THIS IS WHERE IT TURNS — AND SOMETHING BIGGER IS COMING Douglas Macgregor

Añadido: 2026-05-10

[00:00:00]Can you talk more about the, you know, Trump's decision to start this war could literally kill more people than the Holocaust.

[00:00:13]>> Oh, easily, easily. There's no question about it. And you're right to make the point that you put the worst cases up there, which are people that are always living on the margins as it is. But we need to understand that until the 1970s, we never stockpiled oil. It was the oil crisis of the 1970s that resulted in the creation of all these strategic reserves all over the world. And the people with the best strategic reserves, the the most in reserve that can survive this better than anybody are the Chinese. You know, now we're we're going to have our problems. People don't realize how much oil we import to California. And California has a limited number of refineries. And I forgotten the exact number of how many barrels of oil per day they need to sustain themselves, but that's falling rapidly. Now, people say, "Well, we've got oil." Yes, but it's not on the West Coast, which means it has to be trucked over the mountains to California. We don't have any pipelines that go from east to west. California is a basket case. Not only is it deeply in debt, but now it doesn't have the fuel that it needs to power what's left of its economy, which is not very good. So, we're going to definitely have problems here at home. But I think the biggest issue of all for your purposes and and you're spot on on this is really fertilizer. And if you look at the fertilizer today, the amount that's being exported is a fraction of what's required uh for people all over the world. I'm talking about fertilizer coming out of the Gulf >> right >> now. You you hit on something that's very important.

[00:01:50]Trump made the decision to go to war.

[00:01:52]Well, I'm not sure he did. I think the Israelis made the decision and Trump was compelled to follow along with it. I think Mr. Mr. Netanyahu continues to exert far more influence and power and authority frankly in Washington DC than Donald Trump. And that's why people are saying to me all the time, "Well, why haven't the Democrats stood up and insisted on an end to this? Why aren't they fighting this?" And I said, "Because the same people that control the Republican party control the Democratic party." There isn't a profound difference there. They may differ on some other domestic issues, but when it comes to Israel and Iran, everybody's pretty much in the same boat. Now, we're going to we're going to have a vote, I think, coming up either tomorrow or the next day on the War Powers Act. I'll be very interested to watch that because I think we can expect all the Republicans to line up in support of the president's desire to continue this war no matter what. I'll be surprised if any Democrats don't also join. I think they may, but I don't think it it has any chance of passing.

[00:02:57]So, why did we go to war? Well, first of all, this is all about Israel. Uh, contrary to what Donald Trump says publicly and his supporters, we don't have any reason to go to war with Iran.

[00:03:10]Iran presents no existential threat to us. And this argument that, well, look what they did to us when we were in Iraq. Well, what the Iranians did was that they provided some technology for improvised explosive devices to their Shiite co-religionists inside southern Iraq. But the Arabs quickly took that over. They manufactured them and built them. The Iranians had very little impact there. But they did what we would do if we had a Russian or Chinese enemy occupying Mexico. Uh if they if the Russians or Chinese were as dumb as we are and tried to occupy Mexico the way we occupied Iraq, well then I'm sure that we would provide the Mexican resistance with whatever it needed. Uh that I see is something that one does because it's in one's interest to do so more than anything else. is just a natural strategic outcome of a unwanted and unnecessary military occupation.

[00:04:05][clears throat] But we also forget that when Saddam Hussein waged war against Iran and killed over 800,000 Iranians in the process because he wanted to capture their oil fields and that's where most of the war was waged and with missiles of course between cities. We supplied Saddam Hussein with all the materials he needed. We supplied him with weapons and equipment. We send advisers over there.

[00:04:28]When I was a young officer commanding a tank company in uh this got to go way back now to what 198283 at Fort Carson, Colorado uh there were people leaving Fort Carson while I was there as a captain and going over to advise the Iraqis on how to fight the Iranians. We forget that 800 plus thousand dead Iranians because of a war we actively supported against them in Iraq. Then of course we turned around went back to Iraq in 1990 and you know the rest of the story.

[00:04:59]>> And the chemical weapons that we supplied.

[00:05:02]>> Absolutely. And we go to the Germans to support that. We push the Germans into that as we frequently do push our NATO allies to do things. So you're spot on.

[00:05:11]And if I were an Iranian, obviously under the circumstances, I wouldn't feel much sympathy for us. But the the picture itself is is a very grim one largely because of the economic picture that you're well familiar with. And I think that's something most Americans don't understand. They they won't understand any of this until it hits them.

