COL. Douglas Macgregor : How Iran Defeated the US and Israel

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:02]Undeclared wars are commonplace.

[00:00:05]Tragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression, with no complaints from the American people. Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government.

[00:00:18]To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected.

[00:00:26]What if sometimes to love your country you had to alter or abolish the government? What if Jefferson was right?

[00:00:33]What if that government is best which governs least?

[00:00:38]What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong? What if it is better to perish fighting for freedom than to live as a slave? What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now?

[00:01:02]Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Npalitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, May 12, 2026. Colonel Douglas McGregor joins us now. Colonel, a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you very much for joining us. Colonel, how telling is it when arguably the leading Leo neocon in the country, Robert Kagan, the other half of the Kagan Victoria Nuland marriage, can write in the Atlantic that Iran has effectively defeated the United States and Israel.

[00:01:39]Well, I think on one level he's mourning the death of the host that he as a parasite has uh infested for years. This is someone who is always in search of a place to commit US military power, money, and uh capability.

[00:01:57]So now he's finally found something that we are incapable of mastering, and it's no longer possible to disguise. And so he's essentially dismissing the United States, its armed forces, its people as unworthy of further support from Robert Kagan. What a great man.

[00:02:18]Man, I I uh I can't feel but the can't um help but feel your sarcasm and I agree with everything uh you've said, but it must be telling when someone like he uh is willing to uh throw in the towel. Do US and Israeli uh planners and leaders recognize this? The president certainly hasn't. Oh, I think without a doubt they certainly have, but I think President Trump uh probably lives in a bubble of his own making and people are very reluctant to pull him out of the bubble. Now, that doesn't mean he had doesn't suspect that, you know, he's hit a concrete reinforced wall that he can't penetrate. I think he probably knows that. But he refuses to convey the impression that he hasn't won this war.

[00:03:11]You know, I think his problem is uh frankly one of bluff. You know, most of what he does, if you watch him carefully in foreign and policy, but here at home as well, is an exercise in psychological bluff. You know, he he wants the outward show of success and he's managed that to some extent and struggles with weak inconstant leaders in Europe and I would argue in Venezuela to a limited extent.

[00:03:38]But when he employed the bluff uh against Iran, it failed. And his bluff has been called. He never expected this.

[00:03:46]This is hard for him to imagine. So that's why I've tried to tell people that project freedom was abandoned in favor of a new project called Project Nowhere. His game of power and coercion on behalf of Israel has reached its limits. He's lost the strategic initiative. It's not difficult to understand why, but he never never understood what he was up against. He didn't understood the limitations of what he has. You know, one of the things, and we've talked about this before, that distinguished Eisenhower from all of his successors is having lived through the Second War and then gotten to know what it took to wage that war. Eisenhower always had a very acute sense of American limitations. He understood that the American people were not interested in nor would they sustain a long brutal war. That was simply an impossibility. He also understood that World War II had effectively tapped us out. And people don't realize that that we reached a point where we were running out of manpower to send overseas. So the the bottom line is that there there was never a sense of limitations with Trump.

[00:04:55]He felt as though he was the child that broke into the candy store and he could eat as much as he liked and no one would interrupt him. It hasn't worked.

[00:05:05]>> You uh refer to him as surrounded by a bubble. It's a bubble of sycopants. I mean, we keep hearing these stories that uh General Kaine, the chair of the joint chiefs of staff and the vice president might not have been part of the sycopant uh group and might have expressed opinions to him contrary to what he got from Secretary Rubio, Secretary Hegsth and the others. I don't need to mention all of their >> Well, actually speaking, judge, I spoke over the weekend to some people in the White House and they said the opposite.

[00:05:37]There was no one more enthusiastic about going to war with Iran than JD Vance.

[00:05:43]And that's my only own experience with him. Uh I I saw this up close and personal and he was always talking about going to war with Iran. So I don't believe that.

[00:05:54]>> Wow.

[00:05:55]>> As far as consistent with his that's consistent with his financial benefactor, Peter Teal and Palunteer and Absolutely. people that make a fortune on these wars.

[00:06:07]>> And and when it comes to Kane, you know, we've discussed that before. He was not appointed and made a fourstar to say no.

