very interesting. Again, so many follow-up questions.

But I want to focus on the role of Europe now in all of this. It seems like Europe has almost forgotten in that discussion. And the role of us, we’re extremely weak.

I understand where we’re at. I don’t think we’re in any position to make any demands whatsoever. How do you see the role of Europe hopefully evolve, or hopefully, there’s a bit of hope from my end, evolve? Because we’ve got governments crumbling right now.

So we are seeing a bit of a political shift happening as well. So I’m curious what your thoughts are. Certainly, since the fall of the Roman Empire, the once and future king of Europe is Germany.

Let’s face it. Germany has the population, the human capital, the scientific industrial base. It has everything to be a great power.

Since the end of the Second World War, as a consequence of this disastrous defeat, I think Germany has been psychologically crippled, and of course, subjected to a lot of re-education designed to convince the Germans that they should be on an apology tour in perpetuity for eternity. That’s got to end. There has to be a more balanced perspective.

Germany’s role historically in Europe, certainly until the Second World War, was not negative. It was not destructive. It was on the whole very positive.

And I think they have to revert to that. I don’t think Germany was evil in World War I, nor do I think they were responsible for it. So I think this is the problem.

The Germans themselves are the problem. They have to make a decision. What are we going to be? Are we going to be Germans? Are we going to liquidate ourselves? Are we going to continue to commit national suicide by swamping our population with foreigners? Are we going to preserve our country, our culture, our history, who we are? That’s the question the Germans have to answer.

I think they’re going to answer in the affirmative, yes. Not yet, but it’s coming. Now, there are elections on the 23rd of February.

I’ll be very interested to see how they turn out. But at some point in the future, if things go the way they should, I think many Germans will look back on Scholz and his predecessor, back to Merkel, and see these people as treasonous. They did everything in their power to destroy the country.

They’ve got to rebuild Germany back to something good, which is what it was originally, and set aside this apology to us. So that’s number one. Number two, the French usually lead these things.

The old expression was, if Paris gets a cold, or if Paris sneezes and the rest of Europe gets a cold, I still think that the French are quite capable of overthrowing their government and starting over. They need to. I’m a great admirer of the French and French civilization.

They too need to make the decision to survive. And then, of course, there’s Britain, which is on the verge of collapse. It’s a catastrophe.

I don’t know what will happen there. The rest of Europe is watching it, and the same questions are being asked all over Europe. And you’re right, I think we’re going to see nationalist parties come to power, and they are not far right.

Anybody who calls any of these people far right doesn’t know what the words mean. I mean, it’s a joke. These people are all remarkably moderate.

They are not far right by any stretch of the imagination. But this is the power that the left has exerted as a result of the post-war re-education and the emergence of this post-war elite that has been so self-destructive. So Europe can come roaring back, and I think it will, but it’s not going to be, it won’t look as it has in the past.

You may end up with different security arrangements. It may be that the Spaniards, French, and Italians organize themselves along with the Portuguese in one way. It may be the Germans, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Austria, maybe the Czech Republic will organize themselves differently, maybe with Hungary.

You also have this Central European conglomerate, roughly what you had in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire with these countries coalescing into some arrangement. I just don’t see wars breaking out in Europe right now. It’s not impossible, but I don’t see it happening.

There is some unfinished business. If you spend any time in Europe, you know anything about Hungary, you know what happened to it in the two world wars, you look at Romania, you look at Slovakia, you look at other areas. The Hungarians have some unfinished business, there’s no doubt about it.

But on the whole, I don’t see any wars occurring. I think that you’ve got a group of able people who can contain those passions and channel them into productive outcomes. So I don’t share the view that somehow or another, we Americans have to be there forever to prevent you from killing each other.

I don’t. I think we need to go. And I think that the Europeans need to be their own first responders.

And I thought in January of 2022, I was interviewed by Dmitry Syms at the American interest in Washington. And I predicted that if, you know, I said, first of all, the Russians are going to go into Eastern Ukraine. Everybody else thought I was wrong.

