Summary
➡ The central issue arises from a misguided perspective of American indispensability and superpower status, which has led to a messy intervention in Ukraine, potential humiliation, and leaves NATO in ruins. A potential agreement, similar to Putin’s initial proposals, may be inevitable, leaving little space for Ukraine to dictate its own operations. The focus on World War II-style armed forces has left the U.S. military unprepared for modern warfare, leading to wasted funds and lack of cross-service coordination. Defence should be refocused on the western hemisphere due to growing threats south of the border and inadequate national security.
➡ The conversation heavily inspects the geopolitical situation, mainly focusing on the US’s handling of disagreements in Ukraine and Israel, as well as the massive inflow of individuals through the southern border. The discussion highlights the difficulties in deploying troops adequately, the potential for regional conflict with Israel and Palestine to escalate, and the economic implications of wars and restrictions, such as Straits of Hormuz and Suez Canal blockades, all amidst growing concerns over China’s stance towards Taiwan.
➡ The text discusses the geopolitical tension between the U.S., China, and Taiwan with the inference that the U.S.’s show of military power may be escalating tensions unnecessarily as there appears to be no current evidence of the Taiwanese citizens seeking independence or conflict. Also, the text criticizes U.S. involvement in various international disputes, questioning the need for military occupation for secure commerce. The remaining content reflects on the perceived growing disconnect between the American public and their political representatives, pointing out issues like border security and the influence of the industrial complex as points of contention. Lastly, it emphasizes the need for a change in outlook towards global politics and the urgent need to address domestic issues.
➡ The speaker discusses concerns about current American policies not addressing major issues such as border security and the lack of societal cohesion. They also emphasize the need for citizens to unite under a single identity as Americans, encouraging participation in ‘Our Country Our Choice’, a website aimed at bringing like-minded individuals together to promote their collective interests.
Transcript
I think we’re going to see a massive territorial exchange. They’ll tell you how many ukrainian troops you can have under arms, where they could be stationed, what arms they can have access to, and so forth. And as I said before, there’ll be a representative from Moscow sitting in Kiev who says yes or no to whatever Ukraine wants to do, whether it is trade, commerce, or military in character.
All right, Colonel Douglas McGregor, excited to sit down and talk with you. Man. I’m so interested in a lot of these topics I talk about all the time. So really excited to get down and hear your point of view on this. I’ve watched so many of your videos, and you’ve done a really good job educating the public, so thank you for that. Let’s go ahead and just start.
Let’s set the table broad, and then we’ll dig in deep. And so obviously, at this point, we have sort of two wars going on, Ukraine war, and now a new war in the Middle east. It seems like the Russia Ukraine thing was, like, the biggest thing ever, just, like, pounding us nonstop through legacy media, and then all of a sudden it shifted into this other war. Is that a signal that appetite from the public is waning? Or do you think there’s also a shift from the government on the Russia Ukraine old war, I guess.
Well, I think there are two things. The ukrainian government and the proxy force that we built in Ukraine to attack Russia has lost. Ukraine is in ruins. Ukrainian nation is essentially destroyed. We don’t know how many people have died in the war, but somewhere between 450 and 500,000 ukrainian soldiers have been killed, large numbers wounded, who will never return to active duty. Right now there are talks going on in a place called Avdika.
I always have difficulty pronouncing it. It’s a town in eastern Ukraine beyond the Diepa river, where there are thousands of ukrainian troops facing a russian force. And there are discussions there about a mass surrender of those ukrainian troops to the Russians. This war should have ended a long time ago. We’ve kept it going at the expense of the ukrainian people. I don’t think Americans ever understood much of it or really paid much attention to it.
We are very fortunate that the Russians have chosen to limit the fighting and limit the conflict to eastern Ukraine. There was never any intention on Russia’s part to invade Eastern Europe. That was all nonsense. They’re not interested in it now. They would like the war to end. But the problem that we have is, how do we end this thing without looking ridiculous? And I don’t think that’s an easy question to answer.
