Retired Col. Douglas McGregor joins the show to talk about his views on the Ukraine crisis, the Iran situation, and the Iran deal. He also talks about the dangers of nuclear war in the Middle East and the potential for conflict with Iran.
00:01:48.000He would often have you on and to give a completely different perspective on Ukraine than everybody else on Fox News was offering,
00:01:56.600including former four-star generals who thought the Russian army was on the brink of defeat within three weeks.
00:02:04.780I remember watching that and thinking, are these people real?
00:02:07.920I said, they spent, what, 30 years in the military at general officer level, and they really think the Russian army is going to collapse because of Ukrainian?
00:02:17.380And, of course, I listened to you, and suddenly, yeah, it became a lot clearer, and I began to understand that this was these generals, and I think I've heard you say this before.
00:02:28.580These generals who appear on Fox News, on CNN, are so linked in with the military industrial establishment.
00:02:37.560They leave the military, and they go work for Raytheon or General Dynamics or one of these other huge armaments industries, and they just can't find enough wars out there to satisfy their need for money.
00:02:51.140So, I was totally on side, because I used to be in favor of every U.S. war.
00:02:59.540Like I said, I'm a former military officer, senior officer in the Canadian Air Force.
00:03:05.680I think many times, I think about my career now, and half the time I was a propagandist, but I recently wrote a column for Human Events, which I think you'll find interesting.
00:03:15.520This just appeared yesterday, and it's about a subject that you've been talking about quite a bit.
00:03:20.840I think I heard you talk about this with Clayton Morris on Redacted recently, and this is the dangers we're now in the Middle East, and I think Donald Trump appeared to be pushing back on Israel's demand that the United States join them in an airstrike against Iran, which, of course, is going to usher in a regional conflict, at least, if not World War III.
00:03:43.160And Trump responded to that report and said, I'm just not in a rush to do it, and now we're hearing Israel might go it alone.
00:03:52.720Are you confident that Donald Trump can resist the pressure for an attack on Iran that might result in a regional or nuclear war, even if he is, as you've noted so many times, very beholden to Israel?
00:04:05.520Well, I think the short answer is no, not at all.
00:04:10.120I would correct you on one point, though.
00:04:12.140I don't expect anything to be nuclear.
00:04:14.700There's simply no requirement to fall back on the use of nuclear weapons.
00:04:18.660Now, if there are nuclear weapons employed at all, they'll be employed by the Israelis as a last desperate attempt to achieve their aims.
00:04:48.420And frankly, I have a feeling the game is already up.
00:04:52.700We're getting a lot of information now from various sources suggesting that the Israelis are prepping, getting their aircraft ready for the strike.
00:05:00.180Like, we've already assembled, you know, a huge amount of firepower, primarily Air Force and Navy missiles, hundreds of aircraft, jets.
00:05:25.700Do you think Russia, given the fact that it has a loose sort of military pact with Iran, it's arguable how solid that pact is,
00:05:38.360do you think Russia would intervene in the event of such an attack by Israel, Israel alone or Israel with the United States?
00:05:45.140And what would be the reaction of the Arab world?
00:05:48.540Well, I think the Russians will intervene at some point when we come into the fight.
00:05:53.120And remember that if the Israelis should strike out on their own, it's only a matter of time until we're dragged in on the grounds that, you know, we have to, quote, unquote, assist or help or rescue Israel.
00:06:05.680So it doesn't matter whether we're in it initially or the Israelis are the first fly.
00:06:14.280We have to look, step back and look at the whole region.
00:06:16.640And the Chinese have conducted joint drills recently, operations with the Egyptians.
00:06:24.620China is invested in Egypt and has no intention of letting the Israelis do enormous damage there.
00:06:30.900And the Israelis have always privately warned the Egyptians that they would strike the Aswan Dam and cause flooding that could jeopardize the lives of millions of people and, of course, destroy Egypt.
00:06:43.420But the Chinese aren't going to allow that to happen.
00:06:46.040They've got aircraft sitting on the tarmac right now in Cairo.
00:06:49.860At the same time, the Chinese are also connected to Iran for obvious reasons.
00:06:56.420It's not just oil, natural gas and other things.
00:07:01.160It's really because the Chinese view, and I think the Russians share this view, that they'll be on the list in the future.
00:07:09.440If they don't come to the aid of these states, eventually they, too, will be attacked.
00:07:14.860Now, we can all argue and say, well, that's not really true.
00:07:18.540But from their vantage point, the way they look at the world right now, that's not an unreasonable assumption.
