Judging Freedom - [SPECIAL] - COL. Douglas Macgregor: Trump and War.

Episode Date: January 29, 2025

[SPECIAL] - COL. Douglas Macgregor: Trump and War.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 Wednesday, January 29th, 2025. Colonel Douglas McGregor joins us now. Colonel, always a pleasure. Colonel, I don't know if you have a handle on this yet because President Trump has only been in office for 10 days, but in your view, does he seem to manifest the same contempt for the freedom of the Palestinian people that Joe Biden did? Well, in view of his recent decision not to halt the transfer of 2,000-pound bombs to the Israelis, I would say it's hard to object to that characterization, because those 2,000-pound bombs don't have much military use outside of large cities and urban areas where your intention is to destroy infrastructure and

kill lots of people. What would the purpose be of sending them other than maybe sending a signal about his relationship to Prime Minister Netanyahu, which indeed would be a bizarre signal in light of that clip he ran of Professor Sachs being so harshly critical of the Israeli prime minister? I think President Trump is torn, frankly. I think he has a set of instincts to tell him to do one thing, and he has political interests, on the other hand, to tell him to do something else. You know, no one that has had to work with Netanyahu for more than a few minutes has ever liked the man. I mean, let's face it, he's not someone who's warm and fuzzy to deal with. But right now, Netanyahu is in the driver's seat because without enormous support from Mr. Netanyahu's agents in the United States, who are very, very wealthy, I doubt seriously that

President Trump would be in the White House. And I'm sure President Trump knows that. So a certain amount of this is unavoidable, is seen as an obligation by President Trump. Now, how long will this last? I don't know. I think he's the sort of person that when he is confronted with the reality in unambiguous terms, will do what he thinks is right. But he may not yet have been confronted with that. We don't know. I'm going to ask you in a minute another follow-up question about whether the ceasefire is a ceasefire or a pause or even a fraud. But before I do, I would like you to listen to a one-minute long clip from Daniel Levy. Mr. Levy is a former Israeli negotiator. I suspect you will agree with him, but of course, tell us what you think.

Chris, cut number one one cannot underestimate the impact on the israeli public psyche of the release the initial three who were released and of course everyone therefore saw those images they've been told al-qassam defeated they've been told the public has turned against them they've been told so many things and then they saw those images an occupying army armed and aided by the most powerful military in the world, the US. A nuclear armed state. Israel. In a struggle between that and a resistance movement,

we saw a very powerful display. And Israelis saw that. We're being told by Israeli analysts, talking heads, political leaders, and their backers in the West, that the next phase has to be to move forward. We have to have the demilitarization of...

The reality is the most significant force in Gaza, by a long stretch, is Hamas. Al-Qassam emerges from this with a very strong narrative. Israel's narrative doesn't look so good at all. Colonel McGregor, is Hamas the strongest force in Gaza as we speak? For the moment, I suppose that it is. They're not currently under immediate attack, but they can stay there almost indefinitely, maybe perpetually, I don't know. But once the ceasefire ends, and it will, and the attacks resume and the bombing starts again, they will be in control of nothing but ruins and dead people. And I think if you're sitting where Mr. Netanyahu sits, your assumption is that there's not much that you've seen in those clips that cannot be turned around quickly with enough explosive. Hence the 2,000-pound bombs that drop on tenths of refugees who yearn to return to their homes and find only rubble.

I think that's true. You know, not too long ago, you expressed the fear, and of course, events change so rapidly, that we might be on the verge of a regional war somewhere. Do you still have that fear? Oh, absolutely. I don't think that we've disengaged from that extreme danger. I think it would be a mistake at this point to assume that Israel and Iran will not come to blows. There's plenty of time in the future for that. And if I'm right, and a number of people who are far more expert on the region and on the Israelis than I am, then we will see an end to the ceasefire and a resumption of the campaign to mass deport, murder the population of Gaza. That's not going to stop.

