Judging Freedom - U.S. Not Prepared to take on Russia _ Col Doug Macgregor

Episode Date: January 31, 2023

Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, January 31st, 2023. It's about 2.30 in the afternoon here on the east coast of the United States. Colonel McGregor is with us again. Colonel, it's a pleasure. Thank you for joining us. When last we spoke, one of the last things you said to me, and I wrote a note to remind myself to ask you about it the next time we were together, you said that none of the senior generals in the American Department of Defense want to fight in Ukraine. And since you said that to me, you've written a brilliant and terrific piece in Foreign Affairs called This Time It's Different, and your opening line is nearly the same, but it's a little bit more sweeping.

It says, neither we nor our allies are prepared to fight an all-out war with Russia regionally or globally. So can you weigh in on these two statements? Why would generals be leaking that they don't want to fight? Are we militarily and from an equipment perspective incapable of fighting Russia today in Ukraine or anywhere else? Well, I don't know about the leaking bit. Depends on who you talk to. I'm simply saying that based upon my sources in the Department of Defense. People who are close to the senior military leadership tell me that they have made it very clear that choosing to fight Russia in Ukraine would be a serious mistake

and should be avoided. That's what they've said. And I think they're being honest about that. I think they're being truthful for a change. The second part is, are we capable of fighting? Well, of course, we're capable of fighting. The real question is, are we capable of fighting? Well, of course we're capable of fighting. The real question is, if you're going to fight, will you win? And this is the question that people don't ask enough. This goes back to an old strategic axiom. Measure what you might gain by what you might lose. A collision with Russia would be a loss for us. There's nothing to be gained by it. The Russians have nothing that we need or want. There's no ideological hostility. We're not competing for power or control over any particular region. Russia's dispute is exclusively with Ukraine.

We're a large part of the reason why the dispute exists. There's no question about that. But we can end that tomorrow morning if we decide to by simply saying we fought long enough. Russia has the upper hand. Zelensky, sit down, shut up, and take notes. We must have a ceasefire. But first, we have to agree to negotiations without preconditions. Does Washington want to fight Russia via a proxy war? I think they did. I think they regretted at this point, to be blunt with you, no one will admit it publicly, but if you go back to the donor conference, where Lloyd Austin spoke to the gathered donors from NATO and other nations and said, we have a very

short time left, a very short window of time in which to make things happen. And time is running out. I mean, I quoted him in the op-ed piece for that reason. He knows everyone in Washington in a position of authority now knows, Ukraine is losing. Ukrainian resistance is crumbling. The state itself is in danger of going out of existence. That's how bad it is. So the theory is, well, if we can give them anything within the next 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 days, perhaps we can rescue them from disaster. I don't see much evidence for that, but I think that's the theory. Can Ukraine survive as a country if Putin pursues this war all out, whether for military reasons or for domestic Russian political reasons?

Well, the first thing to keep in mind, and this is something of which I was not aware until I consulted with a friend who's done some excellent demographic analysis. And he points out that at the beginning of this war, there were at least in theory, 37.5 million Ukrainians in Ukraine. And he makes the point that today that's not the case. There were already 2 million Ukrainians working in either Great Britain or the European Union outside of the country. You now have 4 million Ukrainian citizens, albeit Russians, people who speak Russian, living under Russian occupation or administration right now in the provinces in the south. Then you have over 10 million Ukrainians that have fled the country. 10 million? 10 million. That's a third of the

country or a quarter of the country. Yeah, you've got a million that have gone into Russia and the rest that have headed west. Now, to this must be added the losses. And again, no one is telling us the truth in the West about the horrific losses that Ukraine has taken. You've heard me say about 150,000, 157,000 dead on the battlefield. That includes 35,000 missing in action, presumed dead. And I've talked about a total of almost 400,000 casualties, people that are wounded. In most cases, not all, but in most cases, more than half of those will never return to duty

because the wounds are too horrific. In other words, they're permanently lost to the Ukrainian fight. Now, supposedly when Zeluzhny was in town speaking to Secretary Austin and General Milley, several people have insisted that he actually told them that 257,000 Ukrainians have died. That includes soldiers, in other words, those in uniform, civilians, all types, all kinds, 257,000. Well, we don't know. I mean, that's an unconfirmed rumor. But what it does tell you is that today in Ukraine, there are roughly between 18 and 22 million people left in the country under Zelensky's control. Now, Judge, that number is roughly the same as the number of people living in the Netherlands.

You cannot sustain this war with that small population. Judge, I'm not hearing you. Can you hear me now? Gotcha. Okay. Apologies. It's okay. Watching and listening.