[00:06:14]And he's an airman. And I think like most airmen, he was more than willing to give it a go because they thought this might be another opportunity to win a war with air power only. Of course, that's nonsense as we both know. But nevertheless, I I'm very skeptical of these attempts to do sort of retrospectively confer a degree of credibility and character on these people when I didn't see much evidence for it to begin with.

[00:06:41]>> Right. That that is uh of profound intellectual honesty and deeply uh appreciated here. And I guess I have fallen a little bit to the uh PR view that Vance has thought of himself as uh the loyal soldier but the dissenter up to the point of the uh decision to go in. But I accept very much uh what you what you said. How can they >> Before we before we leave this topic completely, I think it's worth pointing out that right now behind the scenes, at least I'm being told this, that uh the argument is that President Trump was misled by his quote unquote Israeli friends and that had he paid more attention to his American adviserss, the narrative goes, then events might have taken a different course. But the truth is there is a mountain of evidence that like President Lynden Johnson, Trump and his inner circle, including Vance were really driving military action and escalation from the beginning. And Trump seems to have rejected advice from anyone in or out of uniform who opposed it. But very few people that opposed what he wanted to do ever got to the White House, if any. And I think that's your point on the bubble.

[00:08:01]>> Yeah.

[00:08:02]So the bubble is almost literally a bubble with nobody on the inside to express the the uh the prevailing view.

[00:08:12]>> Yes.

[00:08:12]>> If a person harbored internal objections over this, they lacked the uh personal fortitude, >> use another phrase if you want to uh to say anything uh to the president's face.

[00:08:27]Add to that this craziness that they think they can win a war, disrupt a regime, cause regime change, degrade the ballistic missiles, seize the um uh nuclear enriched uh material and if you listen to Netanyahu, divide the country all on the basis of war power of air power, excuse me, air power. Well, I think that we developed a lot of uh sort of self-d delusion in the 90s. We involved ourselves in Bosnia Herziggoa and at one point we bombed the Serbs in and around Sievo and convinced ourselves that this was the dramatic turning point when in reality at the time I was on the ground in Bosnia and I was talking to British and French officers that were involved and they pointed out to me in great detail that the British and French artillery had done infinitely more damage with greater precision than the air strikes. So I sort of tucked that away. But if you go back to Hullbrook, who was the ambassador at the time that Clinton had appointed to deal with all of this, uh he became a huge advocate for the use of air power. That was his sort of uh favorite topic. Then we get into Kosovo and it was made very clear to General Clark that he could have whatever he wanted, do whatever he wanted. obviously not nuclear weapons, but that never ever came up for discussion anyway. But he wasn't going to get any ground force. And so whatever he did, he had to accomplish with air power. Well, he accomplished a great deal, but it wasn't enough. And ultimately we had to send strobe Talbat to Moscow and bribe the Russians to abandon their Serb friends. At which point in time the Serbs realized they weren't going to get any uh coal or oil or food or medical support of any kind during the winter that was coming. So he said either I get out now or I'll face a winter and hundreds of thousands of Serbs will die.

[00:10:31]But it wasn't exclusively by any stretch of the imagination because of air power.

[00:10:36]But the story was spun up to make people believe that air power had been successful. And then when you move on to the Middle East to Iraq, you know, the Iraqis were many things, but they were never uh, you know, 10 feet tall, even though people described them that way.

[00:10:52]And the Iraqis were in no position to resist us for any length of time. And it was never required to bring in a large number of ground forces. Now the neocons understood that but they made the fatal mistake of having once gotten Arab staying. But again you know I think the glossy uh cover to this uh sort of narrative of self-d delusion is air power Uber alas >> and I think Trump fell victim to it. Now everybody's backpedaling and trying to get out from from under the problem but it's it's not going to work. Everybody who's being part of this judge is ultimately going to go down, I would say, politically for what's happened.

[00:11:31]>> So, Colonel, have your friends in the White House expressed a view as to what Trump will do and who will he blame?

[00:11:38]Will he blame Hegsth? Will he blame General Kaine? Will he blame the Israelis? He's certainly got not going to take blame himself. If he does, it'll be the first time in his adult life.

