Transcript: Col Doug Macgregor: Trump Warns Iran – Daniel Davis / Deep Dive

We’ve had lots of treaties that were deemed the beginning of eternal prosperity, harmony and goodwill. I could go back and research them, but we’ve had a lot of them in Eastern Europe. If you go back to the 13th century forward, I think it’s all unfortunately unlikely.

I know that there are lots of people who say, “Well, you’ve got to be positive. You got to at least see that something good is happening.” Well, I’m looking and I haven’t seen it yet. And I don’t see any alternative to what the Israelis are doing if they are going to accomplish their objectives. And I don’t think their objectives have changed, regardless of what is said or stated.

They want the Greater Israel Project to move forward and they feel they have an opportunity now that they will not have in the future. And they’re probably right. In the meantime, the world, despite protests to the contrary, doesn’t seem to be too terribly exercised over the mass murder and expulsion of a couple of billion people from Gaza or for that matter, increasingly from the West Bank.

Iran: Unfairly Demonized?

DANIEL DAVIS: Well, hard to argue with any of that. And you talked about Israel’s objectives. I suspect that they go beyond just the Gaza Strip and they actually look north towards Iran. There was an interview on here recently with Professor Mohammad Marandi, who seems to think that things are moving in that direction. And first of all, he says this about the situation with Iran:

“For almost five decades, the collective West has been demonizing Iran. They cannot tolerate Iran. But this demonization that has worked so well for five decades, I mean, there’s no denying that this narrative has influenced views on Iran across the world. Why is it that only this evil country is opposing genocide? Why is it that no other country in this region is sanctioned? So people are waking up to that.”

Well, what do you make of that? Is Iran being unfairly demonized or have they earned it?

COL DOUG MACGREGOR: Look, no one’s perfect. And all of us, every country in the world, has committed acts of aggression from time to time that in retrospect, no doubt were regretted. But Iran is hardly this evil incarnate by any stretch of the imagination.

We have to look at Israel and understand that they are treating virtually the world for 1,000 kilometers in any direction as effectively a bombing range. They struck targets in Lebanon quite recently. They continue to attack in Syria. They’ll attack whomever they decide to attack, whenever they decide to attack.

Iran, however, poses a new kind of problem for them. Iran is actually capable of responding and increasingly capable of defeating their strikes with their own integrated air defenses. So I think if we look at the movement of U.S. forces, particularly the rebalancing of munitions and missiles and rockets and so forth, the movement of naval power into the region, it looks a lot like we’re headed into another confrontation with Iran.

And I don’t know what the trigger will be, how it will be unleashed, and it probably doesn’t make much difference. But if you are Prime Minister Netanyahu right now, you look at the region, you look at the United States and you say, “I’ve got to use what I’ve got now. I’ve got to take maximum advantage of the United States and its military power because given the change in opinion towards Israel and what they’re doing, I could actually lose support in the months ahead.”

So there is no incentive for him to suddenly back off, sign an arrangement that would effectively, in his mind, restore the status quo ante. Anything that leaves the Palestinians in charge of Gaza or the West Bank in perpetuity, at least insofar as the treaty is concerned, is absolutely anathema. They have to be removed. They must go. He’s made that very clear.

The Israelis believe that the only holdup he would admit to, I think, is the presence of hostages in the hands of Hamas. If Hamas turns them over, then it’s “Katy bar the door,” the bombs will fall and the killing will continue on an even greater scale with more ferocity.

So, no, I don’t see much hope for President Trump’s alleged peace initiative. That doesn’t mean that I doubt his sincerity. I just don’t see much potential for success.

Netanyahu’s Fear-Mongering About Iranian Nuclear Threats

DANIEL DAVIS: And going back to what Professor Marandi said about the demonization of Iran, if he needed a fresh example, here is this from Benjamin Netanyahu, really trying to lay it on thick. And notice one of the potential targets that he says an Iranian nuclear bomb could fall on if action isn’t taken.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: Is developing now ballistic missiles that are intercontinental ballistic missiles for 8,000 kilometer range. What does that mean? They add another 3,000 kilometers and they’ve got under their gun, under their atomic guns, New York City in target, Washington, Boston, Miami, Mar-a-Lago. Okay, so that is a very great danger. You don’t want to be under the nuclear gun of these people who are not necessarily rational and who chant “Death to America.”

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

DANIEL DAVIS: So, yeah, even Mar-a-Lago apparently is in the nuclear crosshairs. I mean, he’s really laying it on thick trying to make it, “No, we have to go to war against Iran.” With him making these kind of comments, it’s almost like you would be a fool to allow them to go on with the assumption that they’re just going to build this nuclear weapon to use against Boston and Mar-a-Lago. How do you see it?

Small Countries Making Their Problems America’s Problems

COL DOUG MACGREGOR: Iran, the great international relations scholar of France, said that small countries do what they must, large countries do what they can. If you are a small country like Israel, then it is in your interest to make your problems America’s problems, to make your threats America’s threats. And that’s what he’s about.

He’s trying to convince everyone that if for some reason we fail to support Israel’s bid to ultimately destroy Iran, to Balkanize it, to destroy its government, to effectively remove it, as you know, some of the more neocon scholars would say, remove it from the great chessboard. If we don’t do those things, then the world as we know it ends and we are the next targets.

This is not a new ploy. This is a very old ploy. Unfortunately, it’s worked rather well for them to this point. The question is, will it work much longer? I rather doubt it, and I don’t see any evidence for any interest in Iran in launching ICBMs with nuclear warheads, even if they had them in any considerable strength or numbers against the United States.

I mean, we’ve lived with this balance of terror with the Soviet Union and now today Russia and previously with the Chinese for some time. No one is interested in turning their respective country into glass by attacking the United States of America. So that’s all complete and utter nonsense.

But we’ve lost the sense, and, you know, I think this is the problem that we have with President Trump and everybody in Washington. We’ve lost the sense that the most critical thing we can do in foreign and defense policy is avoid war. On the contrary, we seem to be in the hunt for additional wars. We don’t have enough as it is.

