Douglas Macgregor on the US war with Iran, the collapse of the petrodollar, and the paralysis of Western leadership
Glenn Diesen interviews Colonel Douglas Macgregor on the state of the US military campaign against Iran, its global economic consequences, and the broader unraveling of the Western-led world order.
Summary
Glenn Diesen speaks with Colonel Douglas Macgregor, decorated combat veteran, author, and former adviser to the US Secretary of Defense, recorded on April 21st, 2026. Macgregor argues that the proposed talks in Islamabad were never genuine negotiations — the Iranians arrived with seventy people and substantive proposals, only to find the US was not there to negotiate but to demand submission to Israel's terms. He contends that Netanyahu, not Trump, is effectively in charge of the decision to continue fighting, and that Trump's repeated declarations of imminent peace are designed to calm markets rather than reflect reality. Macgregor describes the coming phase of the war as a shift toward total destruction of the Iranian state — targeting bridges, railways, power plants, and desalination infrastructure — while warning that Iran is better positioned than the US for a sustained conflict, having invested heavily in defensive missiles and unmanned systems. He argues the petrodollar is already dead, that the Persian Gulf may never fully recover, and that only China has the financial capacity to rebuild what is being destroyed.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Opening: The ceasefire, the Islamabad talks, and who is really in charge
Glenn Diesen: Today is April 21st, 2026, and we are joined by Colonel Douglas Macgregor, a decorated combat veteran, author, and former adviser to the US Secretary of Defense. Thank you very much for coming back on. We seem to be in the final hours before the ceasefire expires. We're told there was going to be a meeting in Islamabad, but there's been uncertainty about whether that is actually the case. It's difficult to see where we're going, because on one hand we hear stories that the US has depleted a lot of its missiles and intercepted missiles — so they would want to get out of this — and on the other hand, it appears they're too far away for an actual peace deal. So is the best thing we can hope for an extension of the ceasefire, will negotiations take place, or are we going back to full-scale war?
Douglas Macgregor: I think the notion that we were going to hold talks again in Islamabad was always fiction. There was no evidence of any Iranian interest in doing so. The last talks were disappointing. The Iranians showed up with seventy people, large quantities of data, information, maps, and so forth, in the expectation that there was an intention to negotiate and come up with some sort of mutually agreeable solution. There wasn't. And when you have someone like Vice President Vance getting up during the meeting to go outside and take a call from Netanyahu, it suggests that these are not really negotiations. It also suggests that Netanyahu, not Trump, is in charge. And I think, effectively, for the purposes of deciding whether we will or will not fight, that's probably accurate.
I think President Trump was trying to calm the markets again. He's done this several times — said things that were patently false about the likelihood of the war ending sooner rather than later, and that the Iranians were desperate for talks when they weren't, conveying the illusion that we were somehow winning this conflict in the Persian Gulf. We aren't. And as a result, I think there will be no talks. The ceasefire expires at 3:00 a.m. Iranian time tomorrow, and I think the Iranians are preparing to be attacked again. They're also preparing for the possibility that we will attack even sooner. So at this point, I think we should just dismiss whatever comes out of the White House as effectively nonsense, largely designed to calm the public and manipulate the markets. But I think that's over now.
The strategic picture: a defensive Iran versus an overstretched US
Glenn Diesen: This appears to be a common theme with Trump — to always declare victory no matter what happens. We saw this with Yemen, and in almost all instances there's always a victory somehow, no matter what happens on the ground. But how do you expect this war to be fought? If the news stories we read are correct about the amount of missiles which have been used, it seems to be a very significant part of America's stockpile. To what extent is it reasonable to continue a war at this high intensity? Will the US try a low-intensity war, will they focus on a ground invasion, or does it not seem possible to sustain another forty days of this kind of warfare?
Douglas Macgregor: Let me answer that question, but before doing so, let me provide you with a strategic overview from the vantage point of people on the outside looking in. When I say people, I'm talking about the rest of the world that is watching what we are doing and what Iran is doing. Increasingly, we're seen as this aspiring supranational authority that wants to impose its will on everyone everywhere. Iran has opted to stand up against this, and the world is very anxious to see what the outcome will be.
