Judging Freedom - Col. Douglas Macgregor: How Close Is WWIII?

Episode Date: February 29, 2024

Col. Douglas Macgregor: How Close Is WWIII?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, February 29th, 2024. Colonel Douglas McGregor joins us now. There's nothing to laugh at, but one of the viewers, Colonel, just wrote in and said, I'd like to hear Colonel McGregor conduct one of these interviews in a Scottish brogue. He's asking the wrong man. I couldn't. By the way, brogue is Irish. When you say Scottish,

they mean burr. Oh, burr. Okay. Actually, he didn't say brogue. He said Scottish accent. i incorrectly called it a brogue but thank you for the correction there's very little to laugh at so the humor is out of the way and i need to speak to you about um uh israel and gaza and also ukraine i want to start with ukraine i want your comments on the french president and i won't characterize them i'll let you watch what he said and then you can tell me if you think this is crazy or profound. President Emmanuel Macron, two days ago.

There is no consensus today to send ground troops in an official, endorsed and sanctioned manner. But in dynamic terms, nothing should be ruled out. I think there's a lot to unpack there. First of all, is the essence of it crazy that nothing should be ruled out? And declaring war on Russia and that's what people don't seem to understand you send conventional military formations into Western Ukraine you're going to end up at war with Russia and I think President Putin has made that clear repeatedly he's not going to tolerate any external intervention and while he certainly doesn't want a war with NATO,

he's made it clear that if any NATO members send their forces, organized forces into Western Ukraine with the intention of fighting Russians, they would be at war. You know, one of the things that needs to be kept in mind, there is always the outside possibility that Macron made this public statement so that everybody else in the NATO alliance could immediately distance themselves from him, which is exactly what's happened. Virtually everyone has said, out of the question, we won't do it. Even the United States, in a fit of, I guess, a fit of reasonableness, decided to say it's out of the question. So perhaps that was the reason it was done. But otherwise, it makes no sense. Here's one of those responses, the Chancellor of Germany. NATO is not and will not be party to the war. That remains the case. We do not want Russia's war against Ukraine to become a war between Russia and NATO. We agree on this with all our allies. This also means no German participation in the war.

To put it bluntly, as German Chancellor, I will not be sending any members of the German armed forces to Ukraine. Our soldiers can count on that. And you too can count on that. Colonel, do you know if there are French or German special forces there, perhaps out of uniform, perhaps called contractors or mercenaries, but they are truly military personnel of Germany and France? I do not. I can't confirm or deny it. I know that British and American special ops forces in small numbers have been on Ukrainian soil. There's no question about it.

And some of the attacks that you've seen with drones at sea and some of the missile strikes, they have undoubtedly been assisted enormously by the British SAS. I'm told SAS elements or British special ops elements also play a role in Mr. Zelensky's security. But as far as anything else, no, I cannot confirm it. I wouldn't exclude the possibility that there are others on the ground there trying to help or assist in some way, but I haven't seen it. New York Times had a lengthy piece, I'm sure you saw it, that was somewhat weird. It appears to have been leaked by the CIA because there's a lot of padding on the back of the CIA, claiming that the CIA has 12 bases. I didn't know they called them bases

when the CIA builds them. I thought those were what the military built, but whatever. I want to get into a thing about terminology. In Ukraine, I am sure the Russians know exactly where they are and what's going on there. But my point is, how much help is the CIA providing to Ukrainian intel and Ukrainian soldiers? Can an argument be made if American special ops out of uniform or in uniform are helping Ukrainian military personnel use American equipment? If that military equipment is being used to send projectiles into Russia, if the projectiles came from the United States of America, Colonel, is the United States starting a war against Russia? Well, strictly speaking, I think you can argue that we have been a co-belligerent along with many of our allies on the basis of what you just described.

