Col. Douglas Macgregor ｜ 04-15-25
Episode Stats
Summary
Colonel Douglas McGregor is a decorated combat veteran and author of five books, a Ph.D, and the defense and foreign policy expert that I respect perhaps more than any other in the country. He is widely known inside the United States, Europe, Israel, Russia, China, and Korea for both his outside-the-box thinking and his leadership in the Battle of 1973, Easting, the U.S. Army s largest tank battle since World War II, as well as for his groundbreaking books on military transformation.
Transcript
00:00:06.040
We're fluent in data digitization and expansion into foreign markets.
00:00:09.980
And we can talk all day about streamlining manufacturing processes.
00:00:14.260
Because at Desjardins Business, we speak the same language you do.
00:00:18.760
So join the more than 400,000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already count on us.
00:00:40.760
They went after a guy named Roger Stone who's sitting in the office.
00:00:44.500
And I'll say this in front of Roger, he's no baby.
00:00:46.900
And right now he's cleaner than anybody in this place.
00:01:01.500
Here we talk politics, style, news, history, and occasionally food.
00:01:16.100
Today I'm privileged to have as our guest Colonel Douglas McGregor.
00:01:19.900
He is a decorated combat veteran and author of five books, a Ph.D., and the defense and
00:01:26.920
foreign policy expert that I respect perhaps more than any other in the country.
00:01:31.800
Doug McGregor was commissioned in the regular army in 1976 after one year at VMI and four
00:01:39.880
In 2004, Colonel McGregor retired with the rank of colonel.
00:01:44.200
In 2020, the president appointed McGregor to serve as senior advisor to the Secretary of
00:01:49.260
Defense, a post he held until President Trump left office.
00:01:52.860
He has a master's degree in comparative politics and a Ph.D. in international relations from
00:02:02.200
Now, Colonel McGregor is widely known inside the United States, Europe, Israel, Russia,
00:02:07.600
China, and Korea for both his outside-the-box thinking and his leadership in the Battle of
00:02:14.560
1973, Easting, the U.S. Army's largest tank battle since World War II, as well as for his
00:02:21.540
groundbreaking books on military transformation.
00:02:24.920
I was reading a book by Alexander Coburn, Nobody's Idea of a Conservative, and I came across
00:02:31.800
this passage describing Colonel Douglas McGregor as a gifted military theoretician who had led
00:02:39.140
an armored squadron and fought a victorious tank battle in 1991 during Desert Storm.
00:02:43.800
McGregor had long brooded on what he considered the outmoded organization of Army combat units
00:02:50.240
into 20,000-man divisions and proposed the division's reorganizations into smaller, more
00:02:56.220
flexible units capable of more agile deployment and maneuver.
00:03:01.440
Forthright in his judgments when he's speaking to superiors, unfortunately, McGregor has suffered
00:03:06.880
the traditional fate of innovative military thinking.
00:03:09.720
His radical and new ideas exciting fear and distrust among those at the highest level of
00:03:17.960
I don't think there could be any greater compliment.
00:03:21.740
I'm going to bring him with us, and then we're going to cut to a break.
00:03:24.580
But Colonel Douglas McGregor, thank you so much for joining us today in the Stone Zone.
00:03:32.600
We've got a lot to cover here, but the most important one, of course, is war and peace,
00:03:38.320
what's happening in the Middle East, what's happening also between Ukraine and Russia.
00:03:47.260
We're about to talk to our guest, Colonel Douglas McGregor.
00:03:52.740
It's easy to get stuck reaching for the same familiar fruits and vegetables, even when you
00:04:00.320
Balance of Nature's fruits and veggie supplements don't replace fruits and vegetables, but it
00:04:04.320
makes it easy to add more variety to what you already eat.
00:04:08.000
With 31 ingredients that are whole fruits and vegetables, switching it up is easy because
00:04:14.280
Go to balanceofnature.com and get a free fiber and spice supplement, plus 35% off your first
00:04:19.360
set as a new preferred customer, by using discount code POD.
00:04:34.880
All right, we're back in the Stone Zone, joining us once again, Colonel Douglas McGregor.
