Judging Freedom - Ukraine Shifting the World's Stage w/Col. Doug Macgregor

Episode Date: September 5, 2023

Ukraine Shifting the World's Stage w/Col. Doug MacgregorSee 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 with Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, September 5th, 2023. Colonel Douglas McGregor joins us now. Colonel, always a pleasure. Thank you very much for your time, sir. Since the last time we were together, the Wall Street Journal, in a headline story on Saturday, claimed that the Ukrainian military has breached the first of three Russian defensive fortifications, preventing the military from proceeding east into Donbass and that region. If you read the story, you see it's based on an interview with one Ukrainian soldier, but the Wall Street Journal went with it anyway. Is there any truth from your sources to the allegations made in this report, or are the Russian defenses as solid and stable and fortified as we all thought they were before this report? Well, I'm surprised the Wall Street Journal bothered talking to anybody. They're very good at evidence-free reporting when it comes to Ukraine.

I don't see any evidence whatsoever for any success anywhere. And we've been down this road so many times where the Ukrainians have tried to rush through the so-called security zone to get to the first line. They rarely get there. They try to demonstrate their ability to get there and then they run away before they're annihilated. So, no, I don't see any evidence for it at all, Judge. Judge Jean- Do we know how and by whom these fortifications were built? I mean, if the American public, I think, has an image of trenches built by soldiers using pickaxes and shovels. No, absolutely not. This looks more like the Maginot Line. You had contractors come in and pour concrete. It's a very elaborate design that was carefully thought out. The design was executed by the general staff in Moscow, laid out very carefully. It involves millions of mines, very carefully emplaced obstacles, bunkers, firing positions, there's no chance of any frontal assault succeeding. And the reason is not just the

quality of the defense, which is superb. It's also because, you know, you've got to be able to disrupt the intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance assets overhead. You've got to suppress the Russian strike capabilities. You've got to disrupt this, you know, persistent surveillance that allows the Russians to target virtually anything they want in Ukraine. And if they can target it, they can strike it. Colonel, you understand the American military mentality. Surely there are people in the military who see what you see and explain it the way you explain it. Are those voices silent or do you think there's beginning to be a little bit of room between what we know is happening on the ground

and what the West Wing and Brussels are claiming is happening on the ground? Well, the problem inside the American military is a very straightforward one. I remember standing up at a briefing when I was a lieutenant colonel commanding a division cavalry squadron, and I was asked a question by the presiding three-star general. And I gave him a straightforward answer. Everybody, though, expected the general to disagree with me. And to the surprise of the 50 officers who were there, he agreed with what I'd said. Suddenly all the officers that were sitting around the general who had been waiting for me to have my head handed to me began nodding vigorously in support. I think, you know, everyone is on the proverbial bus to Abilene. If the senior man says, you know, we can crash through and beat

these Russians and they're not very good, everybody says we can crash through, beat these Russians. They're not very good. There isn't much room for dissent. There's no room for independent thinking. So the short answer to your question is if anybody's thinking that, and there are intelligent people out there that point out, look, they have no air and missile defense. They cannot conceal their movements. They have no way to defend themselves once they've committed. They're going to keep their mouths shut. It's unwelcome, and they'll be punished for it. So no, the answer is I don't see it. Are American military officers, as far as you know, participating in strategic and logistic decisions being made by the Ukrainian military? Of course. Absolutely. We've been heavily involved from the very beginning.

And I don't want to point out where the headquarters are on the map in Central East Europe, but they're there. We have people on the ground in Ukraine interacting directly. We provided them with as much intelligence as we possibly could, surveillance from our own space-based assets. Well, these people can't be blind. They must know that whatever they're telling the Ukrainians to do, either they're not executing it or they're executing it, and it has failed nevertheless. Well, it's very telling right now. You're beginning to hear people make remarks along

the lines of, well, we've given the Ukrainians everything we can. It doesn't seem to make any difference. The Ukrainians can't seem to make this work. These are telling sort of indicators that somebody is beginning to prepare the ground for a less than gracious disengagement from the failure and shift blame as much as they possibly can away from themselves to the Ukrainians. But if you've listened to some of the retired general officers, certainly to Petraeus, he's hardly the only one, but probably the most prominent one. You hear these phrases over and over and over again. Combined arms warfare. They're mastering it. Well, combined arms warfare was something that was developed in 1941,