[00:11:49]>> Yeah. Well, that's a good question and I don't have a good answer to it except to point out that there are a lot of people who are blaming the Israelis behind closed doors, but they're all afraid to say so publicly. And I think part of that is that they don't want to admit that, you know, the Israelis have led us down the uh the path to destruction eagerly. And in fact, President Netanyahu or excuse me, Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke quite recently, just a few hours ago, as I understand it, saying that the war is not over. and it must continue. And I think that's what he wants. He doesn't care what it costs us. He doesn't care what it costs the world. He doesn't care how many people starve in the global south. He doesn't care whether or not inflation is going to destroy us along with large numbers of governments all over the world. It's it's irrelevant to him. He wants complete dominance, control, hegemony over the Middle East. The only way he can get it is with us. So I think unfortunately uh Trump can't blame it on the Israelis whether he likes it or not.

[00:12:54]He's going to be held responsible.

[00:12:57]>> But can he allow Netanyahu to go it alone? And Netanyahu can't prevail alone.

[00:13:04]>> No. But even even the Congress, which is being very much a puppet of Israeli interest and power, much like the White House, is going to have to come to the realization that inflation in April reached 3.8%.

[00:13:21]Now, what does that mean? It means that inflation is on the rise. We can't artificially suppress it. The problem with the war, the problem with oil, with fertilizer, feed stocks, food, all of these things are metastasizing. They're getting worse and worse with each passing day.

[00:13:40]At some point, in order to disengage from this tragedy, we are going to have to divorce the Israelis in some way. And I think Netanyahu is going to hang on as long as he can, but it's going to be necessary. And even the puppets on the hill as well as many in the White House are going to have to back away from Israel. That's coming. And it's also coming because, you know, inflation of the kind that we're witnessing now, Judge, that affects the things that I mentioned, food, feed stocks, fuel, and fertilizer.

[00:14:15]This kind of thing changes governments routinely in history. I mean, you go all the way back to the French Revolution in 1789 when the population could no longer afford to buy bread. There was a re revolution. It wasn't because people sat in the corner and read pamphlets and said, "We need a new form of government." Absolutely not. It was simply because people could not eat.

[00:14:40]They couldn't get what they needed. I I expect that over the next year we'll see 40 50 60 governments around the world certainly in Europe. Uh we may see it very shortly in India. Uh you have Prime Minister Modi who is now caught in a terrible position. He didn't bring this on. He didn't ask for this problem but now he's got it. And famine in India is a real possibility. Beyond that he's got a power problem. India had power problems before this started. and he started in 2018 to try and fix the power grid, but it's too late. Now there's no power. Uh the a civilization cannot exist without power. That's why cheap energy is so vitally important and to cheap energy is tied cheap credit. We're losing all of it right now. It's all going away. This this disruption is going to bring down governments and I include the Trump administration in that category. you uh wrote a fascinating piece about a week or so uh ago arguing that wealth and power is moving east. So let me ask you a couple of uh questions about it. Has the war in Iran pushed Russia, Iran, and China closer together?

[00:15:57]Has the war in Iran accelerated the movement of wealth and power >> eastward? Oh, absolutely without question. Let's look at this for a second because initially Russia, China viewed India as a p potential strategic partner. But India has been unable to solve its own problems. It's been unable so to say to get out of its own way. Iran is very different and in contrast to us I think both the Chinese and the Russians viewed the Iranian state nation and population as strong enough to resist us. Uh that's one of the reasons that they helped and they assisted but the Iranians would never allow them to bring in their their troops, their forces, their navy, their air force or anything else. And the Chinese and the Russians also saw Iran at the center of this uh central Asian Eurasian landmass project known as Bel and Road. The idea being that you build this tremendous network of transportation uh and movement of commercial goods back and forth across the continent all the way from Europe to Shanghai, you know, from from the west coast of Africa all the way to uh the east coast of uh China. All of this is now part of the reason for Iran's success and the confidence that now the Chinese and the Russians have in them. So what we're seeing is a reversal of what what used to exist. Remember in 1492 when Columbus crossed he discovered a new world and very rapidly that discovery powered Europe. How did it power Europe? Mainly through the acquisition of huge quantities of gold. We had a series of empires that rose and fell. But the living standards rose. Our technology developed faster. Well, that's over. And that kind of wealth is now being generated in the place that used to be the dominant creator of wealth in in human history. And that's China. China is now the the wealth engine. It's the it's the workshop of the world. It's the production center for the world. We're not happy about that. But we've ultimately squandered our wealth pointlessly and needlessly. President Trump is going to go over to China and he's going to play what he thinks are cards. He's going to look at his cards and there may be baseball cards, but they're of no value in this discussion with the Chinese. And China is weathering this terrible disruption that we've created through this war. They have tremendous stocks, stockpiles of everything from oil to coal to various kinds of energy creation. Uh we could go on and on. Food, you name it. China is ready to deal with this and the rest of the world is seeing it and China has skillfully avoided being being involved in any of the disputes that we've started stayed away from all these wars and conflicts while with each passing year we found a new reason to go somewhere in the world Africa Latin America wherever it happens to be and intervene to disrupt to meddle to push.

