Douglas Macgregor argues the US military has already lost to Iran, and American hegemony is collapsing
Colonel Douglas Macgregor is interviewed by Glenn Diesen on the state of the US-Iran war, the Trump-Netanyahu meeting, the war in Ukraine, and the broader collapse of Western economic and military dominance.
Summary
Colonel Douglas Macgregor, decorated combat veteran and former adviser to the US Secretary of Defense, speaks with Glenn Diesen about what he describes as a decisive turning point in American global power. Macgregor argues that the US armed forces have effectively lost their confrontation with Iran, and that the world has concluded American military, political, and economic hegemony is over. He contends that Trump's meeting with Netanyahu produced no meaningful change in direction, and that the White House is functioning as an instrument of Israeli lobby policy. On Ukraine, Macgregor argues that Russia is advancing decisively, that Zelensky's government is decomposing, and that a Russian victory is now inevitable — though Western political and media establishments refuse to acknowledge it. He warns that a convergence of energy disruption, unsustainable debt, and the collapse of cheap credit will produce a severe economic crisis visible by the end of 2025, at which point overseas conflicts will become politically irrelevant to domestic populations.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Opening: The Trump-Netanyahu Meeting and the Direction of the Iran War
Glenn Diesen: Welcome back. We are joined again by Colonel Douglas Macgregor, a decorated combat veteran, author, and former adviser to the US Secretary of Defense. Thank you for coming back on the program. I see now that Trump and Netanyahu have met in the White House. Trump appears to have expressed some concerns about the impacts on energy markets and the global economy of the Iran war, while Netanyahu appears to be pushing the idea that it's unlikely a deal can be made with Iran, and that what is necessary is more pressure — economic pressure, but also military strikes. I was wondering: is there anything to be made of this meeting? Did it have any significance, or are we still on the same path?
Douglas Macgregor: What we're hearing in terms of comments — what we refer to in English as boilerplate — is not particularly informative. I would say we could reach two or three conclusions. The first, unfortunately, is that Trump has once again decided not to decide anything when it comes to Ukraine. He listened to Zelensky. Obviously he was told by his handlers that he should, and he did, and they seem to have had an amicable meeting during which Zelensky wants to license the production of Patriot missiles in Ukraine — which will never happen. By the time they got to that, Ukraine won't exist anymore in my estimation. Trump indulged all of that nonsense and sort of waved goodbye. He's not going to stop Congress from wasting money and time on Ukraine. He's just not going to decide anything. It's disappointing, but I think this is something the Russians have become accustomed to.
When he turned to Netanyahu — Netanyahu showed up and I think privately said what he's always said. Today in the Wall Street Journal there was an article about a two-week plan developed by Admiral Cooper that would result in another massive missile and bombing campaign that would theoretically have different results. And we continue to hear rumors about the use of ground forces, particularly against Kish Island and potentially Chabahar on the south coast of Iran. So I think whatever disagreements they may have had, there's no change in the larger strategic direction. And I have this sinking feeling that we are going to be attacking very shortly, in a big way.
The Regional Spread of the War
Glenn Diesen: Some of these attacks, though — it appears that escalation control is not quite there. We've seen the attacks on Iraq. This can have a lot of unforeseen consequences. The involvement of Yemen in the war is deeply problematic. There are a lot of countries involved here. Which is it that concerns you the most?
Douglas Macgregor: I think we can conclude that a couple of things are underway. One is that this is a regional war now. This is no longer limited to Israel, Iran, and the United States. It has spilled over into Iraq, as you point out. The Popular Mobilization Forces there — the PMF — are very loyal to the Iranians, who stood by them through the civil war and virtually from the beginning of our intervention and occupation. They have their eyes on Kuwait. Frankly, I think Kuwait will cease to exist when this war ends. It'll become part of Iraq.
I also think this war is spreading to places we're not paying attention to. There was a refinery in Egypt that was badly damaged by an unmanned system. We're not quite sure where it came from — it could have come from Iraq or any number of places, could have come from the Houthis. Al-Ansar is now in control of access to the Red Sea. Iran controls access to the Persian Gulf. This is a clear and unambiguous message that the United States Navy no longer controls either of those waterways and is no longer the dominant force it claims to be.
