Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 7/28/22 Douglas Macgregor on NATO’s Doomed Strategy in Ukraine

Episode Date: July 31, 2022

This week on Antiwar Radio, Scott was joined by retired Col. Douglas Macgregor to discuss the ongoing war in Ukraine. Macgregor has been deeply critical of NATO’s reaction to the Russian invasion, which he calls impulsive. He says the leverage Russia holds over Europe’s energy supply is itself enough of a reason to avoid picking a fight. He predicts a painful winter for Europeans, especially Germans, as energy shortages threaten their access to heat. He then gets into some mistakes the Russians made such as the choice not to cut off gas supplies before turning to military action and, once the invasion had begun, not committing to hold captured territory permanently. While Scott and Macgregor agree that NATO’s intent is to fight until the last Ukrainian, Macgregor predicts that weak western economies will cause NATO’s support to dry up before Russian forces run out of steam.  Discussed on the show: “Worshipping Dead Horses” (The American Conservative) Douglas Macgregor, Col. (ret.) is a senior fellow with The American Conservative, the former advisor to the Secretary of Defense in the Trump administration, a decorated combat veteran, and the author of five books. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For Pacifica Radio, July 31st, 2022, I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, y'all welcome to show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm editorial director of anti-war.com and editor of the new book, hotter than the sun. Time to abolish nuclear weapons. You can find my full interview archive. More than 5,700 of them now, going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com

slash Scott Horton Show. And you can follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show. All right, you guys, and introducing Colonel Douglas McGregor. Of course, he's the hero of the great tank battle of Iraq War I, and he wrote a whole bunch of books about military strategy, writes regularly at the American Conservative magazine and has been very outspoken about America's role in Russia's war in Ukraine. Welcome back to the show. How you doing, Doug? Great, thanks.

Good. Very happy to have you on the show here. There's so much going on, but let's start with your news. You have been blacklisted, sir, along with the likes of John Mearsheimer and Glenn Greenwald and Edward Lutwack, huh, and Ray McGovern, Doug Bondo, Tulsi Gabbard, Max Blumenthal, Pilar? I feel so left out. How could they include Paul Pillar? And not me. I'm shop over here, I guess. But anyway, at least they got two of my colleagues from anti-war.com, Ray McGovern and Doug Bondo on there for being good on this war, essentially. So how's it feel? Have you been sanctioned, sir, are they closing your bank account? Or how's that work? Well, I've been sanctioned for years, largely by generals in the military.

Yeah, I'm not talking about the Pentagon. I'm talking about. But you've got to remember the Pentagon probably cooperated with this. It seems as though the entire Biden administration is cooperating with Zelensky and this facade of a government in Kiev. So nothing surprises me. Yeah. Now, on one hand, it's just farce, right?

But on the other hand, this is an absolute outrage. Who do these people think they are to talk this way about people of even my stature, much less yours or John Mearsheimer, or Ray McGovern, who was the former chief of the CIA Soviet division back when it mattered i mean this is crazy well the fact that we've heard no uh real opposition from the biden administration or in my judgment from the hill because of course senator rand paul's also on the list right uh tells me that uh there's almost universal agreement dissension or dissent of any kind should be silenced and selensky is obviously on the right track as far as mr biden and his colleagues are concerned

You know, I saw Rand Paul's statement to the press here, he said, hey, listen, my sympathies are with the Ukrainians, of course, but my allegiance is to the United States of America. That's the job here. And, you know, it's funny because I actually put your name in Google News just to see what's new, because I know that you're doing interviews and writing articles all over the place and things like that. And I could see where people are trying to attack your patriotism for them to go after you, a conservative army colonel. and, you know, famous and decorated from Iraq War I and all of that and try to pretend that you have some kind of allegiance other than just what you think is in the national interest of the United States of America is beyond absurd. And yet I do see that. In fact, I read a couple of things where they just quoted you when it was supposed to be self-evident how horrible you were for saying what you said when it was the simple facts. In fact, the quote at media matters. The quote was something about, look, we ought to be seeking a negotiated end to this war because the longer it goes on, the worst the Ukrainians lose. It sounded to me like you care about their position in the war, not the Russians' position. You're just saying it happens to be the case that the Russians are in a position of strength.