Sometimes I'm all thumbs. I want to play a clip from Jack Devine. This is a guy that our audience loves to hate. He is, however, career CFA and for many years was in charge of American espionage in Russia and monitoring Russian espionage here. Here's Jack Devine betting on a Ukraine win. I'm betting on the Ukrainians still. It's not to say that the Russians aren't going to be formidable. I do think they'll be under-trained. Sometimes when you create something big and it's not well-trained, they become cannon fodder.

So I think it's going to be a really tough spring, and I think the war in many ways will be decided. There won't be a victor. In other words, the Russians cannot conquer Ukraine. And the Ukrainians are not going to beat the Russians. There's a certain point where both sides pull back. Even if you don't have an agreement, they lower their intensity. And that's what I think Putin personally is in trouble in his own country. And I think he goes.

That's why the stakes are so big. So he's suggesting that this will be over when both sides lower their intensity, and if Putin does that, quote, he goes, because that will not be interpreted as a victory for the Russian nationalists. Your comments on that, Colonel? Well, remember, the CIA has been telling us lies almost from the very beginning about everything happening in Russia. Well, when Mike Pompeo was running the CIA, he publicly acknowledged that's their job, to lie to us. So how do you know whether to believe them or not? Well, they do a very good job of lying. The problem is they're lying to Americans,

and this man, Devine, knows absolutely nothing about Russians. I don't care what his job was, or about Ukrainians or the Slavic peoples that occupy Eastern Europe. The Russians are winning. Ukraine is crumbling. Ukraine's on the verge of collapse. We're going to watch that happen over the next several weeks. The Russians will crush out of existence what remains of the Ukrainian armed forces, and I think they'll have to go after this regime, assuming Zelensky and his friends don't rapidly flee the country to Poland or somewhere else. Now, having said that, the Russians are being very methodical, very deliberate. They are moving constantly, but they are not moving on multiple axes simultaneously.

In other words, you're not going to see the Blitzkrieg. What you're going to see on several axes are what I would call large meat grinders that are just systematically plowing forward, annihilating everything that they come in touch with that is Ukrainian until Ukrainians are finished. There is no incentive for them at this point to negotiate with us unless we go in without conditions. Would the Russians prefer not to annihilate everything in Ukraine? Yes. They never went in there with that goal to begin with. But you can't walk in there and say, well, the only way we'll talk to you is if you withdraw all your forces from Ukraine and Crimea. That's absurd. It's never going to happen.

What you're saying is there's no way that Ukraine, and I'm now paraphrasing you from the column, which I mentioned earlier, there's no way Ukraine can survive this war as an intact country. Listen, I just told you what the demographics say. And what's even worse is that Ukraine has the lowest birth rate in Europe. In addition to having lost millions of people because, frankly, people like Devine and his masters have decided to wage this war on the backs of Ukraine, Ukraine is destroyed. I don't know what survives of it. I have no idea what will happen. Even though I am your friend and admirer, and at times your student, let me raise your blood pressure one more time

with Jack Devine on a weakened Russia. Do we want a strong Russia with Putin and Xi? Is that going to bring us peace and harmony so we can live in isolation? I think Putin, the day he crossed, I'm on record, I'm on record in the Washington Post, in March last year, a few days after he invaded, he sowed the seed of his own demise. That is actually good news for us. Whoever causes it, that's a good news. A weak Russia that sees Putin going weakens China as well as Russia. Does that make sense to you? Again, I think the man's delusional.

Putin has never been stronger than he is today. The Russian people have never been more united than they are today. Only someone who's never spent any time in the country and doesn't know anybody over there would make such preposterous statements. This is part of the larger false narrative. Look, he reminds me of some of the Germans that stood around in Berlin in 1945 and asked, you know, what about the inevitable victory? What's wrong? What's happened? Because the regime over the previous six to 12 months had lied so consistently and effectively that the Germans were surprised to see Russian and American troops on

the outskirts of the city. I think all I can tell you is that, no, he's dead wrong. Now let's talk about this weakened Russia business. It's not weakened. The IMF has now stepped forward and talked about growth in Russia dramatically improving. Their exports are way up. None of this nonsense that we anticipated that was bad has happened to Russia. Russia is in a very strong and healthy position. We, on the other hand, our growth is declining, and it's not going to get better in the near term.

