Judging Freedom - ** COL Douglas Macgreor : Foreign Policy Without a Plan, Who’s in charge?

Episode Date: January 20, 2026

** COL Douglas Macgreor : Foreign Policy Without a Plan, Who’s in charge?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Undeclared wars are commonplace. Tragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression with no complaints from the American people. Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government. To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected. What if sometimes to love your country you had to alter or abolish the government? Jefferson was right? What if that government is best which governs least? What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong? What if it is better to perish fighting for

freedom than to live as a slave? What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now? Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for judging freedom. Today is Tuesday, January 20th, 2006, Colonel Douglas McGregor, joins us now. Colonel McGregor, a pleasure, my dear friend. Colonel, who runs American foreign policy? I think the president of the United

States is running it. You know, it's hard to call a foreign policy. Recently, some people that are in the White House have referred to it as economic statecraft. I think to the rest of the world, it's a case of mugging

I mean, is there a central theme or value judgment underlying what passes for foreign policy today that you're able to discern? I think we have to say clearly that as far as President Trump is concerned, his version of foreign policy is that he's going to seize or take control of whatever he thinks is the interest of the American people. And that varies from Venezuela to Greenland to Eastern Europe and the Middle East. I mean, there's no other way to put it. It's power legitimates, and he decides what a legitimate interest is. Did he reject his oath of office when he told the New York Times that he is no use for international law, given the status of treaties under the law?

the Constitution? I don't know that he took an oath to uphold a body of international law. I'm not familiar with that, and I would defer to your judgment, but I'm not aware that he's taken any oath of allegiance to any body of law other than the Constitution of the United States. Well, you know that the Constitution places treaties like the Geneva Conventions or the UN Charter or the Treaty Against Torture as the Supreme Law of the Land in the same category as constitutions.

What I'm driving at, I'm not, don't mean to be nitpicking. What I'm driving at is how does a seasoned veteran, also an academic with a PhD like you react when the president says, nothing restrains me but my own mind and my own morality? Well, on one hand, I think he's being honest. I think he's telling you what he really thinks. On the other hand, you know, I think his view is that he's going to change what he thinks is inappropriate.

Now, you and I know that when it comes to treaties and so forth that the Senate has a role, and he is obligated to obey those, but he also has a certain amount of latitude as the president to exercise his judgment regarding what he thinks is or is not in the national security interest. other presidents at various points in time have done things that quite frankly i don't think were appropriate given constitutional law we can go back over fDR in particular issuing secret orders to the fleet in the north atlantic to provoke the germans as much as possible in the hopes that the germans would overreact and he could declare war on germany that failed but nevertheless he did that but i don't recall anybody standing up and trying to remove him from office for

doing so. Right, right, right. Did the president authorize the CIA to foment killings in the streets in Iran in the past two weeks? Well, I don't know any more than you do whether or not he was shown any findings from the CIA, was given any recommendations, or that he blessed anything. I suppose the president always has plausible deniability. He can say that he did not directly authorize something. It's sort of like being the godfather. There are lots of people between the godfather and the person who executes the task. So I suppose he has plausible deniability,

but it's hard for me to believe that, you know, Radcliffe is an independent rogue actor. When you say Radcliffe, you're referring, of course, to John Ratcliffe, who's the presidentially appointed and Senate confirmed a director of the CIA and we both are of the view that it's hard to believe that he did this kind of stuff on his own. I mean, is there any question but that the CIA was involved with MI6 and Mossad in fomenting chaos on the streets of Iran and that the purpose of that fermentation was to cause people to die so that there'd be an

overreaction and in theory an overthrow of the government like all these people four generations ago fermented in 1953. I think you can certainly make the argument given Mr. Pompeo's comments in the press, and he's the former head of the CIA, where he pays tribute to the role that the Mossad was playing in doing exactly what you said. I think the Mossad obviously had the lead, but I doubt seriously that they acted without support and intervention from MI6 and the CIA. Here's the tweet that the former Secretary of State and Director of the CIA issued the significant line to which you referred as the last one.