And there's nothing the Ukrainians can do about that. Well, I wouldn't take very much that comes out of David Brock at Media Matters seriously. He has an enormous network, is backed by millions of dollars. but he's part of this machinery of personal destruction that is launched by the left against anyone that disagrees with them. So I wouldn't pay too much attention to that. I'll also remind your listeners that there was a time in the 1950s when General George Marshall, the former chief of staff and general of the Army, was accused of being a

communist in the United States Senate and in Congress. So we've been down this road before. Anybody who takes a position that for whatever reason at the time is not widely popular or widely supported is inevitably going to be called something terrible. I just wouldn't worry a great deal about it. And I appreciate your interest, but I think we're wasting time on the topic. Sure. Well, but I think it's important for people to overhear it discussed because, well, it's disgusting. And it should be self-refuting, but yeah, maybe it needs a little refutation. So there we have it. Now, I want to start for the,

talk about the actual war, can we talk about the bigger picture about the economic war and specifically the liquefied natural gas wars and the state of those different pipelines operation and to what degree the Russians are selling or cutting off supplies to Europe and what difference it makes, sir? Well, let me start at the top. You want the big picture and you mentioned the word strategy in the introduction. I think it's very important for Americans to understand that there is no strategy. Everything that we do, everything that Washington has done, London has done, and ultimately has happened in Kiev, is very simply impulse-driven. In other words, emotion, not reason, has been driving actions. Anyone who sat down and said, what should our position on Ukraine be? Should we

actively support the Ukrainians against the Russians? Should we argue for a ceasefire? Should we stay neutral in other words looking at all the options would have had to ask the question what happens if we do option one option two option three option four and anybody who sat down and looked at it very carefully would have discovered that the russians are sitting in a very strong strategic position because of all the natural resources that they control and that europe was in a very weak position not simply because of its dependence on liquefied natural gas which is one key vulnerability But in a whole range of areas, not the least of which is that European forces are a fragmented conglomerate of armed forces that together don't amount too much. So there is no European force, per se, inside NATO that can march anywhere and do anything.

Under those circumstances, you would think that people in Washington, in particular, would have pursued a much more prudent policy line that would not have put us as well as all of our allies at risk. But everything is impulse-driven. There is no careful consideration of what's the purpose, what are we trying to achieve, how are we going to achieve it? And if we do this, what will things look like in the future? Those questions just aren't asked. Instead, we say, oh, Russians are evil. Well, we've decided the Russians were evil and should be punished 20 years ago.

And ultimately, as a result, we brought on the war. Now, when you look at the liquefied natural gas situation right now, the Russians are playing this brilliantly. The Germans are the ones who obviously are at greatest risk. And the Russians, frankly, thought that the Germans throughout this entire crisis would have been voices of reason. But very, very much contrary to the German performance in the past and previous German policymakers, Berlin has been entirely emotionally driven. It is all impulse once again. And they have joined unconditionally this de facto war. or proxy war on Russia. Right now, the liquefied natural gas exports coming out of Russia are about

20% of what they were before the crisis began. And whatever the Russians do, however much liquefied natural gas, they release through their pipelines. And remember, moving liquefied natural gas on trucks is extremely difficult. We don't have enough of them to do it, just as we don't have a fleet of tankers that can pick up liquefied natural gas in the United States and move it en masse in any great quantity to make a difference in Europe. Without that liquefied natural gas, large numbers of Germans are going to be quite miserable all through the winter. Putin knows that. In fact, I was on the phone yesterday talking to friends in Germany, and they were telling me that they're already rationing power everywhere. They're finding their shelves and stores

are empty. And the Germans are asking themselves, how did this happen? Why did this happen? Why did this What is Schultz doing? What is he trying to accomplish? So I suspect by the end of the year, the current German government will be out of business. But in the meantime, there is no good answer for the Germans. They can certainly go back to burning coal in great quantities, which they don't want to do for environmental reasons. I don't know how they can rapidly restart or place nuclear power plants into action. So there's no easy or really good solution for Germany right now, other than that. than to gut it out all through the winter. And Germany is the gorilla in the living room, Scott.