Preparing for Another War Against Iran

DANIEL DAVIS: Well, it certainly seems that we’re all, we have been on that path, and it certainly seems that we’re on the path to going back to here. And going back to that interview with Professor Marandi with Rachel Blevins, he seems to think that Israel is flat out planning on one:

“It is also believed by some that Trump would like to have a lull in the hostility so that the Israelis could have a freer hand in carrying out a new war against Iran. That is a possibility. We’ll have to wait and see. We don’t know. But it is clear that the American and Israeli regimes are working together to prepare the regime for another war. And that is quite extraordinary if one takes into account the fact that the United States claims that it has, as Trump repeatedly says, obliterated Iran’s peaceful nuclear program, which, of course, was an act of war and barbaric and inhumane, that aside. But they don’t have an excuse, based on Trump’s own claims, to attack Iran again. But they seem to be preparing for that.”

So they do seem to be preparing for that. In case you had any wonders, he mentioned something about Trump there. And I want to play this clip. We got a couple here. But I’m going to start off with this one from President Trump speaking at the commemoration of the Navy here just a little bit ago. And he brought up the issue of Iran.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Spectacular military feats the world has ever seen. The obliteration of Iran’s nuclear sites in Operation Midnight Hammer. How did that work out? Pretty good, right? And we shot 30 Tomahawks. You know that on top of after the B-2. How about that? The B-2s, what they did, those beautiful flying wings, what they did, they hit every single target they hit. And just in case, we shot 30 Tomahawks out of a submarine. Every one of them hit.

So I would say Iran was not particularly thrilled. They were going to have a nuclear weapon within a month, and now they can start the operation all over again. But I hope they don’t, because we have to take care of that, too. If they do, I let them know that you want to do that, it’s fine. But we’re going to take care of that, and we’re not going to wait so long. It should have been done long before I came along.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

DANIEL DAVIS: So that last part there is kind of what got my attention. “Except next time, we’re not going to wait so long.” How do you interpret that?

Trump’s Dangerous Marketing of Military Power

COL DOUG MACGREGOR: Well, it’s pretty hard to miss, isn’t it, Dan? I think he’s once again the perpetual marketer. He loves to market himself, and he uses whatever he can to market American military power. He places American military power at the head of the list of instrumentalities for the advancement of whatever interest he thinks is important there.

We have no interest in the destruction of Iran. We never have. As far as we know, though, the Iranians may very well have the capability to build nuclear warheads. There’s no evidence right now that they have any. And they made it pretty clear that they would rather not leave the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty Organization. So we have to take that with a grain of salt.

But unfortunately, this is something that he enjoys talking about. As we’ve discussed it before, for people overseas, it’s very hard to sort truth from fiction, imagination from reality. When President Trump speaks, he may want to cultivate a positive image for the United States, but what he does, unfortunately, is demonstrate that he’s reckless, he’s impulsive, and he’s quite capable of taking action that is devastating on the world stage. That’s all he did in that speech.

You know, “We’ve got these marvelous flying wings. They can show up in the middle of the night anywhere in the world and destroy everything beneath them.” Well, at the moment, he’s gotten away with that. Is that the future? I don’t think so. And do we want that as a future?

Because you know that somebody said many years ago, “Cast your bread upon the waters, and in a few days it will return many fold unto you.” I think he’s on a dangerous path. I think the world is increasingly sick of us. And that’s how you get BRICS. That’s how you get parallel financial institutions. That’s why we’re in a lot of trouble right now, because we are financially fragile and economically weak, and the world is beginning to figure it out.

It’s only a matter of time until this military hammer that he’s talking about is exposed for what it is. It’s an instrument, but it is by no means without countermeasures.

Potential Military Action Against Iran

DANIEL DAVIS: Well, we don’t ever want to talk about that. More on that in a minute. I want to stick on this issue with Iran, though. Right now, let’s just kind of pepper you with some questions here. Let’s just say that that is in the planning and that we’re going to take some military action against Iran. Start off here. What would such an attack look like? What do you think that given our capabilities and assets in the region, along with Israel, given what happened last time, what could we, what would even be an attack look like and what would be the end state?

COL DOUG MACGREGOR: Well, you know, everybody wants to delve into this, and this is really very dangerous. So I’m going to talk in broad terms because I happen to know a great deal about this and the world does not need to know. I don’t want to see Americans being sent in harm’s way who are going to be exposed to dangerous enemy countermeasures. So let’s keep this general.

First of all, it’s overwhelmingly, and must be of necessity, air and naval power. We are not going to commit ground forces to the invasion of Iran. It’s just not going to happen. We don’t have the ground forces to send. They’re already overstretched. Most of them are in Europe. So that’s not going to happen.

Secondly, it’s not so much what we will do. I think that’s important because what we’ll do is similar to what you’ve seen in the past. We’ll fly intercontinental bombers into the area. We’ll try to bomb with impunity. We’ll try to hit targets on the ground that we think are not adequately protected. We will refuel and resupply and support the Israelis who try to do the same thing from the air. This is not going to be altogether different.

What we don’t know is where some of these attacks will come from. Is Azerbaijan still a usable platform, or have the Russians made it clear to the Azeri Republic that this is unacceptable and they’re not going to tolerate it? Where are the Russians now in all of this? What are they prepared to do? How many of them are already on the ground in Iran working on this integrated air defenses?

What about the rest of the region? Will the rest of the region sit idly by and let us violate their airspace as they have in the past? What happens in Egypt? The Egyptians are building up and the Egyptians could intervene militarily. And right now the Israelis on the ground are probably weaker than they’ve been in a very long time. They’ve taken heavy casualties. The country is fatigued. Reservists are not showing up.

There are a lot of things that could happen and they could happen very suddenly. You know, we don’t have the luxury of doing anything we want. We are going to be limited in how we attack from the directions we attack, how far we penetrate and what we use.