I mean, that's an easy argument to make. But bear in mind that President Putin, contrary to popular belief in the West, has never wanted a war with the United States or its allies in Europe. Never. Has never had any aspirations to move West to attack anybody. Doesn't now. I think it's important to understand that there are a couple of realities that have dawned on the people in the west. Number one is you can tinker on the margins of this war and pretend that you're having a profound impact, and that's what we've done, but you're not going to fundamentally influence it. Secondly, if you actually provoke the Russians to the point where they feel compelled to fight back, and I'm talking about the introduction of conventional military power, we have. That means that in the event that there were a conflict or confrontation and we attack them with air power, which is what a British admiral recently said we might do,

we would lose badly because tens of thousands of missiles that we could not stop would rush through and attack every conceivable airfield, port, or installation of any military significance in Poland, Germany, Scandinavia, France, Italy, and the rest of Europe. There's nothing they can't reach. I don't think that comes up for discussion very much. And then we have this assumption that our air power on which we've depended almost exclusively since the end of the Second World War for any kind of strategic impact and long-range attack is probably not going to survive contact with all of the Russian air defenses right now we see new air defenses springing up in Syria, northern Lebanon, Iran. I think we're going to see more of it in parts of Iraq.

And I think it's going to challenge our air supremacy. It hasn't been there before in any great numbers. It's going to start showing up. We are accustomed to no enemy in the air. Well, the enemy is a missile, and it comes in the form of air defense and anti-missiles. And that's going to change everything. So I think everybody is sobered up and concluded what schultz said the other thing is schultz and most of his colleagues are on very thin ice they're close to being voted out of office and he's trying to say please please please i'm not going to send you to war relax and the germans will not tolerate a war against russia they didn't sign up for it. They don't want it. Here's what President Putin said.

This is just a 27-second clip as part of one of his longish speeches in response to President Macron and in response to some other nonsense that came out of Poland. You and I emailed about it. I'm going to ask you about Poland in a minute. And also what the prime minister of Great Britain said a week and a half ago that caused his predecessor, who's now the foreign minister, to try and pull back from it. But here's cut number 12, Chris. Here's President Putin threatening war over this. They should eventually understand that we also have weapons.

And they know it. I just said it now myself, weapons that can hit targets on their territory. Everything that the West is coming up with now, what they threaten the world with, it can result in a conflict with the use of nuclear weapons, and therefore the destruction of civilization. You surprised he used language that strong, Colonel? No, not at all. I think he felt it was absolutely necessary to make it unambiguously clear that if you attack Russian territory, we reserve the right to respond with whatever we think is

appropriate up to and including nuclear weapons. That's why you possess nuclear weapons in this age. It's really almost exclusively for territorial integrity and protection. And I think he wanted to put to rest if there was any question in anybody's mind, what happens if you attack Russia? This is the answer. So I think it's a very good way to put the whole issue to bed. And I think that helped to convince Schultz and everybody else to forget it. How dangerous is the leadership of Poland and their inclinations toward a war with Russia? You mean the incredibly stupid comment by Andrzej Duda saying?

Yes, I do. You and I emailed about that with a Polish friend of ours. Tell us about it. The world would be better off if no Russia existed. The only thing one can conclude from this sort of thing is immense stupidity. And that's putting it mildly. Anyone who is

Polish has more sense than that. I don't know where he's from. He must be from another country. Most of the Poles I know are more sensible than that. It's absurd. It's stupid. We should ignore it. Unfortunately, we cheer it on because we're led by a small minority of people that are very well financed and determined to do whatever they can to harm Russia. But it's not going to happen. By the way, to get back to your 12 CIA bases, that's very interesting because normally when something like that is deliberately leaked to an outlet like the New York Times, which has contributed to the fiction that Ukraine could win and Russia was going to be defeated, it future, we're simply going to quietly leave. You know, that's what we do when we create disasters. There's no other way to do it. We just pack our things, get onto the boats, get into the air and we go home.