00:07:23.600Then finally, if you look at the rest of the region, knowing how fragile the various regimes and societies are, particularly in the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf, I think you could see all of those places collapse, those regimes removed.
00:07:39.660And I think Iraq would come roaring back in as a major player strategically because of the numerous militias and military organizations that are supportive of Iran in that country.
00:07:55.500And at some point, I think the Turks are going to have to make a choice.
00:07:58.940I mean, right now they've been the beneficiaries of their willingness to tolerate Israeli military expansion and territorial expansion.
00:08:10.960They'll have to make a choice because at the end of the day, if you talk to people in the region, they're all expressing a certain amount of disappointment that the Turks have failed so miserably to pay attention to and intervene on behalf of people in the region that were once part of the Ottoman Empire.
00:08:27.420I mean, after all, for hundreds of years, the Turks ruled everything in the Levant and all across the Arabian Peninsula, and they've done nothing.
00:08:35.840And on the other hand, here are the Shia, the Shia Persians, who seem to be the only ones standing up and being counted in this fight against the Israelis.
00:08:48.680The region will change beyond recognition.
00:08:50.860And it's only a question of how far the Russians and the Chinese will go to prevent us from reducing Iran to rubble, which I'm quite sure is the plan.
00:09:03.340Well, I think a lot of commentators, including Professor John Mearsheimer of Chicago University, have suggested that if this becomes a regional war, it's going ultimately perhaps mean the end of Israel itself, because it's going to create a coalition of angry defense partners in the Arab world.
00:09:25.260Why is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu so intent upon carrying this to the ultimate degree?
00:09:35.040Well, Prime Minister Netanyahu represents this Likudnik strain in Israel that is determined to essentially demonstrate its supremacy across the West as well as across the Middle East.
00:09:48.420His expectation is that with the support of the American military establishment, that he can subjugate the entire Muslim world to his will.
00:10:01.140And frankly, to this point, there's a lot of evidence to suggest he's not entirely wrong.
00:10:05.860There's been almost no pushback against the mass murder and expulsion of human beings from Gaza, no real violent response to the enormous damage done in Lebanon, including the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians.
00:10:22.780What's happened in Syria is another example.
00:10:25.420And of course, we've always helped these things along.
00:10:27.760We've worked closely with the Israelis.
00:10:30.420That's one of the reasons the Turks cast their lot with us in Syria.
00:10:33.840So I think the bottom line is, Mir Seimer is right, but, you know, this was pretty obvious two weeks after the 7th October.
00:10:46.840And, you know, one thing that I'm not sure Mir Seimer has looked at, but I have, and I have serious doubts about the alleged surprise of 7th October.
00:10:54.780I think the Israelis let that happen because it was going to be used as the rationale or justification for this war of Jewish supremacy in the Middle East and also to tighten their grip on the West, especially the English-speaking world.
00:11:10.460They've had their grip or their hands on the throat of the Anglo-American sphere for a long time, certainly financially.
00:11:19.080So I think this is part and parcel of that operation.
00:11:25.580So if you were back advising the current Secretary of Defense, what would be your advice as a way to get out of this that would at least absolve us from having to escalate?
00:11:39.080I'd advise him to resign because there's no way to get out.
00:11:47.340Remember, he's one of these Christian Zionists.
00:11:49.960He and his team were appointed because they swore allegiance to whatever Israel wants.
00:11:56.940Go back and look at the various videos that came out of the Department of Defense shortly after he took over and Mr. Netanyahu with his team came for a visit.
00:12:07.660They all sat in the conference room that belongs to the Secretary of Defense.
00:12:12.600It's right across from his office, literally.
00:12:17.380Mr. Netanyahu trooped in there with his and he sat across from Mr. Netanyahu and says, you can look at this team and look at me and you know that there's nothing we will not do.
00:12:29.900You tell us what you want and we'll do it.
00:12:33.220The problem with Hegseth, of course, is that he was never qualified for the job to begin with.
00:12:37.500He didn't understand the gravity of the situation.
00:12:41.020I don't think he understood the enormous responsibility that he's got.
00:12:45.500And as a consequence, when it became increasingly clear to him that this war was by no means something that could be predicted or, as we have been talking, even contained, Hegseth got cold feet.
00:12:58.700And certainly the people that were there working for him were equally unenthusiastic about the idea of launching a war against Iran for all the reasons that we've just been over.
00:13:09.260Well, that made it absolutely necessary to remove his team and ultimately, I think, to remove him.