So I think President Trump would do us all a favor by talking a lot less about it. But beyond that, I don’t think we should say very much. Let’s just assume it’s all air and naval and people like air and naval power in Washington because they don’t see it as putting much at risk. In other words, they think that they can continue to strike and bomb with impunity with no probability of high losses. I’m not sure that’s true, but we’ll see because no doubt that’s what we’re going to see again.

Iran’s Defensive Capabilities

DANIEL DAVIS: And let’s look at the other half of that equation. What would Iran do in response? So the claim was made after the 12 Day War was that Israel and the United States destroyed most of what was left of their air defense systems. And so now then everything is really vulnerable and they can go in and clean up. But then I’ve seen other reports which I cannot validate that says that they have actually been rebuilding both their missiles, their strike missile force and expanding their inventory as well as with the Russians help expanding or rebuilding their air defense. Do you have any expect or understanding of how that situation is developing?

COL DOUG MACGREGOR: You know, if I were to guess based upon the limited material I’ve seen, if we say integrated air defenses are at 100%, if everything is perfect, I would say they’re probably 60 to 70% of what they need to be. Now, that’s 50% better than we saw before. Okay, so if I say that they’re 60 to 70% of what ideally they would like to have, that’s exceptionally better than what was encountered the last time around.

And frankly, some of those air defenses were destroyed. Some of them were never really tested. Most of the munitions and rockets, missiles and so forth, were fired beyond the range of the integrated air defenses. That’s going to be tougher right now because our missile inventory is down. We don’t have as many missiles as we had the last time. We are going to rely more, I suspect, on precision gravity bombs, which means that you have to fly through the integrated air defenses to deliver those bombs.

We’ll see. That’s just a general observation based on the numbers I’ve seen presented to me of the available missiles and munitions. And we’ve talked before, Dan, about the inventory. Our inventory is down and we can’t rapidly surge and build more missiles.

The Israelis, of course, now have a good stockpile of the theater high altitude air defense missiles, the THAAD, the radars. They’ve got the equivalent of two batteries. I suspect we’ve stripped out a lot from the other batteries to bring them up to full strength. And our soldiers are operating those on the ground in Israel. I’d be very surprised if those were not targets early on in any response the Iranians launch against the Israelis. In other words, they’ll go after those batteries. There’s no doubt about it.

And something like the Oreshnik, if they have something like that, they do have hypersonic missiles, will annihilate all of that in a few seconds. The bottom line is that this is a very dangerous thing for Israel. Israel could be on the receiving end of something twice or three times worse than what they saw the last time.

The danger for Iran is very clear that as the Israelis begin to lose, if we’re not able to reduce the damage, that the Israelis will simply opt for a nuclear weapon. I think that the Israelis once again are going to be focused on the regime. They think that if they can just remove this regime, the country will begin to fall apart. They don’t seem to have figured out that the opposite is the case.

And right now, in both human terms as well as in equipment terms, the Iranians have built a lot of redundancy. So they made it very clear, actually, the president of Iran has made it clear if I die, there are others who are going to step up and take over and execute the mission.

So I don’t think they’ve come to terms with the reality that Iran is not some sort of tribalized state in the Arabian Peninsula. This is a modern nation state now with a lot of capability, and it now has the support of its people on a scale that I don’t think it’s had in decades. So the notion of an invasion from Azerbaijan to raise a rebellion of Azeri Turks against the government is pure fantasy. It’s not going to happen.

You know, I think the Israelis have a great deal of difficulty coming to terms with reality. They just don’t like it. And they don’t believe it. If they believed it, I think we would be dealing with a different group of people in Israel. They’re not rational at this point.

Israel’s Nuclear Deterrent

DANIEL DAVIS: Well, and speaking of that, if Israel, or rather since Israel actually has a nuclear inventory and it’s the worst kept secret, everyone, everybody’s aware that that’s the reality here. Given that Iran probably doesn’t have any nuclear weapons, why can’t Israel just say our security is completely insured and we can tell them, if they ever cross any, you can fill in the red lines that you want to, then we’ll use nuclear weapons. And if you don’t, everything’s going to be fine, that they would then be secure. Why this compulsion to either destroy or turn off or have a regime change? What do you think the compulsion is that I don’t understand the logic?

COL DOUG MACGREGOR: Well, I think the compulsion is important to understand. It’s sort of extending your frontiers of insecurity well beyond what is reality or necessary. We can go back through history and look at many states that have engaged in this sort of thing.

Why did Bonaparte feel compelled to invade Russia? There was no real reason to do so. Had he stayed out of it, he could probably have stayed in charge of most of Europe for the balance of his lifetime.

If you turn to the Second World War, setting aside the first, where the Germans made it very clear they were not going to invade Russia, and they let the Russians impale themselves on German defenses that ran from Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, down through Poland, all the way around Hungary and Western Ukraine, they were smarter than that. They let the Russians do the attacking and they took the heavy losses.

In World War II, though, they decided to march into this place with the goal of regime change. What a dumb idea. Anybody who’d looked at that rationally, had even announced a common sense, would have said no. But this romanticism took over. And I think there’s a lot of romanticism in that sense in the Israeli mind. They really think they’re on the verge of dominating everything.

I mean, imagine the President of the United States being in a foreign country and announcing that he now controls TikTok and everyone in the world is going to be subjected to a steady dose of pro-American propaganda and information from our control of TikTok. People would look at him and they’d say, what’s wrong with this man? Is he crazy? We don’t all just watch TikTok. I mean, we do have brains. We can think. There are alternatives.

But that’s what Netanyahu has done. He’s now extolling the virtues of Israeli control over TikTok. And as a result he thinks he’s won a critical battle in the Great War for control of the United States and the Western world. It’s a dumb idea. People aren’t that stupid, but apparently he seems to think they are. Why would you announce such a thing? If you wanted it to be effective, you would probably pretend that it was objective.

DANIEL DAVIS: Right?