The second piece — and this is the most important part, and what I think troubles Trump more than anything else — is not just the loss of control over the flow of oil or the destruction of the global energy complex. To Donald Trump personally and to his inner circle, what's at stake right now is the survival of American military, political, and economic hegemony. That's what it's all about.
You'll recall all these remarks about the rules-based liberal international order. That thing was concocted in the aftermath of Bretton Woods — the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the instrumentalities that were supposed to be helpful and good for people in the world. People bought that for a while, and they finally realized, as Charles de Gaulle predicted, that everything being developed was really a Trojan horse for American hegemonic power. And what has happened over the last thirty years, as the Russians and others have noted, is that this hegemonic power expanded to a point of intolerability. People just won't tolerate it anymore. And the acid test for this military age has been Iran. The United States armed forces, thus far, have lost.
For all intents and purposes, the world has concluded that the era of American military, political, and economic hegemony is over. So what is Trump really doing? At this point, Trump is fighting a rearguard action. He's trying to save whatever he can of this hegemony. The reason he went back to war after signing the ceasefire is that he finally realized the ceasefire was an unambiguous surrender of US military hegemony. He couldn't afford to allow it to happen.
Now you have all sorts of people saying, "If this is allowed to stand, if we cannot defeat Iran, then others will challenge us, and years ahead we will be targets." The possibility that most of the world will simply get on with itself — especially in the Eastern Hemisphere — without us doesn't seem to occur to anybody.
We are now continuing to weaponize our economy and our financial system. Sanctions upon sanctions directed at China, sanctions upon sanctions directed at Iran, directed at Russia — anyone that we don't like who challenges us. It's a dead end, Glenn.
Russia's Advance and the Emerging Eastern Axis
So I think we are rapidly approaching a turning point. Whether it's a turning point or we're just reaching entropy, I don't know. But if you look at the Russians right now, contrary to what people are saying in the West, they are advancing. The Russian military is stronger today than at any time since the 1980s. More and more forces are being mobilized, trained, and equipped. Russian forces are now effectively blockading Odessa and Mykolaiv ports, shutting that off, turning what remains of Ukraine into a landlocked area. Kyiv is justifiably concerned that the so-called fortress cities are going to fall shortly, and that will effectively open the path to Dnipro, Kharkiv, and Kyiv. Zelensky is worried. His government is decomposing — firing people left and right, people resigning and leaving.
At the same time, we've actually privately said to the Russians that we'd like to talk. And apparently Minister Lavrov has said no thanks, because he sees no evidence that we're really interested in bringing an end to the war.
Then you turn to Israel. Israel is very happy that we abandoned the memorandum of understanding. They simply want to keep the war going as long as possible because theirs is a war to the finish. They've turned it into an existential war for Israel. Either they can exterminate and annihilate their enemies all over the region, or not. They have complete control of us for the moment, and so they're confident that can still be achieved. I'm not so sure it can, but that's what they think. And as long as we are obedient and do what they tell us to do, they're going to continue.
So we're in for another massive air and missile strike scenario, another offensive, and the White House remains what I would call an Israeli or Jewish lobby policymaking center. That's why I say Trump listened, and I think Trump is going to obey.
At the same time, we're still in a fight with the Chinese. The potential for war there has receded. Everyone, months ago, announced that we didn't have enough missiles and enough capability to attack China, and if we did, we'd lose. For some reason, nobody bothered to say the same was true for Iran.
This is a catastrophic outcome for Trump. And another thing I don't think Trump is fully aware of — though maybe he is — is that we're beginning to see the emergence of a new axis. We talk about these axes all the time. Well, there's only one axis in the West and the Middle East: the Israeli-American axis. But when you look east, you have a growing axis consisting of Russia, China, Iran, and I would add Turkey — because even though the Turks have not yet engaged, they are on the very edge of doing so. The population there is overwhelmingly in support of striking back against this Israeli-American axis in the Middle East. I think Erdoğan has waited as long as he possibly can and will continue to wait, but he wants to be in at the end.
It's sort of like the Battle of Waterloo, which was largely a German affair — Prussians, Hanoverians, and Germans from everywhere, and of course the British — and then suddenly at the end, imagine the Austrians and the Russians and others showing up. I think that will be Turkey at the end of this thing.