[00:19:10]China has not done that. China is certainly willing to do business with everybody, but China has demonstrated conclusively it's not interested in changing regimes or countries or societies. So this is why you're seeing this tremendous shift in wealth and power. And I don't think we can reverse it. Now there are ways for us to benefit from it. Strangely enough, we can alter our behaviors and ultimately the world can become more balanced in time. But for the moment uh the wealth, the technology is moving east.

[00:19:43]>> Let me ask you about um military reserves. I'm talking about armaments.

[00:19:51]Uh our friend Scott Ritter has argued between what we have given the Israelis, what we have given uh the Ukrainians, what we have wasted in Iran, our supplies are dangerously dangerously low. In some cases, he says uh close to zero. Do you hear that view?

[00:20:15]I think uh again in addition to squandering wealth unnecessary on things that are absolutely not profitable to us instead of reshoring industries which should have been President Trump's top priority securing our borders ending illegal immigration enforcing the law.

[00:20:32]All of those things are things that he ran on but he hasn't done it. Instead he's done I think what Scott Ritter is alluding to. He's wasted uh the tremendous foundations of power that were built up in 30, 40, 50 years of cold war. There's no question about it. Now, is it to the point where if we were dragged into a war at this at this stage with a major power uh that we would be at risk of being destroyed? I I don't think it's gotten that far, but in time it will. But I think the greater danger is not so much the low stocks of precisiong guided missiles and weapons.

[00:21:10]It's this tendency that we have to create alliances against us. You started off with a critical question. Has this brought Russia, China, and Iran closer together? Absolutely. I would go one step further and say that most of the global south sees itself now aligned with China and Russia against us. And the Europeans that spoke out and warned everybody about this, like Mr. Orban, they're not on the stage right now. And they desperately need to get on the stage and soon because they used to be the soberminded ones. They're the ones that said, "What do you want to go to Vietnam for? What are you doing?" Well, Desert Storm looks good, but I don't think we really want to be part of it.

[00:21:53]They they were the ones that talked sense to us. they became vassels of this greater sort of neocon fantasy world in which uh we were going to dominate everybody everywhere all the time. Well, that's crazy nonsense. It's nothing that anybody with a right mind should even strive to achieve. So bottom line is judge, I think Scott's right, except that I would go one step further and I find the second part of that answer far more dangerous. The possibility that people are just aligning against us.

[00:22:26]Colonel, why do we have uh 40,000 troops in South Korea?

[00:22:32]>> You know, it's interesting. President Trump asked that question uh when I last spoke to him in person in November of uh I guess it was No, I guess it was earlier than that. I guess it was in April of 2020, which is the first time that I met with him. And he said, "How long have we been in Korea?" I said, "Well, sir, we've been there for 70 years." He said, "That's ridiculous."

[00:22:55]I said, "Yes, it is." But you you had other people sitting in the room at the time who were horrified because I suggested the Chinese were not going to attack Korea. The the Chinese were interested in going to war with anybody.

[00:23:07]Oh, no, that's wrong. I mean, you know, others that were sitting there from defense and the National Security Council st, oh no, this is terrible.

[00:23:15]China is a great threat. I said, no, I don't think China threatens us. We threaten ourselves by keeping our borders open to the south, by not dealing decisively with the drug cartels, not in Mexico per se right now, but here at home inside our own country.

[00:23:32]He uh seemed to understand that. So, you know, it's it's it's surprising that it doesn't get more attention. Now, the key thing for us in connection with Korea is as follows.