And it will continue elsewhere as the Israelis see fit to do it. They are committed to this greater Israel project. I don't think the majority of Israelis are prepared to give that up. And maybe the gentleman you interviewed knows more than I do, but I think they are still committed to that. So I think that's still in the offing. And when that happens, everything will change because so much damage has been done to us in the region. We have almost no credibility whatsoever. We depend very heavily on bribery. You know, we send billions to Egypt, billions to Jordan to buy off their complacency, to buy off their complicity with Israel. And then we use our military power as necessary to bully and suppress.

Don't think that'll work too much longer. The real question is what happens in the future. Will we see Iran not only engage, but then Russia come to Iran's aid? And eventually, there's the wild card that no one talks about, the Turks. They've only just established themselves in Syria. They have a long way to go. And anyone who thinks that the current marriage of convenience is anything but temporary between Israel and Turkey is wrong. So you put all of those things together. You put together the problems that exist in Egypt and Jordan, the wider, broader Arab population. I think we're still a long way from any regional war avoidance. We're still on a path to it. The question is not if,

but when. So what do you expect President slash General al-Sisi and King Abdullah to say to President Trump when he says, I need you each to take three quarters of a million Palestinians? Well, that's not going to happen because then they will be seen as cooperating with us and the Israelis to liquidate the Palestinian problem. You liquidate it by removing the population, either killing it or driving it out, and eliminating the infrastructure. And that's what they would be accused of doing. So General Sisi or President Sisi is under no illusions about that. He would be gone in an instant. Right now, the Egyptian military is preparing in the Sinai for what they think will be a war with Israel. I can't imagine what King Abdullah in Jordan is doing. That place is barely

afloat. And that would collapse almost overnight if he admitted more Palestinians to Jordan. Why would the Israelis and the Egyptians have a war? What would it be over? Well, I think the Egyptians look at the Greater Israel Project, look at the map, and the map stretches all the way to the Nile. And the Israeli view of the Egyptians is no different from their view of the Arabs in Gaza or anywhere else in the region. And remember that Sisi, as well as other Arab leaders in the peninsula, are seen as cowards, people that stood by while the Israelis

slaughtered their brethren, people like them. So I think it's very clear that at some point in Sisi's mind, he's going to have to stand his ground and fight. And that will come at a point when he thinks it's prudent to do so. And remember, the whole region, the whole region is on eggshells. Nothing is certain at this point. Colonel, Prime Minister Netanyahu is coming to Washington next week at the invitation of the president. Do we know what the president's Gaza policy is, or can we

conclude what it is from the comments he made about removing the population, giving 2,000-pound bombs, as you mentioned earlier. And then, of course, there is Mrs. Adelson, who seems to get whatever she wants. First, I think we need to understand that without President or Prime Minister Netanyahu's support and his direction to the wealthy forces inside the United States to support Trump in his bid for election, President Trump would not be president of the United States at this point. Let's be perfectly blunt, because the forces that brought him to office were very heavily financed by Mr. Netanyahu's strongest supporters, number one. Number two, they also prevailed upon those who may be friendly to Israel, but who don't like Trump

to effectively stand down and not oppose Trump's election, all on the grounds that Israel's best shot at dominating the region and achieving all of its aims under this rubric of Greater Israel Project comes with President Trump's election. So that's a fact. President Trump is inviting him here. I'm sure this will be a very happy reunion for everyone. And President or Prime Minister Netanyahu will reaffirm the support of everybody in the United States who has invested heavily in Trump's election and wants to stay on Israel's good side and avoid a fight with the lobby. So I think that's number one. Number two, what does Trump want to do? Trump would like all of this to go away.