Iran had to do two things. The first was survive. It's done that. It's demonstrated it cannot be destroyed, and it's going to continue to attack. The second goal for Iran, having survived — and they weren't sure that they would; they spent twenty or thirty years preparing but were never completely sure — now that they know they're going to survive, is to drive the American military presence completely out of the region. And that's going to happen, because we can't protect our own bases, let alone any of our partners.
At that point, this new axis I just described is going to dominate. It's going to dominate the Middle East. It's going to dominate Eastern Europe, perhaps Western Europe, because people in Western Europe are looking at this and saying, "Why should we sign up for the United States? It's no longer the leading economic power. It no longer has the same political influence. Financially, it's brought us to ruin. We're part of this Western arrangement — circulate and recirculate all the dollars back through New York City, fund the massive debt so that we can continue to live well." Europeans are saying, "What are we doing this for?"
And then there's the military dimension. Europeans are beginning to question their governments because they are unsure about this Russian threat — and they should be unsure about it, because it's not real, as we know. But the possibility that you could end up in a nuclear confrontation with China, Pakistan, and Russia, let alone a confrontation that would also include Turkey and Iran — these things don't seem to enter into discussion in the White House. And I think that's because right now, everything being done in the White House and on the Hill is seen through the lens of the Israel lobby and the fight for Jewish supremacy in the Middle East as well as in the United States and the West.
Netanyahu's Demands and the Desperation Behind Them
Glenn Diesen: That's definitely the impression you get from the meeting between Trump and Netanyahu, because everything was framed around how it benefits Israel. Netanyahu apparently showed Trump a map complaining that Turkey controls fifty times more territory in Syria than Israel — essentially arguing this isn't fair and that they want larger spoils of war. And with the nuclear deal between the United States and Saudi Arabia, Trump had apparently reassured Netanyahu that this would depend on Saudi Arabia normalizing relations with Israel, which would also put some proliferation pressure on Iran. It looks as if a lot of poor decisions are being made to serve Israel. But how stable is the situation for the Israelis? Because a lot of this reeks of desperation.
Douglas Macgregor: Well, of course it does. It's kind of interesting, though, because it's very reminiscent of the meeting in January 1941 between Molotov and Hitler in Berlin. Molotov requested the meeting and came in with Stalin's demands — not Stalin's recommendations or requests, but Stalin's demands. Stalin demands control of the Bosphorus, control of the Dardanelles. Stalin demands control of areas in Romania and Bulgaria adjoining the Dardanelles. Stalin demands control of Finland. And Hitler sat there and said, "My God, these people are crazy. They're threatening the whole world." It was a very unsatisfactory meeting.
Subsequently, some smart people on the German General Staff tried to make the point: let Stalin do what he likes. If he does that, he'll be at war with the British Empire and everyone else, because they can't accept these things, and that would work to our advantage. But foolish Hitler said, "No, we have to defend civilization, the West, against the Soviets." The rest is history.
The problem I have with the meeting you're describing is that Zelensky and Netanyahu are joined at the hip. They're both supported by the same groups of people. Let's be frank: the same groups of people that want to essentially depopulate the Middle East of Muslim Arabs and Christian Arabs and replace them with Jews are the same people that want to do something similar to Russia. So they are backing the Ukraine mess.
The bad news is that we don't seem to want to recognize that, and we're not willing to stand up to it, because those same forces own everyone — literally. How do you turn to people who have given you hundreds of millions of dollars, who have enriched you, who've helped you win elections, who've kept you in power and in office, even though many of their policies are really distasteful, both domestically and in foreign policy? I don't know. But I fear that this meeting is going to lead to a widening of the war. Just as the meeting in January 1941 led to catastrophe, I think these meetings in Washington did not solve any problems. They didn't take us off the path of disaster. They're keeping us on it.
All we have to do is look at the global energy complex and the global economy to know that all of those things are plunging into the abyss. People here in the United States and in Europe don't realize we haven't even begun to feel the effects of the disrupted energy complex. It's going to get a lot worse.
I look at the situation in Germany. Volkswagen is essentially committing hara-kiri — it's on a suicidal path. I don't know how the German government can survive. This is a bad situation, and instead of leading us out of it — which is what Washington under Trump was supposed to do — we're marching right into it. It's not so much that Trump is making wrong decisions. It's his failure to make the right decisions and his extension of these policies that will bring disaster to us, to Europe, and to the Middle East.