Whatever happens in Germany economically, politically, is going to dominate what happens in the rest of Europe. And not very far behind the Germans are the Italians and the French. The other two large economies, and they have a whole set of problems that are not unrelated either. So the picture for the European Union is bleak, particularly for Germany, Italy, and France. You know, it would have made I think Aaron Mote pointed out, it would have made a lot of sense for Putin to just cut off the gas first before he invaded. See how they like that and do it back when it was still cold outside last December, January, February there. Well, I think Aaron was right. I think Aaron is right. And Aaron has a, you know, good head on the shoulders. The problem is none of what's happened is what

Putin really wanted to happen. That's what people don't understand. He's not interested in a war with the West. He wasn't interested really in invading and conquering any part of Ukraine. He was hoping that by demonstrating that he was serious with the military power that he assembled, that people would say, look, it's time we sat down and talked to the Russians. And instead, you know, this emotional response that how dare you challenge NATO? How dare you question our right to bring in anybody into NATO that we want. How dare you try and stop us from turning Ukraine into a platform for military action against Russia? We can do whatever we want. And so on the assumption that our resources are unlimited, our power is unlimited, we embarked on this very emotional course of we're punishing

Putin. We'll teach him a lesson. We'll remove him from power. Well, that hasn't gone very well. Yeah. Well, and so that's the thing, too, you talk about how the policy is based on emotion, but it also seems like they're breathing in their own fumes here in the sense of they're basing their actions on their propaganda. For example, I mean, I think everybody expected that the Russians would quickly crush the Ukrainian military back months ago and that what we would have, and they said this explicitly in the New York Times before the war started.

Then we'll back the insurgency like we did in Syria and Afghanistan, right? And then so I think everybody was surprised that, uh the ukrainian military has lasted this long but the american media's version the american government and media's story there is that the russians are losing i saw a thing this morning in the news uh 75 000 casualties the russians have suffered and you might get the idea that ukraine has invaded and is conquering russia right now they're getting beaten so badly except that the amount of territory that they control inside ukraine keeps growing and growing and growing so Well, of course, all those statistics are lies. They're cooked up without any basis and evidence at all.

The real casualty figures are probably closer for the Russians to between 10 and 12, 13,000 dead and maybe another 20,000 wounded. That's about it. The Ukrainian side has taken far, far heavier casualties. We're estimating now somewhere between 60 and 70,000 Ukrainian dead and perhaps 100,000 plus wounded. So their forces have taken a beating and the original forces that they put into eastern Ukraine are largely destroyed. But I think it's important to understand again, many of us did not really understand what Putin's purpose was. Now, we certainly understood the use of military power to try and get us to negotiate and talk. But when he went into Ukraine, he spread this force of 130, 140,000 troops along a border of perhaps three, 400 miles, and he moved in very small elements because he gave strict instructions

to commanders that they were supposed to minimize collateral damage. He didn't want to kill very many people. And I think he thought that the population in eastern Ukraine would come over to him, lock, stock, and barrel, but he made a mistake. He told everyone in eastern Ukraine he wasn't coming in to stay. And the Russians that live in eastern Ukraine, and they're the majority, particularly in the areas where he's sitting right now, told Russian officers, look, if you're going to stay, that's one thing. We're happy to help you. But if you're just going to go back after this is over, why should we help you? Ukrainian secret police will show up, put a bullet in our heads, and kill our families. So either you stay or get out, but make up your mind. So now, of course,

everything has changed. The second thing is that I think Putin thought, and I certainly did, that the Ukrainian forces would actually try to maneuver against him. But apparently the light infantrymen from the United States and Great Britain convinced the Ukrainians to simply crawl into urban areas, isolate themselves, hunker down, and die. And the real lesson of this war is that with precision strike and satellite-based photography and video, the notion of hiding in an urban area for any length of time is suicidal.