Very clear. He'd like this to end tomorrow morning, but he feels incapable of doing anything to stop it. And I think he's right in the sense that unless you're willing to cross Netanyahu and the lobby and their supporters, the people that control our government and the House and the Senate, if you're not willing to do that, then nothing is really going to change. So we don't know what the president's Gaza policy is, except we can imagine what it is, given what you've articulated about the forces that brought him to power. Is the spigot still open of daily shipments on U.S. Air Force cargo jets to Tel Aviv airport? Oh, as far as I know, absolutely. Now, I don't know the content, but I know that they're

continuing to receive arms and ammunition now. Either a spokesman for President Trump or President Trump allegedly said that he approved this because this was already arranged under the previous administration. Well, of course, that's a ridiculous comment. He is President of the United States. He has absolute power and authority over foreign and defense policy. If he wants to stop it and halt it, he can do so. He was under no obligation to President Biden or anybody that supported President Biden to go ahead and authorize the delivery of those 2,000-pound bombs. I don't know how many are in the delivery, but I'm sure there are more than enough to level Gaza.

Does the pipeline to Ukraine still exist? People are telling me that it is not universally being enforced. That is the suspension of military aid to Ukraine. In fact, the Air Force with their C-17 fleet just ran a huge operation to move 90 aging Patriot missiles from Israel to Ukraine. These missiles were apparently aging out. The Israelis were going to dispose of them. And so we picked them up and moved them to Ukraine for the Ukrainian regime right now.

I don't know what else is going across the border. I'm getting feedback from people in Europe that materiel is still flowing into Ukraine. President Trump had a big problem during his previous administration, as you will recollect, where he gave direction and said specifically, I want the following to happen. One of those things involved removing our forces from Syria, which I'm told right now is either under consideration or once again being directed. He was told that everything was moving right along, and we know. All you have to do is listen to this Ambassador Jeffries, who made it abundantly clear that nothing happened, and they had no intention of following the orders or directions issued by the president. I think President Trump

is back in that position now. If he does not have large numbers of people who are tasked exclusively with following up inside the federal bureaucracy and the United States government, the United States Armed Forces, to ensure that his orders are obeyed and executed, then I suspect he's got that problem again this time around. What is General Kellogg trying to accomplish? You know, I think the real question is not what General Kellogg wants to accomplish, but what does President Trump want to accomplish? Now, he said he wants to end the war. Well, that's fine. I don't think very many people are going to disagree with that. But what precisely is the goal? In other words, what are we trying to achieve in Eastern Europe that will provide for some sort of enduring condition of stability,

peace, and prosperity? That's what I would look for. Unless, once again, any ceasefire that is reached is another version of the Minsk Accords, where everybody smiled and everybody lied through their teeth about the Minsk Accords because there was no intention of implementing them. So I think the real question is, President Trump, what do you want? I think President Trump wants peace and cooperation with Russia. Now, why would that be the case? Well, I don't think we want war and hostilities with Russia what are you going to accomplish anywhere else in the Middle East or Asia

if you live in a permanent state of hostility to Russia? Russia is a Pacific power, just as we are. Russia has enormous influence in Asia, influence in Africa, influence in the Middle East, influence in Latin America. So is it not in our interest to find common ground and achieve some measure of cooperation with Russia? I think there is. But that's not the way things are shaping up. What we're seeing is, no, we want hostilities to continue.

And that's been the conclusion reached in Moscow. And by the way, despite the fact that people in Mar-a-Lago or the White House have said, oh, we're talking to the Russians and we're going to talk to them, the Deputy Foreign Minister made it abundantly clear the Russians have heard absolutely nothing from President Trump or his administration. So there's been no attempt to establish any kind of communications to arrange any sort of meeting or visit of any type. And I think it's because you have this problem. What do we want? I don't think Trump wants war and hostilities, but that's

what he's going to get, because that's what the people around him seem to support. General Kellogg. You addressed what was going to be my next question, which is, do you know from any sources if Secretary of State Rubio and Foreign Minister Lavrov have spoken? You have already indicated they have not, which in my view, and I think yours is reprehensible because diplomacy is the key here. And we all know that Tony Blinken and Foreign Minister Lavrov never spoke or at least didn't speak in the last three years of the Biden administration. When President Trump says things like Putin is ruining Russia, the Russians have lost a million troops, do you think he's just shooting from the hip or he's being fed intentionally false data from his intelligence community? I think the latter is the case because he's still, unfortunately, in the habit of believing effectively whatever is given to him by the people that are around him whom he's decided to trust.