Energy Prices and the Gap Between Reality and Markets
Glenn Diesen: On the topic of the energy crisis — this is something Trump brought up in his meeting with Netanyahu, and he cited concern about energy and the global economy as the reason he signed the ceasefire, which he then walked away from almost as soon as he signed it. The issue of the Strait of Hormuz has not been solved and is not going to be solved. We can add the Red Sea on top of this. We see Saudi energy facilities being struck. But energy prices don't seem to reflect the dire realities you speak of. I'm not contesting what you're saying — I'm just trying to make sense of it. We can watch on TV the energy fields in Saudi Arabia burning, and at the same time oil prices are dropping. How do you make sense of that?
Douglas Macgregor: There's a yawning gap between reality and fantasy on Wall Street. Wall Street is accustomed to manipulation. Everything is financialized for Wall Street. You don't have people on Wall Street who've ever been to drilling rigs. You don't have people on Wall Street who have visited any refineries. If you ask one of them how many refineries we have today versus thirty years ago, they have no idea. They don't see a problem.
And the White House, thanks to the leadership of Trump and his inner circle, has been very effective at manipulating oil prices. But we know, for instance, that the cost of oil coming off a ship right now is about $140 a barrel. That's not the paper price. This is all going to change.
In the military, we talk about latency in communications — that as a result of the structure of your communications, orders or information or intelligence take time to arrive at a location. It's not instantaneous. That's what you're dealing with right now in the oil market. If you listen to Jeff Curry or people like Pippa Malmgren and others who have years of experience in the oil industry, they're all saying the same thing: the reality hasn't caught up yet, but it will. And when it catches up this time around, it's going to be awful.
Weeks ago, we said that if President Trump stepped out of this or put an end to it, there was a chance we could get out of this with minimal damage — two or three years and we could return to normality. But where we're headed right now, it'll be a decade or more, and everything is going to change.
When you listen to the Iranians and others in the Middle East who are fundamentally opposed to us and Israel, they all say the same thing: Sykes-Picot is over. The structures of the past formulated at the end of the First World War are going away. We're going to live in a new Middle East, and it's not going to be one dominated by the Greater Israel Project or the United States. It's going to be indigenous. And the two great powers that are going to shape and decide these things are not the United States and Israel. They're primarily Iranians and Turks, because they live there — but also Chinese and Russians. The Chinese especially, because they're the only country in the world that can help rebuild anything. We're broke. We're on the edge of a total financial meltdown.
It's like standing at a railroad crossing and looking out and saying, "See, look over there — the train is coming." And everybody says, "Oh yeah, you've been saying that for the last six hours. It hasn't gotten here yet." Yeah, but we can see it now. It's visible. It's coming. "Ah, right. Fine. Wake me when it arrives." Well, it's going to arrive, Glenn. You can replay this at some point in the future, and the people who said I was crazy, who said all these other experts and military analysts were crazy — replay it. Everybody will reel in shock and ask, "Why didn't we do something?"
The man who has to do something is named Donald Trump. And it's not a question of what he's doing — it's a question of what he's failing to do. He's decided not to decide. That's why you get this vacillation every other day. "I'm going to destroy them." "I'll hit every bridge." What difference does that make? "We're going to seize Kish Island." Great. What are all those soldiers on Kish Island going to do as they sit under constant bombardment from the Iranians? This will be an exercise in suicide and certain death. "Okay, well, then we'll destroy Kish Island." Now what?
There's no sense to any of this. The intelligent thing to do is to stop it. There's not going to be a public surrender by us or by Iran. He's just going to have to disengage. And he will — but not until the eleventh hour, and not until it's too late. Only when the economy here at home is awful and is really profoundly affecting everyone in Washington. That's coming. It's absolutely certainly coming.
President Trump does not fully appreciate the limits of American air and naval power. He never understood that our military power was always structured for relatively short campaigns against opponents like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Africa — people without air and missile defenses, let alone operational strike capabilities in the form of ballistic missiles. In addition, we have to operate at the end of a very long logistical support system, and that's very fragile. That's one of the reasons we're in a pause right now. This is not a new problem. We've been dealing with it, contrary to popular belief, since the Bush administration in 2001. But that's where we are, and Trump has never understood it, and he's now going to pay a terrible political price for it.