COL DOUG MACGREGOR: But this is unbridled arrogance for which that particular group of people in Israel are well known. And arrogance is always the next to last chapter in the history of the state that engages in it. We’ve seen that before, you know, during the war several times German generals did actually tell Hitler, you know, that that’s too much, it can’t work. And he would look at them and he’d say, you don’t know what you’re talking about. I know the German soldier can do anything.

No, no soldier in any country can do anything. That’s nonsense. So I think that’s where Netanyahu is now. Only instead of soldiers, I think he’s talking more about commanding lead in aerospace technology and missiles and the absolute, total and complete unconditional support of the United States Armed Forces.

Shifting Focus to Ukraine

DANIEL DAVIS: Well, we’ll have to see how that’s going to play out and we’ll keep monitoring that. But you mentioned this kind of delusionary thinking which we’ve been talking about in terms of what’s going on in the Middle East. Unfortunately this, that illness or that sickness extends into other areas. And we’re going to take a look at what’s going on in the Russia-Ukraine war because there’s another example there. And we’re going to start off with Volodymyr Zelensky, who on the one hand is complaining about all these attacks on his energy infrastructure.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

VOLODYMYR ZELENSKY: Russia has rejected every proposal to end the war or even to halt the strikes, is blatantly trying to destroy our civilian infrastructure, especially now ahead of winter, gas facilities, power plants and transmission systems. Zero real reaction from the world.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

DANIEL DAVIS: So he’s actually mad at the world because they’re not standing up and I guess coming to his aid and fighting, oblivious to everything that’s happened in the last three and a half years. But what do you make of his focus right in here? That how dare the Russians do this and they haven’t paid any attention and done anything for peace? Is that accurate?

The Energy Crisis and Russia’s Strategic Pivot

Well look, anything that comes out of the man’s mouth is a bold-faced lie. But the issue of energy is a very important one. Energy is the key to everything. You can make a pretty damn good argument that the Second World War waged by Germany was lost largely because it didn’t have the energy to sustain itself and keep things running. If you look at the strikes right now, they’re terrible and they’re doing enormous damage to the energy infrastructure.

But I received some information this morning that was sent to me from friends abroad. It was translated from the Russian, and the Russians have internally said all of Russia’s oil and gas is now completely diverted away from Europe. In other words, most, all of it is going through Central Asia into China and down into India. And there is no plan nor any interest in the infrastructure that exists in the west in terms of restarting the energy to Europe.

So as far as they’re concerned, they’ve made their decision. They’ve reoriented all of their energy to Asia and Central Asia and Southwest Asia. In other words, it doesn’t make any difference what we say or do anymore. They’re not playing. They’re not coming back.

I think that’s the most serious consequence of this Ukraine catastrophe. It’s not that the energy infrastructure in Ukraine is being destroyed. That’s the sort of thing you do when you’re finishing off your enemy once and for all. That’s what we did during World War II to the Germans. We reduced them to the point where no German aircraft in June, July of 1944 could stay in the air for more than a couple of hours because they just didn’t have the fuel to move them. You know, they were making fuel out of potatoes, believe it or not, in order to move armored divisions.

So my point is that the Russians are finishing off the Ukrainians, put it bluntly. But it’s not just the Ukrainians. They are saying, that’s it. Our history with Europe is at an end. No more from us. And that’s a very tough thing, because if you live in Finland and Sweden and Germany and Poland and Hungary, now they’re going to try and supply the Hungarians and I’m sure the Slovaks, but the rest of us are out. We’ve had it.

This is catastrophic. Because when the stupidity ends, this pointless, unnecessary war ends, what has everybody got to do? They’ve got to rebuild. How are you going to rebuild without energy? You’re going to import from us. And we’re not cutting anybody any breaks on price. On the contrary, we’re exploiting the opportunity and screwing our European allies to the wall, which in the mind of somebody like Trump, who thinks that’s good business is something to be celebrated.

General Keane’s Call for Escalation

DANIEL DAVIS: Let me ask you this. Interpreting in light of what you just said and what it seems like that many in the west are stumbling into, how would you interpret this comment by General Jack Keane, who’s saying, who’s viewing all these things that you’re talking about, all this stuff with the energy infrastructure, the final settlement, at least some knowledge of history and World War II, et cetera. He’s saying that not only should we not recognize that and seek a negotiated settlement, he’s saying we need to slap Russia harder.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

GENERAL JACK KEANE: Putin is steady, he’s deliberate. He’s ruthless, to be sure, but he’s not reckless. These are deliberate, methodical moves that he is making to undermine the United States’ will and resolve, and undermine the Europeans’ will and resolve. That’s what he is really about here. And we’ve got to stay focused on it. We’ve got to up-gun the Ukrainians militarily. And some of those decisions have been made last week. And that’s all good. We can’t get into the specifics of that.

And I still think we got to foreclose on the sanctions and the tariffs, slap them hard in terms of anybody that’s purchasing oil, certainly from the Russians. That obviously is China, it’s Iran. It’s a whole bunch of other countries that are doing, they’re helping to finance this and arm them for sure. But the reality is we have got to get tougher militarily and also economically to put real pressure on Russia.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

DANIEL DAVIS: I just don’t understand with the wreckage of three and a half years of failed military and economic policies, why do we still get people in positions like this saying, let’s do more of that?

The Denial of Reality and India’s Response

COL DOUG MACGREGOR: Yeah, it’s difficult to explain, but I think there is active denial of reality. Just look at what’s happened with India. You know, India has been a friend to the United States. They’ve actually absorbed a lot of the missions that we used to perform in the Indian Ocean and in East Africa. They’ve gone after the pirates so that our sea power was freed up to do other things. We have had good relations with India. We don’t do a lot of trade with them. But nevertheless, there’s no reason to alienate the Indians. But that’s exactly what we’ve done.