Mike Pompeo, happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets, also to every Mossad agent walking beside them. Why on earth would he have said that? Well, I think he, and I think we have to also say this about Mr. Radcliffe, these are people that were fully funded, supported and advanced by A. A.P. And that lobby. So I think he's essentially signaling that he's still on the team and he continues to plug for APEC and the Israel lobby. That's all. That's that sums it up in a nutshell. But as far as President Trump is concerned, if he had any qualms about it or he had any reservations, I think he would have immediately intervened to stop it. So we can't necessarily say with absolute certainty that he directed it. But he could certainly have stopped it very quickly had he wanted to. Would the attack on President Putin's home have been, which we now know was at least orchestrated or coordinated by the CIA? Would that have had to have been, sorry for my fumbling, the verb tense is here, approved by the White House? You know, we don't know how President Trump is prepared and briefed.

We know that he receives an intelligence briefing every day. We don't know what's in that briefing. We don't know how many details are provided. And I think based on limited exposure and the exposure of others that knew him better than I did, President Trump is very rarely what you would call a detail-oriented individual. So the details that we're discussing may not have been known to him or that the dots were not connected for him. He has a lot on his plate. You would think that the director of the CIA, before supporting something like that, would have come to the president and say,

I wanted you to be aware, this is planned, MI6 has the lead, we're providing targeting data. I wanted to make sure that this was aligned with your feelings, views, opinions, desires, whatever. but I don't know that that happened, Judge. I mean, we're in the dark here trying to figure out why things happen. And that's a tough position to be in. But that's where we are. We just don't know what has transpired at the highest levels between the director of the CIA and the president.

Well, I think you're right. And I guess we may not know until after he's out of office and somebody writes a memoir and it has the earmarks of credibility, but to me it is almost inconceivable that the United States government would try to kill the head of the Russian government and the United States president didn't authorize it. It may seem inconceivable, but based on other president's records in office, it's not. You know, Franklin Roosevelt, when he was president, enjoyed sailing up and down the east coast on a battleship. He would simply direct the Navy to provide him with one. He'd been the

assistant secretary of the Navy. He was, after all, president. And he would ride up and down the East Coast during the 1930s, sometimes with friends enjoying himself on a cruise. We don't know how much communication went back and forth between Washington and the battleship or what was discussed. And people have asserted from time to time that much happened that he was not aware of. So you would think in today's world it would be impossible. And unfortunately, I don't think it is. Is the United States a trustworthy ally or negotiator? From the vantage point now of our colleagues in Moscow, absolutely not.

That's the biggest single problem that we confront right now. Too many 180-degree turns left or right, too often. Failure to stay on course, failure to be consistent. And now more recently, as I found out this morning, the president has actually published remarks made to him by leaders in Europe in privacy. You know, that's catastrophic. No one will talk to you and communicate with you as president of the United States if they think whatever they have said privately to you will end up in public. The president has begun to appoint people to this so-called board of, peace for Gaza. The Israelis are not happy with the people who've been appointed and the people

who've not been appointed. President offered a seat on this so-called Board of Peace to President Putin. I can't imagine Putin accepting something like that and subordinating himself to Trump. Where do you think this is going to go? Nowhere. I don't think any of these initiatives right now that the President has launched are going to have much impact. I mean, this is about as meaningful as the ceasefire agreement agreed last year in Gaza. We all know how that's turned out. And I think Mr. Netanyahu is ultimately the final authority here.

We know that he doesn't want certain people and certain things. He clearly does not want Mr. Erdogan or anyone from the Turkish military on the ground in Gaza. I imagine that he'll have the final say. So, you know, the other thing is this billion-dollar price tag for admission. All of it is very strange. It's not the sort of thing I've ever seen before, have you? No, no, I haven't seen anything like that or learned of anything like it from my study of American history, which is not as exhaustive as yours, but which is a fairly thorough one.

Was the Alaska meeting between Trump and Putin essentially a fraud or a deception on the part of the United States? I would not say that it was a deception. I would say that you had essentially what President Putin subsequently described. When he did not criticize the meeting per se, what he talked about was what a meeting should have entailed. And he said, you're normally when you have a meeting like this, there have been months of preparation. People have sat down and put together proposals, reviewed each other's proposals, so that when the meeting occurs, there is an agenda.

Specific proposals are discussed on their merits, with the hope that there is some resolution, some outcome. He effectively said there was none of that. And I think people showed up and looked very foolish and stupid to be blunt and repeated the same sort of requirement for a ceasefire that had been stated repeatedly in the past. To which the Russians have always responded, no, we're not going to sign on for ceasefire

that gives the opponent time to recover, restock, missiles, ammunition, bring in additional mercenaries or troops. That's out of the question. What we want is a larger security architecture, and we want to talk about what that ought to look like. That's the end state we want to reach. And no one on the U.S. side was prepared to address.