Putin's Signals and the Coming Russian Offensive
Glenn Diesen: On your analogy of the approaching train — there's another predictable disaster which nobody appears to want to acknowledge, which is the pending Russian victory. Despite all evidence, our political and media establishment still holds on to the narrative that the tide is turning in Ukraine and NATO's favor. But we now see key territory collapsing. We see this speech by Putin in which he seems very confident. We hear from Moscow that they're quite angry and ready to take the gloves off, that they have no more trust in diplomacy, which means they will go for a very brutal victory instead. And we now see General Surovikin — also known as General Armageddon — being reintroduced. What do you read into this?
Douglas Macgregor: The last few days we've had a speech by Putin to a very large audience inside the Kremlin, and another presentation with veterans — primarily naval officers, based on the uniforms. They were both important because President Putin signaled that things are about to change. He pointed out that to this point they have moved very methodically and deliberately, for various reasons. He is probably the man in the history of Russia most concerned about Russian lives of anyone I can think of over the last thousand years, which is a credit to him. But he pointed out that he has had to be very cautious because of the economy — he wanted to preserve the structure of the economy, the standards of living, the prosperity. And the buildup to the point where they are now, with the kinds of forces and capabilities they have, would take time. He said they've accomplished all those goals and are doing very well. Frankly, all these sanctions that people in Washington love because they feel noble and moral for imposing them are irrelevant and have had little to no impact. People have learned how to circumvent these sanctions and get on with life, especially Russia.
And he said he'd talked to veterans and they said, "We need to be more bold. Let's get on with this. Let's crush this enemy and be done with it." Then — either later that day or the next day — he spoke with these veterans and went further, saying that perhaps not this week or tomorrow, but sometime soon, these lands in western Ukraine will probably end up being Polish, Hungarian, Romanian, Slovakian again. A lot of people became very upset over that. The Poles said, "Oh no, we want nothing to do with that." But in truth, he's going back once again to something that we in the United States ignore at our peril — history, culture, language, and people's identity.
I remember during the Kosovo air campaign there was a question about why both Serbs and Croats were so opposed to the rebuilding of a mosque in Banja Luka. I asked one of the German General Staff officers — a very able man, now a major general, possibly retired by now — to find out what the issue was. He came back the next day with a short paper, only a couple of pages, and sure enough, it turned out that the Banja Luka mosque had been erected with money that the population of eastern Slavonia had collected to buy back the head of an Austrian nobleman who had commanded the defense of eastern Slavonia against the Turks. This was in the early 1600s. This particular man had been commanding that area for years. Everybody in eastern Slavonia loved him because he protected them from the Ottomans. He was unfortunately killed in battle, the Turks cut his head off and took it back to the Sultan, and said, "If you want to bury this man with his full body, you're going to have to buy the head." So they collected several pounds of gold and bought it. That gold paid for the creation of the mosque in Banja Luka.
The answer I got back from the Americans at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe was, "Well, this is ridiculous. That happened three or four hundred years ago. Who cares about that? That doesn't mean anything." I said: in the Balkans, that was yesterday. We don't understand Europeans.
So when President Putin made his comments, he was telling the truth. Most of what we call Ukraine was part of Polish-Lithuania. In fact, before this conversation, we were talking about Minsk. There used to be a giant column that stood in Minsk that said in three languages, "Here begins Lithuania." Not anymore. But I'll guarantee that if you go to Lithuania, the Lithuanians are well aware of that. Polish-Lithuania dominated what we call Ukraine. And when Putin says that Ukraine was not a nation-state, he's not wrong. It was more of a region, usually fragmented or split between east bank and west bank — what they used to call right bank and left bank — and Cossacks. It's a very complex part of the world.
His point is that the people living on that terrain today, in many of these areas, are not Ukrainians. The Hungarians living there would very much like to rejoin Hungary and get out from underneath the Ukrainians. I'm sure some Poles feel the same way. I'm not advocating the systematic dismantlement of Ukraine, though I think at some point it's probably going to happen, because it's happened before. And what we don't understand in the United States is that this is how you create peace. This is how you create solutions. You make these decisions.
We made a series of bad decisions at the end of World War II. We left too much of it to Stalin, and he created a monster. And Putin effectively said that Stalin created this construct called Ukraine — why? Because it's false. It's not real. It's not historically accurate.