I think that's coming. And I think that's what the, after listening to her at her bombastic worst, if she knows that the end is coming, please listen, Colonel, for the last five or six words she uses, claiming inexplicably, crazily, that our involvement in Ukraine has made the United States safer. Without sending a single U.S. soldier into combat and investing less than one-tenth of one year's defense budget of the United States, we have helped Ukraine destroy 50 percent of Russia's ground combat power, 50 percent, and 20 percent of its vaunted Black Sea fleet. Ukraine has taken off the battlefield 21 naval ships, 102 Russian aircraft, and 2,700 Russian tanks.

By every measure, Ukraine's bravery and strength, its resilience has made the United States safer too. Does this woman know that she's lying? Oh, absolutely. There's no question about it. And she has no reservations whatsoever about doing so. Remember, this is an ideologue. This is a globalist, neocon, whatever you want to call it, revolutionary, who has determined that she's going to destroy her enemies. Now, you know, Russia is not the enemy of the American people, but she thinks it's her enemy and her friends' enemies.

And Ukraine is utterly and completely destroyed. You know, you've got over a million casualties and one half million dead, 500,000 at least. I'm told it's now up to about 530,000 dead. The entire Ukrainian population that is still under Zelensky's control lives in mortal fear of Zelensky and his regime. That's what people don't seem to understand in this country. They're afraid to speak up and express any opinion at all. Nobody wants to fight anymore. And people certainly don't want to be utterly annihilated by the Russians.

So they're dealing with a secret police that can show up at any time, arrest people, imprison people, shoot people. The NKVD is really the model for zelensky and his friends and that's what's going on in ukraine right now so no ukraine is destroyed as a nation she could care less and the interesting part is and i don't know about her numbers she may have some of that correct especially in the black sea fleet but russia is not a maritime power and frankly surface vessels to them are irrelevant everything hinges on submarines secondly russia today as a military power is stronger and greater than it's been since the early 80s and it might well grow stronger the

russian general staff has been told to look into the potential for the mobilization of 800,000 additional troops. Now, I hope that doesn't become necessary because the only circumstances under which I can conceive of that being useful is if they are compelled to cross the Dnieper River and go west. And that happens only, only if no one will sit down and negotiate with Moscow. And if you listen to the Tucker interview with President Putin, he repeatedly said that he was open to negotiations and looking for a way to end the conflict, not because the Russians are losing, that's absurd, but because he knows how destructive and pointless the war is, and he has no wish to continue it. I was moved by a statement by the retired German general and former chair of the NATO military committee saying that Putin has no intention whatsoever to conquer Ukraine, notwithstanding what Mrs. Newland, what the President Biden, what Tony Blinken have said.

And it made me wonder, do your colleagues, retired senior military people in Western Europe, have this general sober view that you do? Or do they have the maniacal view of the American neocons? I would tell you that many do share what you call a maniacal view for the same reasons that you have many retired four stars and senior officers in the U.S. Armed Forces express similar views, because they're on the payroll. They're paid handsomely by forces, by entities, institutions, and the media in their governments that are ultimately beholden to this ideological coterie of the ruling class. These are what I call Western oligarchs, you know, billionaires who are essentially buying political support, buying up retired officers, and paying them to say what they say.

You're not going to hear anybody like Petraeus or Keene or the rest of these people stand up and suddenly start telling the truth. That's not what they're being paid to do. They want to say, you know, Russia is going to lose. This retired general, four-star, whose words motivated me, he's an outlier. Very much so, yeah. Well, you agree with him, obviously. I mean, look at what President Putin said to Tucker Carlson. Look at everything else he said.