Secondly, Russia is a state with an important role in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. If Russia were to be destroyed, which is not going to happen, if it were to weaken, it would open up opportunities for all sorts of potentially malicious actors to intervene. First of all, Eastern Siberia is not of much interest to the Chinese, contrary to popular belief, but it's very interesting to Japan and Korea. And the Japanese and the Koreans view Eastern Siberia as their territory, because up until about 300 years ago, Mongols, Turkic peoples, Tartars, they were the only people in the region, and they're brothers of the Manchus, Mongols, and Japanese and Koreans. So do you really want Russia to collapse in eastern Siberia? I don't think so. You go into Central Asia, Russia is a stabilizing factor there. In fact, Xi depends upon Russia to help stabilize it because the people in Central Asia have much more confidence

and trust in the Russians than they do in the Chinese. How unified is NATO behind Washington? I'm going to play a clip for you in a minute from the president of Croatia. It's not Germany, it's not France, it's Croatia. But the language is very strident and the criticisms of the West are very strong and articulate. Take a listen. je vrlo strani i artik jer tu nema rješenja. Rješenje nije promjena vlasti u Rusiji. Da pa će, njemački tankovi u Harkovu će dodatno homogenizirati Rusije. Politički će ih homogenizirati.

Zbližit će ih sa Kinezima. To se događa. Okay, there's a lot to unpack there. The West is not united. You've been saying that. The tanks coming from Germany, he didn't mention the American tanks. The tanks coming from Germany will only gin up the Russians to fight more aggressively. It's in nobody's interest to weaken Russia. And he's a member of NATO. Of course. Two things. Nassim Taleb often talks about finance, and he talks about people at the top who don't

have skin in the game. Our problem in Washington, D.C., and in many capitals in Europe right now, is that they're perfectly happy to fight this war until Ukraine ceases to exist and a million Ukrainians are dead because they have no skin in the game. They haven't put themselves at risk, nor will they do so. And that's disgraceful. And he's talking about that to some extent. And then secondly, it's interesting this man is a Croat

because, you know, the Croatians, like most Europeans, to be perfectly blunt that people don't like to admit, were part of the crusade to destroy Bolshevism during World War II. But he knows that Russia is not a communist state. He knows Russia does not aspire to conquer Europe. The Russians learned the hard way that imperialism is a very bad form of government and business. When you move into countries that are not yours and you have to govern and sustain people that are not yours, inevitably there's bad blood, there's anger, there's corruption.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who probably more than anyone else inspires the Russians who are at the top today, made it very clear we should all be grateful that this horrible empire that existed is gone. We don't want to govern other people. We want to govern ourselves. We want our own country, this place called Russia. And that is the way the Russians think right now. They're not interested in conquering anything, but we are making it impossible for them to turn away because we make threat after threat after threat to dismember the country, to destroy its regime. We keep talking about it as though this is something the Russians want. They do not want that. After decades of German political leaders disarming Germany and depriving Berlin of its credibility, quoting your article,

Chancellor Scholz decides to send tanks. Is this to please Joe Biden? Because he's not going to please anybody in his domestic political forces, is he? He'll please some people in Germany, a minority, I would suspect. The majority, I think, are somewhat horrified, because the Germans, based on their experience, and they also know their own history, know that when Berlin and Moscow have cooperated and done business together, there has been peace in Europe. You know, if there's any one war in human history that made absolutely no sense, it was the war between Tsarist Russia and Imperial

Germany. They had been close allies and friends for hundreds of years. There was no reason for that to happen. It did. The Second World War, we know the background on that. It was a huge tragedy. Everyone decided in 1945, it was German, this will not happen again. We will not permit it. I cannot imagine Chancellor Kohl or Chancellor Schmidt, Helmut Schmidt, that some of your viewers may remember, standing up and urging equipment be sent to this corrupt gangster regime in Kiev that's killing off its own people with these stupid uh instructions that are given to their generals in the field with a military structure that is corrupt and and and celebrating it on the contrary i i think they would have said absolutely not out of the question this man schultz is not going to last long and if anything

what we're seeing now even though it is not patently obvious, is the beginning of the end of NATO. countries economically, in NATO, the United States, Germany, Great Britain, France, want to wage this war against Russia, if Tony Blinken and his globalist buddies in the foreign ministries in Western Europe really think that they can use the war to push Putin out or weaken him, if Jack Devine and the CIA, if Jack is actually articulating what the CIA is trying to accomplish, why is the Western military response so tepid? I mean, you can't fight the Russians with just a half dozen tanks, and you can't fight them at all with tanks that aren't going to get there for another four or five or six months. And American troops in Poland are not going to keep Putin up at night.