00:04:41.000
This is the distinguished officer that I respect perhaps more than any other in the country
00:04:46.460
when it comes to matters of geopolitical defense and national security, but also one who understands
00:04:55.820
Colonel McGregor, the other night you texted me an interview with Secretary Pete Hegseth,
00:05:03.500
who I like, take nothing away from him, but he says that we, the United States, are ready
00:05:09.120
to launch powerful strikes deep within Iran if negotiations break down.
00:05:13.840
I tend to agree with my colleague, Tucker Carlson, I think war with Iran would be a horrific
00:05:21.160
So what did you mean when you sent me this interview?
00:05:27.720
First, you know, and I think you would agree with this, that Trump's instincts on a whole
00:05:34.320
range of policy issues, not just foreign and defense, but many policy issues are very, very
00:05:41.060
good. And one of my frustrations with President Trump in the past as being his failure to follow
00:05:48.240
his own instincts. And right in his White House, with large numbers of people who are hell bent
00:05:54.160
to go to war with Iran. And they seem to think that threats and bullying tactics are somehow
00:06:01.120
or another helpful. And I don't think they are. When you're negotiating with someone, frankly, Roger, it pays to say
00:06:10.060
as little as possible. And once the negotiation is completed, you reach some sort of decision, good, bad or
00:06:18.500
otherwise, then you can talk about it. But I think President Trump wants very much to reach an accommodation
00:06:25.740
with Iran. So I would refrain from saying anything at this point that is belligerent or threatening,
00:06:32.860
because it simply drives away the people that you're trying to bring on board. And that's a difficult
00:06:39.120
thing to do right now, because we're asking the Iranians to accept life in a region where only Israel
00:06:47.100
has nuclear weapons. And that's a hard pill to swallow for them. And I think for large numbers of other
00:06:53.120
people in the region, because they don't trust the Israelis. Now, whether or not that appeals to us
00:06:58.720
is irrelevant. The point is, under those circumstances, Whitcoff and President Trump have a very difficult
00:07:04.940
challenge. And I hope that what Mr. Whitcoff has said about events turns out to be the case. And he is
00:07:13.500
cautiously optimistic. So whatever we can do to be supportive of a positive outcome of an accommodation,
00:07:21.200
we should we should support that and encourage, I think, President Trump to listen to his own
00:07:29.040
instincts, because if he does, we'll be successful. For those to listening to this interview with Colonel
00:07:36.280
Douglas McGregor, you can follow him at OurCountryYourChoice.com. I strongly urge you to do
00:07:43.260
that. Look, I always thought, and I could be wrong about this, that the sanctions that President Trump put on
00:07:50.400
the Iranians during his first term, seemed to me to be terribly successful. I mean, it's an oil-rich
00:07:56.780
country, but they were not even able to sell their oil to their Chinese patrons under those circumstances.
00:08:04.400
Therefore, it occurred to me that when Joe Biden and his administration unfroze over $190 billion of
00:08:12.180
wealth to go to the Iranians, that it was inevitable that they would not only restart their nuclear weapons
00:08:19.420
development program, but they would also begin to fund Islamic terrorism again, leading to the attacks
00:08:26.880
on October 7th. Could sanctions be effective or successful yet again in the new administration?
00:08:37.440
No. I think the sanctions in the past have been much less effective than people in Washington think.
00:08:44.340
The truth is that we have overused sanctions to the point where everyone has found workarounds.
00:08:52.540
One of the things we need to keep in mind, especially about the Chinese and the Iranians,
00:08:57.540
is that the Chinese in particular have built alternatives to reliance on the movement of oil and gas
00:09:04.680
via the Straits of Hormuz by sea to China. In fact, the Belt and Road Initiative is very much a part of
00:09:13.560
creating a system of cross-continental trade and commerce that we, with our Navy, cannot interrupt
00:09:21.020
or disrupt. And the other thing is that, and this is the problem with our tariffs and so forth,
00:09:26.440
over the last five years, the world has changed. The Chinese have developed new markets. The Chinese
00:09:33.340
have developed new supply chains. In other words, at some point, your sanctions are counterproductive.