So the Ukrainians went into these areas, The Russians figured out, well, they're not going to come out and fight. We isolate them and reduce them and destroy them. And that's effectively what's happened. Now the Ukrainians are talking about a counteroffensive. Ukrainians have never launched any serious counteroffensive since this thing began. There have been local counterattacks by isolated units, but they don't have the command and control. They don't have the maneuverability.

They don't have the firepower to launch a serious counteroffensive. So the Russians are just grinding them into bits. and moving slowly forward until they reach their intended objectives. And now they've announced that they're probably going to seize most of southern and eastern Ukraine. Not that that's a surprise, since that's the area that is largely russified. But nevertheless, there's been a change of venue. In the meantime, we continue to pelt the Russians with insults and abuse. We continue to pretend that the Ukrainians have some capability to throw them out, which they don't.

so i i don't know where this goes it strikes me that what we're seeing really is president biden and his friends and the senate and the house are all on the titanic and they're uh going to drive this titanic to the bottom this thing is long since taking on water and hit an iceberg it's now sinking so they've decided they're going to double down and what they've done thus far and go all the way to the bottom yeah hang on just one second hey guys i had some wasps in my house So I shot them to death with my trusty bug assault 3.0 model with the improved salt reservoir and bar safety. I don't have a deal with them,

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That's greenmill supercritical.com. Man, I wish I was in school so I could drop out and sign up for Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom instead. Tom has done such a great job on putting together a classical curriculum for everyone from junior high schoolers on up through the postgraduate level, and it's all very reasonably priced. Just make sure you click through from the link in the right margin

at Scott Horton.org. Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom, real history, real economics, real education. Well, and you know, it's in the news

that for the first time in five and a half months, as unbelievable as that sounds, our Secretary of State is going to meet with the Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, only it's just to negotiate

the release of the basketball player and the former Marine who may or may not have been a spy, I don't know, and he's even saying, no, I absolutely will not talk about Ukraine with him. That's the American policy. It's just completely nuts.

And yet, as you say, the longer the war goes on, the more the Ukrainians have to lose here. And especially when there's an obvious question from the Russian point of view, that if they're going to take all of the Donbass, but then they're going to leave this space of, I don't know what it is, two, 300 miles between the Donbass and the Nipur River. that sort of buffer zone well those are predominantly russian speaking people still east of the neeper and so they're going to take the dombas but they're going to leave them to the tender mercies of the ukrainians it only makes sense at that point from a government program point of view to expand the mission there and then as you said to uh the southern coast they've already taken kurson and it's not far from kurson to the pro-russian breakaway province transnistria there on the border between uh

Ukraine and Moldova, although if they go that far and take the whole southern coast and including to Transnistria, now they have this crazy little strip of land next to Moldova, right up there and bordering Romania. And then at that point, now they're leaving a rump Ukrainian state controlled by Ukrainian nationalists allied with NATO, who are totally unpredictable and a problem for the future. So at that point, from a government program point of view, it might only make sense for the Russians to just continue to push until they take all of Ukraine if it takes a year or two to do it and then at that point they have more border with NATO than ever before so I don't know if they would be that you know willing to do it but they are kind

of putting themselves in this situation it seems like well I don't think the Russians will necessarily follow that that line I think the Russians are watching carefully what's going on in the European Union and in the United States. Our economy, as you know, is contracting. It's shrinking. The economies in Europe are in a very similar position. Both the EU and the United States have engaged in the same general economic policy, which is being to flood the markets with cash.