Everyone is running around in Washington and London trying to put a happy face on the dead rat, and that’s the case with Ukraine. But the Russians have a series of demands. I’m told that they’ve actually sent a note at our request, privately, through back channels. People in the White House are apoplectic. They don’t know how to answer, mean, frankly, we no longer have a say in what happens in eastern Ukraine.
Neither does NATO. NATO is in ruins. I’ll be very surprised if NATO survives much longer. So the whole thing has been a catastrophe for us. We grossly underestimated the Russians. We did not understand them. We thought we could isolate them. We were never able to do that. And then our proxy force did all that it could. But it’s very difficult to build armies from scratch in a short period of time.
They really didn’t have much of a chance. So this is over. And I think the american people are now focused on the Middle east. And this is, if you will, a new disaster unfolding, one that unfortunately, we’ve had a hand in creating. Before we jump into the Middle east, I’ve seen, like I said, many of your interviews, and of course, you’ve been calling, this war was over a long time ago.
It was probably, I think maybe you just made the comment it was over probably before it even started. A couple things I know, obviously, when this war started, seemingly since the Vietnam War and all the Middle Eastern wars and kind of where we’re at now, there was no objective, like, what does winning look like? Right? And so when you think about it from that perspective, what did winning look like? I don’t know if that was clearly identified.
You can correct me if I’m wrong, but some of the maybe winning to me looks like a few months ago, Zelensky was over here not just trying to get money from the political establishment, but he was in Wall street, and he got money from Blackstone and Blackrock and Bill Ackman. And it sort of looked like the country might have been demolished and sort of the people, millions of people left, tens of millions of people left, and then the country just got divided up, chopped up and sold off to Wall street.
Maybe that was mission accomplished. Any insight into that? Well, the Wall street vultures have certainly swooped in and are interested in acquiring ownership of as much fertile land in Ukraine as they can get. Remember, this is the famous black Earth. A friend of mine who lived in eastern Ukraine for a long time, he said, all you have to do is take a know, like a broomstick, stick it in the ground, and suddenly something will grow on it.
You’re talking about some of the most fertile ground anywhere in the planet, and this is 15 20ft thick, as topsoil goes. It was so good that during World War II, the Germans filled box cars or trains with this fertile earth and brought it back to Germany. It’s tragic. But yes, I think you’re right. Wall street will find a way to profit from this. I think Blackstone is the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
How far will they get? I don’t know. It’s tragic. I feel terribly for the. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, JP Morgan and like I said, all these groups have pledged hundreds of millions of dollars of investment capital. And so when you just think through, well, investment, that means they’re putting hundreds of billions in expecting some sort of a return. So natural gas, minerals, uranium, potentially, obviously the fertile ground, all of those things seem to have been potentially sold off, and then there’s going to be some big rebuilding effort.
Well, I don’t know about the rebuilding effort. We’re going to have to wait and see. You’re talking about a lot of damage, and coming up with that sort of investment means that you first and foremost have to have an agreement in place with the Russians. That means that whatever remains of Ukraine has to be neutral and demilitarized. That’s what will happen. I’m not sure what kind of a government you’re going to get, but I’m sure the Russians will have someone appointed to the National Security Council of that government to ensure that nothing is undertaken with the goal of harming Russia.
Now, to go back to this business of what’s the purpose? What’s the objective? That’s very important. Let’s just stop for a second. In the military, we usually talk about three things, purpose, method and end state. What is the purpose of the operation? How do you oppose to execute the operation? In other words, what’s your plan, what’s your method? And then finally end state. What do you want things to look like when it’s over.
We don’t usually think through that on the strategic or operational levels. We never ask the question. First of all, the objective, if you’re going to go into Iraq and your objective is to transform it into the first liberal democracy in the Middle east that will be friendly to Israel, you’re inane. You’re stupid. That will never happen. That, of course, was the objective in 2003. That has failed miserably.