00:09:39.700
I think the president understands that, which is one of the reasons that he's folding pretty quickly
00:09:45.200
on the tariffs that he's imposed. He's now said clearly the automotive industry needs
00:09:51.600
the trade, and he's pulling back on those tariffs. I think we're going to see that with all forms of
00:09:57.560
electronics coming out of China, Japan, Korea. So I think President Trump understands that. I just don't
00:10:03.340
think he's being well advised on these things. And I don't think that we will get further by
00:10:08.240
threatening and bullying. I think we'll get further with more accommodation and recognition
00:10:13.520
that other countries have legitimate rights and interests. We have had a bad habit, particularly
00:10:19.940
with Biden. I mean, his administration just cast any caution to the winds and treated anyone else's
00:10:30.280
Mr. Colonel McGregor is the CEO of OurCountryOurChoice.com. OurCountryOurChoice.com. I want to get that
00:10:41.980
And look, I appreciate being corrected on the sanctions. I'm a politico. I'm not a military
00:10:50.520
strategist, nor am I a world economist. China seems to be cutting off the experts of rare earth minerals
00:10:57.060
needed in the production of automobiles, aerospace, and defense manufacturing. I mean,
00:11:02.660
what is the best way for America to respond to that?
00:11:06.540
Well, there's not much of a response. I mean, the things that we sell most are things that
00:11:11.640
China can easily replace. Our biggest exports are agricultural products and energy. And the
00:11:19.920
only other thing that we export in great quantity is military equipment and bombs.
00:11:23.780
So someone put it recently in terms of the three Bs, bushels, barrels, and bombs. That's what we
00:11:31.160
export. Well, the Chinese can replace the agricultural and the energy output very, very easily with all
00:11:39.300
sorts of people all over the world. So I don't think you're going to get very far. On the other hand,
00:11:44.840
we're very dependent on the Chinese for a lot of the microcircuitry, the electronics,
00:11:49.880
you pointed to the rare earths. And you know, this is something else that's depressing about us,
00:11:55.560
Roger. We should have built a rare earth refinery in North America a long time ago.
00:12:01.880
And right now, if you find rare earths, and I happen to be in this business at the moment,
00:12:07.340
and you extract them successfully, and we have a lot of rare earths out there,
00:12:11.440
it's just that it hasn't been profitable to extract them. Now it's becoming very profitable.
00:12:16.280
If you do that, you've got to send your rare earths to China, or Kazakhstan, somewhere else
00:12:23.960
on the other side of the world to have them refined into the materials that you need for
00:12:29.420
your defense establishment, and for every cell phone that you manufacture. So I hope that if we
00:12:35.560
learn anything from this, we need to build our own refineries. And we need to invigorate this rare
00:12:41.660
earth exploration and extraction in our country. Probably the country with the most rare earths in
00:12:47.200
the world, but they aren't tapped yet, is Canada. They're just north of us. So hopefully, we will
00:12:53.680
have learned something from this whole business. But right now, the Chinese are cutting off Boeing,
00:12:59.200
cutting off purchasing any of our aircraft. And everybody says, well, wait a minute now,
00:13:04.340
where else are they going to get great aircraft like that? Well, we no longer monopolize the aerospace
00:13:09.720
industry the way we did. I think this is something we don't seem to understand anymore, Roger.
00:13:15.880
We had a huge monopoly on all sorts of technologies back in 1990, 91. And that gave us an enormous
00:13:23.880
strategic advantage. That monopoly was eroded and then erased in the early part of the century.
00:13:30.160
So we no longer are in the same position we were. That's not the end of the world. It's not something
00:13:35.660
we should try to fight our way out of. It's simply something we ought to recognize. And we can
00:13:40.960
moderate some of our positions as a consequence. President Trump seems steadfast in his desire to
00:13:48.300
acquire Greenland. He keeps saying that we need to do so to bolster our national defense and for
00:13:54.500
national security purposes. How would having Greenland help the United States protect itself?