We have 100,000 troops in Europe. And of that number, I'd be surprised if we have 40 or 50,000 combat troops. That means the soldiers, sergeants, lieutenants, captains who actually go in and shoot people. In other words, most of that is still support. And we don't have that much artillery. We don't have that much in the way of immediate indirect fire support. We're in no position to do it. We could bring in more Poles. They can bring in a couple of hundred thousand Poles to fight, but they're not going to be adequately armed to take on the Russians, and they're not going to be adequately trained. So it's sheer lunacy. But again, you've got to go back and understand how this began. At the beginning, Putin sent in a very small force and gave them very specific instructions that they were not

to kill civilians, they were not to damage infrastructure, because he was simply trying to demonstrate the seriousness with which Russia viewed what we were doing in eastern Ukraine by building up this dangerous force against them. Well, it took two, three months. He finally figured out no one is going to negotiate with us. No one cares to. In the meantime, we reached the erroneous conclusion that, see, look, the Russians are weak. The Russians can't cope. The Russians are no threat. We can beat them. Well, that was the wrong conclusion. And what we're seeing happen right now is a massive expansion of Russian military power on a scale that we have not seen since the Cold War. And this is going to be a permanent expansion, a large and

powerful force. The 700,000 plus that are around Ukraine right now are a brand new force, a brand new army. This thing is poised to do one thing, annihilate whatever is in its path. It will do that. However, again, the Russians are being methodical. They're being cautious because they do worry that we are led by impulsive, erratic personalities in Washington. And that stupidly, when we realize that the place is falling apart, I mean Ukraine, someone will say, well, we have to do something. I don't know how many times while I was on active duty, I heard people at the top of the political structure say, well, we have to do something.

As soon as they say that, leave the room. Get the hell out of there. I mean, this is a favorite government line. They have to give the impression to the public that they're doing something, even if it's 180 degrees from what they're doing. But the West, whether it's Chancellor Scholz or President Biden, or to a lesser extent, the new prime minister of Great Britain, is like a boxer punching with his left hand and then apologizing to the gallery with his right for hitting too hard. What are they accomplishing? Shultz is doing what he's done throughout his career. Remember that Shultz and others have grown up over the last 30 or 40 years

in this environment where there was very little change and their formative period of experience came after the cold war ended and they saw a very different world and they became i think enamored of this notion that the united states is the hegemon of the world and that whatever we do is right and anybody who resists us is morally wrong. They've taken this position, and this justifies all sorts of dangerous behavior. I don't think that Mr. Schultz is going to last much longer. I certainly don't think his foreign minister will. These people are out of touch with reality. No competent German statesman over the last three or four hundred years would have made the stupid remarks and statements

that they have. Didn't he just lose his defense minister about two weeks ago? Well, we haven't had much in the way of defense ministers in that country now for at least 20 years. I mean, when we went to Desert Storm in 1991, arguably the Germans had the finest forces in NATO. I mean, they were top-notch, and they remained excellent through the mid-1990s. And then a series of leftist governments systematically dismantled them. This is after Chancellor Kohl left. Now, on the one hand, they took the position that Russia was not a threat,

and it is not a military threat to them unless they make it so. And that was understandable. But they lost sight of the fact that if you have no skin in the game, as I said earlier, when it comes to military power, nobody's going to pay attention to you. I mean, the Polish army could invade Germany tomorrow morning and conquer it in a week. Well, that's the line of this interview. Colonel, always a pleasure, sir. Thank you very much for joining us.

Okay, thank you. By the way, can I add one thing that a lot of our people don't seem to understand about these tanks? Please. We promised 31 M1 series tanks. They have to be built from scratch. And people have said, well, why is that? Well, it's very simple. We have a form of armor protection on the existing M1 with that unique armor to fall into the hands of the Russians. And we have to assume, based upon the Ukrainians that have lost, we estimate 7,000

vehicles, including at least a couple of thousand tanks and two or three thousand other armored vehicles that have either been destroyed or fell into the hands of the Russians. We have to assume that these could. So the decision was made to build 31 M1 series tanks, but apply the 1970s armor to them. Ah. So that if they fell into the hands of the opponent, it would not be a security risk for us. We would not lose this advantage that we have. But there's something larger here, and this is very important.

There's a lot of nonsense going on about what we're going to send. And you've heard all the analysts that are worth a damn and honest point out it's not going to make any difference. I think we're preparing an apology in advance. I think everybody in Washington in a few months is going to say, well, we did all we could. Look at all that we sent. We just couldn't make it happen. And I think that's where we're headed. In the meantime, millions of Ukrainians lives are destroyed. The state is destroyed. The nation is destroyed. Who will be held responsible for that? If they point the fingers at Putin, he's the wrong man. He didn't want to do it. He was the reluctant fighter in

this whole mess. He held off for years. He begged us to listen. You can go back all the way back to George Kennan, who pointed these things out, and right up to Ambassador Burns, who is now the director of the CIA, who wrote the famous memo, yet means no, don't advance the borders of NATO to Russia. All of this is well known. Colonel, no one is explaining these things as you are, and certainly no one knows tanks the way you do. And thank you for the education and the passion with which you have offered it that you've explained to all of us. Always a pleasure, my dear friend. Okay. Thanks, Judge. Judge Napolitano.

Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.