We have always had the ability — certainly since 1899, I would argue — to project power. In fact, that was the whole purpose of President Teddy Roosevelt's Great White Fleet. He was the Assistant Secretary of the Navy when the Spanish-American War began, and that was the first time we attempted to fight beyond the Western Hemisphere. We sent a fleet to Manila Bay in the Philippines and managed to defeat the Spanish fleet, which was rather antiquated. We then discovered we had no ground force that we could put ashore to claim victory, so we sat in the bay and waited until some troops arrived. But since then we have been able to project power. We are not inherently defensive. We are a power that banks on the offense — the ability to attack beyond its normal limits in order to impose our will.
The Iranians are an inherently defensive power. They spend perhaps one, maybe two percent of what we do on defense, and their investment has been in fundamentally defensive weapons. Contrary to the unending Israeli propaganda and the propaganda by their agents that control our mainstream media, the Iranians can't really reach very far beyond their own borders. They are in a strategic defense posture. And if you look at the two sides — one is operating 6,700 miles away from its logistical support base and its manufacturing support, and the other is operating essentially from within the boundaries of its own country — there is a home court advantage, as we say in basketball.
The Iranians have invested very heavily in a new form of warfare that has reduced us to a position very similar to what was happening on the Western Front in 1914 and 1915. If you try to move against Iran, you are identified, you are targeted, you are attacked from anywhere from 500 to 1,000 miles beyond Iran's borders. That makes it very difficult when you're dependent upon air and naval power to attack your opponent. You have to move your support and sustain it thousands of miles. You have to periodically refuel and reload from a great distance. The Iranians don't have to deal with that. And most of their critical facilities and stores are underground.
What the next phase of the war will look like
So what can we expect to happen now? I think we have replenished our stocks in the theater — resupplied all of our platforms, naval and air, with required munitions. Now, how long will they last? I would say you would see something similar to what we did the last time, but with greater emphasis on an initial period of intensity. In other words, the first 48 to 96 hours will be more intense than what we saw previously — more sorties, more missiles, more bombings — concentrated on what are allegedly critical targets that, if sufficiently damaged, could influence the outcome of the operation.
Remember, this is an air and missile operation. That means everything depends upon the targets you select. You're looking for targets and portions of a targeting system that will give you a strategic advantage over your enemy — that will convince your enemy to give up, to say enough is enough. We've been trying this really since the end of the First World War. There were massive bombing attacks, long-distance strikes, interdiction, as well as close air support in the last six months of that war. We tried many of these things, and when World War II came, we doubled down on all of it. My point is that certainly since 1945, the air power community in the United States has been trying to prove that air power could do everything.
So it was always foolish to expect that someone like General Kaine of the Air Force would step forward and say, "I don't think you should do this, Mr. President. If you try to do it, it probably won't work. It would be a strategic disaster." No — I think what he probably said is there are pros and cons, there are things we can do and maybe things we can't, but here is what we can certainly do. And he laid out what was essentially a plan for an air and missile campaign.
What I think you're going to see now is a far more intense opening salvo. That salvo will be designed to be — in President Trump's words — a war operation so furious and so devastating that the Iranian forces and their citizenry won't recover. That means the objective now is to destroy the Iranian state. That needs to be understood. When you begin attacking bridges and road networks and railways, power plants, desalination plants, and oil infrastructure, that's about destruction of the state. You have moved beyond what you considered to be critical military targets and are focused largely on critical infrastructure.
We did that during the Second World War, and its effects were mixed. The most important things we did during World War II in retrospect were two. Number one, we destroyed the fuel distribution and manufacturing system — you couldn't produce fuel, you couldn't redistribute it, and that opened the path for the Soviet armies in the east. Number two, you couldn't refuel your air force, which meant all of your air forces were concentrated on the protection of your cities.