Essentially, Modi has said, thank you very much, you want to punish us for buying oil and gas from Russia. We’re going to continue to do that because it’s vital to our national interest. You know, there’s this old expression that Washington used repeatedly saying no nation can be expected to move beyond the limits of its own interests. When you begin saying that you must now become hostile to Russia or we will take action against you, means that at least half the world is just going to walk away from you because they don’t give a damn what you are trying to do to Russia. They’re concerned with their own economic stability, their own energy needs. You know, they’re not going to behave like the Germans and commit national suicide. So it’s a rather stupid idea. It has no chance of success.

The other thing is, militarily, what are you going to do? Are we going to round up the million men that we think are Ukrainian men that are living in Europe right now who refuse to go home? Now, there are many millions, but I’m talking about military eligible males, whether it’s in Italy or Sweden or Germany or France or Poland. Are we now going to arrest them, put them on boxcars and ship them east so that they can be quickly equipped and trained and sent into the meat grinder to die in vast numbers?

Or is he simply saying, we’ll just provide more missiles and rockets that can be lobbed over the heads of the Russian army on the ground in eastern Ukraine and hit Russian cities? Well, if that’s what he’s advocating, we’re going to be at war with Russia and we don’t have the manufacturing base that we did 80 years ago. We’re not going to be able to gear up quickly for a war. We’re not going to be able to keep up with the wastage and missiles and equipment that are necessary to fight a war. But the Russians can do it. The Russians are ready for it.

And as you know, Dan, they’re mobilizing additional manpower. They’re fully prepared for the unfortunate tragedy that we decide to go to war with them. And then of course, you have President Trump that seems to vacillate. Oh, yes, I’m going to send Tomahawk missiles and that’ll make a big difference. Then he talks to Putin on the phone. He says, well, maybe I won’t do that. Maybe we need to tell the Ukrainians. Well, or ask the Ukrainians, where are you going to shoot them? You know, come on, give me a break.

This is all nonsense. It’s irrational nonsense. It’s a combination of arrogance and ignorance in the worst sense of the word. And there’s a failure to understand that we and the Europeans are playing with fire. The Russians aren’t going to stand around and allow us to humiliate them in perpetuity. It’s ridiculous.

The Influence Industry

So bottom line is that he’s well paid. He’s one of your Fox News influencers. Just like the influencers that our friend Bibi Netanyahu has purchased in the United States, who are being paid as much as $7,000 a post for something that advocates support for Israel against the Palestinians in Gaza or anywhere else. He’s in the same boat. He picks up his check and his bank account is flush with millions in cash because he comes on and says these things.

And it’s not only the Israelis. I mean, if anybody has looked at the defense industries, they certainly have profited enormously from these wars and want to continue to do so. So there are people all over Washington, all over the United States, who are willing to throw money at someone like Jack Keane because when he speaks, they introduce him as a general. Four-star general. If a four-star general says it, it’s got to be right. Wrong.

I mean, we went through this in Vietnam. And let me tell you, William Westmoreland was a much better human being and a much better officer than many people give him credit for being. But he was wrong and he was saying things that were outrageous, only I think he actually believed them. I don’t think that’s the case right now. I think you’re either on one team or the other and that means you’re with the uniparty and everything the uniparty wants to do, or you’re out, you’re edged out. You go to the land of Charlie Kirk and vanish.

Ursula von der Leyen’s Delusions

DANIEL DAVIS: Well, that’s a darker version of it. But you mentioned something that really got my attention. You said there’s this kind of arrogance and delusion that’s on the American side that we’re talking here. Unfortunately, it’s also very much on display at the European Union with Ursula von der Leyen. And she is not hiding her glee.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

URSULA VON DER LEYEN: And support for all of his obedient friends in Europe who are doing his work for him. This is the oldest trick in the book. So division, spread disinformation, create a scapegoat. All to turn Europeans against each other. To try to lower our guard while we fight each other, to weaken our resolve and our resilience. This is a trap.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

DANIEL DAVIS: So she’s saying that “obedient friends,” what she was talking about there was Viktor Orban and Robert Fico from Slovakia, that they’re not on board with blocking everything from the Russians and from supporting all these sanctions and everything else. They’re much against that. Viktor Orban, we showed earlier this week in a comment that he made last week where he’s saying, listen, we’re doing our own national interest. He goes, it would be economic suicide for us to just stop buying Russian oil. We’re not going to do it. We have no interest in going to war with Russia and we’re going to go for our own national interest. And then to which you see Ursula von der Leyen then demonize them as being obedient friends of Vladimir Putin. How do you think that’s going to play?

Germany’s Decline and Orban’s Vindication

COL DOUG MACGREGOR: Well, did you look at the audience? I thought the snapshots of people sitting in the audience spoke millions of words. I mean, everybody’s there like, you know, thanks, Ursula, for your brilliant leadership that’s utterly destroyed the economy of Germany and most of Europe. Thank you and Mrs. Merkel and the others for having opened our borders and admitted millions of people that did not come to become part of our society, but came to change us into them. Thank you for the rise in criminality, for the destruction of our law-based society.

I don’t think anything she says is anymore taken completely seriously by anybody. And by the way, when she was the Secretary of Defense or Minister of Defense in Germany, the damage she did to the German armed forces was treasonous. And Merkel let her do it. And now Germany has nothing.

But, you know, the Germans are slow to wake up. It takes time. And things are getting worse in Germany, not better. Germany is really on the skids and at some point it’s going to bottom out the way it did in the Weimar Republic. And when that happens, everything will change. And I suspect von der Leyen and others will leave the country, lest they be imprisoned and eventually tried for treason against the German people. That’s how bad it is.

So I wouldn’t pay too much attention to von der Leyen. And Orban is on the right side of history, as is Fico. They know the truth, they know what’s right, what is wrong, and they have spared their populations tremendous suffering as a result.