[00:05:32]>> Yes. Yes. I'm I'm what I love about your take on this is not only are you a highly experienced and highly educated, you know, hands-on military man, a veteran, but also I would consider you an academic of military history as well.

[00:05:48]And I want to >> actually actually my background is entirely in international relations and comparative politics. The history is something I studied on the side.

[00:05:58]>> That's interesting.

[00:05:59]If you don't know the historical record, what are you going to say about politics? Uh my my only point is that unfortunately we tend to compartmentalize a lot and people that go into what they call political science frequently have a superficial grasp of historical experience and they may or may not understand much about basic economics, >> right?

[00:06:20]>> And that's the problem. So they build these models that are there to try and tell you what's going to happen. They don't work.

[00:06:26]>> You know, most models are useless. Some are useful, but most of them are not.

[00:06:31]And it's a big problem in in our educational approach. But anyhow, that's another subject.

[00:06:35]>> Well, that actually is a great segue to what I wanted to ask you about next, which is the long-term damage to the oil output or oil throughput capacity of these wells in Iran and also neighboring countries. And of course, uh, big news just broke, uh, today or yesterday. The UAE is leaving OPEC. they're going to set their own, you know, production at this point. But let me show you this infographic. It's another one I put together. Uh very few Americans actually know this or very few people that if the oil wells stop uh functioning especially these low pressure wells that are in Iran where the oil is barely flowing if they stop and and there's not flow for 2 or 3 weeks or it could be as little as a few days or as long as a few months then you can get 20 to 30% permanent loss of output of that well for a number of reasons. uh water intrudes in the fissurers, there can be paraffin blockages, all kinds of, you know, the the chemical engineers can figure that out. But the bottom line that that you cover that you know is that the economic consequences of this are now starting to add up day by day where you can't turn it right back on. So talk to us about what that means for our world.

[00:07:49]Well, in the short run, if we don't stop this air campaign right now, this air and missile campaign, if we don't disengage from what we're doing, and I say this in in all sincerity, and I would do it if I were the president of the United States, I would say on humanitarian grounds, I am disengaging our forces from this war because this is no no longer a question of a dispute between ourselves, Israel, and Iran.

[00:08:14]This is a dispute that's having global impact. And I'm not interested in being responsible for what you described earlier. But the startup cost in the future, if we don't if we don't stop this, I think that it'll be 5 to 10 years before most of these oil fields really recover from the damage that's being done to them. It's it's not just oil infrastructure, as you point out. You you have a problem that we, by the way, have right now in Venezuela. That's one of the reasons all the oil corporation CEOs that met with Donald Trump's simply told him repeatedly didn't like it.

[00:08:49]Didn't want to hear it. But they said, "Look, this is too expensive to go down there. The infrastructure is old. It would cost us hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars to go down there, refit, refurbish everything, and pump out oil even from existing oil wells for all the reasons that you've already cited. So you're talking, you know, he talks about bombing everybody back to the stone age. I think we're not going to go back to the stone age, but we're certainly looking at a profound drop in our standard of living here at in the United States and around the world. And that's going to last for several years. Every economist that I know has told me that repeatedly. If we don't stop this now, we continue this and we do another three or four week air and missile campaign on the same scale that we did the last one, we're going to see damage. It just won't be recovered for almost a decade in most cases.

[00:09:42]>> It It's like we're getting to the point where each day that ticks by right now can now have a price tag attached to it.

[00:09:50]A cost to the global economy and a cost to human lives. And and it might be something like I'm just guessing but for each day that this war continues another 50,000 people will starve in a year or you know something like that. Maybe the numbers smaller than that but there's also an economic cost to this. For every day that ticks by there's you know $200 million of losses to the global economy.

[00:10:14]So this is becoming, you know, Trump is sort of exporting the cost to the rest of the world while the American people are funding the weapons and Netanyahu is giving him his orders. It's like everybody loses. Well, it's uh you know, I'm just looking right now at a at a chart that unfortunately uh you know, it's not available for you, but the bottom line is that starting in April, the export of ura [clears throat] laden ships uh out of the Gulf, in other words, URA has gone from, you know, 1 million tons down to zero.

[00:10:47]>> Oh, wow.

[00:10:49]>> To zero right now. And that means uh you know everybody who's trying to cultivate crops, the planning season is upon us.

