Diane Sare Interview With Colonel MacGregor

This article appears in the October 3, 2025 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

[Print version of this article]

Col. Douglas Macgregor
Trump Is Biden II
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EIRNS
Col. (ret.) Douglas Macgregor, U.S. Army.
Douglas Macgregor served a highly-decorated career in the U.S. Army from 1976 until 2004, when he retired with the rank of Colonel. In late 2020, he was appointed as Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Defense, a position he held until the end of U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term in 2021. He also holds a PhD in international relations from the University of Virginia, and taught in the Department of Social Sciences at the United States Military Academy at West Point.

During his career, Col. Macgregor has had a major strategic and intellectual influence on military policy. He has written five books, some of which have led to substantial policy transformation and development within militaries across the world, including in the United States, Russia, China, and Israel.

On Oct. 4, Col. Macgregor will host the first of what he hopes will be many town hall meetings across the country called “The National Conversation,” aimed at providing an avenue for Americans to discuss a way forward outside of the two-party system. The following is an edited transcript of an EIR interview conducted on September 23 by Diane Sare. The video interview is available here.

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UN Photo/Mark Garten
U.S. President Donald Trump addressing the 80th UN General Assembly meeting, Sept. 23, 2025.
Diane Sare: Hello, today is September 23, 2025. I’m Diane Sare, and this is an interview for Executive Intelligence Review with Col. Douglas Macgregor, whom people know, I think, very well, from seeing him on all kinds of podcasts. An otherwise retired U.S. Army colonel, briefly advisor to the acting Secretary of Defense under President Trump, and an extremely insightful analyst of world affairs. So, Colonel Macgregor, welcome!

Col. Douglas Macgregor: Good to see you, Diane. Now that you’ve gone through the formalities, why don’t you just call me Doug?

Sare: [laughs] OK, I’ll do that. Thank you very much.

Before we started, we just mentioned a little bit about Pre�sident Trump’s speech at the United Nations, and one thing I can’t help but wonder is: How does the rest of the world view him? What do you think is going on in the minds of the people who are listening to this speech about all of the wars he’s ended? How useful the United Nations is; that the Europeans, if they’re serious about fighting Russia, should stop importing any gas from Russia—I don’t know where they’ll be at that point! What do you think the world thinks about this?

Macgregor: Reinhold Niebuhr was an American theologian. He wrote a lot of material. One of the things that he wrote that I thought was especially good, he said, “hypocrisy is when vice pays tribute to virtue.” I think there was a lot of hypocrisy in his performance.

The notion that, somehow or another, he’s brought peace, happiness, and good will everywhere since he came into office, and that Israel is the victim of everyone in their neighborhood, especially Iran—all these kinds of things, I think, are just dismissed out of hand by most of the population in the world.

One of the things that’s really interesting is the comment about oil and gas. You know, energy is at the very core of international trade and commerce. It’s the lifeblood of the planet. And no nation, according to President [George] Washington when he was in office, can be expected to move beyond the limits of its own interests. All of these countries in the world have an interest in purchasing energy, preferably cheap energy, in volume. Expecting them to put themselves at high risk and do what the Germans had done, which is, essentially, deindustrialize themselves and plunge their population into poverty and despair, is unrealistic. And I think that’s the problem with most of what he was saying about the Europeans.

And then, of course, the comments on the United Nations itself are ridiculous! The United Nations does not dispose over armed forces. The United Nations can only do, frankly speaking, what the big powers are willing to support. And we are not only in arrears in terms of our payments to the United Nations—which we, at the behest of the Israelis and their lobby, have dismissed out-of-hand as a useless body—but we also don’t supply the forces and the money that would be necessary for anything to be established in favor of the United Nations and the world. So, it’s just a silly comment.

But I think the hardest one of all to accept is really the issue on oil and gas: The notion that everybody’s going to stop doing business with Russia because we threaten them, is just silly nonsense.

More Destructive Than Biden
Again, this goes back to the core problem that we have with President Trump. I’ve stopped really calling him “President Trump”; I’m now addressing him as “Biden II”, because his policies, his approach, are now largely indistinguishable from Biden’s. Only, one can argue, they’re even more destructive, and that’s tragic, because our dollar is plunging: Global demand for the dollar is dying; nobody wants it. It’s going to be very, very hard for us to avoid an extremely hard landing, when we finally default. And we’re on the road to default, it’s quite clear. I guess the plan is to debase our currency before we get there.

So, in total, I thought his remarks were, frankly, irrelevant. Everybody shrugs their shoulders, gets up and walks out, because nothing has changed. Everything is as it was. And anything that he says is frankly disbelieved.

Sare: Right. Well, it has no basis in reality, as people understand it. You know, one thing that I’ve been involved in: There are many people trying to get the United Nations to invoke the “Uniting for Peace” Resolution [377] to do something to stop this horrific onslaught against the Palestinian people by Israel, especially with what’s happening now—I think they’ve shut down the internet altogether in Gaza City, so we can’t even see the horrors unfolding there.

But I think it’s very hard to do that, if the United States is on the wrong side. I was thinking of President Eisenhower in 1956, over the Suez [crisis]. But you had an American President who was acting. What are your thoughts on this? Is there any hope that these nations, even though they are vastly the majority, could get together to get something done?

Macgregor: Well, I think that’s happening, Diane. Not as quickly, perhaps, as many of us would like. But I think that many of us have to come to terms with the reality that a new parallel universe is emerging on the planet. The problems we have with our economy, this outrageous national sovereign debt that we cannot possibly maintain over time, we’re having great difficulty, because we refuse to cut spending; we refuse to take the measures necessary to put us on any sort of healthy path to the future—means that the rest of the world has said— Well, let’s look at the example of Russia.