There's no indication whatsoever that he wants to, well, you choose Joe Biden's phrase, take Ukraine. Well, remember the idea behind this entire proxy war was Russia is weak. It can't withstand us. We can disrupt it and we can ultimately pull down the Putin regime because the population doesn't support him. These are the fundamental assumptions, all of which were false. They can't back away from those assumptions. And unfortunately, we're stuck with the outcome, which, as you see, is the very opposite of everything they said. Anybody with any sense who looked at it objectively would have reached the

same conclusion. But these people that we're discussing, I don't know what the right phrase is to describe them. This ruling class that dominates Western Europe and the United States, is very similar. They're all ideologically committed to something that, however false, however wrong, must be upheld and maintained to the bitter end. Switching over to Israel and Gaza. Earlier today, hundreds of Gazans were online to receive flour and water from an aid truck, and more than 100 were mowed down by the IDF. Another example, in my view, of the barbarity with which Prime Minister Netanyahu and his folks have conducted this horrific ethnic cleansing in Gaza. What will it take for a state actor to enter with force of arms to stop

this? Well, what you just described is ultimately required. But one of the key assumptions underpinning Israeli operations from the very beginning was that, first of all, from the Israeli standpoint, anything you do against the Arabs is justified because, after all, they are animals, exactly as Prime Minister Netanyahu described them. That's the first underlying assumption anything you do is justified therefore it's not a war crime you're you are doing something in service of of the Israeli people and the Israeli cause secondly the assumption was that the Arab states are too weak they're they're essentially burdened with enormous domestic problems. Egypt has 100 million people living on an infrastructure for perhaps 40 million. They have to be fed. They have to eat.

They have to live. There has to be some measure of order. They can't risk a war. Jordan is not as populous, but it too has internal contradictions, doesn't want to risk a war. Therefore, pretty much whatever you want to do you can do because the rest of the peninsula are arabs who are very wealthy and living well they're not going to put anything at risk to help their brother muslim and christian arabs up in a place like gaza or on the west bank

and then finally you know you have the buildup of israeli forces on the border with southern lebanon right now and i suspect that if they grant some sort of temporary ceasefire because it will be temporary if they get it in gaza they will try to exploit that temporary ceasefire to launch war on another front this time against uh hezbollah and they've already started by bombing in northern lebanon that will widen the war that will create opportunities for others who are now standing quietly on the side and doing nothing to begin to seriously contemplate intervention. However, the Israelis believe they have this unassailable trump card.

They have control of the government in Washington and therefore, by definition, control of the United States Armed Forces, particularly air and naval power, that they can employ at will to do whatever they like. And I know that they're betting very heavily if they go into a place like southern Lebanon to fight Hezbollah that they expect strike packages provided by air and naval forces in the United States to support them. Who do you think will blink first in southern Lebanon? Hezbollah, by blink first, I mean give in first. Hezbollah were the Israelis. I mean, the last time this happened, the Israelis cried uncle and put up a white flag

and went home. Right. The difference between what happened the last time and what could happen this time is that the Israeli population truly believes that there is no alternative to the annihilation of the Arabs on their soil and anyone on their periphery that they insist represents a threat to Jews. Therefore, you know, they're embarked upon this campaign to rid Israel and its surroundings from any threats. So I think the Israelis will press ahead. The population will support it. And again, they're betting heavily that we will show up and reinforce them. The population will support it. And again, they're betting heavily that we will show up and reinforce them. The question then is what happens after that. The Peninsular Arabs are obviously not going to do a great deal, but they can finance others who

will. The real question in the region is Turkey. What will the Turks do? The Turks have been in Egypt. They held private discussions with the Egyptians. General Sisi was very happy with the outcome of those talks. I rather suspect that Egypt, which is viewed as a former Ottoman possession, will not be abandoned by the Turks. Then the question is, what do the Turks do once the Israelis press into southern Lebanon? That will depend upon iran i'm not sure the iranians are prepared to sit and watch the southern uh portion of lebanon alter utterly pulverized and