[00:10:56]And it takes weeks and weeks for these ships to be to to arrive. I mean it's not just you you're not just disrupting the the supply train for this whole thing, the supply chain rather. You're you're doing exactly what you just said. You're making famine absolutely unavoidable.

[00:11:16]Now I don't know if uh President Trump understands that. If this is being briefed to him, I don't know his attitude. That the problem is that the Israelis want the destruction of Iran.

[00:11:26]That is their goal. This business, you said, "Well, how did we get into this?"

[00:11:30]Well, it started out, well, we'll begin a campaign in support of the unrest, the supposed theory of millions of people who want to overthrow the evil regime.

[00:11:41]Well, that was always nonsense and that failed quickly. Well, now what we have to do is decapitate. Go in and destroy the regime. that didn't work. Well, now we have to cause the disintegration of the Iranian state and society. That's not going to happen. You know, we had 180 ships at sea during the Cuban missile blockade. That doesn't include all the submarines, but that included about [clears throat] eight carriers, half of which were submarine chasers.

[00:12:09]Now, you stop and look at that. Remember that we were operating on our home waters, which meant that logistical support was easy. It was easy to reach a port. You could replenish quickly. You could pull ships off off the line, send them back into port, bring them back, rotate them, whatever. Rotate crews. We can't do that in the Indian Ocean. We have people that have been at sea for 10 months or more.

[00:12:32]>> Wow.

[00:12:33]>> Morale in the ships at sea is not good.

[00:12:37]They're they're miserable. Let's be frank. This is terrible duty. Anybody who's been to sea for any length of time knows it's tough. Well, this is worse.

[00:12:45]So there are a lot of people that are unhappy about that. Now the other thing we're not talking about is the arsenal of missiles that we have at our disposal and you can read you can read different kinds of accounts and I don't like to go into into numbers because I don't know when it becomes classified. We know we launched over a thousand tomahawks.

[00:13:04]Tomahawk missiles were actually not bad off in that particular area. In other words, we've got another thousand that we can expend and we still have something left over. But when you move out of that into the standard missile into Patriot missiles into theater high altitude missiles and so forth, we're scraping the bottom and everybody misses the point that we are not mobilized for total war. Which means that you're only producing a couple of hundred missiles or so every month when in order to keep up with the demand, you need to do hundreds and hundreds of missiles every month, preferably two or 300 every week.

[00:13:38]The Chinese can produce a thousand engines for missiles and rockets every day. So just stop and think about a thousand rocket or missile motors every day. How many can we produce in a day? I think it's not going to be very many. And I doubt seriously we can get 30 out in a month. Well, I think the first problem is that there's a failure in Washington to understand that while you can print money, you can't print fertilizer. You can't print petroleum product uh products and there's no appreciation for the very serious emergency that much of the world confronts right now because most of the petroleum products that can be delivered have been delivered. We're now looking at a time lag because all of the tankers that were able to get out several weeks ago are now arriving and nothing more is coming or very little is coming. So I think that's the first problem. There's just no sense of the global emergency. The second part is that I don't think there was an understanding [clears throat] of just what Iran could do. I think there was a tendency to grossly underestimate Iran instead of taking them seriously and understanding the geographic realities.

[00:14:53]Iran in geographic terms is a giant fortress and it has perfected its use of precisiong guided weapons and overhead surveillance and that's unbeatable at this point and I don't think the president wants to come to terms with that reality. [clears throat] >> You know the other aspect to it is that this is not just about oil anymore. This is as much now about uranium stockpile of Iran, which is why this war may go into a completely different direction, more deadlock.

[00:15:23]Well, I don't see much evidence that the Iranians are prepared to surrender their right to enrich uranium. For them, that's a question of a sovereign national right. Uh just as it is for India or any any state that wants to engage in enriching uranium. There's also no evidence that the Iranians have ever tried to build a nuclear weapon.

[00:15:44]Could they do it? There's no question in my mind about what that is possible. But thus far, we've never seen any evidence for it. So, I think the obsession with uranium enrichment is a serious stumbling block.

[00:15:56]>> Okay?

[00:15:56]>> And I don't see how we get past that because that is a demand really from Israel. And you have to keep in mind that we are essentially putting Israeli demands in front of the Iranian leadership. Frankly, we don't have a desperate need to halt their uranium enrichment. All of this originates with Israel.