So you have to have an attainable objective. No one has ever said, what is the attainable objective. What we said is, let’s harm Russia. Why? I haven’t figured that out. I never regarded the Russians, or I shouldn’t say never, but certainly have not regarded Russia since the mid 1990s as an enemy of the United States. So I was trying to figure out, what is this as an objective? Secondly, how do you do it? Well, we sacrifice the lives of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, we drive millions of Ukrainians out of the country, and we destroy the economy and the infrastructure.
So what’s the end state? In other words, what do you want it to look like when it’s over? Well, the Russians should be defeated. The regime should change. Putin should be mean. This is all absurd nonsense. So we have a problem. We don’t want to think through things realistically. We see everything through this utterly absurd lens of America is the indispensable superpower. Nothing can happen without us. We are always right.
Well, I think we know that’s simply nonsense and we’ve made a terrible mess out of Ukraine. And as I say, I think NATO is effectively in ruins. I’d be surprised that much of it survives. I want to talk about NATO when we get into the Middle east because of what Turkey is doing. But in regards to Ukraine, do you think that potentially whatever this note was that was passed or whatever, this potential peace agreement that gets hashed out probably looks very similar to what maybe Putin wanted from the beginning, which is, let me just keep the land that we have, demilitarize Ukraine, and we’ll call it good.
I mean, do we sort of end up where we probably would have ended up from the beginning? No, I think it’s much worse. We could have had a deal within the first 60 days that would have left most of what we call Ukraine today intact. Putin simply wanted equal rights for Russians before the law. He wanted these oppressive policies instituted in Kiev to stop. And so he said, look, if you’ll go along with this, if you’ll stay neutral, stay out of NATO, stop trying to turn Ukraine into a base for projecting hostile power towards Russia.
We can live with what you’ve got that’s gone. I’d be surprised if Putin doesn’t make it very clear that Kharkov, Odessa, and most of what we call eastern Ukraine is not russian. I think we’re going to see a massive territorial exchange. Secondly, you’re going to get neutrality, but this time, neutrality is going to be specified by the Russians. What does that mean? They’ll tell you how many ukrainian troops you can have under arms, where they could be stationed, what arms they can have access to, and so forth.
And as I said before, there’ll be a representative from Moscow sitting in Kiev who says yes or no to whatever Ukraine wants to do, whether it is trade, commerce, or military in character. Yeah. So they should have just taken the deal in the beginning. They don’t have a lot of, not a lot of bargaining room now. Yeah, we’re going to be humiliated. Let’s be frank. We will be humiliated.
I watched you on Tucker Carlson, and you talked about sort of some of the failures on the battlefield, sort of the way that we staged troops and putting old tanks into position and how the russian military with their space program was able to target and isolate and hit targets within minutes, et cetera. And it seemed like you were saying that it also sort of highlighted to the world maybe how weak or incompetent our old school military is.
Well, I think we need to understand a few things. First of all, there is a revolution in military affairs. That revolution, however, has not been clearly understood, and there are many features to it. But the most prominent one is the ability to link platforms for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance that are overhead or for that matter, in the seabed, offshore underwater with various kinds of strike systems that are now precise.
In other words, you can effectively look at any region on the planet. You can position satellites, you can position overhead platforms unmanned and manned and platforms off sea, on the sea and under the sea. They can gain a clear picture of what’s happening. Then you link that picture and the potential targets that you may want to strike, whatever they are, people, equipment, infrastructure to strike systems, rockets, missiles, artillery, mortars, from the simplest to the most complex and devastating, and you have the opportunity to effectively neutralize your opponent very, very quickly, if not destroy him outright.
We have ignored this and we have pretended that we live in this World War II paradigm where you have massive maneuver forces, large armies that sweep across open spaces and decide outcomes. Those days are over, what you have to have. And I wrote a book about it called Margin of Victory. And before that, I wrote one called transformation under fire. Trying to get people to understand that your ground force, whatever it is, whether it sits on wheels or tracks or is dismounted, has to be integrated within the framework of what I just described so that it can move under the protection of that ISR strike complex.