Now, the Iranians don't have an air force of significance. The president talks about destroying the air force, but they really haven't had one since the Shah left. They have very few aircraft. That was never a major player, just as the navy was never a major player. The Iranian navy consists largely of fast speedboats, unmanned submersibles, and unmanned surface craft designed to operate in the Persian Gulf, not much further. So everything relies on missiles, target acquisition, matching the missiles and unmanned systems to the various targets.
Iran's missile and drone stockpiles — and the US replenishment problem
We think the Iranians have perhaps 45,000 to 50,000 unmanned systems remaining, maybe more. They certainly have somewhere between 15,000 to 20,000 missiles, maybe more. I would say that is more than an adequate supply to sustain Iran through several weeks. And they still have the ability, beneath ground and out of reach, to manufacture missiles and drones. How many? How rapidly? I don't know. But we also know that the Chinese resupplied them and the Russians resupplied them.
When you turn to our side — do we have another thousand joint air-to-surface missiles? We expended a thousand of those in the first three weeks, most of them frankly in the space of a week. I don't know. I suspect we've probably replenished those stocks. There are others where we've replenished as much as we can provide, particularly your anti-missile missiles — your PAC-3, your THAAD missiles. What have we got in terms of radars? Well, that's a grim picture. The radars that have been destroyed have not been replaced. They cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take years to manufacture. Whether or not we have anything left to put on the ground, I don't know. It could be that we would bring in whatever is left around the world. But my point is I think the Iranians are in a better position than we are.
That doesn't mean they'll win and we'll lose — it's too soon to say that. Then there's the question of how many precision-guided bombs we have, and whether we have unguided bombs. I suppose we probably do. And if you're trying to demoralize your enemy, we still periodically rely on the provision of B-52s, each of which carries 95 500-pound bombs. You do the math — how many B-52s can you fly over an area? That's called carpet bombing, and that clearly can be done.
The Israelis have been reprovisioned as much as we could afford, but I don't think their air and missile defense is likely to be infinitely more capable than it was. I think they're in a tougher position. We still have a lot of missile defense in the fleet. We have a lot more ships now at sea, more carriers, more pilots, more planes. I think we have replaced the losses of the KC-135 fuel tankers. So I think we're gearing up for something similar to what you saw before, only far more intense up front.
Ground troops and the Persian Gulf islands
You asked about ground troops. Based on the reports I've read — and I'm not on the inside, I'm not attending any of these meetings, so what I'm dealing with is hearsay, Glenn, meaning I'm reading what the New York Times, the Washington Post, and others who are fed things by the CIA, the NSA, and the Pentagon are reporting — what they're suggesting is that President Trump has been unenthusiastic about the use of ground forces. He has said he doesn't really want to do that. That's a very good thing, because I can't imagine any operation involving the use of ground forces in the Persian Gulf to seize islands that would make any difference to the outcome. I just can't imagine what they would be used for, because it's not going to give them control of the Gulf just because they're sitting on an island. And I always worry about how you resupply them, how you evacuate the wounded — all of that.
I'm sure Special Operations Command wants to do things. I'd be very surprised if people in the Army and the Marines don't want to do something. But I'm encouraged that President Trump has at least expressed reservations about it.
Iran's counter-threat and the global economic catastrophe
So what will the Iranians do? I think this is very important. We've talked about the enormous damage we're prepared to do. They have made it very clear that they will destroy most of what's on the west coast of the Persian Gulf. And that is of great concern to the entire world.
If you stop and consider that the ingredients for your fertilizer — about 50% of urea, nitrogen, phosphate, and so forth — come out of the Persian Gulf, and you're going to destroy this infrastructure, I think we're looking down the line at famine across the Global South. It's unavoidable. We talk in terms of liquid natural gas and petroleum — those are already problems. There are people rationing things already in India, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. The cost of a barrel of jet fuel, I'm told, is now over $240 a barrel and rising. It's not even on hand. Apparently Britain is going to run out of anything in about two weeks in terms of both jet fuel and heating fuel. And of course all these countries in Western Europe that have gone crazy on the green energy business are in terrible positions. They've also shut down many of their nuclear reactors — the French haven't, but the Germans have.