[00:23:44]We have thanks to the Korean War, the arrangements that were made after the war by the United Nations, operational control of all the Korean forces in South Korea. Now, the reason for that was that we feared >> Wait a minute. We control their military.

[00:24:02]>> Yes, exactly. We have operational control of them. The reason for that was that in the 60s and the 70s there was a real interest in South Korea in attacking north. Very few people realize that but they were ready to go north to reunify the country. Obviously given Soviet nuclear weapons capability and the potential that this could once again widen into a war that included China. We were absolutely disinterested in that possibility. Well, those things are no longer dangers or problems. In fact, I would say the opposite is the case.

[00:24:36]Right now, South Korea does a land office business with China. And if you were to ask Beijing, if you have to make a choice, which Korea do you want? They would eagerly point to South Korea, not the North. The North is a basket case.

[00:24:51]It's a terrible basket case. And I think under ideal circumstances, the Chinese would welcome the reunification of the peninsula under South Korean leadership so that North Korea can be developed into a successful, peaceful, and prosperous state. But we stand opposed to that. So we are no longer seen as a benefit strategically to the Korean people or to anybody else in Asia for that matter. We're seen as a catalyst for war. And the bad news is there's a lot of evidence to support that because Mr. Hegsth right now is talking to the Koreans and trying to drag them into the conflict that we started in the Persian Gulf. And of course, the Koreans are completely disinterested in that. They just want this thing to end like everybody else does and get back to business. But at the same time, we want by implication to drag them into war with China. We're trying to do the same thing with Japan. We're trying to do the same thing with Australia. And for that matter, we tried, it hasn't worked to do that to Vietnam. The Vietnamese have made it very clear, we may not like the Chinese, but we're not interested in going to war with them. This is the problem. We're living in the wrong century, dealing with the wrong issues.

[00:26:05]We need to live in the 21st century, and the issues that we're worried about are largely irrelevant to what's happening right now.

[00:26:17]Colonel, uh, how do you see the Iran escapade ending? What offramp does Trump have?

[00:26:28]>> Well, as we've discussed before, I don't think he has one. And every time that one might have surfaced in some way, it involved some form of concession from us that was anethma to him. So I think at this stage, you know, whatever he does, whatever decision he makes is going to convey the impression that we have lost strategically in the Persian Gulf.

[00:26:55]That means that the only other alternative is to go back to attacking Iran in the hopes that maybe this time around you'll hit the right targets.

[00:27:03]This time around you'll do enough damage and this time around the Iranian state society and and people will fall apart.

[00:27:11]That's not going to happen, Judge.

[00:27:13]Absolutely will not happen. And in fact, earlier today, a spokesman for the Iranian government stated that if they are brought once again under attack by the United States, they may consider enriching uranium to 90%. In other words, produce the plutonium that is critical to a nuclear weapon. They haven't done it, and I still hear voices telling me that they don't want to, but if they are attacked again, that's something they have to consider. And I think this is the greatest tragedy of all. Uh, you know, obviously I'm, you know, my heart goes out to the hundreds of millions of people around the world that are now going to be desperately hungry because Donald Trump in his war has single-handedly reversed the green revolution, >> right?

[00:28:02]>> You know, you go back to the 60s, the population was half the size of the population today. Well, there's a reason for that. because we were able to produce the green revolution and people could could eat on a scale and live on a scale they never have before. Well, he's he's destroyed that, I think, at least temporarily over the next 12 months or so. He's set inflation loose. But the worst part of all is that he has sent an unmistakable message. If you don't want the United States and or Israel to attack you, you better invest in nuclear weapons. What a disaster.

[00:28:42]>> Yeah, Colonel, thank you very much. Thank you for extraord this extraordinary insight all across uh the board. I have another commitment otherwise I could talk to you for another hour on all this. I know you have other things to do as well. Thank you for your time. We'll look forward to seeing you next week.

[00:29:00]>> Sure. Thank you, judge.

[00:29:02]>> What a pleasure. Thank you. Uh, coming up later today at 2:00 this afternoon, Matt Hoe at 3:00, Colonel Karen Quatowski, Trust Nepal Tanner for Judging Freedom.