Judging Freedom - Col Doug Macgregor - Ukraine Russia latest

Episode Date: July 29, 2022

Russia strikes areas in northern Ukraine while Ukraine counterattacks in the south https://www.npr.org/2022/07/28/111419... #Ukraine #Putin #BidenSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here with Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, July 28, 2022. It's about five minutes after one in the afternoon on the east coast of the United States. My guest today is a regular and a fan favorite, Colonel Douglas McGregor, formerly United States Army expert in military warfare and our go-to guy in what's happening in Ukraine, Colonel McGregor. It's a pleasure. Thanks for joining us and welcome here. Sure. What's the current state of affairs in Ukraine? The front page of the New York Times reports that Kyiv is back. Its nightlife is back.

Its restaurants are open. And the people seem to be operating without fear for the first time since early February? I think the Russians are completing their task in the south of fully occupying and controlling the Donbass. And I think that this is the last opportunity that Kiev has to negotiate an end to the conflict. I don't think that Moscow expects anything to happen. We've made it pretty clear, along with our friends in London, that we're not going to support any negotiated settlement. So I think they're pausing until August when they'll launch a major offensive that will probably take them to the Dnieper River down in the south, near Zavarošia and south of Zavarozhia, probably over to Odessa and eventually Transnistria. And I think we should expect them to take Kharkov up in the north.

And that's about it. Those are the areas that are traditionally Russian speaking, the areas that were always part of Russia. And those are the areas that supply Ukraine with about 90% of its gross domestic product. Russians are not interested in seizing Kiev, never have been. Will Ukraine peacefully accept the Russian dominance of those areas, or will they continue to beg? And if they beg, they'll probably receive arms from NATO and from the U.S. to continue this war, even in those areas.

Well, there are a couple of other factors in this multivariate equation, as you know. The EU economies, particularly Germany, are in real trouble. Right now, Russia is exporting about 20 percent of the liquefied natural gas that it was exporting when this whole thing started. And there's no evidence at this stage that the current German government is willing to part ways with Washington and London and take a different position on what should happen in Ukraine. I was on the phone yesterday talking to friends in Germany, and the situation there is really reaching a critical condition. Not only are they faced with a very high probability of having insufficient liquefied natural gas to heat and supply the German economy. Remember, we're not just talking

about heat anymore in the winter. We're talking about the ability to extract ammonia so that you can provide fertilizer to grow crops. We're talking about a shortage of all sorts of foodstuffs coming out of white Russia, Ukraine, and Russia into Germany. So the German standard of living is really under very serious threat. I think by the end of the year, our friend Olaf Scholz, Mr. Habeck, his economics minister or economic advisor, along with the foreign minister Baerbock, they'll all be gone, judge, and there'll be a new government. What that new government will do, I don't know, but I think the new government's argument is going to be we must have a settlement with Russia. And indeed, we need to make peace with Russia. A new line needs to be drawn. Territorial reality needs to be recognized. We don't want to do that.

But of course, as Charles de Gaulle said, there are two things that everyone in Europe needs to remember. Number one, the United States does not live in Europe. Number two, Great Britain is an island. In other words, Europe is going to have to find its own way forward, because if they're depending on us, we're perfectly willing to let them suffer in perpetuity. While you're talking about the Germans, are they willing to send troops to Ukraine if somehow this expands into a NATO war against Russia? No, and no one in Europe is interested in shipping forces to Ukraine. And that's been obvious from the beginning. Somebody asked me the other day, well, can't the Europeans put together forces? No, they can't. There is no European or NATO

European command and control structure. There is only an American command and control structure. In other words, C4ISR, command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance. That's the space-based terrestrial backbone, as well as the backbone at sea from essentially sensors from seabed to space. All of that is American. And that's because the Europeans have been unwilling to spend any money. As a result, they can't put anything together without us.