Not just exploit it, but move under protection from it, because your opponent is going to try to do the same thing to you. If you go all the way back to breaking the phalanx that I published in 97, I have a chapter on a future war, and I talk about the sensor battle that begins the war simply that sensors, the ability to see, to detect, to hear, in space, on the ground, at sea, those are the first, if you will, the front lines, the spearheads of future offensive or defensive operations.
We’ve never really come to terms with that. We keep building for a World War II style environment. And frankly, we equipped fielded a very good World War II style army in Ukraine. It’s been obliterated by the Russians. The Russians were the first, I would argue, among all of the leading military establishments of the world to recognize the outlines of what I just described to you. Now we can do it very effectively.
We have the technology, but we also have a problem. We have a problem with this enormous service bureaucracy. The service bureaucracies all want to build their own mousetraps. There is no unity of effort across service lines. If there is at all. When you begin operations, it’s because the people conducting the operations force it into existence. In other words, every service has its own doctrine, its own organization, its own approach.
The notion that this should be an integrative whole is discussed, but it’s never implemented, and it’s bankrupting us, by the way. Well, it’s certainly bankrupting us. I know the military expenditures in the United States far exceeds, I believe the United States spends more than the next ten countries combined on its military. So with that amount of money being spent, even if it was sort of compartmentalized into these four branches of military, if that’s sort of what you’re referring to, with the enormous amount of money that we’re spending, you would think even if it was compartmentalized, they would still be able to develop some of this new technology within their individual branches, if not working together.
Well, the technology exists. That’s not the problem. Coordinating it menu of technologies is pretty extensive, and we control a lot of it, and all we have to do is pick carefully from it. The problem is that we’re trying to refight wars that aren’t going to happen. We’re not going to be able to move armies of hundreds of thousands across open ocean the way we did to get to desert storm.
It’s not going to happen. Submarines, the overhead surveillance, long range precision strike, all of these things will interfere with that. So trying to build forces designed for the last war is a surefire way to fail miserably. The same thing is true at sea. What are we going to do with these large surface fleets with capital ships that are centered on aircraft carrier battle groups? The aircraft carrier is a marvelous piece of equipment.
It’s unlike anything the world has ever seen. The problem is, it’s not very useful any longer because you can’t hide it. And you’ll have plenty of admirals and senior naval officers say, oh, no, that’s wrong. You give me aircraft carriers, I can hide them in the Pacific. Well, if you can hide them because you’re so far away that you can never possibly affect anything on land, I suppose that’s possible.
But if you can’t affect anything on land, what’s the purpose of having the aircraft carrier? Not very much so. I think the whole idea of giant surface fleets, the sort of what I call Jutland midway paradigm, which is similar to the World War II paradigm of massive divisions online moving slowly across the european continent or from island to island across Pacific, all of that is over. It’s gone.
So if you’re not those things, what kind of a force do you need? That’s the question that has to be asked. Now, the other part of this is we have neglected hemispheric defense, that is, defense of the United States and the western hemisphere. If we continue this, we will not have a country much longer, because the real threat to the United States does not emanate from Russia or China or Iran or anywhere else.
It emanates from south of the Rio Grande because we’ve opened those borders. It comes through our ports because we don’t secure them, and our airports, because, again, we’re not securing them. We don’t know who is in the country. People act as though, well, that’s not a big deal. We can sort that out. Well, I certainly hope so. And we better get started pretty quick, because right now, we really don’t know the answer to that question about who is inside our own country.
Right. And you talk about moving large amounts of troops. And now, then you mentioned the southern border. And so we’ve had somewhere over 8 million people that have come across that southern border. From the videos that I see, it’s mostly military age men seemingly coming across the border. So 8 million people of military age men is not an inconsequential number. No, you’re right. You’re absolutely right. I hope people are listening to you because you’ve just made a very salient point.
What do you do with these people if we go into the kind of economic death spiral that so many people are predicting? You listen to James Ricards or Kyle Bass or Alastair McLeod, any number of analysts that look at the fragility of our economy right now, they talk about either a very deep recession or an all out depression. What do you do with all of these people? And by the way, what are they all here for if we can’t employ know, you’re absolutely right.