A French Parliamentarian Speaks Out

DANIEL DAVIS: Well, you talk about that, not people paying attention. Unfortunately, she is the President of the European Union, so she does have a bully platform. But as you pointed out there and those images that you saw where the people were really bored, one lady’s just kind of on her phone, so they’re not paying a lot of attention. The hall itself, when they had a big pan back, was pretty empty as well. Yeah, that was one of the good ones. But watch this clip here because somebody else finally got up and said something about it. And this is an EU parliamentarian from France, a woman named Aubry, and she has a different message for Ursula von der Leyen.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

AUBRY: You’ve capitulated to Donald Trump not just by supporting his neocolonialist plan for Gaza, but also by giving way on all of the economic demands of Europe to benefit the U.S. It’s been a one-way street against democracy, the vassalization of the EU and accepting the fascization of Europe. You should leave.

Madame von der Leyen, you’ve acted against democracy with this MERCOSUR free trade agreement, disregarding national votes in parliament and the unity of the member states. You’re killing off our agriculture. You’re poisoning with dangerous pesticides and destroying the planet. Madame von der Leyen, you should leave.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

# European Union and NATO’s Uncertain Future

DANIEL DAVIS: So that was a pretty strong. And Gary isolated some of the comments here when Ursula is being asked to leave and he’s like, hmm, that’s not really liking that part there. But it’s just not a lot of strength being shown there. And she’s talking about divisions. She was talking about Ursula von der Leyen was about divisions between Fitzo and Orban. But obviously that’s not the only ones. How do you see that in terms of fracturing and where is Europe as a whole right now?

COL DOUG MACGREGOR: Well, look, von der Leyen is essentially the captain on the Titanic and the bow is already underwater, the stern is rising. So the EU is on its way out. So is NATO. These things will continue until they can’t. And that’s coming sooner rather than later. So I think that’s essentially what that very astute French woman had to say and God bless her for standing up and saying it, because I know that that is widespread feeling across Europe.

Now, there are some Europeans who have a tougher time coming to terms with reality as far as the EU or for that matter NATO is concerned, but certainly on the continent with the French, the Spaniards, the Italians, the Greeks. When you go into Austria or the Czech Republic. The Czech Republic just held an election. They elected a very staunch nationalist, very much a common sense man who is concerned with what’s in the interest of the Czech people. And I’m confident that he is going to ally himself to, for all intents and purposes, with others in Europe who feel the same way.

This is over in Europe. Von der Leyen is finished. But these people will not leave until they are thrown out. That’s coming. And von der Leyen will go out the way so many others have in the history of Europe. In a blaze of fire and storm and misery. But that’s the way it has to be, because it’s the only way for the Europeans to recover.

DANIEL DAVIS: And unfortunately, the wreckage from all of that disaster that they have reached for the last three and a half years will be smoldering ruins in Ukraine and just bodies upon bodies stacked up in military cemeteries. And that will be the ultimate, I guess, legacy that these folks will have left behind.

Poland’s Trade Policy and Economic Shortsightedness

COL DOUG MACGREGOR: But one thing, if I could mention it, you know, an example of colossal stupidity is in Poland, where the Polish government is not allowing rail connectivity to China. In other words, they’ve said nothing can come through Poland into the rest of Europe. Well, what are the Chinese shipping in that is so dangerous for the Europeans? Are they shipping in finished products that you can use in your home office? Is it automobile parts? Exactly. What is the danger of allowing China to ship goods into Germany and France where there’s obviously a demand for them?

Well, I don’t see it. And in fact, the sad part is that if you look at the map, there’s a city in France called Rochefort, enormous harbor facility, some of the best in the world. You could run that rail line right into Rochefort. You could get on fast sea lift, and you could ship straight to the United States. And, oh, by the way, the United States could ship straight into Rochefort, and that same rail connectivity could be used by us to promote commerce.

We’ve got to stop equating commercial prosperity with military danger. They’re not the same. And the fact that a country is growing rich and prosperous from its trade doesn’t make it an enemy of the United States or Europe or anybody else. The Poles have done something very stupid that’s going to harm them for a long time. And the sad part is, as you and I both know, the Chinese, like the Russians and everyone else, will send all that material somewhere else. It’s not as though they don’t have another market.

Again, this goes back to President Trump’s approach. Our market is the greatest in the world. No one can live without it.

DANIEL DAVIS: Wrong.

COL DOUG MACGREGOR: That is not true anymore. And that’s what we’re finding out. So the whole tariff concept was always a dead end from the beginning. It was going to lead us nowhere. It was going to jack up prices here, and it was going to offend everybody. And what the French woman said was accurate. What about this agreement you signed with Donald Trump? That stuff’s never going to happen because it’s not in the interest of the various members of the European Union to sign up for their own destruction.

And again, it goes back to what we were talking about before. Energy. Oh, sure, I’m Donald Trump. I’ll send you liquefied natural gas and I’ll screw you to the wall while I do it. And that’s business and that’s me. And I’m transactional. Great. Over the long run, that’s not going to endear us to anybody. It’s just going to make more enemies. It’s a terrible situation right now.

Trump’s Misunderstanding of Military History

DANIEL DAVIS: It is, yeah. Across the board, when you see that. And unfortunately, President Trump said some other things here recently which also either had people scratching their heads, raising their eyebrows, or just outright being concerned. And I want to look at a couple of ones here because he said something really odd in the military sphere that kind of echoing some terms that was said to the US Generals when they were in town a week or so ago that, you know, we’re getting rid of this whole DEI woke culture, whatever. And there was a lot of things in that that needed to be gotten out. But unfortunately, I’m not sure that he really understands what even that means, because yesterday at this naval meeting here, he said this problem with Vietnam, we, you know, we stopped fighting to win.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

DONALD TRUMP: We would have won easy. We would have won Afghanistan easy, would have won every war easy. But we got politically correct. Let’s take it easy. It’s. We’re not politically correct anymore. Just so you understand. We win now. We win.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

DANIEL DAVIS: What. What does that mean? He said we would have won Vietnam easily if we hadn’t been, you know, woke and all that. And DEI, and if we had hadn’t have been woke, we could have won Vietnam easy. All these would have been easy, along with Afghanistan. But he’s the one that signed the protocols, wisely, I’ll point out, to end the Afghanistan war with the, I think it was called the Doha protocols in 2020. And now he’s going back and saying, well, it was only the woke military. What do you make of that?