00:13:15.380And I suspect that will happen here shortly.
00:13:17.280Well, we're certainly hearing that in the back panels right now.
00:13:22.560The Hegseth stays are numbered, even though he got a very, very bright assessment yesterday from the White House press secretary.
00:13:31.040But, of course, that's usually when people do go, isn't it?
00:13:45.640And I, you know, I don't know who they'll get, but they'll find someone, I think, in the Tom Cotton mold.
00:13:50.020Senator Cotton has been a beneficiary to the tune of millions of dollars from the Israel lobby, along with a lot of others like Ted Cruz and other senators.
00:13:59.540And I think Tom Cotton has always aspired to be the secretary of defense.
00:14:04.140He sees that as the inevitably is his path to the White House.
00:14:08.380So he may well resign because he's got a Republican governor and that Republican governor can appoint another Republican to be Senate senator from Arkansas.
00:17:02.800He could have also said that he didn't start the war in Ukraine, was not his idea.
00:17:08.580He doesn't like it and he wants to end it.
00:17:10.480And he is directing the immediate cessation of all further support, military aid and otherwise to Ukraine.
00:17:17.820And he's ordering the withdrawal of all U.S. personnel, military, intelligence, civilian, doesn't make any difference from Ukraine within 48 hours.
00:17:25.280Then he could have also said, everyone knows that I love Israel, but this is a dangerous course for Israel to take.
00:17:34.320And I've got to intervene and put a stop to it and tell Mr. Netanyahu that if he continues on this path, we will be unable to support him.
00:17:46.200Instead, we got an extension for all intents and purposes of the Biden policies, except that I would argue that President Trump has doubled down on the Israeli campaign for regional hegemony or Jewish supremacy in the Middle East in ways that were never even contemplated by the Biden crowd.
00:18:15.100He could have then said, I'll host a conference and let the Europeans sit across from the Russians and do everything I can to promote peace and reconciliation and so forth, essentially taking us out of the equation, which I think would have been a very good thing.
00:20:32.540What's happened in eastern Ukraine is irrelevant to us.
00:20:35.580But we do need to normalize our relations with Moscow.
00:20:38.840And you're not going to get a normalization of relations with Moscow as long as you continue to pretend that there is some justifiable cause against Russia in places like Crimea or eastern Ukraine.
00:20:56.280And the Ukrainians have been badly used by the West.
00:20:59.220It was always a setup from the beginning to try and somehow or another maximize the use of Ukrainian manpower with lots of ammunition, weapons and so forth against the Russians to wear down the Russians.
00:23:52.560I think you're going to see a major offensive in the near future.
00:23:56.500There certainly has been a requirement to wait until the muddy season was over so that you could move large numbers of troops.
00:24:03.100He's also mobilizing another 140,000 or 135,000 men.
00:24:10.320You're going to have a huge mass of manpower and military power and military equipment and capability very shortly, and it's going to move west.
00:24:19.640I think the general staff in Moscow has always argued, whatever we do, we should march to the river line, because the Dnieper River, certainly for most of the history of the last sort of 800 years, has tended to be the eastern border of Western civilization.
00:24:40.920Byzantine culture and Russian civilization began at the Dnieper River.
00:24:46.020So I think there's pressure to do that.
00:24:49.800Then there is also the determination to go back to Odessa as well as Kharkov, both of which are historically Russian and Russian-speaking.
00:24:58.320Odessa was never part of this Ukrainian construct.
00:25:01.480The Ukrainian construct was much further north, west, with a little bit on the east side.
00:25:06.280And I think then the decision will be made, once we've secured this, do we now go straight into Kiev, which is something he's never wanted to do, because none of the Russians want to destroy anything in Kiev.
00:25:19.880They see that as the birthplace or the cradle of their civilization and religion.
00:25:25.500But they may find that they have to do that to put an end to this.
00:25:30.460Between now and then, I think NATO will fall apart and EU will fall apart, and you may see interesting deals struck over what remains of Ukraine.
00:25:40.540The Poles certainly have their eyes on what used to be called the rest of Galicia and Ruthenia, that was part of the Austrian Empire, and now the Hungarians are interested in getting their slice back that belonged to them.
00:25:55.600I don't know what the Romanians will do and where they fit in or what these people in Moldova have up their sleeve.
00:26:01.380But I suspect we could see all sorts of things happen in the future.
00:26:05.260But what will not happen is that we are not going to preside over some peace deal.
00:26:11.460We are not going to have the opportunity to sit at the peace table and support anything that the Russians and the Europeans come forward with.