A friend of mine who came back recently from Europe told me there was a demonstration put on somewhere by Ukrainians. They ran into one of the towns — I think it may be Kostiantynivka, though I may have pronounced that wrong — and they put up some Ukrainian flags and took pictures to send to the media, saying, "Well, the town really isn't in Russian hands." So the Russians showed up, and they all stopped and surrendered. The Russians said, "What are you doing?" They said, "Well, we were told to come over and do this, so we did it." The Russians said, "Well, what do you want to do?" They said, "What we really want to do is surrender." So they surrendered, and they pointed out the Russians treated them very well. They all said, "Look, we're all sick of this war. This needs to end. We need to stop killing each other."
I think that sentiment is very strong, but it doesn't reach the White House. It doesn't reach Paris. It doesn't reach Berlin. It doesn't reach London. It needs to, but it doesn't. And the media are complicit with the governments. The governments are in the hands of these globalists — the same people driving the wars in both locations. And by the way, they're also behind what is effectively economic warfare against China. I don't have an easy answer, but I think it's all going to collapse because we're broke.
The Prospects for Peace in Ukraine
Glenn Diesen: I always thought that peace would have to be established between Moscow and the US, because the Europeans have essentially been boycotting diplomacy. But there's no real loss for the NATO countries. If the Ukrainians kill one Russian and the Russians kill five Ukrainians, that's zero loss for NATO. So there's not that much pressure to put an end to this. And at the same time, there's no willingness in Kyiv under Zelensky to find some kind of a deal. I know that once the Russians went in in 2022, within the first few days, Zelensky had agreed to meet with the Russians to discuss neutrality — he had made points suggesting perhaps we need a deal that recognizes Russian security interests, things which would be unthinkable to discuss today. But today, I don't think it's possible for Zelensky to discuss these things. It only leaves military victory on the table, which is very depressing. If anyone had told me twenty years ago that Ukrainians and Russians would be killing each other in the hundreds of thousands, it would have been very hard to believe.
But if we take a step back — you mentioned that Sykes-Picot is over and there will be a new Middle East. How do you look at Europe in this context? As this era ends, we see Russia and China playing a very different role. The political West won't look like it did in the past. How do you see the world being shaped by these wars?
The West Turning Inward — Internal Crises and the Coming Reckoning
Douglas Macgregor: I think we and Europeans are going to have to turn inward and focus on all of the terrible problems that we have created for ourselves inside our own societies. Very few people look at things from that standpoint. Nobody likes to say we are the authors of our own destruction. But we're all going to have to look at the policies of the past thirty or forty years that have brought us to this point.
The Europeans are going to have to deal with all these vast numbers of unwanted migrants — people who came in starting in 2015 — that the Europeans were never asked about. They were never consulted. There was no plebiscite. Now they're stuck, and it gets worse with each passing day. We now have demonstrations in Spain over a recent decision to admit more people that the Spaniards do not want in their country. This is going to have to be addressed. We have a similar problem in the United States. Millions streamed into our country under Biden and under some of his predecessors, but what happened under Biden was unprecedented. Those things have to be dealt with, and they pose existential questions for our societies.
Somebody talked to me the other day and said, "Doug, the problem is we have tried to get Americans to focus on all of these unnecessary wars and interventions overseas for many years by identifying whatever we were doing with human rights and democracy." He said, "You and I know that's all nonsense." I said, "Of course." He said, "Americans are beginning to figure it out. They now know that they were essentially deceived and lied to." I think Europeans are going to reach the same conclusion. And I think you'll see something in the West on the scale of the revolutions of 1848. Now, those revolutions did not achieve their aims because at the time the governments were strong and didn't have to make many compromises — they could use the armed forces and the police against the people. This time around is going to be tougher. The governments are not strong. And I think that's another reason why the wars overseas receive so much attention. If they can create the perception of conflict and crisis, that keeps them in power, extends them in power.
How long can you live in a country like Germany — which has been a leader in the world in scientific and industrial terms and built, in my judgment, a very successful and fabulous society after World War II — and expect that to be destroyed without anyone doing anything?
There's another aspect you sort of pointed to earlier. Something given has no value. If you don't earn it, you don't appreciate it. The people that rebuilt Europe after World War II in Germany understood what they were doing. They appreciated the criticality of the task in front of them and were devoted to their country, and they rebuilt it. They've passed. They're gone in overwhelming numbers. The people there now are the beneficiaries in many respects of what was done, but they've also become the victims of dumb and destructive policies — some of which they voted for and some of which they did not. Now they have to deal with reality, but they didn't build it. They're just living in it. Now they know how important it is, how they must fight for it if it is to survive. And I think that's true all over Scandinavia, true everywhere, true in the United States. My generation built nothing. It consumed. Well, the consumption is about to end. The building has to begin.