The Vietnam War: A Lesson in Strategic Confusion

COL DOUG MACGREGOR: What this inevitably boils down to when you talk to a veteran who is in Vietnam, who’s bitter and angry, and I’ve certainly talked to many of them, most of them now are far older than I am, but they would say, you know, we had enough firepower. We could have killed everyone. Well, that’s a marvelous solution, isn’t it? And that effectively is what it boils down to here, is Vietnam a country in Southeast Asia of no strategic importance to the United States whatsoever, not in the fundamental sense we decide to intervene in that country. And what turned out to be a. Essentially a civil war.

We paid no attention to anybody who told us what they had encountered, what they’d learned, like the French, but not just the French, also the British and others. We went into that country and the first soldiers and Marines and so forth that landed weren’t even sure what their mission was, let alone the objective.

There’s a very famous event that I’m afraid President Trump is unaware of, and that happened when Lyndon Baines Johnson, as I recollect, in 1967, asked General Omar Bradley, General of the Army Omar Bradley, to go to Vietnam and evaluate what was happening over there and then come back and tell him he was over there, I think, for almost two months. He came back, he walked into the Oval Office with the President, and LBJ said, “Well, General, what did you find out?” And General Bradley said, “Well, I can’t find anyone from the rank of sergeant or captain all the way up to four stars who really understands what it is they’re trying to do.”

He said, “Well, what do you mean?” He said, “They don’t understand what they’re there for. They don’t know what the mission is.” And LBJ said, “Well, that’s unbelievable. I can’t believe that.” And he said, “Well, why don’t you come back? Or why don’t you take this legal pad that was on his desk?” And General Bradley handed him the legal pad and said, “Write out the mission. Explain what we’re doing in Vietnam.”

And so LBJ took the pen and he started, right? And, well, you know, there are a lot of things here, and it’s going to take me some time. And so Omar Bradley said, “If you can’t write down what the mission of our forces is in Vietnam right now in the next few minutes, get out.” Well, gosh, Omar Bradley was right. You know, this was the problem in Korea.

Eisenhower’s Wisdom on Korea

You know, everybody wanted, you know, Eisenhower was being lobbied to extend the war in Korea. And he went into. When he went over to Korea, he never promised that he would end the war in Korea, never said that. He simply said, “I will go to Korea.” So he went to Korea and he got a briefing. And the briefing was given to him by General Mark Clark, who had been placed in command on the ground in Korea.

And Mark Clark gave him this wonderful briefing and said, “We need, in order to win this war, 830,000 men in the 8th Army. And with that force, we can march into Manchuria, swing around and move into China and put an end to this war.” Well, Eisenhower sort of listened. He knew Mark Clark from the second World War. He didn’t want to say a lot. He said, “Thank you,” got up and walked outside, turned to his military assistant, who was General Goodpaster, and he said to Goodpaster, he said, “This is insane. United States isn’t interested in going to war with China. You know, we’re not going to draft in millions of men to supply an 830,000 man army to fight the war in Korea. We have to end this war.”

So what did he do? He said, “No, we’re going to restore the 38th parallel. We’re going to negotiate with the enemy. We’re going to end the war. The American people don’t want it, don’t need it. It’s irrelevant strategically to us.” And by the way, if you go back far enough, it’s MacArthur who after World War II, recommended that we vacate Korea completely because he said it’s very difficult to defend this peninsula against a determined land power like China. If they really want to take it, why are we in the way? We can’t fight that war. That’s not something we want to do.

Remember, people had this crazy notion that you don’t want to fight a land war in Asia against people that have inexhaustible quantities of people. You know, look, all of this is craziness, and Donald Trump is out of touch with reality. And again, this is something you and I have discussed on more than one occasion. People have lost their fear of this thing called war, and it’s a terrible mistake.

Dangerous Overconfidence in American Military Power

DANIEL DAVIS: And one more piece from that same speech, which I think really underscores exactly what you’re saying is this. Not only is there not a fear of war, but there is an unsubstantiated confidence in our military power.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

DONALD TRUMP: We’re gathered on this storied waterfront to celebrate 250 years of strength, tenacity, and unwavering courage by the greatest fighting force even. And that’s true no matter where you go, no matter where you go, no matter what you even think about, there’s nothing like the fighting force that we have roam the seas. It’s called the United States Navy, and there’s nothing in the world like it. Knocked beside us today are a combined 150,000 tons of pure American naval supremacy and two colossal reasons why no one should ever want to start a fight with the USA.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

DANIEL DAVIS: You know, that kind of echoes something that one of the weirder parts, I’ll say, of Secretary of War Hegseth’s commentary comments to the generals the other day when he was berating them on so many different fronts, and yet he said, “We are the most powerful military on the history of the planet, bar none. Nobody else can even come close to it.” Which seemed to undercut the whole comment that there was a lot of things that need to be supplied.

But the point being that they think that at the top leadership, that we are basically an unstoppable military force. And that comes in the light of maybe we’re going to go back into Iran or maybe we’re going to go into Venezuela. Apparently, there’s some movement on that, too. What do you see as the concerns about this belief that we have the best military in the history of the world still today?

The Vulnerability of Legacy Forces

Well, I think we’ve heard this on many, many occasions. You know, the Japanese certainly made these noises in November, December of 1941. The British were convinced of this when they sent the Prince of Wales towards Singapore in 1942. The Prince of Wales is now comfortably on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, as is most of the Imperial Japanese Navy.

Our forces are legacy forces. They are a structure that rests comfortably on the foundation of the Second World War. We are in a period of very rapid and unpredictable technological change. The force that we have, as good as it is, is vulnerable in many, many ways.

If we continue to push our way into other people’s countries, if we continue to interfere in the affairs of other people overseas, eventually they will use the capabilities that are emerging right now to destroy or neutralize the forces that President Trump is extolling.