Remember, I think I may have mentioned this. He's currently the mushroom in the cave who's being kept in the dark and fed crap uh he's got to reach that point where he understands the crap's wrong now over the last week I've seen a remarkable explosion of truthful reporting about the losses the Ukrainians have taken now I would hope that some of that has reached President Trump there's a vast difference between the loss of one to 1.2 million Ukrainian lives in the last three years and the loss of between 90 and 100 000 Russian lives over the last three years right now that that needs to sink. And then he needs to understand the Russian economy is not falling apart. This is not McCain's Russia, a gas station with nuclear weapons. This crap needs to go away. And then he has to understand that we no longer enjoy a monopoly of control over the vast technologies that made us so powerful 30 years ago. Those technologies have all proliferated. We are not

dealing with an inferior state in the form of Russia or China or any number of other states. These states are powerful. They have the capability to defeat us depending upon when and where they choose to stop us. We have got to come to terms with this. But until that happens, there will be no diplomacy. Colonel, we just spent $265 billion funding a war intending to bleed Vladimir Putin dry. Donald Trump has not yet stopped the war. The war was essentially funded, fomented, and concocted by an attitude in the State Department of the Foreign Service that is prevalent? Can Donald Trump end that attitude? Can he bring about the end results that he wishes? Or are those 2,000 troops in Syria that you say he may very well have ordered out still going to be there a year from now? You know, that's the question I can't answer.

Because one of the things that your national security advisor is expected to do is to come back and routinely say, sir, you directed the following. I wanted to update you on where we are and tell him the truth. Are those forces leaving? Are those forces still there? If they're still there and they're not leaving, then why are they still there since the order has been given? Was there a drop dead date for removal? Is there a departure time? What's scheduled?

All of these things have to be presented very clearly and routinely to the president. I don't know that he gets that. You know, and he's not the first president to be in this position. You know, this happened to Nixon during the during assault talks and ultimately to get ground truth in terms of what soviet nuclear capabilities really were or were not station chiefs from the central intelligence agency had to be summoned from central asia northeast asia europe to come to the White House and tell the truth, because the material provided by the CIA was inaccurate. Once they had the true picture of what the Soviets had, then they could go into the SALT talks and come up with an arrangement that made sense.

Right now, there's a discussion, I'm told, about linking future strategic nuclear talks with the Russians to what happens in Ukraine. Well, that's a catastrophe. The Russians are absolutely willing to talk to us about arms limitations talks if that's where we want to go, if we want to revisit these things. But that's not going to change the reality on the ground in Ukraine. I think there is a certain unreality in the atmosphere in Mar-a-Lago, and I don't know what to do about it. Only the president could do something about it, but approving or appointing someone like Senator Rubio, whose views are well known, is certainly no way to establish a new

direction in U.S. foreign or defense policy. Would you add the same thing about General Kellogg? Yeah, of course. I mean, why dredge up that man again? Yeah. Back to repeat whatever he's done before. And all of these people are just repeating the narratives. Again, we don't have truth in this country. We have narratives. And you have to embrace the right narrative, in which case, you're welcome to the party. If you don't and you speak the truth, you're out. All you have to do is look at this Stalinist show trial that's going on right now in the Senate with RFK Jr. And you appreciate that there is no reward for the truth. Everything is about the narrative. And an outfit called The Independent.