hezbollah destroyed so then the question is does this become wider do we end up at war with iran and not simply in a supporting role for Israel that obviously would be mana from heaven to put it bluntly for the Israelis or so they think all of these things then open up other possibilities the Russians aren't going to allow us to destroy Iran the Russians are would not stand by and allow such a thing to happen to the Turks I mean they may not be close friends and allies but they are on good terms I'm'm certain the Russians would intervene to support the Turks to the extent that they can, as well as the Iranians. And then, of course, China is in the background, lives in fear that it will be denied access to the oil and gas that it desperately needs from the Persian Gulf and the food that comes to it

from West Africa or East Africa, rather. So it's too soon to say. It's going to take another month or two, I would say, again, mid-April to late May for things to coalesce. But we stand an excellent chance of seeing a real regional war breakout that will ultimately be directed against us as well as Israel. Are there American special forces on the ground? I think I know the answer to this because there's a picture of Joe Biden shaking hands with them, and then the White House took the picture down. American special forces in American uniforms intermingled with Israeli IDF somewhere in Israel. Oh, absolutely. No question about it. I know that some have been wounded and probably some killed that went into the Gaza Strip. I don't know the details, but clearly we are very

involved there to help and assist. And this is the problem that Americans don't come to terms with, because quite frankly, Americans aren't focused on any of it. The United States population is focused on the southern border, the 9, 10 million illegals that have poured into our country, the deterioration in the rule of law, the failure to deal with the criminality, the disintegration, frankly, of the United States at home. Those are the things that Americans are focused on. They're not really interested in the Middle East. They certainly were never interested in Eastern Europe. But what I see happening is a gradual disengagement from the Ukrainian catastrophe, and we will treat that pretty much as the way we treated Vietnam. Well, that's over. Stop talking

about it. The media will comply, and people will then focus elsewhere, and I suspect that will be largely in the Middle East. The question is how large the conflagration in the Middle East becomes before we finally intervene ourselves in some way and say, stop. We're a long way from that. Right now, everyone is pleased as punch to sit back in Washington and watch Gaza annihilated. I'm going to prevail upon your aptitude for domestic American politics. Were you surprised that 100,000 Democrats in Michigan voted none of the above the other day when the alternative was the sitting president of the United States? And do you think Joe Biden would take us to war in the Middle East with some scatterbrained idea that a wartime president has a better chance of getting reelected.

You know, I don't think Joe Biden is going to take us anywhere. If he did, he'd need more than the GPS. I don't think he's a driving force of any kind. The people that are making decisions are really behind the scenes. They're the ones shaping policy. They have lots of facades. You know, Blinken is a good facade. Nuland is a facade. All of these people are front men, if you will, for the people behind the scenes making the decisions who have all the money. Look what's happening in Congress. Do you see anybody expressing any concern about the humanitarian catastrophe we've caused in Ukraine?

The humanitarian catastrophe that's rapidly developing in Israel that could not happen without us? I don't see it. So I'm not surprised. I just don't know what it means. Everybody I talk to says, well, we'll get to the election, then there'll be change. I think increasingly people are looking at it and they're saying, change? Where does the change come from? Who's going to change anything?

Somebody was lecturing me the other day because I, you know, you know I have great affection for President Trump. But he pointed out to me, well, Doug, I understand that. But keep in mind that when Trump was running for office in 2016, everywhere he went, he listened to crowds of thousands, tens of thousands chant, build the wall, build the wall. Ultimately, what did he do? As soon as he was elected, he decided that he needed to address Obamacare. Yeah, yeah. Obamacare. So there's a lack of confidence that anybody will stand up and do anything that is really fundamentally in the interest of the American people. Conor McGregor, thank you very much, my dear friend. Thank you for your time, and thanks for your analysis. As always, I know you're busy and much in demand, and we greatly appreciate it and hope you can come back next week.

Oh, yes. Thank you, Judge. Thank you. Bye-bye. A brilliant, sophisticated American patriot. Coming up at 4 o'clock, another American patriot, Professor John Mearsheimer, and at 5 o'clock, Scott Horton. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thanks for watching!