In other words, for every measure, Daniel, there is a countermeasure. We know that only so well. And you can be the best at whatever you do this week and two weeks later, it’s not quite what you thought it was, because something else has happened.

The Germans found this out repeatedly. And when they figured out that they needed something other than what they had, it was too late in the war to build it because they didn’t have the industrial capacity to keep up. We don’t have the industrial capacity to keep up either at this point.

The Need to Retrench and Secure Our Borders

What is really required right now in the United States’ interests and national security is that we need to retrench. We need to come home. We need to shed these unnecessary overseas commitments. We need to get control of ourselves. Who is in our country? Are these borders and territorial waters—and I’m not just talking about the Mexican border, all of our land borders, as well as the borders on the oceans—are they secure? No, they’re not.

We are still seeing massive drugs and massive criminals find their way into the United States. Someone sent me something earlier today and said, “We need to go after these people in Venezuela. Look what they did to Laken Riley.”

Well, I remember Laken Riley. That was a horrible tragedy. This criminal from Venezuela did terrible things and murdered that girl. How did that person get into the United States? That person walked through an open door created by President Biden and Mr. Mayorkas. You know, if anything, they are to be blamed for what happened to that girl. That was simply a criminal Venezuela unloaded.

But do we attack Venezuela and kill tens of thousands of people because a Venezuelan criminal inside the United States murdered one of our citizens? I don’t think so.

Enforcing the Law at Home

I think what we need to do is enforce the law at home, round up these people that don’t belong in our country and send them back and shut down immigration. Until we know who’s inside the United States, we can’t pretend it’s business as usual anymore. It’s not.

But instead of taking those things seriously, adopting sensible measures that are not all that expensive, that are relatively easy to implement, what are we doing? We’re cultivating a new war in Venezuela, and that makes no sense at all. I don’t care whether you like Maduro or anybody else who happens to govern in South America or Central America. We don’t need to do that.

We can cut all the drug problems off at the border and in our coastal waters if we want to do it, and that’s something we need to do. But it’s also—you’ve got to make some hard choices instead of blaming Venezuela. We need to go after the people that come into this country illegally, and we need to go after the people that disseminate the drugs. We need to go after the people who are engaged in child trafficking. And the punishment for these people should be as severe as we can make it.

You know, this is no time for us to indulge criminality. If we are prepared to go halfway around the world to kill people we don’t know who present no threat to us at all, I should think we should see the virtue in dealing with the criminals that we have right here at home instead of going overseas to find people we don’t like. Doesn’t make any sense to me.

DANIEL DAVIS: Yeah, I have to agree with you there. There’s a lot of things that we could do differently that would actually produce a more secure and safe and prosperous country. And I’d like to see us go down that path. But as always, we’re very grateful to you for coming on, for providing such clarity on these things, so that we see that there is a path that can actually help us, and there is a path that we can harm ourselves more. And if we can avoid the one and cling to the other, then there still is a hope for our future. We’ll have to see if our leaders can actually wake up and see that kind of stuff. But all we can do is provide the truth and the evidence that you do here. And so we’re very grateful for that.

COL DOUG MACGREGOR: Okay, thanks.

The Dallas Meeting

DANIEL DAVIS: And by the way, before I let you go there, we had been highlighting this October 4th meeting you had in Dallas a little bit. And so a lot of people were wondering what came of that and wonder if there’s anything you can tell us about it.

COL DOUG MACGREGOR: Well, I need to provide you with some photographs. And we did videotape it, and we will pull out excerpts of the evening because we had some very impressive people speak. And I think it was very well received. It was sold out, so there were no seats. Sold out. And we will do it again. We have not yet decided which city we will go to and when, but that decision will be made in the near future.

But it was not just the people that were there to speak. Judge Napolitano turned in a bravura performance, really explaining what is constitutional, what isn’t, and the importance of the law and how to think about it. Natalie Brunell came in and answered everybody’s potential question about digital currency better than I’ve heard from anybody in the country.

But then we had people in the audience who also spoke, and one of them was a lady, spoke in perfect English. Very, very impressive woman, very smart. But she had lost 22 family members in Gaza, all Christian Palestinians. These particular people were Roman Catholics, and they were members of a church which is arguably, if not the oldest Christian church in the world, perhaps the second oldest.

And of course, these people tried to protect the church, and they were killed by a mix of airstrikes, tank ammunition and snipers. So I asked her if she would please speak, and grudgingly she did. And she broke down because how could you not?

But she was there, as there were several people that came from all over the country saying, “You know, thank God for you. You are saying the truth. You’re telling the truth. And we all need, we all want this to end, and we want it to end as soon as possible.”

And of course, the problem is we all agree, but we don’t have the authority or the power to influence government. The government is under somebody else’s influence, and it’s not American.

DANIEL DAVIS: Well, we’ll have to do whatever we can to change that dynamic. And as I understand, that’s part of what your conversation was. And we look forward to that continuing to expand. And we’d love to promote some of that next time you have opportunity with, whether it’s Natalie or some of these others that are some of your videos here. We’d love to expand that and amplify this message because we certainly believe it as well. Thank you very much, Doug. We appreciate it.

COL DOUG MACGREGOR: Thank you, Dan.

DANIEL DAVIS: And thank you guys very much, too. To let you know, we’ll be back at, let’s see, 1 o’clock or 2 o’clock today with Glenn Diesen. We’re going to be talking about some things he has learned in Russia recently. Also to point out that we are on podcast, Apple Podcast, Spotify, Podcast Addict. Let your friends know that we’re there because some people I know don’t even watch a lot of videos, but they love podcasts. Let them know that they can get the truth there as well.

We’re also on the written form at Substack. You can go to danieldavisdeepdive.substack.com and you can find the written materials there as well as some of the videos posted. So one way or the other, however you get your information, make sure your friends know. Do not keep this to yourself, folks. We need to spread this word. It’s been working and we appreciate what you guys have been doing. We ask you to do a little bit more. Thank you very much folks. And we’ll see you here in a little bit on the Daniel Davis Deep Dive.

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