42 by the Germans. We eventually managed to get it somewhat right before the war ended. And we've been stuck in that World War II paradigm ever since. This is not World War II. This is a new kind of warfare. I keep talking about ISR strike, that kind of complex that exists from seabed to space. That's what Ukrainians are up against, and they're not organized, trained, or equipped to deal with it. PEDRO PINAR O'BRIEN Talk to us, please, about the announcement made over the weekend that Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chairman Kim Jong-un of North Korea are going to meet in Vladivostok soon. Also, talk to us, if you will, about the revelation of the supplying of ICBMs by Russia to North Korea, none of which, the latter, appears in the mainstream media in the U.S. We have to go back to the meeting between President Trump and Chairman Kim in Hanoi. You'll recall that before Kim went to Hanoi, he made a trip to Beijing, and he met with Mr. Xi, the president, and Xi made it clear to him

that his job was to go to Hanoi and sign the agreement. That agreement was a very good agreement, a very important one, because it led inevitably to the denuclearization of North Korea and with it the denuclearization of the peninsula. People do not understand the long-term relationship between China and North Korea. It's very troubled. The Chinese were very unhappy when the Russians encouraged the North Koreans to attack South Korea in 1950. They were not consulted. They did not advocate that. That was something forced upon them by Stalin. They then had to bail out the North Koreans because obviously the Russians did not want to be directly involved in a confrontation with us. The Chinese didn't want that either. And they fought, you know, the whole thing to

stand still. They did very well against us, but they took horrible losses. And ultimately, we were back where we started the war. Ever since then, we've managed to avoid collisions with the Chinese, even under sometimes very strange circumstances. North Korea remained after that primarily a Russian client state. Russia has always thrown a lifeline to North Korea, not China. China supports North Korea under extreme protest. Chinese do not like the North Koreans. I don't think the Chinese like Koreans anyway, and the Koreans don't particularly care for Chinese. But North Korea has been a state that was seen by Moscow as having some strategic value, a way to offset its weakness in other parts of the world, and essentially to distract us and potentially send a message to the Japanese that if they are

contemplating any return in the near future to the continent and contemplating a potential conflict with Russia, that Russia holds the upper hand in North Korea and is close enough to do enormous damage. The Chinese, when Mr. Trump raised the bet, so to say, and sent forces to South Korea, it was very straightforward in his threats. The Chinese made it very clear to Mr. Kim that if they started something against the West, against Japan, against South Korea, against the United States, that they were on their own. China would not come to their assistance if they started a war. On the other hand, they did confirm that if North Korea were attacked by us, by Japan, by South Korea, that the Chinese would then support North Korea.

Things have changed. Remember, Mr. Putin tried for many, many years to fashion, create, groom, cultivate a better relationship with the West, particularly with a series of presidents. That has failed. He had hopes for President Trump, but President Trump proved unable to master Washington. Washington mastered President Trump. And I think President Putin reached a conclusion that he can't really depend on anybody who comes to power in Washington because the power of the city itself, federal bureaucracy,

the parties that occupy the proverbial swamp is so great that no president can come in and turn it around. Putin and his predecessors have always supplied the North Koreans with just enough technology to make North Korea look dangerous until now. And now Putin has done something that has never happened before. He has provided them with the capability to strike us on the North American continent. Now, why would he do that? Well, I think it's pretty obvious. We have pursued a policy of reckless hatred towards Russia in Ukraine. We have said that we will accept nothing less than the destruction of Russia. He has to conclude that we're serious, that there's no hope for negotiation with Washington. Remember, from the very beginning, many of us warned that the Russians have the potential

for horizontal escalation. Right. So they can make life miserable for us in Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Korea, Syria, elsewhere. What you're seeing is horizontal escalation. Now, will North Korea launch a weapon against us? No. They understand that they will be incinerated and they will not have China's backing. But China right now has serious economic problems, very serious economic problems. China is in no position this, Vladimir. We don't want those weapons in the hands of the North Koreans. They've relented. And they've let Mr. Putin essentially make the call that now is

the time to provide North Korea with sufficient destructive power that it will cause us to back away from anything we may be contemplating against Russia or China. There's a lot to unpack there, Colonel, and it was a brilliant, nonstop explanation of the history of the relationship, the interrelationship between China, North Korea, Russia, and the United States. What about South Korea and Japan? How do they react to the presence of these sophisticated, catastrophically destructive, if properly used, weaponry in the hands of somebody whom they perceive to be crazy and unstable, Kim Jong-un? Well, I think the South Koreans have already been to the United States on several visits trying to extract reassurances from us that they still enjoyed the protection of extended deterrence. Extended deterrence very simply means that if a nuclear weapon is used against one of our allies, whether it is Korea or, say, Poland or someone else, that we will respond with nuclear weapons against the source of that nuclear attack. So I think the South Koreans have been worried about this for a long time in North Korea,

especially after the talks that were convened by President Trump broke down and no agreement was reached. So extended deterrence is the thing they fall back on. Japan is also theoretically under our so-called nuclear umbrella. However, ever since about 1969, 1970, even in the United States, people have raised questions about the willingness of the United States to put several cities and hundreds of millions of Americans at risk of extermination in support of a small ally 6, 8, 10,000 miles away. The Japanese, I think, are watching carefully to see what we do in the near future.