All right. Now, what you've just said, do American military command, whether it's Lloyd Austin or somebody below him, Tony Blinken on the State Department side or the CIA. Do they tell this to Joe Biden? Is he aware of this? Or does he go to bed at night thinking that Olaf is going to send 100,000 troops, German troops, to Ukraine if Joe asks for them? Well, I think that President Biden knows that without us, there is no such thing as an allied command and control structure. He knows that. There's no space-based imagery. There's no real-time intelligence surveillance for causes and the rest of it. So yeah, I think he knows that. Now, that the Germans will do nothing, I can't see how he could not know that. Unless the intelligence community is lying to him, not to deceive him because they think they should tell him what he wants to hear, which, as you know, is a pattern in the intelligence community.

That's always the case. I think their principal contribution is to paint a picture of Russia that is much weaker and much worse than is the case. That much, I'm sure, is being done. Oh, the Russians are hurting here, they're hurting there. This sector is bad, that sector is bad. The truth is that the Russians have experienced some hardship, but nothing on the scale of what's going to hit Europe now in the fall and the winter. And then secondly, the Russians have already made adjustments. This was said from the very beginning by Putin and Lavrov and others. Europeans are weakening the sanctions regime.

They're making exceptions in order to skirt the very sanctions packages, which von der Leyen and Blinken and others have talked about. Europe is not in a position to withstand the onslaught of no liquefied natural gas. They can't withstand the sanctions that have been imposed on Russia in a whole series of areas. Can Europe get through the winter of 2022 and 2023, six months from now, in the current state of what Putin is sending to them in terms of gas? I think it's going to be very hard, particularly for the people. You mean it's going to be very cold? Yes. And anybody who lives north of Rome is in trouble. And even Rome itself will have problems.

And we don't know how harsh the winter will be. We've had a very hot summer, that's obvious. We could have just as easily an extremely cold winter. So the bottom line is no, the Europeans aren't prepared for this. And I think Putin is just waiting. That's why his export is 20% of what it was previously. He holds all the cards in terms of resources. Meanwhile, there's this nonsensical discussion about a Ukrainian counteroffensive. And again, remember the general staff that Zelensky theoretically has is now NATO. These are NATO officers that are essentially directing Ukrainian forces, NATO officers that are planning. NATO officers from what countries, Colonel? Certainly not the U.S. Well, no, there are Americans involved, along with British.

And I think you probably have some Canadian and French involved. And they're operating actually on the ground in Lvov and in parts of Ukraine. I mean, this is something that is... What is Tony Blinken, Secretary of State, and Joe Biden, what is their long game? Do they not know what you have told us? Do they think we can keep sending 60 billion a year in arms to Ukraine and that this will be war without end? You have just asked a critical question, and I think we have to go back to the beginning. First of all, Judge, there is no strategy. What we have is impulse, impulse based on emotion, not reason. No one sat down in January of this year watching the Russian forces assemble

along Ukraine's border and said, look, what can we do? In other words, what's within the limitations of our resources? What kinds of things can we do to influence this? Secondly, did anybody ask what is the purpose of our intervention in this matter? What do we want? Secondly, how do we do it? What are the methods that we're going to employ? And finally, do we know what we want this to look like when it's over? Do we have an end state in mind? Instead, we just had impulse after impulse after impulse based on the false assumption that our resources are limitless, that we are simply able to print as much money and subsist as long as we wish on top of this dollar-based global economy without any alternative. And what's now happened is that Putin, not only Putin and

the Russian government, but the Chinese, the Indians, Brazil, Iran, I think increasingly the Saudis, the Emirates, everyone is looking at the alternative to the dollar-based monetary system. In other words, the global economic system is based on the dollar. Now, this isn't going to happen overnight. Right. But they are now seriously planning for an alternative. They don't have the institutions that we have. They don't have a swift system, if you will.

Remember, we control the World Bank. We control all of these things. They have to build those institutions, but they are now actively beginning to do that. The handwriting's on the wall. We've overplayed our hand. But our position is not that strong. People are talking about, well, are we in a recession? Of course we're in a recession. The economy is contracting. The question over the next six to 12 months, Judge, is are we in a depression? That's the question that people are going to start asking. Well, that's a question that Joe Biden doesn't want to have asked because he doesn't want to confront the reality of answering it. Not too long ago, Colonel, you told us that the main Russian fighting force,