I think what you're going to see happen in Europe now is that governments are going to be overthrown. You're going to see new governments come to power. What can they do? We'll see. I don't think they're going to be able to correct the problems very quickly, because most analysts who have looked at the magnitude of destruction from the first round have said it'll take a year, maybe two years if we were to stop now, to recover in the Persian Gulf. And most people, understanding what I've just outlined, are concluding — accurately, I think — that it will take five to ten years to recover. And we're not sure what "recover" means, because a lot of this infrastructure in the Gulf may never be rebuilt. The decision may simply be made not to go back in there.
The death of the petrodollar and China's rise
And if anybody does go in there, I would say it would probably be China, because right now the sort of global safe area for cash and money is increasingly going to be China, not the United States. I think that's where things are headed. If you look at just the credit markets, people are going to go to China to borrow, not come to the United States. And I think the petrodollar is already dead. Whether or not the yuan replaces it is anybody's guess — it probably could, but it may be a basket of currencies.
I think the Emirates and the Saudi House of Saud — all of these people — are really in danger of losing their countries in the sense that others will take over in their absence, because we know that large numbers of the Gulf elites have already fled to Egypt and Europe and other places. We don't know what will happen in the region this time around. You have the Turks who have geared up, in my estimation, to be far more involved this time around than they were previously. So are the Egyptians.
I don't see how Israel fares very well through all of this, because whatever incentive may have existed in the past for the Iranians to exercise restraint no longer exists. And I think they've made that very clear — they're ready to go to a total war footing. We've never done that. And the lesson of history is that he who goes to a total war footing, certainly in the 20th century, has a better shot of winning if he does it immediately. Remember, Hitler did not totally mobilize the German state and nation for war until mid-1943. How could you possibly wage war on multiple fronts the way they did and expect to win? On the other hand, the Soviets lived in a state of war mobilization and went to total mobilization very quickly. We did too, and so did Great Britain. We are not going to do that to defeat Iran. That's an impossibility.
The Strait of Malacca proposal and the risk of widening the war
Now, I should be careful, because I'm sure you've seen the report that General Kaine apparently suggested to President Trump that it might be useful to consider conducting operations in the Strait of Malacca against Iranian vessels. I think that's a catastrophe. But it's not unusual for someone who's already losing a war to think they could expand it to other areas, conceal the loss in one place, and ultimately bring it to a successful close elsewhere. I'm not sure that's a good idea. And I know there are foolish people out there who say, "Fine, then we'll also stop Chinese ships, because after all, the Chinese are supporting the Iranians." That's your opportunity to spread and widen the war even further.
One of the reasons the Chinese have been so sensitive to the South China Sea is that they know from their history that whoever controls the South China Sea ultimately controls the flow of resources into and out of China. The Royal Navy did that, the French did it before the Royal Navy, and ultimately the Imperial Japanese Navy did it.
The bottom line is I see no good news here, no good new direction. The ideal outcome at this stage would be to simply end this series of hostilities, put a stop to the whole thing, and admit that we cannot — employing our military power — gain control of the Strait of Hormuz. What the Iranians have got, they're going to keep. And it's up to the rest of the world, once this war ends, to sit down with Iran and work out something similar to the Montreux Convention, which was created in 1936 and put the Turks in charge of the Dardanelles. By the way, the Turks have handled that very well — there haven't been any problems there. A similar convention can be set up, and I think the Iranians are the logical choice, given their strategic position, to run it.
We don't like that. We're opposed to that. But we keep forgetting we don't live there. We don't live in Asia. We don't live in Europe. We don't live in Africa. We live in the Western Hemisphere. It's a huge problem — a strategic reality that we really don't want to accept. And we don't want to accept the fact that warfare has now changed dramatically. With the right mix of missiles and unmanned systems and space-based surveillance and good communications, command and control, a much lesser power with fewer resources can be much more effective against a maritime aerospace power that doesn't have those advantages.