This is not working, and it's not going to rescue us from inflation. It's not going to rescue us from a contracting economy. The only thing that can do that is retrenchment, cut spending dramatically, and begin the process of repatriating manufacturing facilities and getting people to work. That's going to take years. The situation in Germany and France and Italy is the same or worse. So I think what the Russians are saying is that we're not going to cross the Nieupper, except in the southern area where you pointed out. But I think if I don't have a map in front of us, but if you look at where Zapparosia is on the map, near the Dyepper River and draw a line from there up to Kiev, or excuse me, up to Karkov.

And then you basically show that that whole eastern section will very definitely be Russian. The second thing is to remember that today, we know with absolute certainty that the Russians can identify everything on the ground in Western Ukraine. There is nothing in Western Ukraine that cannot be struck with precision by a guided missile rocket, which means that if we are stupid enough to try and repeat the dumb experience of going into eastern Ukraine and building up a force designed to attack Russia in Western Ukraine, well, the Russians can obliterate it. They don't need to hold on to it.

They can simply deny it to any NATO forces to go in there. And then finally, that also assumes what you said, that this government in Kiev is going to last. I just don't think it will. I don't see how Zelensky and this little tribe of people that he's brought with him from the theater are going to be able to stay there in the long term. I think they'll either have to leave or someone will take them out, frankly. And that will be a complete game changer. Right now in Poland, which is the keystone for the Ukrainians in the edifice of support, is not in good shape

either economically and at home the population is very very restive people are worried about being dragged into a war with russia and there are limits to how far the polls are willing to go remember poland has been obliterated more than a few times in the last few hundred years because they took positions that were strategically untenable i don't think they want to do that this time yeah all right now there's a lot of hype about the high mars and they're even talking about giving a 10s or f-16s to the Ukrainians now. But leave aside the planes for a second. When it comes to all the artillery and the high mars are better than the last kind, I guess they say, how much of a game changer is this weaponry? And in fact, how much of a game changer has it been so far in prolonging the war?

None. Not at all. None of this can arrive in sufficient quantity be picked up and employed in the field by trained soldiers to make any difference at all. And if you look carefully at what's going on, you understand that we're playing another crude game that is so typical for Washington. Remember, Washington as opposed to America first, Washington is me first. And the me first movement in Washington is moving enormous quantities of money to the Pentagon. In turn, the Pentagon moves equipment slowly but surely over the ocean to Ukraine and through Europe. In the meantime, the Pentagon takes the funds that they just received from the Hill to compensate them for shipping out equipment and puts those funds into the defense industries. The defense industries, in turn, are charging more than they ever had before for replacements of all the equipment that are being shipped out.

In other words, the money really isn't going to Ukraine. If you look at the $20 billion that was originally earmarked in the $40 billion package, $20 billion, $20 billion, for military assistance, only perhaps a billion has ever gone to Ukraine. And most of that is being eaten up by a number of different things. First, you've got to pay the Ukrainian government bureaucracy, what there is of it. You've got to repay Ukrainian forces. And then large quantities of cash are disappearing into the pockets of various oligarchs and organized crime syndicates inside Ukraine. So only a fraction really goes into Ukraine. In the meantime, most of that cash goes into the pockets of the industries and the donors who support people on the hill.

So really, we're seeing a kind of racket on both sides of the ocean. In Ukraine, it's organized crime, grift, theft, call it what you will, and misuse. And in the United States, you see what I just described. It's transferring money from one pot to another pot, but ultimately the people on the hill are rewarded for their efforts. A good example is aircraft. They initially talked about A10s. A10s have been set aside immediately. No, we want to sell them F-16s. What do you realize how long it takes to train an F-16 pilot to operate that thing effectively?