00:14:00.800
I think that President Trump is approached by people, particularly in the Navy, who are quite
00:14:10.360
concerned about the Arctic passage that is developed, because you can now cut your travel across continental
00:14:17.900
travel down to a couple of days, three or four days, because you can send a ship between Greenland
00:14:26.380
and Norway through the Arctic passage on the north side of Canada. And poof, they're on the other side of the
00:14:34.600
world, where China, Japan, Korea, and so forth are located. And I think there has been a fear that we would end up
00:14:43.420
in some sort of conflict in the Arctic over who controls what and who has passage and so forth. And of course,
00:14:51.260
the Navy has always been very bellicose and sees this as a justification for a larger surface fleet
00:14:58.220
and warlike action. And I think Greenland fits into that because the assumption is that from Greenland,
00:15:05.580
you can control access to this passage. I don't think we need to militarize this. I think what is
00:15:12.980
required and what the president ought to do is say to all the nations that border this Arctic passage,
00:15:20.540
that includes Russia and Norway, Canada, the United States, why don't we come up with an arrangement
00:15:28.760
so that everybody has passage? We know where you can go and where you can't. And I think this would
00:15:35.380
work. You've got another problem because there's so much in terms of rare earth as well as oil and gas
00:15:42.160
products, energy products lying on the seabed. Everyone wants to rush out there and extract all of this,
00:15:48.920
which is not an easy process. You know, this is very cold water, tough environment. You can't do
00:15:53.560
that every night. We need to sit down and sort through this like adults. This is not the time
00:15:59.960
to figure out how we fight a war in a place like that because the war will sabotage all the productivity
00:16:06.140
and development that we're seeking. So I don't think we need to control Greenland per se. You know,
00:16:11.940
Roger, the Danes have been good allies. We've done along brilliantly with the Danes. We already have
00:16:18.180
a base in Greenland. Why not just talk to the Danes because they have much to gain from all of this as
00:16:24.820
well, since they too are a maritime power like the Norwegians and the British.
00:16:28.900
As you know, I am an acolyte of President Richard Nixon, who was my political mentor. I think one of
00:16:38.740
his great accomplishments was driving a wedge between the Russians and the Chinese, recognizing
00:16:45.060
they had a long mutual border and centuries of distrust between the two countries. I think it is how he
00:16:53.060
secured the strategic arms limitation agreement with the Russians. I think he is unfairly blamed
00:16:59.860
for the threat that China poses to our country today. The time that Richard Nixon brought them
00:17:06.420
in out of the cold, they were a dirt poor, backwards agrarian society with very little indoor plumbing,
00:17:12.660
didn't even have electricity in the rural areas. There was no way for Nixon to see that 30 years later,
00:17:18.500
Bill Clinton would give them most favored nation trading status, and he would actually
00:17:23.780
sell them in return for illegal campaign contributions, some of our top military secrets in the morale
00:17:29.620
scandal. Can President Donald Trump be equally successful now? Because Biden drove them together.
00:17:36.420
Can President Trump now be successful in driving them apart?
00:17:41.300
No. The case was very different when Nixon was president. First of all, the wedge already existed.
00:17:49.860
He had the good sense and the wisdom to recognize that it existed. You remember back in the 50s,
00:17:55.860
everyone saw communism as this monolithic force. Well, Stalin used to refer to the red Chinese as red
00:18:03.460
onions. He said they're red on the outside, but inside they're really white. And his meaning was,
00:18:09.460
the Chinese are really at heart capitalists. Well, Stalin was right. And I think Richard Nixon
00:18:15.780
understood that. And as far as China representing a threat to us, militarily, I absolutely reject that
00:18:23.140
notion. If you look at the Chinese military, I've seen it. It's not postured for offensive warfare.
00:18:29.940
Everything is purely defensive. And the Chinese are preeminently about business. They don't start wars,
00:18:35.860
don't want to start a war anywhere. And if they and whenever they have had conflicts, they've lost
00:18:42.340
them. They've spent most of the last 500 years, roughly 340 of them under foreign governments and foreign
00:18:49.860
occupation. I think that the Chinese are an economic power. And we need to remember that for
00:18:56.180
most of the last 2000 years, China was the richest country in the world, although some of my friends in India
00:19:03.060
argued that India was actually richer, be that as it may, when we were very poor and backward,
00:19:08.660
China was a flourishing civilization and extremely wealthy. I don't think that's going to change anytime
00:19:15.300
soon, nor do I think it should. I think we need to change our approach. But the notion that we are
00:19:21.220
going to drive a wedge between the Russians and the Chinese is ludicrous. This is a marriage made in heaven.