Nobody, nothing at all. Here's comments made earlier today by Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov on the Gaza Peace Board. It's very interesting the Russian perception of this, and I'll be anxious to hear your thoughts on it. Chris? I have already said in my introductory remarks, and Mitri Piscov confirmed that yesterday that President Putin has received an invitation by President Trump to become a part of the Board of Peace. We have also received annex to that letter, a rather lofty document called a charter of the Board of Peace that states that the board will be prepared to deal not only with the Gaza sector.

I don't think it's even mentioned there, but it would be tasked with the, resolution of conflicts around the world. And naturally, we'd like to clear up the conceptual vision and the practical vision of our American colleagues of this initiative. We're trying to clear this matters up. We'll keep in touch. Is it foreign minister Lavrov's understanding that Trump wants to supplant the United Nations with his Board of Peace?

with him as the chair, with a chairmanship that would extend beyond his presidency, which ends three years mercifully, three years from today. Well, that's not an unfair characterization, judge. I mean, the United Nations, like most of these multinational structures, are very large. And from the vantage point of Washington, these large organizations like the UN, give an outsized role to smaller countries. In other words, it makes someone that you otherwise can largely ignore in any given day veto power. He's trying clearly to reduce the numbers to the states that he thinks are strategically relevant in his mind.

And so what you've got is exactly what he described. Now, for the Russians, they're looking at this. And admittedly, I think they're confused. And keep something in mind, both President Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov have always tried to be as polaro. light and understanding as possible towards President Trump. Remember that in Russia, people looked forward to Trump's election. They saw his arrival in the White House as a potential breath of fresh air and a break with the immediate past.

They thought that the unrelenting hostility towards Russia could end, that there would be a way into the future that both Russia and the United States could take together. That hasn't happened. So now he's looking at this and saying, well, this looks like a a well-meant or well-intentioned idea, but it's not terribly practical. It's not going to help us solve problems around the world. We may be able to do something about Gaza,

but beyond that, I think it's probably unrealistic. And I imagine that's the thrust of the conversation behind the scenes. Do you think that the Russians will just sit back and watch all the machinations over Greenland, in the hope that those machinations further destabilized NATO, something they have long sought. Well, I think everybody believes strongly that NATO lives, or Russia lives in fear of NATO and wants to see it destabilized.

I think it's a little more nuanced. Russia wants stability on its borders. You know, for the Russians, Venezuela was a wake-up call. That came out of the blue. It signals, as you pointed out at the beginning, a complete disregard or disinterest in the normal rules of the road, which we sometimes refer to as international order

or international law. At the same time, remember, with a keystroke, we've been trying to delete 300 billion of Russia's national or life savings with a few minor moves in New York City. You know, Iraq is another issue. For them, they look at all of, these behaviors and they're trying to sort through it and understand what is it that the united

states really wants it goes back to your question what is the goal of u.s foreign policy well the goal is clear to get for the united states with that whatever president trump thinks the united states needs and wants without regard to other people's interests so on the one hand i think the russians are looking at what's going on a nato which they understand increasingly is crumbling anyway And they're beginning to wonder, is it really in their interest for NATO to crumble and sort of end up a drift without any leadership? Because the problem, as we've discussed before, is that Washington is supposed to lead NATO. That's why our military is there. That's why you have a U.S. Army or Air Force four star sitting in Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers, Europe.

But President Trump is not leading NATO. President Trump is confronting NATO members as though they were the enemy. And that, I think, is bewildering to the Russians. I think they're trying to figure out where is this going. I don't think they know. I don't think they know any more than you and I do. Where does recognizing the presidency of a former head chopper come in? Well, you know, this is...

I'm speaking of Syria. Yeah, of course. and this man that we call Jolani. Well, that's, speaking of the intelligence agencies, this is a joint Mossad, MI6 CIA creation. We set out to destabilize Syria ostensibly because that's what our Israeli friends demanded. They would not be safe or satisfied

until Assad and Syria was gone. So we achieved that outcome, and then we confronted chaos. Erdogan, of course, had always had his hands in the ISIS, jar and had bankrolled and supported to some extent the ISIS community as had we. We suddenly faced chaos and we cobbled this arrangement together. And Erdogan has supported it.