I mean, that's a sophisticated piece of technology. But why are we shipping out F-16s? Well, there's a lot more money in F-16s than there is an old A-10. And that's the tip of the iceberg. So lots and lots of people are getting rich once again. all you have to do is drive through Great Falls, McLean, Potomac, Maryland, all these places where the CEOs, the senators, congressmen, so forth live. And you can see the enormous wealth that they are accumulating

and what is done for them thus far. Yeah, we don't call it organized crime in America unless their last names end with vowels. But what you're describing, that's just business as usual in Washington, D.C. It's just amazing. Now, so here's something that was mildly surprising. to me, frankly, I read a newsweek here. Kremlin spokesperson Dimitri Peskov told Reuters last Sunday that their demands are still just four things. And one is that Ukraine will somehow swear

in their constitution or, you know, by an agreement with America, one way or another, a real assurance that Ukraine will not be brought into NATO. Their recognition of Crimea as Russian territory, which news for you, that ship sailed eight years ago, forget it, and that the Luhansk and Donetsk regions should be recognized as independent, you know, aka under Russian quote-unquote protection there. And then also ceasing all military actions, ceasefire in the war itself. So in other words, their stated positions, their negotiating points, haven't really expanded since the war.

They're not saying, surrender your southern coast to us, or whereas part of their demands. In other words, maybe they wouldn't keep Kurson. You know, maybe that would be negotiable. I don't know. Well, look, I think Kestkoff was reminding everybody of what the essential demands were. And our unwillingness to even consider them has produced the current outcome. There's something else going on, too, that Americans need to understand. The original population of Ukraine was supposed to be 40 million, but five, six million over the last. to 15 years, 10 or 15 years have left Ukraine anyway. So I suspect that it was probably closer to 32, 33 million when this got started. Given the numbers of people who've left and probably

in many cases will never return, certainly to the West, that population is probably down to maybe 25 million, 26 million, if that, in Western Ukraine. Now, the 9 million or so that went west, there's almost two million that went east. These were Russians that left eastern Ukraine to get out of the mess. The ones in Russia will probably come back and resettle in eastern Ukraine, but the ones that went to the West won't. So then when you begin talking about taking the rest of Ukraine, I don't think Mr. Putin is a fool.

He doesn't want those 20, 25 million Ukrainians, people who are really Ukrainians, culturally, ethnically, linguistically, whatever you want to call it, inside Russia. He's perfectly happy to let the rule themselves. And I think he would accept certain conditions for self-government. I'm sure he'd probably want now to have someone in Moscow, or excuse me, in Keith, some Russian representation there to at least guarantee that they will not re-militarize the rump state. So I think you could get an agreement that puts an end to the war that might surprise everybody in terms of how flexible the Russians are on territory. But he knows, and his spokesman knows, we're not going to negotiate. You pointed

that out with Blinken. We're taking this absurd position that we are morally righteous and superior. Therefore, millions of Ukrainians have to either die or be made homeless to reinforce our moral position and in the meantime the russians who really are not suffering whose economy is not being damaged at all are destroying europe's economy it doesn't make any sense yeah i mean it's a cliche now i saw a clip where Putin repeated the cliche himself back to us they say they're going to fight to the last ukrainian is that the slogan for this war that's what we are doing to them and you know there's something morally reprehensible about asking other people to die in a war that you start and you want to prosecute but are unwilling to fight in it's pretty brutal all right you guys

and that's colonel douglas mcgregory he knows of what he speaks there uh writing the american conservative magazine thanks very much again for your time duck sure scott thank you all right y'all and that is anti-war radio for today. I'm your host, Scott Horton. Again, I'm editor at anti-war.com, and I'm editor of the book, hotter than the sun. Time to abolish nuclear weapons.

You find my full interview archive, 5,700 of them now, going back to 2003, and signed up for the podcast feed and all that at scotthorton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show. And I'm here every Sunday morning from 9 to 9.30

on KPFK, 90.7 FM, in LA. See you next week.