You talk about the absence of reality reports. Quote, Putin rejects talks with Zelensky as North Korean cannon is deployed. Vladimir Putin is, quote, afraid of strong leaders, says President Zelensky. I don't know what President Zelensky thinks he can accomplish by insulting President Putin. He's not even, Zelensky's not even the lawful leader of that country. No, for all intents and purposes, he's a Washington puppet. Why bother talking to him? He doesn't represent, quote unquote, the Ukrainian people or the will of the people. But here's something else.

You mentioned this North Korean nonsense. And I and all of my colleagues have looked high and low at every conceivable place that you could to find evidence for North Korean military presence in Ukraine. There is none. It's entirely a hoax. It's as much of a hoax as the Russia hoax was. But this is dredged up routinely to try and justify the false picture of the Russian military. They don't have enough men. They're running out of supplies. There are people objecting to the war in Russia. They can't recruit. All of it is a lie. Turn it around 180 degrees, and then you get what? You get the picture in Ukraine.

So everything that's wrong in Ukraine is then imputed to Russia. I mean, the lying machine goes on without interruption. If President Trump does not act decisively to disrupt the lying and put the record straight, he won't last. Can I tell you what President Trump should do? He should listen to you. That's what he should do. Instead, he has surrounded himself with sycophants and Zionists who are going to tell him what they think he wants to hear, just like Joe Biden did. Well, again, you know, he's got to pay attention to his donors. The donors brought him to the White House. Now, I once had a discussion, I was very fortunate, lasted two and a half hours in private with Cap Weinberger.

And Cap Weinberger told me that Reagan came to Washington and all of these Californians came with him until finally Weinberger and a couple of other members of his inner circle went to him and said, listen, listen to us, Mr. President. They're nice people, but you got to send them home. We have to govern the country. This is not about their agendas or what they thought was important. You're now the president of the United States. We've got to do what's in the U.S. interest. I think somebody needs to have a discussion like that with the President, but I don't know of anybody with the stature and the influence of someone like Cap Weinberger that could make such a statement. Douglas MacGregor.

Colonel, thank you very much. You provide analysis and insight like no one else. Deeply and profoundly appreciated. Thank you so much for your time. I have one point. Yes, of course. Before I disappear over the horizon, I'm beginning to see an awful lot of material about China come across my desk in connection with the Panama Canal. People need to understand something. The Chinese have contracts at either end of the canal to work on the harbor facilities and the infrastructure. The reason they have those contracts is because American firms showed no

interest in the work. And so the Panamanian government did not turn deliberately to the Chinese contractors. They went to them because they needed the work done And so the Panamanian government did not turn deliberately to the Chinese contractors. They went to them because they needed the work done and they were the ones who were willing to come and do it. Working on that infrastructure does not imply an imminent Chinese occupation and control of the Panama Canal. Right now, there are discussions about another canal going in there. Everyone is interested in the same thing, which is access through the canal. We have more ships that need to go through. The canal is actually quite narrow. I'm not even sure that it could accept a U.S. aircraft carrier. I know that we built the canal originally so that a U.S. battleship could get through it. And that's one of the reasons our

battleships were very narrow compared with the British and others. But my point is that this hype about the Chinese is very unhealthy. If you don't want the Chinese to do the work on the canal, there's a simple solution. You call the Chinese contractors and say, we'll buy you out. We'll replace you with American contractors. And the Panamanians will have no objections to that. It will be done. And if that will make everybody feel better, that's good. When it comes to Greenland and the talk about Greenland and Canada, we need to understand something. Since the end of the Second World War, we have effectively controlled whatever happens in Northern Norway, Iceland, Northern Britain, Greenland, Northern Canada. Nothing is going to go in up there or come out up there unless we want it to. There's no reason for an imminent American military seizure of anything.

We're already in control. So I think people need to get that truth. But for some reason, the media doesn't care to pass that information on. And that information is real. I hope that the people who watch this show, some of whom are critical of you and me, will pass along to the man in the White House all that you have just said. Thank you, Colonel. Thank you so much. Of course. Coming up at three o'clock today, Phil Giraldi, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.