Oh, no, they’ll never do that. I said, absolutely, they’re going to do it. And then I said that if NATO engages in this and essentially tries to run a proxy war or a war, they will lose and NATO will eventually fold and go away.

I think NATO is on the path to extinction. That was my next question. Like, what is the role of NATO here? And how strong is it? And what role does it play? Obviously, it’s US dominated, like Germany doesn’t really have a say in it, we don’t spend enough to actually have a say in all of this.

So the question is, like, what is the role of NATO going forward here? Well, what is NATO now? If you look at Stoltenberg, or Stoltenberg, and then you look at Rutte from the Netherlands, these people are Washington’s puppets. They’re warmongers. They’re saying like, we’ll be in war in three years.

Well, they’re Washington’s puppets. You still have this Washingtonian class that’s hijacked our foreign and defense policy, and they want to perpetuate this conflict. That’s what President Trump is up against in his administration.

People that see value in it for their own purposes. And of course, it helps to justify this unending stream of income for the Department of Defense, which is outrageous. We have almost a trillion dollar defense budget.

And these warmongers, as you call them, are talking about adding $200 billion more this year. Well, that’s ridiculous. And at some point, we’re going to run ourselves into the ground.

We’re headed for a financial crisis. Whether you talk to Michael Al-Farber, or you talk to Alastair MacLeod, or James Grant, or Luke Groman, or any number of people, they all know this. Nassim Taleb is one of my favorites.

He’s been saying, Armageddon is just over the hill. I think he’s right. That’s going to change everything.

Because we can’t afford this nonsense. And we have real problems in the United States. We are not a cohesive society anymore.

We have problems with the rule of law. Our borders have been opened. We have millions of people in the country we don’t want and don’t need.

And I don’t know how we’re going to resolve it, but it’s going to be resolved. It may not be particularly attractive the way we do it. But if we don’t, we won’t have a country.

There’s so many more topics. But I think I might have saved the biggest question for last. And I know we were short on time here.

Is the US going to stand by Taiwan? I would say absolutely not. I think that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. First of all, Taiwan is not under immediate threat.

That has been grossly exaggerated out of all proportion of reality. If you look a couple of years ago and you read specifically what President Xi has said, he was talking about peaceful unification on or about 2040. That was his forecast.

And I still think that that’s likely. It could happen sooner. We also don’t understand Taiwan.

Taiwan is split. You’ve got the old Kuomintang party under Chiang Kai-shek. Well, that party is pro-Beijing.

They want unification. They want to become part of China because they know China has changed. China is not a communist country.

And we get confused because we don’t understand that both the Chinese on the mainland and the Chinese on Taiwan aspire to the same sort of social structure. That social structure is on display. It’s called Singapore.

Lee Kuan Yew’s formula is what both of them would follow. And then you have another large party, and you have a president from this party right now, though this party doesn’t control the parliament, that is historically pro-Japanese, is now pro-American, and wants independence. It’s not going to happen.

The Taiwanese parliament will never go along with it because they know that’s immediate war with mainland China. They don’t want it. You’ve got to understand the banking systems are interconnected.

Capital flows from Taiwan into China and back out to Taiwan. So I don’t see it. And then if you look at it militarily, the idea of waging war against China is quite conceivably the dumbest idea in the history of mankind.

There’s an old expression, a ship is a fool to fight a port or fight a fort. China is the largest fort in the world. What are you going to do to it? Lob missiles and rocks at it? It’s absurd.

It doesn’t make any sense. And you’re going to do all this from the sea because Taiwan is 6,000 miles from us. That means you have to sustain logistically everything you do.

And today, everything from Japan all the way to Australia that is involved with the logistical support for our air and naval forces can be targeted by the Chinese and destroyed with precision-guided missiles. So the war has changed. The world has changed.