Netanyahu has supported it. London supports it. And now we do. I think it's a catastrophe. I see nothing good coming out of it over the long run. And I think we're going to see more war in Syria. I think it's only a matter of time until the Turks finally intervene in the place. they've got to finish off the Kurdish threat to them, which we and the Israelis have worked very hard to build up.

And unfortunately, that Kurdish threat unites Turkish and Iranian interests, which is why the Turks and the Iranians have been cooperating recently against various Kurdish insurgents and attempts to destabilize Iran. So it's an interesting world we're living in because we seem to be creating the forces that produce coalitions against us. And I don't know how we get out of this now. Is it only a matter of time before the United States and Israel attack or invade Iran? Well, invasion is an interesting word, but I don't think that's possible. Remember, you're a nation over 90 million, the size of Western Europe.

I don't see any invasion occurring. If we could develop proxies like the Kurds or others that could go in there, then I suppose we would consider that. We've done that with the Ukrainians against Russia. But otherwise, I think if Iran is destroyed, better yet, from the Israeli standpoint, if it fragments, if it divides into smaller states, that opens up the opportunity to gain complete control of Iran's oil resources and natural gas, which is a hugely important goal. If you go back to the 1990s, read the documents that were published then by people like Richard Perr. and Wolfowitz and others, the idea was to capture and assert control over the oil resources of the Middle East and then hold China hostage to access to these resources.

Well, I still think that's in the back of people's minds in London as well as in Washington and New York City. And so the outcome is we're going to take on Iran. We will definitely attack Iran at some point. I think it's inevitable, unfortunately. I wish it weren't. I don't see President Trump standing up and simply saying no. And of course, the Turks, they may not care for the Shiite Iranians, but they see themselves at great risk if Iran falls apart. Just as Russia views that as creating chaos on the southern flank. And of course, there sits China.

About 30% of its oil purchases are in the Persian Gulf. So if you can't get the oil out of the Persian Gulf and bring it to China, China then becomes a co-belligerent in some form or another. I hope that President Trump is listening to people about these things. But I don't know. We have a tendency to grossly underestimate the rest of the world and its capacity to resist us or harm us. I think that's what's gotten us into trouble with things like rare earths.

We met with China in Seoul not long ago. And what we discovered was, in Donald Trump's words, China holds all of the cards. And the Chinese were very straightforward. They'd been working for 30 years to build themselves up to what they are today. And that became quite obvious that they do hold the cards. So we came to some sort of temporary measure or compromise that allowed us to continue to do what we want with the rareists and other things.

But it was a temporary measure. That could be cut off instantly. And I still see no evidence that we're working domestic. and within the Western Hemisphere to cultivate the capability to survive without access to many of the minerals and resources around the world. I mean, this thing with Greenland is another mystery. I mean, just let me make this point, because I don't think a lot of Americans are aware of this. It's very important.

Very recently, within the last couple of years, Norway discovered that just offshore at about 200 to 250 feet of water, that they have one of the largest concentrations of rare earths in the world and potentially the largest concentration of rare earths in Europe. Now, for reasons internal to Norway, the Norwegian government, largely as a result of its green participants, decided that it could be economically problematic to extract these minerals. Not industrially, very easy. Shallow water, right offshore, not difficult.

But they saw it as presenting a potential environmental problem. So they decided to essentially postpone it. Well, we have had wonderful relations, not just with Denmark, but also with Norway for many, many decades. How difficult would it be to fly to Oslo, to sit down with the Norwegians and say, we Americans really need access to rare earths? You have this concentration. We will help to co-fund the extraction. these minerals. By the way, in the meantime, instead of spending $1.5 billion on a port on the coast of Peru

for the U.S. Navy that the U.S. Navy absolutely does not need, we could spend $1.2 billion to build a rare earth refinery in North America. And we could turn to the Norwegians and say, instead of sending your rare earths all the way to China or Kazakhstan to be refined, we'll refine them for you. We'll give you a discount. We'll do it for nothing. why are we not doing those things instead of challenging people militarily, especially over Greenland? That doesn't make any sense at all. That brings us, I have to run, but that brings us back to where we started, the president's mind and the president's personal morality. Colonel, thank you very much.

Thank you so much for enlightening us all on the Greenland situation. I wish we had more time, but I have another commitment. Look forward to seeing you next week. Right. Thanks, Judge. Thank you, Colonel. All the best. And coming up later today at 1 o'clock this afternoon, Pepe Escobar at 2 o'clock, Matt Ho at 3 o'clock, Colonel Karen Koukowski. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.