And the Japanese are in the process of building up their military capability. They could become a nuclear power literally within weeks if they chose to do so. Do you see us, do you see the U.S. being dragged into some kind of military conflagration in that part of the country, either over some saber-rattling by North Korea or some saber-rattling by China itself over Taiwan? Well, Judge, I've worried from the very beginning about the proverbial tail wagging the dog in Poland. You'll recall we talked many times about the potential for the Poles to intervene in western Ukraine and ultimately hope to drag us into a conflict on their behalf. I think the South Koreans and the Japanese are both hopeful that

they will not be alone. However, as President Trump pointed out, whenever the discussion comes up for the Japanese to support us anywhere outside of Asia or anywhere in Asia, the answer is no, there is no support. So he complained about the lack of reciprocity with Japan. You know, I don't think that Chairman Kim is going to wake up tomorrow morning and say, this is the day I go down in infamy. I'm launching a nuclear weapon at the United States. I think that's unlikely. I don't see any evidence that he wants to nuke South Korea at all, or Japan. But nevertheless, the effect of him having something with which he can now reach out and destroy substantial civilization on the North American continent is a very frightening prospect. And I think that was Putin's aim, to frighten us. And if so, he succeeded.

Can we defend against these? Can we shoot them down? Do we have the military? I'm not happy with the look on your face. Do we have the military capability of shielding Los Angeles or Chicago or Miami or New York or Washington? defense against intercontinental ballistic missiles, which are all hypersonic. In other words, they come in at such a speed. They move out into space and they return to the earth at such a speed. And then they have the capacity, of course, of launching multiple warheads. The answer is no. If those things are launched against us, they will penetrate. That's why we have always insisted on having the capacity to penetrate their defenses, which we can, and destroy them. That's called mutually assured destruction. I think it's still real. I think it still works. I hope that we're

ready for something like that. I suspect we are. But I don't think we can possibly shoot anything down. Remember that when we talk about shooting down an incoming missile, normally we're talking about theater ballistic missiles. Right. And those are slower. They do not move into outer space. They're easier to track, and we can shoot some of them down. We can't shoot them all down.

No defense is going to succeed against multiple missiles with multiple warheads. The enemy can always shoot more missiles and warheads at you than you can shoot anti-missile missiles at them. So the only defense is to be offensive, this sort of mutually assured destruction, which quite frankly, I thought we had gotten rid of in the Reagan-Gorbachev years? I think the proper defense is not to talk about a first strike, which is just insanity. That guarantees a counterstrike, because everybody's built enough of these things to the point where even if you strike them first, they have enough left with which to annihilate you.

So the answer is, first of all, what every president has done since Eisenhower was in office is to essentially meet with your Russian counterpart or Chinese counterpart, whatever it happened to be, discuss areas of mutual agreement and mutual conflict, and try to find a way to avoid areas of conflict and capitalize on those areas where we agree. This is the first president that I'm aware of who has deliberately provoked a nuclear power like Russia. Let me take you back to where we started. You and I have seen the same literature, which shows that the Ukrainian recruiters, if you will, are not drafting people, they're just conscripting them. They're dragging guys in their 60s out of bars and 16-year

olds out of basketball courts. How much longer, no matter the aid the West provides, can Ukraine possibly last in this war against Russia? Well, keep in mind that the Ukrainians have now approached the Polish government. They want to be able to go into Poland and force young Ukrainian men who have been there from the beginning of the war, some of them, to come back to Ukraine and fight. Remember, you've got over 14 million Ukrainians that have left the country and headed West. Right. So I think, you know, to 14 million Ukrainians that have left the country and headed west. So I think, you know, to be frank, Ukrainians have been staring into the abyss now for a long time. The Russians recently captured a 71-year-old Ukrainian man on a Ukrainian tank.

This is insane. You know, people criticize me and say, well, you said this was over. It's been over for a long time. The Russians have simply decided to wait in the hopes of two things negotiations which obviously haven't worked and secondly that the economies in Europe would crash and I think they're on their way they're not only headed into serious recession but we're now headed into a winter. The oil and gas problem is enormous. I think the EU is in trouble. So I think from the Russian standpoint, well, let's wait a little longer and watch this thing collapse because they really don't want to kill any more people.

Remember, Putin is different from us. Putin wants to live with the West. He wants to live with Ukrainians. We have said we do not want to live with Mr. Putin wants to live with the West. He wants to live with Ukrainians. We have said we do not want to live with Mr. Putin. That's the problem. So we've said he must go. His regime must be destroyed. Russia must be fragmented, divided, and sold off at auction, literally. That's not going to work. So it's up to the Europeans, I think, very shortly to end this thing. It's the only way out. The other way, of course, is what Putin is prepared to do and what the Russians can do, which is march to the

Polish border. They've got the capability. They're quietly mobilizing more forces. They're up over 750,000. They're headed to 1.2 million. Everything that supposedly we fought this war to stop has come to fruition. We have created the very thing we said we didn't want. Colonel McGregor, always a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you for your thoughtfulness, your analysis, and your time. We'll see you again soon. Okay, Judge. More as we get it. This is a lot. More as we get it.

Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.