00:19:26.900
The Russians have all the resources that the Chinese could possibly use. And the Russians still have
00:19:33.300
superior military technology in many key categories, which they have willingly shared with the Chinese
00:19:38.660
that have helped China immensely in terms of developing its defensive force posture. I think
00:19:44.980
we have to treat them with respect and understand that they have legitimate interests and that neither of
00:19:53.140
those states won a war, least of all with us. All right, we're going to have to leave it there.
00:19:59.540
I want to thank our guest, Colonel Douglas McGregor. You can find him at OurCountryOurChoice.com,
00:20:07.060
also at RE-Public. I want to thank you again for joining us in the segment. I guess we'll be right
00:20:14.500
back with just a little bit more of Doug McGregor. I was a little premature there, but up next,
00:20:19.220
keeping the live and alive with Debbie Nigro, sponsored by Native Path Collagen.
00:20:39.780
And you're back in the Stone Zone. I just got some amazingly good news from my wife late last week.
00:20:47.460
My wife had what the doctors described as a cardiac event. A completely incompetent
00:20:55.460
cardiologist who attended her at the hospital to which she was taken by ambulance basically told her
00:21:02.660
that her heart was pumping at 30 percent, that there was no explanation for this,
00:21:06.740
and nothing could be done for her, that she should go home and get her affairs in order.
00:21:11.700
Yes, it was pretty shocking. I'm happy to say now, having gone through multiple tests and seen
00:21:17.220
a highly competent cardiologist, I can report that all of that was wrong. And she's not only going to
00:21:24.980
live, she's going to be fine. So I apologize if I have been a little disjointed here, Colonel.
00:21:30.500
Tell us about Republic, this incredible online social media platform in which you have been active.
00:21:39.220
Well, listen, Roger, I think everybody in the future needs to get a second opinion,
00:21:43.060
and that's really what you've demonstrated. I'm very happy to hear that. That's your wife.
00:21:46.900
The Republic platform is a free speech platform that I think everyone should look at carefully,
00:21:54.580
and it's locally focused, but it covers the spectrum of news and events and people.
00:22:00.580
It's a place where you can find out who governs you and look at their decisions,
00:22:04.820
and it's a place where you can register your opinion and ultimately affect what happens at your
00:22:10.580
level of life in your county, inside your state, where you can contact any of the political leaders,
00:22:17.140
who are responsible for events in your state, all the way up to and including the national level.
00:22:22.660
So I think the Republic is something RE, and we say colon public, is well worth your time and effort to examine.
00:22:33.460
This is very much, I've signed up just because I think it is extraordinary. I like the social media
00:22:40.100
programs I'm in. I really like X and what's being done there by Elon Musk. But I think in terms of
00:22:46.340
connecting you to like-minded people, and with action in mind, I mean legal action in mind,
00:22:53.780
I really like the site. Tell people again how they can go there.
00:22:57.300
Yeah, I think the easiest way to do it is to, you can go to re.republic.com. You'll find
00:23:10.420
everything that Roger's describing, and I can't emphasize enough the accuracy of his statement,
00:23:14.900
which is that this is a place where you can communicate across the country. You will find
00:23:21.140
like-minded people, and no one is going to censor you. We've made that very clear. Now, of course,
00:23:26.340
you know, we draw the line at vulgarity, and we're not going to support, you know, statements arguing for
00:23:32.740
the overthrow of our own government. But other than that, I think you've got pretty much free reign.
00:23:39.860
Nancy Pelosi can go on just like anybody else. Let's put it that way.
00:23:43.300
All right. Thank you very much. We're going to wrap it there. My great thanks to my good friend,
00:23:48.580
Colonel Douglas McGregor, for joining us today. And I thank all of you who have been tuned in.
00:23:54.660
Until we meet again, God bless you, and Godspeed.