That is a huge problem for us. Right? Yeah. I mean, if you think about a military, to your point, moving men across the ocean while they’re here, and we already know what we do with them, because all we have to do is look at Europe and we can see exactly what our future holds on, fortunately, and it’s not good. I want to come back to some of that stuff, but I want to just jump.
So we went from the Ukraine, interest is waning. Everyone that was running flags, Ukraine flags, seem to have gone down. You don’t hear about it, really anymore. Maybe they’ll just sort of let it just kind of sweep it under the rug. And now it seemed like then, now all of a sudden, we’re in the Middle East. I was really surprised on the response the United States had to Israel.
It seemed it was so much greater than what we saw in Ukraine. So Ukraine seemed to be this big effort. But within days, seemingly, of this Israel Hamas outbreak, the US was sending aircraft carriers and destroyer vessels and moving massive amounts of equipment over. But we never did that for Ukraine. Well, I think that’s misleading because you’ve had over 100,000 us troops sitting in eastern Europe now for months now.
Part of this was supposedly to deter the Russians. You’ve got 3 seconds to answer the question. How much deterrence did that force create? Time’s up. None. Yeah, none. So they sat over there, drank beer, enjoyed the local cuisine, and I’m sure the populations in eastern Europe would be happy to see us go home, but we didn’t accomplish anything. If anything, things are worse now than they were before they started.
We also committed a lot of assets that you don’t hear anything about at sea and in the air to Europe. Huge numbers of aircraft, huge numbers of satellites and platforms and so forth. So I think that’s misleading. It’s cost us a lot of money. Now, you’re right about Israel, on the other hand, in the sense that we have no treaty of alliance with Israel, but we do have a congress that is absolutely committed to Israel for a whole range of reasons, not all of which are, let us say, altruistic.
And we have committed naval assets largely because we don’t have much in the way of ground forces to send. What are you going to send? You’ve got, what, 140,000 sitting in Europe. I don’t know how many aircraft we have within striking range, but I suspect out of perhaps a couple of thousand, we’ve already got several hundred. Then you’ve got multiple carrier battle groups. Could you send more? Sure you could, but again, the problem with the carrier is sustaining a high sortee rate.
What I mean by that is how many aircraft can you get in the air at a particular point in time? How much ordinance can they deliver? How rapidly can they be replaced, refueled, rearmed and sent back into action? When you look at the total numbers, we have perhaps 180 aircraft at sea. Of that number, how many fighters can we keep up at any given point in time? What, 30, 40, 50? Not very much.
So if we have to fight more, let us say, than I would expect Hezbollah to offer, we’re in a lot of trouble. Can we send more carrier battle groups? Sure, we can send more. Then you’re surging whatever you’ve got. I don’t know what the state of readiness is in the navy, but over the last few years, the reports coming out of the navy haven’t been very good. And then when you look at the missiles that we have aboard the surface fleet, reloading those missiles requires most of the surface fleet to return to port so that you can restock those launchers.
Then, of course, we have submarines. And for a very long time, I’ve argued and a few others have, but I’m probably a very strong voice for this. We have too few submarines. We have too few attack submarines. We should have 50 to 100. We are a global naval power. It is our first line of defense. It’s perhaps the most important asset in our strategic arsenal, this submarine. And we’re down to what, 29, 30? And of those, how many are ready? I don’t know the answers to those questions, but this is not a good situation for us to be in.
And you’re talking about the potential for a regional war. Now, we had that with the Russians, but remember, the Russians were not interested in a regional war. They never were. We’re the ones that talked about it. We’re the ones that tried to mobilize all these european states that for decades have spent almost nothing on their own defense to ship everything they have to Ukraine. Well, most everything they had is gone.
It’s been destroyed. A lot of our stocks are gone and destroyed. So what have we got left to send somewhere? That’s the first question. Secondly, if we don’t have anything in the area of ground forces, that could make a dent, and we can’t get them over there safely, potentially. Now we’re talking if a regional war breaks out, as a minimum, I would expect the Turks to be participants.