The world order unraveling: Asia, Iran, and the collapse of international law
Glenn Diesen: It seems that bringing the fight to the Strait of Malacca would be a good way of pulling China closer into this war — a disaster on its own. But you get the impression that there's growing concern around the world, especially vocal now in Asia, that the entire world order is being dismantled — that international law itself is being rejected. There have always been violations of international law, but at least people were making excuses for breaching it or pretending it wasn't being breached, thus upholding the legitimacy of international law even by breaking it. This time around it seems to be just refuted outright. I was wondering what wider picture you see from around the world. Is this a deliberate dismantling of the world order? It seems to be getting some strong reactions, and not just in the economic sphere — there's a massive pushback, especially with regard to Iran. It's quite a remarkable achievement that there's now so much empathy for Iran around the world. I haven't seen this before in my lifetime.
Douglas Macgregor: If you look at India, India sees itself as dependent upon an extension cord that plugs at one end into India — let's say for simplicity purposes the socket is in Mumbai — and then the rest of the extension cord goes through into the Persian Gulf and plugs into the various oil states, Emirates, Iran, and so forth. That extension cord was suddenly pulled out of the wall, and it's something the Indians never really anticipated. No one seemed to think there was any reason why anyone would disrupt the flow of resources out of the Gulf to India. India also does roughly $180 billion a year of business in the Persian Gulf. A great deal of commerce, money, and resources are flowing into and out of the Persian Gulf.
India is sensitive to international laws and norms. India is opposed to the use of force to solve anything if it can avoid it. And they're shocked now that the United States has opted for the use of force to solve Israel's problem with Iran. Because if it were not for Israel, we would not be at war with Iran. Let's be frank. There's no real reason for us to do so. We have this wealth of propaganda that's been created over the last three decades to try and demonize Iran and turn it into public enemy number one for the United States. But that's a lot of nonsense.
When 9/11 occurred and we suffered the losses from the two towers destroyed in New York City, one million Iranians poured into the streets in places like Tehran and elsewhere at night and held candlelight vigils to mourn the loss of life in the United States. There was real hope at that point that some sort of improved relationship could be fashioned as a result of this tragedy. They tried very hard, and we essentially spat in their faces. It's unfortunate.
They were very supportive of us in ways that most people don't know. Once we were in Afghanistan, and subsequently — if it hadn't been for General Soleimani, whom we were so anxious to murder — we couldn't have stopped the war against us in Iraq. He was instrumental in going in and persuading the Shiite militias to stop fighting. He picked up the imam responsible for leading the Shiites, brought him back to Isfahan, put him in a corner, and told him to study theology until further notice. Subsequently, when we fought ISIS, those Shiite militias liberated Christians, liberated Sunnis, liberated Yazidis, liberated Jews — anybody that was oppressed by ISIS — and they fought very hard with us, not against us.
All of these things were swept away in favor of Israel's agenda. Israel's Greater Israel project is the problem. The destruction of life in Gaza, the destruction of life in the so-called West Bank in Palestine, the destruction of life in Lebanon — all of these things are inextricably intertwined with the desire now in Israel for us to destroy Iran. It's what it's all about. There is no particular reason why we should be involved. And how many times have you heard Americans stand up and say, "We're not really dependent upon the resources in the Gulf — why are we there?" It happens all the time.
But we've had this long-term agreement that enshrined the petrodollar as the currency for the purchase and sale of oil. Now that's been destroyed. I don't think we're going to ever see that come back again. That's been a cornerstone in the edifice of our prosperity, because we came out of the Vietnam War completely broken financially. We could not cope. That's the chief reason we came off the gold standard. And that then made the petrodollar preeminent. This was Nixon's way of extricating ourselves from the terrible economic disaster that LBJ and his friends had created in Vietnam.
Well, all of that's water under the bridge now. I think we're out of the Gulf and I don't think we're coming back. That's why I said I don't think we can afford to go back — only China can finance what's required there. So this whole war has been nothing short of a strategic disaster for us. The intelligent thing to do now is end it. To step forward and say this is the wrong instrument, we were wrong, we shouldn't have done this, we're going to try and find a different way, we are looking for help from others to help mediate this. But that means behaving like a normal power within this multipolar system. And there's no appetite for that in Washington. We want to be the supranational authority. We want to establish the rules of the game, dominate the game, and win the game. That's over. Those days are passed.