their best troops, were back in Russia relaxing or retraining or whatever they do. They're not in Ukraine fighting. That's sort of the second team is there. Is that still the case? Yes. Most of the Russian troops are not active in combat right now. They're resting, refitting, reorganizing, retraining in some cases. And I think, again, that's in preparation for a massive offensive in August that will be designed in the absence of any

willingness on our part to negotiate, to finish the job in the south, take Odessa, move to the border with Transnistria. That turns rump Ukraine into a landlocked country. And then finally complete the job in Kharkov. What happens if Joe Biden wakes up one morning and starts to sound like Colonel McGregor? By which I mean, stop sending military aid there. Will that be the end of it? Or is there enough in the pipeline? Is there enough there for them to resist the August offensive that you're predicting will happen? They're not going to be able to resist this offensive. They don't have the forces on the ground. They don't have the trained manpower. Now, we have provided, under the guise of contractors, some manpower that is manning, for instance, the HIMARS, the High Mobility Rocket System. We know that.

There are NATO, quote-unquote, contractors doing a lot of that. Just as we know that we have people under the guise of contract or NATO planning and organizing forces to fight. It's failing. It's failing very badly. Okay, you keep saying under the guise, by that do you mean regular U.S. Army out of uniform? Yeah, we have Americans on the ground in that country, too many. Out of uniform? Well, I don't know what they're wearing. I'm not there. But my point is that no one is telling the American people that there are Americans on the ground in Ukraine. No one is telling the British people there are British soldiers and British

officers on the ground in Ukraine. This is reprehensible. If they're in uniform, they're a fighting force. The American public needs to know about it. If they're out of uniform, they're unprotected by the Geneva Convention, and they're crazy because they've exposed young men and women to summary execution as spies if they don't have a uniform with a recognizable military patch on. This is Uniform Code of Military Justice 101. Everybody knows this. Yes. And if Joe Biden has American troops on the ground and thinks that because they're out of uniform or because they're showing Ukrainians how to use equipment as opposed to shooting at Russians, he doesn't have to tell the Americans about it.

I think the American public about it. I think he's got another thing coming. Well, we've been through this before, Judge, as you know, in the 1950s and early 60s before we formally intervened in Vietnam. We had advisors on the ground. Yes, I remember. I can hear JFK's voice calling them advisors. I was 13. So we have something similar going on, and none of us knows, I certainly don't know, none of us knows exactly how many. All we know is that they are there and they are helping the Ukrainians to plan and organize and execute operations. And they're also assisting with high-tech weaponry. We are passing directly intelligence to the Ukrainians from space-based surveillance, from our satellite arrays. We're facilitating communications with our satellite arrays. We're facilitating communications with our

satellite arrays. All of these things are happening. There is no declaration of war. There isn't even a sense of Congress or the Senate that we should be doing any of these things. But I think we can't lose sight of the money, these billions of dollars. Where do they go? Well, most of it does not go to Ukraine. Most of the money goes to the Department of Defense to compensate the armed forces for the movement of equipment and resources over to Europe. That money in turn is then transferred again to the defense industries, the contractors who actually support and provide the replacement equipment. Those are the people that are donating and supporting the people on the Hill.

In other words, this whole circular operation enriches everyone who is important to the Hill in terms of re-election. It's a shell game. What will it take to stop this pipeline of cash and military equipment and the taxpayers, the taxpayers because they borrow the money, tax dollars anymore, enriching the military industrial complex, to use Eisenhower's phrase? Yeah. Well, I think that's the critical question. My own view is that this war in Ukraine will not end with a bang, but with a whimper, that eventually we will just sort of quietly run out of resources, we'll no longer be able to afford the money printing, the restrictions on our ability to support will be great. We'll have so many problems here at home in the United States that we can no longer bother with it. And really, we've already seen a lot of evidence that people are no longer talking very

much about Ukraine. You know, today everybody on television is talking about China. Right. All right. We'll talk about China for a minute. Colonel Douglas McGregor, should Mrs. Pelosi go to Taiwan? No. Never thought I'd be asking you that. Why the hell does she want to go? Well, look, this is a larger insanity. No one really knows very much about China, let alone Taiwan in the United States. And they've created this illusion that China is armed to the teeth and can't wait to invade Taiwan, which is not really true. There are two major political parties on the ground in Taiwan. One of those parties is pro-Japanese and pro-Western.