[00:16:15]>> You know, before I ask you about the Iranian nuclear capability, I will have to clarify that Colonel Douglas, as far as India is concerned, our nuclear facilities are totally civilian for civilian purposes and we have a doctrine which is no first use. So, we can't compare India to any of what is happening. Which brings me to ask uh the Iranian nuclear capabilities and how much uranium they've been able to enrich is still a cause of concern and essentially is going to decide which way this conflict goes.

[00:16:45]>> Well, I I think you know if you're an Iranian at this point and you look at what's happened to your country, you look at the enormous damage that we've inflicted and you recognize the danger and the future of not having a nuclear weapon.

[00:16:59]In other words, I I think it's not just Iran. I think it's many many countries around the world are learning the the lesson that we didn't want to impart, which is that if you don't want to be attacked by the United States or Israel, then you'd better have a nuclear weapon on hand to deter such an attack.

[00:17:16]>> Okay, >> that's unfortunately where I think we're headed. But at the moment, is there any room for negotiation on this topic? To me, that's unclear. And the Iranians have been pretty clear in so far as their opposition to any further discussions as long as we are blocking access to the straight of Hormuz.

[00:17:34]>> So if no negotiations, what will really open the straight of Hormuz?

[00:17:40]>> I think the best way to do it is for the president to recognize that we're facing a global emergency. We're looking at famine. Millions of people could actually starve in in 6 7 12 months as a result of the supply chain disruption.

[00:17:56]The whole energy complex uh is being essentially isolated from hundreds of millions of people all over the global south and I would say increasingly also in Europe and Africa from access to the petroleum products and ultimately fertilizer.

[00:18:11]>> Okay.

[00:18:11]>> So I think you've got to stop the blockade. It's not the Iranians who are preventing people from getting in or getting out. It's us. We are blockading Iran and that's the problem.

[00:18:23]>> Okay. So, diplomacy has very little window. Hasn't succeeded. The war continues. Are we then looking at some sort of an endless war that is just frozen right now and will continue?

[00:18:36]>> Well, that's a good question. Uh I think that it it's not going to be a perpetual war.

[00:18:41]>> Okay. because the world is suffering and ultimately the pain is is coming home to Americans in the United States. It's not just rising gas prices, but uh farmers are are going bankrupt in the United States because they can't afford to purchase fertilizer and in many cases we don't have the fertilizer to sell them.

[00:19:01]We learned to stockpile oil back in the 1970s, but we never learned to stockpile fertilizer. So, I don't think this can go on for too long before things get very bad here at home.

[00:19:12]>> And we're in a financial crisis of our own. Our dollar is is essentially losing its position in the world. Much of the world is moving away from us and towards bricks. So, I think the combination of the financial crisis at home along with the economic implications of what's happened are going to bring this to a close. Now, how that happens, does the president finally say, "That's enough.

[00:19:37]We're leaving." Do we walk away? I have no idea.

[00:19:40]>> What more can be done in terms of diplomatic options to ensure this ends soon?

[00:19:46]>> I think President Trump right now is trying to make that decision. Uh, I don't think he wants to return to massive air and missile strikes against Iran, though that remains a possibility.

[00:19:58]I think that he stumbled upon the idea of a blockade without realizing what he was doing. And so they're starting to re-examine the wisdom of continuing the blockade. There are some people that want to spread it across the world so that we're stopping ships coming from the Persian Gulf and places like the Straight of Mala. I think that's very stupid. But there is a final option and the final option is to stand up and say there is a humanitarian crisis in the world and I as president of the United States have a moral obligation to the rest of the world to end this conflict and as a result I'm suspending any further military operations. I'm ending the blockade and we're going to look for other ways to reconcile our differences with Iran. But that depends on to some extent I would say in fact almost decisively on Israel because Israel is the state that demanded this war and we obliged. Israel thanks to its lobby in the United States and the and the billionaires that support that lobby currently controls not only what happens in the White House, they also control the Congress.

[00:21:06]>> [clears throat] >> We've heard almost nothing from anyone in the Senate or the House about the terrible consequences of this war.

[00:21:13]There's been no expression of concern or sympathy for the rest of the world. They they frankly are not interested. They are currently obliged to do as the Israelis want them to do and that's simply based on money. Billions of dollars over many decades have been poured into the House, the Senate, and in more recent years into the White House to ensure that Israel gets whatever it wants.

[00:21:37]>> So, I think it's really up to the president. He's the one that has to break ranks with Israel. He can do it, but I'm sure it will be painful.