And everybody says, well, they’re NATO members, yes, but they are first and foremost Muslim Turks. Right? That’s their identity. And they are not going to stand by and watch Israelis and or us butcher large numbers of muslim Arabs and civilians. It’s impossible. The Egyptians don’t want a war. The Saudis don’t want a war. The Jordanians certainly don’t. I don’t know of anybody over there who does. But the populations in that part of the world are enraged.
And at some point, if this does not stop what we see happening in Gaza, these governments will be in danger of being overthrown and replaced by people who will fight. Now, Mr. Erdogan has already made some very powerful statements, and these statements are not coming out of Iran. These are coming out of Turkey. And he says, Mr. Netanyahu is a war criminal. The israeli state is a war criminal state.
There will be justice. We will not tolerate it. We are not going to talk to Mr. Netanyahu anymore. And the day is coming when turkish soldiers will fight in Gaza. Now, people in Washington have chosen to dismiss this out of hand. They’ve chosen to say, oh, this is impossible. It can’t be done. Well, these are the same people that told us the Russians had no military power or what they had was inadequate, that they could be isolated, that they were weak, that their economy could not withstand the strain of sanctions.
Well, they were wrong. I think they’re wrong now about the Middle East. I think the situation is very dangerous. And when Mr. Netanyahu says, we are fighting for our existence, he hasn’t even begun yet. He’s only scratching the surface. His existence is not going to be threatened by Hamas, but the existence of the israeli state is very much open to question if the region coalesces along the lines that it’s begun to, and the Turks enter this fight.
And of course, there’s always Iran. Iran has no ground force, but Iran has an enormous arsenal of tactical and theater ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, unmanned systems. Those can all be employed. And we haven’t talked about the other effects that we would rather not experience. We don’t want to see the Straits of Hormuz closed. We don’t want to see the Suez Canal closed. Those things could be economically catastrophic.
We haven’t talked about the overland routes for oil and natural gas and so forth. Bottom line is what’s happening today in Israel, in Gaza is very, very dangerous, not just for Israel, not just for the region, but for us economically. Yeah, from a lot of levels. And then now I don’t want to spend time jumping into it, but obviously, I’m sure everyone listening is aware of what’s going on in China and Taiwan and all that.
So seemingly we have potential. Wait a minute. Let’s stop for a second. What do you think is happening in China and Taiwan? Please tell me. Well, it seems like there’s sort of a showdown in the South Pacific potentially where China wants to move into Taiwan. They’ve been stationing ships, running maneuvers on our jets, our aircraft carriers, et cetera. And we don’t know what’s going to happen. But it seems tense, I guess, is my guess.
But let me tell you what I think. First of all, I don’t see any evidence for any chinese aggression aimed at Taiwan. I see the Chinese who have expressed the view that if we put forces on Taiwan, if we put missiles on Taiwan, that’s a red line, they will go to war. Sort of like Russia saying, if you put missiles in Ukraine, they don’t want them on their borders, I guess.
Yeah, I think that’s a fair analogy. I think also that President Xi made it very clear that if Taiwan declares its independence, in other words, it no longer accepts the truth that Taiwan is part of the chinese nation, that it decides to strike out entirely on its own, then there will be a war. Now, I personally don’t see any evidence right now that the people on Taiwan want any kind of war.
I’ve looked at the political structure there, and the parties involved, all of them have backed away from this notion of independence. If anything, the pro Beijing or pro chinese mainland parties are probably going to win the coming election. That means that you could have a peaceful reunification sooner rather than later between Taiwan and China. So the question is, where do we fit in? What are we trying to do? And we are operating in their seas, in their waters.
The Chinese have never stopped a commercial vessel. And theoretically, we are the ones that say over and over and over again that freedom of the seas is primarily for commerce and as long as commerce is not interrupted, what are we concerned about? Somebody said, well, what about Vietnam? The Vietnamese have disputes with the Chinese. Yes, they do. The Vietnamese have built fortifications or military installations on 29 islands in the South China Sea that they claim stake out areas of the South China Sea which are Vietnamese.