00:26:21.600And I think the British and the French know that.
00:26:24.320But they thought that they could, by effectively holding us hostage, drag us into another conflict with Russia.
00:26:33.700That's an impossibility at this stage.
00:26:36.220So, the British and the French have talked a great game, but in the final analysis, they're not going to go into Western Ukraine, because if they do, the Russians will see that as a direct provocation to their security.
00:26:49.400The Russians will move west and crush whatever is coming to Western Ukraine.
00:26:52.860Take you back to 1996, since we're talking about NATO and the relevancy of NATO today.
00:27:02.740Christmas 1996, I'm having my Christmas dinner in Tuzla, Bosnia, which, of course, where the U.S. forces were there.
00:27:11.600I was seconded as a Canadian Air Force officer to Tuzla, working under Colonel Neugebauer, who was their public affairs guy on the scene.
00:27:22.660And an incredible event happened to me Christmas Day.
00:27:27.020I was sitting at the mess table with three American Green Berets at my side.
00:27:34.420Across the table from us were three Russian special forces who had come to Tuzla just for Christmas dinner.
00:27:42.120And the interaction was that easy in those days.
00:27:45.180This was before suddenly Russia became demonized again.
00:27:48.160And I thought, isn't this emblematic of this new world we have here?
00:27:56.520And, of course, the two sides were trying to talk to each other.
00:28:00.560The Russians were speaking in broken English, and the Americans were doing their best to answer.
00:28:06.420And these were people who just years earlier were pledged to kill each other.
00:28:10.500But yet they were getting along, and they were doing everything they could to understand their differences.
00:28:17.020Of course, that's not how things worked out, was it?
00:28:21.660And, of course, that whole—I was there with S-4, the NATO Stabilization Force from 96-97.
00:28:28.500And if I recall, I believe you were a senior planner with NATO at that time, working on why NATO was bombing Serbia and Kosovo, trying to explain that.
00:28:43.900And I was interpreting that policy to the world media in TUSLA as a public affairs officer for S-4, and CPIC, as we call it, the Coalition Public Information Office.
00:28:58.940And in retrospect, do you think this is when NATO had an opportunity to say, why are we doing this?
00:29:09.200Why are we looking for wars to continue to justify our existence?
00:30:08.880Well, that's going to happen with NATO.
00:30:10.020There was an opportunity in the early to mid-90s to essentially liquidate NATO by Europeanizing it.
00:30:19.300Now, that was something that I and many others privately discussed and thought was a very good idea.
00:30:24.400The idea being that we get a European to take over the military command structure to replace the U.S. four-star.
00:30:33.280Well, when that was first discussed, everyone said immediately, well, we can't do that because all the command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, particularly everything space-based, it's really critical, is all American.
00:30:51.480NATO has no non-U.S. military command structure.
00:30:55.580Then there were some discussions about an EU army and an EU headquarters.
00:31:02.660And predictably, nobody in Europe wanted to invest any money in the idea.
00:31:07.160And so everybody was comfortable sitting on their rear ends doing nothing over in Europe and watching us run the show.
00:31:13.700What they did not think at the time was that we would take such a short turn in the direction of conflict and hostility.
00:31:21.260If you go back to 1997, 98, the hostility to Russia inside the Clinton administration, not at the top with Bill Clinton by any means, but certainly with Madeleine Albright and Vance and Al Gore, who was kind of a non-entity, but he threw his lot in with that bunch.
00:31:43.000The people in the CIA at the people in the CIA at the top of the U.S. military, and I mean the top, I'm talking about Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, things like this.
00:31:52.300It was a strong feeling, attitude that Russia had to be watched, Russia had to be contained, that in time there would be an attempt to recover in Russia.
00:32:03.620And when that happened, we had to be on our guard and so forth.
00:32:49.140If you were to gather the men that wrote the Constitution together and suggest that we were a democracy,
00:32:55.020they would immediately have you arrested and thrown out of the convention.
00:32:58.520They were afraid of democracy because they saw it as mob rule, which, of course, is exactly what we've experienced under the Biden administration, mob rule from the left.
00:33:12.460We have authoritarians, but now it's not necessarily the right.
00:33:15.920It's the Israel lobby, for all intents and purposes, allied with all the people that stand to benefit and make money from whatever happens.
00:33:23.460And you mentioned the military-industrial-congressional complex.
00:33:29.820But the lead at this point is definitely the Israel lobby.