Europe, Ukraine, and the danger of escalation with Russia
Glenn Diesen: I think this adjustment from global primacy to multipolarity is going to bring us more wars. But in this war, it seems to have consequences. Asia is being impacted greatly, especially economically. But in Europe as well — Zelensky is making the point that the lack of air defenses is as bad as it could possibly be. At the same time as weapons are drying up, he's complaining that the US has been disrespectful to his country because Witkoff visited Moscow but not Kyiv. We see the EU complaining that US weapons supposed to be sent to Ukraine are being delayed or diverted. The Europeans are talking about establishing a NATO without the US. And at the same time as the situation is getting worse, the Europeans still appear to be escalating — these massive drone programs being sent to Ukraine, seemingly allowing their territory to be used to strike Russia's Baltic coast. Russia is now essentially warning that all of these factories producing drones are considered legitimate targets. Where do you see all of this going? There seems to be some massive delusion — I'm not sure what's the best word to describe what is happening in Europe now. There's not much strategic thinking. It's just this obsession with defeating Russia, yet the weapons are drying up, the lack of capability seems to be compensated with more belligerent language, and all the red lines are being dismissed.
Douglas Macgregor: My perception is that the misrepresentation of Russia's true intentions — which never had anything to do with conquering anybody anywhere — is going to vanish in an energy crisis that the current governments in Western Europe in particular can't master. I think that's the final straw. So the globalist leaders who want to maintain this war against Russia will be unable to do so because they'll be thrown out of office.
I'm still surprised that we have not seen open revolution in places like Germany and Great Britain. I think we will in the future. The situation in England, Ireland, and Wales is really bad. We've already seen the Irish come out into the streets. I think we're going to see more of that. They may be the canary in the coal mine for the British Isles. I hope so. But the people running the show in Parliament are simply out of touch with reality. They recently refused licensing for more drilling in the North Sea, even though they know that the oil deposits there are enormous and the need for energy is overwhelming. We're still dealing with people who live in this illusory world where wind and solar power are going to replace carbon-based energy. It's not going to happen. Not this way. Perhaps at some point Tesla's dream of harvesting energy from the atmosphere will work, but in the meantime we have to use what we've got.
I think Europeans are concluding that. And in Germany, eventually you're going to see a return to the status quo — the people running things are going to be gone, they're going to have to restart nuclear power plants, and once they've thrown these people out, they're going to have to come to terms with Moscow. And they should. Again, all the abuse, the insults, and the lies hurled at Moscow have to be fundamentally dismantled. It's very hard to do when the media is controlled by these globalist governments. The media has not told the truth. They've portrayed Ukraine as a sort of luminous group of patriots fighting desperately for their freedom. That's a lot of nonsense. The Ukrainians were built up for the purpose of attacking Russia by us. We encouraged this. We cultivated it. When I say us, I'm talking about us and the Europeans.
NATO is finished — exactly what I thought would happen at the beginning of this crisis in January of 2022. I said then that NATO is done, the Europeans must find a way forward for themselves, and that makes sense. I think eventually this will happen. I hope sooner rather than later, because President Putin has restrained the use of Russian military power. He's held it back. He has everything he needs to finish this war decisively this year. There's no question about that. He also has the means to flatten substantial areas in the Baltic states, in Germany, Poland, elsewhere, anywhere in Great Britain for that matter, where they're manufacturing these drones to be hurled against Russian infrastructure and against Russian citizens. He has sat on all of this. He has declined to do those things. He's held the force back. The Russians want to do it. He doesn't.
I hope that European governments will outpace the Russian desire for action. I really do, because it would be disastrous for that war to unfold in Europe. The Europeans today have lost their fear of war. They don't understand just how bad it can be. I think these governments, once they're replaced, new people will come in and they'll behave differently. And this Zelensky and the corruption in that regime — its underpinnings, which are the worst imaginable criminality — have to be revealed. The truth has to come out. How many times have we heard about supposed atrocities committed by Russians, only to discover that they were committed by Ukrainians? That's not to suggest that in wars all sides don't make mistakes — we all know we committed terrible atrocities on more than one occasion, most of the time accidentally, some of the time not. But what the Ukrainians have done is unforgivable, and this has got to stop.