Well, that’s fine. What does that have to do with us? Nothing. Then why are we concerned about similar behavior on the part of mainland China? And, oh, by the way, mainland China’s claims in the South China Sea are identical to the claims that Taiwan makes since Taiwan declares itself a representative of the chinese nation. I guess what I’m trying to get across is that if there is any confrontation, collision or crisis over there, it’s because of us.
We are the outsiders. We don’t have chinese fleets sitting in the Caribbean. We don’t have a fleet of chinese vessels sailing up and down the Pacific coast. The Russians are not conducting exercises off the coast of Boston, but we have conducted exercises within 50 miles of St. Petersburg in the Baltic. So my point is, who’s provocative and who is not? Has the US had that stance since World War II? Sort of.
Peter Zeihan makes the case that the US was sort of policing the world to the point you made about free commerce. Right. So sort of kept the oceans clear, policed the world since World War II. And so that’s sort of been the stance and maybe that stance is still there, which is why they’re in St. Petersburg, why they’re in the South Pacific. But now, as China says, hey, we want to take back over the South Pacific.
It’s that territorial war that then is causing this. Commercial access does not require U. S. Military occupation of any land or sea. But the notion that we have to control the Strait of Malacca, which is a critical junction for the movement of commercial vessels to and from China up through the South China Sea is absurd. We don’t need to do that now. Have there been pirates there? Yes, pirates you can deal with.
Piratical activity is an international crime. Everyone is interested in suppressing and destroying piracy. My point is that if the Chinese or the Vietnamese and anybody else, as long as they are not interrupting or interfering with commercial traffic, what they do is of really no consequence to us. And this is the part that people don’t get. Just because we have decided that we are the world’s greatest naval power and that everyone should bow down to our demands because we’re the greatest naval power, therefore we have a right to sail within a few miles of someone else’s territory or someone else’s installation is ridiculous, especially in the world today because of what I described to you earlier, this ISR strike complex, all these little islets in the south Pacific, if we were ever to go to war, would vanish in minutes.
They’re easy to target, easy to destroy. This is why amphibious forces, large amphibious assaults, are now an impossibility anywhere that counts. If you try to assemble a large amphibious task force, everybody will watch it on their home televisions via satellite tv, and then when it’s completely established there are enough vessels there, it will be sunk because everyone can target it. Do you understand what I’m saying? Yeah, of course.
We need to think about the world today differently from the way we have thought about it in the past. Yeah, I agree. And I’m a non interventionalist. I don’t want to be over there either. I agree. I mean, we should not be just trying to understand that. I know we’re kind of running out of time here, so I want to get to maybe just one last point. It seems like the Americans, maybe as a whole, and I don’t have any data on this, but seemingly sort of went along with the narrative of Russia, Ukraine, and maybe they got fired up over Israel, but it seems like for the most part, we’re sort of against the war for the most part.
But at the same time, the war complex continues to seemingly get bigger and bigger, and not just in these military wars, but even now into misinformation, malinformation, controlling the Internet, controlling the information, controlling all these things. And it seems like this military industrial complex, or I should say, forget the military, the industrial complex just seems to keep me get bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger. And it’s really coming down to a showdown of, like, we the people versus the government, if you will.
Right? Constantly encroaching, imposing. And I know you have this. Ourcountryarchoice. com. I’ll throw that out there where I think some of what you’re trying to do is maybe trying to limit the government’s sort of bureaucracy and their reach into some of this part of our lives. Well, first of all, let’s be frank. We the people, the american people have been asleep. I can’t imagine any great power in the history of civilization on this planet doing nothing about their borders and allowing millions of people, many of whom are transnational criminals involved in human and drug trafficking, to pour into the United States.