00:33:33.840And back in the late 1990s, there were people that you saw later on, like Tony Blinken and others, who were on the periphery of what was going on in the Clinton administration.
00:33:44.240They were already in that mode of thinking and had that attitude.
00:33:50.100So I think it was a short-term opportunity, but not a very great one, because the Europeans would do nothing.
00:33:57.960And the United States tends to mortgage a lot of what it does to national vanity.
00:34:03.040And a lot of people in Washington like the idea of the United States being the, quote-unquote, single superpower who ruled over everything.
00:34:13.020And that has brought us to where we are now.
00:34:15.500We're no longer the single superpower.
00:34:17.320We're not even, strictly speaking, a superpower, unless you just want to attach that to nuclear weapons.
00:34:25.440And so now it's a backlash from the same people that got started in the late 90s in the Balkans and against Russia and then proceeded all through the early part of this century with the goal of building up this American hegemony that was directed against any potential, I would say, competitor.
00:34:47.920And that, of course, is largely Russia and China.
00:34:53.000Now, if we look at the Canadian election, and I'm sure you haven't been watching it too carefully, but what bothers me is that all of the potential prime ministers, and there's really two of them, but all political leaders involved in this race, are all can agree on one thing, that we have to continue to support Ukraine with money, billions into the black hole of Kiev, forever or as long as it takes.
00:35:18.260And they're using the same phrase, and they're using the same phrase that these lunatics, Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron have been using.
00:35:25.220And remember, the Canadian military, as you pointed out in our pre-conversation, is in worse shape than either the UK and France.
00:35:36.600But Canada's using this phrase now about going it alone, because if the U.S. doesn't want to fight Russia, if the U.S. doesn't want to support Ukraine, well, we'll do it alone.
00:35:47.780How delusional and insane is that kind of talk?
00:36:02.700But then again, I'm somebody that thinks we should stop embarrassing ourselves and being stupid in Ukraine.
00:36:08.480We should now do what we should have done months ago, which is end the support to the Ukrainian regime and get everybody who's an American citizen out.
00:36:19.740And I would pull all these forces that are sitting in Poland and Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, out.
00:36:33.620So bring them home and start looking for a new European security architecture.
00:36:41.480And we should help with that, but we should not necessarily try to lead it.
00:36:45.080And we should reduce our presence in Europe to the bare minimum militarily until the Europeans decide what they want to do.
00:36:53.920But I think, as President Trump has already suggested, and others have, it's time for us to remove that U.S. four-star.
00:37:01.700The man right now, his name is Kavoli.
00:37:03.920He seems to have played a leading role in the complete failure of the Ukrainian military operation against the Russians.
00:37:10.460He seems like he should probably go anyway, along with a lot of other people.
00:37:15.760But the point is, the whole thing is over.
00:37:19.880Everybody is sort of delusional at this point, thinking that somehow or another they're going to step in and force these evil Russians back.
00:37:29.840And there's nothing to force them back from that's of any importance to us at all.
00:37:41.220It's incomprehensible to me that our friend Zelensky and his fellow frauds have not been removed from power.
00:37:49.240But then again, I think the British and the French, but particularly the British and us, have provided him with extraordinarily good security to keep him alive.
00:42:06.060At some point when it becomes a fire sale, we're in a lot of trouble because right now, foreign capital, contrary to everyone's expectation, I'm talking about Mr. Lutnik and Mr. Navarro, who've been advising President Trump on these tariffs, is not flowing into the United States.
00:42:24.720And the interests in the bond market, particularly on the 10-year treasury, is rising.
00:42:42.240So I don't know what this man Carney is talking about.
00:42:47.800And I don't understand the sort of hostility, except as you point out, he seems to be connected to the Bank of London or the London banking cartel.
00:42:58.800And he's connected to the regime there that is fundamentally globalist, not just anti-American, anti-European, anti-Christian.
00:43:07.720And I'm sure he has support in Canada from people that think that being anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-European, anti-Western is a good thing.
00:43:18.400I mean, after all, you look at your your own situation from the standpoint of immigration.
00:43:24.260I was in Vancouver and it was made very clear to me that Vancouver is an extension of China in terms of immigration with substantial Indian participation.
00:44:57.840And the reason I was there is that my grandfather wanted me to come up so that I would see the mass pipes and drums of the Royal Canadian Army march into the stadium.
00:45:30.760But the bottom line is, you know, he said to me, I want you to see this Canadian Army, which was really a British Canadian Army before it is destroyed by the French.
00:45:42.640Of course, he was rather anti-French at that point.