The whole idea is crazy. And I think President Trump knows that, and I think President Trump’s already made it clear that that’s not a place he wants to go. He wants to do business with the Chinese, but he wants it to occur on an equitable basis—in other words, if it’s mutually beneficial.

And most of our problems with the Chinese could be secured or could be solved by securing our borders. You don’t like what they’re bringing into the country? Kick them out. Throw them out.

The Chinese throw Japanese and other foreigners out of their country all the time. We could throw thousands of Chinese out of our country for stealing not just IP, but being mules carrying cash for drug cartels. I mean, come on, let’s just get real.

You don’t go to war with another nation-state, with one of the world’s oldest civilizations, because you don’t like what they’re doing today in your country. So let’s fix what we got as a problem here at home. Let’s not go to war.

No, absolutely. That’s a great statement that we should end on. But I have one last question there, Colonel.

What do you see or perceive as the biggest risk for the remainder of 2025 on a global level? Is there one thing that could set it all off? I think what’s happening in the Middle East is extremely dangerous, because you’re dealing with groups of people who have been sort of brought to a boil over the last year since October 7th. And Israel was never popular, but people had come to accept its existence. I think that’s over.

When you talk to people from the region, these are the elites that govern, whether you’re talking about somebody in Libya or Egypt or Algeria or Pakistan and Turkey and elsewhere, what you get from people is the same. Sykes-Picot is over. In other words, we’re not going to live with this menace.

That’s my greatest fear. And if we challenge the whole region, it’s not going to work well for us or Israel. What I would try to do is call a halt and de-escalate the tensions, but I don’t see that happening.

I see the president doubling down without perhaps understanding the enormity of the challenge and what could happen. We have a tendency to dismiss a lot of these people as backward, because for so many years, that’s the way they were. Well, they’re not all backward anymore.

They’re actually very intelligent and they produce brilliant systems, whether it involves computers or missiles or weapons. It’s a mistake to take that position. It’s also a mistake to think that you can bully people over and over and over again.

Eventually, it fails. No, absolutely. Colonel McGregor, I really, really appreciate it.

It was a great pleasure to have you on the program. We’ll need to catch up again soon. I could chat with you for hours.

There’s so many more topics I want to dive in with you, but I appreciate your time. Where can we follow your work? Well, I would go to two places. One is OurCountryOurChoice.com. I’m the CEO there.

This is a growing movement of people who are, to be frank, fed up with both of our parties. We’re tired of voting for people and getting the same outcome regardless of who we vote into office, although I hope that’s going to change with President Trump, certainly at home. The other place is republic.us. That’s a new social media platform.

Actually, I’ve got a show that’s going to be on that platform. That show is called McGregor. It’s going to start mid-March, stream live, and it will be on for an hour, Tuesday and Thursday nights.

We’ll have a variety of different people, not all celebrities, the usual mindless twit that comes on to advertise her new movie. I’m talking about more thoughtful people who happen to be celebrities. We’re going to try and get at the truth.

As I say, when it comes to searching for the truth, we take no prisoners, and that’s where we’re headed. We’ll send you something if you want to look at it. It’s a short 30-second promo.

I’d be grateful to you if you launched that in greater Germany. Absolutely. I really appreciate that.

That’s what it’s all about. We’re trying to educate here and really trying to make sense of things. Thank you so much for helping us unravel some of the mysteries out there, I have to admit.

I know, it’s a terrible term, but trying to make sense of it all. It is difficult if you’re just googling. We talked about this earlier, just trying to find information on a certain topic is almost impossible without being fed biased intel.

That’s just what it is. Colonel McGregor, I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much for joining us and everybody else.

Thank you so much for tuning in. A bit of a geopolitical episode, probably one of my favorites I’ve done in a long time. It’s really educational.

I hope you took away something from this. If you did, leave a like, leave a comment down below, subscribe to the channel. It’s a free way to support us.

Thank you so much for tuning in. We’ll be back with lots more here on Soar Financially. Thank you.