Incomprehensible to me. I haven’t been able to figure it mean what does it take to wake up the american people saying, bring the troops back from eastern Europe where they have no useful mission, and put them on the southern border? To me, that is unassailable logic. But instead, you have people like senators Blumenthal and Senator Graham who are now talking about attacking Iran. I fail to see how attacking Iran is going to improve our position here at home in the United States.
But let me ask you a question about that, because it looks like the people seemingly are enraged by this and we see little uprisings, or I should say protests in New York City, shouting down AOC. And the people are saying, secure the border. Secure the border. All these polls that are around, the people said it, the leaders are completely ignoring that. Oh, the greatest problem that we have is Ukraine.
It’s like, no, it seems like the people are for that. It’s the representatives that are not. Well, look, Mark, you’re right. And I don’t know how to fix this quickly. But what I can tell you is that american interests are simply not represented for the most part on the hill. You have this new speaker of the House. Everyone is celebrating. We have a new speaker of the House.
And what’s his first priority? It’s Israel in the Middle east now. I support Israel. I want Israel to succeed. But Israel is a sovereign state. If it takes imprudent actions and puts its existence at risk, we cannot necessarily save it. They have to cooperate with their own future if they want to survive. But he has not said anything about the border crisis. He has not talked about millions of illegals.
I sat with some people in homeland security and I said, how many illegals do we really have inside the country? And I said, they say, what, four, five, 6 million have come in. They laughed. They said, no, it’s more than 8 million. And we probably have at least 28 million illegals inside the United States because this has been going on for decades. So how do you restore the rule of law if you won’t even enforce basic laws that protect your borders? And the answer is, you can’t.
Right now, the rule of law is at risk all over the country. So when you go to our country, our choice, you’re talking about, people have said, we’re tired of voting for people and getting the same policies regardless of whomever is elected. You remember when President Trump ran, he would talk to audiences in 2016 and about the border, and they would chant, close the border. Close the border.
Close the border. What did we do? We did not do that. Here we sit years later, and what have we got. Well, there doesn’t appear to be much money in the border for the Department of Defense. The Department of Defense wants shiny new toys. If you don’t produce shiny new toys, shiny new bright objects that promise silver bullet performance, you don’t move money great quantities. If you don’t move great quantities and Congress isn’t appropriating money, how do the people on the hill line their know, follow the money in Washington? That answers almost all the questions.
And until Americans wake up and realize this, nothing will change and we may not make it. I’m serious. Right now, I’m more concerned about this country than I’ve ever been in my life because we are losing all that remains of societal cohesion. We are losing our sense of identity as Americans. Obviously, that’s the intent for a lot of people in Washington. They’re succeeding. And we’ve got to stop this if we’re going to make it in this.
Yeah, yeah, I agree. I think we are losing our identity, partly, to your point, destroyed. And you said, like the border, it seems like, how could it be this bad? How could they let that, how could Mayorkas, the head of the DHS, continue to let this happen while he’s pushing policies to take away more freedoms online and through communication? So the wrong attack, attack on Americans and letting the border stay open.
And so it seemingly is being done intentionally. So, yeah. I don’t know. I guess if the people can stand up enough and we can get good leaders, unfortunately, that’s seemingly our only choice at this point. Well, if people listen to what we’ve just discussed and they find it attractive, they need to go to ourcountryourchoice. com. You can register and join. It costs nothing. We are just beginning. We only started back in August.
We’ve got a long way to go, but we expect millions of members. And the more members we bring in, the greater weight our arguments will have. And remember, we’re about being Americans. We’re tired of the divisiveness. We want to put an end to the tribalism. We are either Americans or we’re not. If you’re an American and you care about this republic, you care about the bill of rights, you need to join us.
Yeah. All right. Well, that’s a good point to end it on. I agree. In the tribalism, forget the left and the right, the blue and the red. Like, we’re Americans. We should stand for american ideals. So definitely check out our country, our choice. We’ll link to it down below. Colonel Douglas McGregor, thanks so much for joining me. We’ll make sure we send people to that website so they can all get involved in this and keep fighting the good fight.
I appreciate what you’re doing. Thanks very much. .