I wish we would stop immediately. I had hoped that Donald Trump would pull the rug on that one. It turns out he's been unable to do anything. He is truly the prisoner of the Washington status quo. And I think that extends to what's happened in the Persian Gulf with Iran. The Congress has done nothing to really restrain him. That's because they're all on the payroll. You have a few voices here or there, but the Israel lobby and its agents in the United States have ensured that the money flows to those that support Israel. Hopefully that will change. There is a vote this week on the war powers resolution. I hope that produces something. But I'm not optimistic. There's just too much inertia in the system.
Trump's "deny, attack, claim victory" doctrine
And Donald Trump — he cannot get past his three rules that he learned from Roy Cohn. His three rules: deny, deny; attack, attack; and twist everything into a victory. When I listened to the president being confronted by a journalist — "Mr. President, why did you put your face on the figure of Jesus Christ and then send this out?" — and he said, "Well, I thought of myself as a physician who was healing people." That's absurd. He had an opportunity to be truthful. What should he have said? "I made a terrible mistake. I apologize for offending people. It was in bad taste and I shouldn't have done it. I regret it and I hope people will help me get beyond that." That's what should have happened. But he can't tell the truth.
And just as we were talking before the show, I said the Iranians are not going to talk to us. Everybody who has paid any attention to them knows that. There's no point in talking to us. Remember, they too watched our little soirée with Putin in Anchorage. What did we do? We showed up with nothing. President Trump seemed to think he was going to charm the Russians into doing whatever he wanted so that he could walk out and pretend he was this heroic figure who won the war. The Russians came with proposals, substantive material. The Iranians came to Islamabad with a group of seventy people with substantive materials. They thought they were there to actually negotiate a solution. They discovered that's not what it's all about. All of it has been about the same thing: you must submit to Israel. You submit to Israel's demands, the war stops. Well, here's a news flash — that's not going to happen.
Glenn Diesen: This deny, deny, attack, attack, claim victory strategy comes with a great cost. I can see why it's assumed to have some benefits, but — such as with the picture of Trump as Jesus — it comes out so much worse. You can say the same about Iran, when the US killed all those little girls. If he would have come out and said, "I assume this was accidental — these things happen in war, it should never have happened" — you could put the whole matter to rest. Instead, this whole idea that Iran is launching Tomahawks at its own schools just makes the matter so much worse and keeps the wound open. This strategy of always spinning everything as a victory has to have some exceptions, otherwise it's very self-destructive.
Douglas Macgregor: There's a portion of the base that supports him that believes in something that was widespread in the United States certainly at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century — the statement "my country right or wrong, but always my country." In other words, whatever your country does, you defend it to the bitter end. But one would think that at this point in time, we — like every other power at some point — have made mistakes, and that identifying those is the only way to move beyond them. But he's not the man to do it. He keeps telling everyone, "We have the greatest military in the world." Well, we had the greatest military in the world designed to refight World War II. It's not the one we need. It hasn't been what we needed since 1991. But instead of recognizing that, he keeps telling everybody, "Oh, I rebuilt the military during my first term." Well, he put money into the old structure. He didn't build anything new.
This is our problem. It's sort of like the army of Frederick the Great that marched out to meet Napoleon in 1806. It didn't work, and they were destroyed. We've got to get out of this mess. If there's anything good that comes out of this, it's that we will see a turnover in Washington, because Americans are not stupid. They see what's happening. And I think this assumption that everyone is going to rush into the arms of the left is wrong. I think Americans are saying, "Wait a minute — everyone has betrayed us. Elections don't matter. We go to the election booth, we vote, and we get the same damn stupid outcome." So I think if nothing else, that realization is beginning to set in in the United States. That's a good thing.
Glenn Diesen: Well, Colonel, thank you for taking the time and sharing your insights. As always, it has been very interesting.
Douglas Macgregor: Thank you, Glenn.