The other party is the old KMT party of Chiang Kai-shek, and they would like to reunify with China. That's what a lot of people don't understand. The party that's currently governing only won election by a few points, which means you could have another election in a few years. The KMT comes in and votes to join China. Now, does that sound like you're in a hostile environment, a hair-trigger war? Of course not. I don't expect you to get into Mrs. Pelosi's head. Nobody can really do that. But if she does go,

what will the Chinese do? They're not going to arrest her and restrain her. The Chinese aren't going to take any direct action. What the Chinese are looking for are the following things. Is Xi going to pledge some sort of alliance to Taiwan? Will the government that currently rules in Taiwan forge an alliance with us? In other words, will it be some public statement that says we are going to ally together? We are going to be allies in the future. Number two, is there any provision under this alliance that will be announced that would involve U.S. forces

of any kind on the ground in Taiwan? Those two things. If either of those things are mentioned, then I would say an eventual collision is probably unavoidable because the Chinese regard Taiwan as the unsinkable aircraft carrier used by the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces to invade China. Without Taiwan, the Japanese would have been in serious trouble trying to move equipment and forces into that enormous country. And they'll see it the same way that we saw Cuba in the Cuban missile crisis. The difference is, unlike us, they'll go in because they'll say, no matter what it costs, we cannot afford to have this ticking time bomb on our border. Last question before I let you go. Kim Jong-un, the crazy dictator, or maybe crazy like a fox dictator of North Korea, recently threatened to use nukes. A, can he do that? B, what, if anything,

should the American government do when he says things like this? Well, there's not a lot we can do, but he's done that before. I mean, we've heard the saber rattle repeatedly over the last 10 years off and on. The problem for us is this. Donald Trump had an enormous opportunity in Hanoi to begin this denuclearization project on the Korean Peninsula and to begin withdrawing our forces from South Korea. Right. At the last minute, Messieurs Bolton and Pompeo, both card-carrying neocons, swooped in to stop it.

Right. Now, what we have as a result is that North Korea's principal supporter, principal sponsor is not China and never has been. It's Russia. Putin likes North Korea. supporter principal sponsor is not china and never has been it's russia putin likes north korea that that is a very interesting statement most of the american public no assumes i don't know what the what the people in the state department know but the american public assumes it's chinese and it's not the chinese actually regard kim as a as a dangerous destabilizing force. And that's one of the reasons that he was told to go to Hanoi by Beijing, by Xi, to sign the agreement, get on down the road with it.

They would like to be rid of Mr. Kim or have been interested in ridding themselves of Mr. Kim for some time. The problem that now, because of the Ukraine crisis, North Korea is invaluable because it's a way to divert resources, time, money, and attention away from Europe and focus it once again on the Korean Peninsula. All right. As for his- Koreans in the South are going crazy. Okay. As for his substantive threat, does he have the ability to deliver nuclear weapons to an adversary? Or are they still in the developmental stage? Or don't we know? He has nuclear weapons. Can he deliver them? Then you have to look at the delivery mechanisms. Can he deliver a nuclear weapon against us? At this point, no.

But that could change overnight because all of the missile technology that he has been given has come from Russia, not China. So he could overnight have that capability. That's a matter for decision by Putin. Putin has always given him just enough to appear dangerous, but never enough to really threaten us. And Putin has to be careful because Japan is also in that path. And Putin doesn't want to end up in a war with Japan under any circumstances. And China isn't very excited about a war in Northeast Asia. Does Joe Biden have his arms and his head around all this? No, absolutely not. He has a very infantile view of everything. So does Blinken. I don't think any of these people have any idea what they're doing. You've handed a box

of matches to a group of children. You know, I keep trying to tell people that what you have in Washington instead of the American first movement in charge, You have the me first movement in charge. Everybody there is lining their pockets and doing what they want to do to aggrandize themselves, to push themselves, to popularize themselves, so they don't understand the strategic implications of their actions. Colonel Douglas McGregor, you are of such a benefit to our audience. It's hard for me to thank you enough. We are deeply and profoundly grateful. Thanks for joining us today.

Sure. Thank you, Judge. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.