We're going to have to build something new, because what we built in the past is no longer applicable to our needs today. That may be true in Europe as well. That's why I think these wars and conflicts will end for reasons of finance and economics more than anything else. And I'm not demeaning or disparaging the achievements of the Iranians, who have stood up successfully against enormous military power. Nor am I disparaging the Russian military achievement. I'm simply saying that inside the West — the United States and the West — and to some extent in Japan and Korea — Korea just shut down its stock market, and that's just the beginning of emergencies we're going to face — you're going to see bank runs, you're going to see all the things we've seen in the past and worse. But these things we'll have to deal with internally will suddenly make everything happening beyond our borders irrelevant.
Timeline for the Coming Economic Crisis
Glenn Diesen: That's a good point. The external conflicts do distract us now. But again, that fits in with what you said before about the approaching train, because the economic crisis can't really be avoided anymore. Anyone taking a serious look at the economy — debt levels, energy problems — recognizes this is not sustainable. It's going to crash. But as you said, people don't seem to want to hear of it until the crisis is actually here. Do you see a timeline? What indicators are you looking at in terms of when this crisis will hit?
Douglas Macgregor: I sat in a discussion the other day with some very bright people talking about AI — people involved in the technology, not people selling stock — and they were talking about the bubble that's about to burst. They pointed out that nobody seems to understand that AI consumes enormous energy. Where's the energy coming from? And if you want to build, you have to have credit. You've got to be able to borrow. Well, cheap credit and cheap energy are inseparable. And those two things have been the foundation for our economic expansion on the North American continent, I would argue, for over a hundred years. So where do we go when we don't have them? When energy isn't cheap and credit isn't cheap, everything stops. We have to start over.
I think that's coming. In terms of timeline, I think we'll know by Christmas. We'll see a lot of these things come to fruition this fall. And from that point onward, it's just going to get worse for a while. People are going to vote in new prime ministers, new presidents, new governments, and they're not going to get anywhere because they don't know what they're doing. And suddenly there's going to be a demand for competence.
In the United States, it's a popularity contest. Why'd you vote for Bill Clinton? "Oh, I think he's a really nice guy. He understands." Why'd you vote for Donald Trump? "Well, he says stuff I agree with. He just says it out loud." Why'd you vote for Obama? "Well, he seemed like a nice guy, easygoing, somebody I could talk to." I sat with people that met with Hitler, and I said, "What was it about the man?" And everybody said the same thing: "Oh, that was a man you could talk to." At some point, competence is critical. You've got to have people that know what the hell they're doing. And you've got to have people that are going to enforce the law, because one of the things that's relaxed across the Western world is law. We let people get away with all sorts of things that our ancestors a hundred years ago would have hanged them for.
We've got a long way to go. It's going to take us years to recover. But by this fall, it's going to be pretty obvious where we are. And there's no easy fix. You're not going to manipulate your way out of it.
The strategic petroleum reserves are drying up. There are people very upset with Trump — they're afraid the reserves are going to be drawn down to the point where we can no longer use them, especially these underground salt mines. I don't have access to that information, but I hear these things all the time. Then we start talking about microcircuitry and the requirements for the microchips that we desperately need — not just for the military, but to run our entire economy. Then you look at the power grids that we've neglected for years. All of these things are suddenly going to become very, very important. And then nobody will care what happens overseas. Everybody who talks about that will be shunned. And a lot of the people who have brought us to this point — who are responsible for the financial disaster, responsible for these pointless wars that have drained our treasuries — they're going to be held accountable.
Glenn Diesen: Let's hope so. I think a key problem in Europe is how passive people are — especially in a place like Germany, where the collapse has already begun and you simply have leaders going on TV saying, "Oh, well, this is the new normal." There seems to be some acceptance of it. The opposition is clearly taking over, but nonetheless, I'm a bit surprised people aren't taking to the streets, to be honest. Anyways, thank you so much for your time and your insights. Let's hope for better days.
Douglas Macgregor: Absolutely, Glenn. Thanks very much.