First of all, most of the world does not agree with his version of the Russian-Ukraine war.

Sare: Right.

Macgregor: They understand that Russia was acting defensively against a force and a regime that we had done everything in our power to build up, with the sole purpose of harming Russia. And, in addition to just harming Russia on the battlefield, as much as we could, we also imposed sanctions. And finally, we banned them from the financial system: “You can’t use SWIFT, and oh, by the way, we’re going to confiscate, effectively, $300 billion of your wealth!”

Well, if you’re Chinese or you’re Japanese, or Korean, or you’re Thai, or you’re in India or anywhere else, you’d look at that and say: “Gosh! This is the United States? These are the people to whom we have entrusted management and conduct of our financial affairs—since when? The end of the Second World War, and again, after [President Richard] Nixon took us off the gold standard. We can’t trust these people! This is outrageous!”

China Won’t Go Down with the Dollar
So, the Chinese, who are very sensitive to the possibility that we could try and isolate them, began several years ago, very deliberately, in a very programmatic fashion, to build alternatives to our financial institutions. And the first thing they worked very hard on, was to come up with a settlement system that could replace SWIFT. And part of this has also been to go, increasingly, to gold-backed currency. Now, the yuan is not interested in being the reserve currency; [the Chinese] are perfectly willing to have [the U.S. dollar] remain the reserve currency. But they don’t plan to go down with the dollar, as it debases and fails. The demand for the dollar right now is plunging to new lows. And [U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott] Bessent just closed a deal with Argentina, that we would buy X millions of their pesos and we would pay them in dollars. Well, the whole thing is an unconcealed attempt to try and create demand for the dollar! Because it’s going away.

Sare: I think that’s similar to the stablecoin operation. Isn’t it? Which is another—I mean, this will destroy the dollar faster than anything we’re talking about destroying the dollar.

Macgregor: Well, see, some people think that that’s the aim: debase and ruin for the dollar. That may be the case; I don’t know. I think there are various ways to deal with default in this country. That is not a good way to do it, because that will hurt the majority of the population. And I think the people that surround Trump and his friends are all Wall Streeters, financial capitalists. So they’re looking for a way to insulate themselves from as much harm as possible, but at the same time, to shift the pain, the misery, and the misfortune to the population. That’s worth hours of discussion, by people who know more about finance than I do.

But my point on the Chinese is, the Chinese have now established, or are in the process of establishing, gold vaults, one in Hong Kong and one in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia. The idea is that they want to begin doing business with the various people in the world, by saying, “If you do business with us in yuan, instead of in dollars, you can redeem whatever you purchase, whatever you pay us, in gold.” And these are essentially warehouses, where gold will then be transferred from one owner to the next, on the national level. It’s really a profound development, and they have been hoarding gold, developing it, buying it, in great quantities, in order to get to this point. This is essentially the heart of BRICS. You know, everyone wants to move to a gold-backed system.

We have resisted that. Now, I don’t know how much gold we have; supposedly we have more than anybody else. But we don’t seem to be very interested in inventorying it, and the Germans and the Italians, for instance, who’ve already asked for the repatriation of their gold, have found out that they’re not going to get it, because they got about 30-40% of what they owned, and were told, “That’s it, that’s all you get.” And they are privately asking, “Well, where’s the rest of it?”

I don’t know where it is. But I’m very worried about this development. And I think that the Chinese are building credibility, while we lose it. So that people will, more and more, be willing to put their gold into these vaults, knowing that it’s safe, it’s there, and can be used for these critical trades across national lines. And we will be the losers in this process, because people will walk away from us. It’s already begun.

Sare: Right. Well, I think the other difference with China is the question of actual, physical investment: They’ve built—I don’t know—30,000 miles of high-speed rail in the last few decades. They’re working on nuclear power plants, floating nuclear power plants, as Russia is; and the Belt and Road is real. It’s not just a monetary trick; it is trade of goods! And the intent, I think, is to raise the standard of living everywhere. It is something that, if the United States were in our right mind, we would be cooperating with this. I sometimes have the image of the United States being like a giant black hole, because, when you get to our ports, suddenly the average freight train speed is 17 miles an hour! I mean—where can things go, when they come to the United States? We don’t have manufacturing, we don’t have industry, we don’t have energy, we don’t have transportation!

But, were we to become part of this, I think we could have a very dramatic change for the better.

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Pakistan’s nuclear missiles on display.
Macgregor: I agree with you completely. And there are a couple of things we need to point out: You talked about domestic infrastructure that China has invested in, which is very important. They’ve also put a trillion dollars of investment into the Belt and Road Initiative. Now, there’s another reason for it. It’s not just to promote prosperity and commerce and sort of resuscitate the connections that used to exist when China was a great imperial state. It’s also to negate the impact and the influence of the United States Navy. China knows that if it can’t import oil, gas, or other commodities into the country from the sea, it’s in a lot of trouble. And so, they recognize that this was one of the trump cards (pardon my pun) that we hold. It’s not so much the surface fleet; it’s the submarine fleet. Our submarine fleet is unmatched; it can’t be tracked. And they can sit offshore, in deep water, and anything that comes out can be sunk, and anything that goes in can be sunk. So they could shut down China, very, very quickly from the sea.

So, naturally, the Chinese have responded by building the Eurasian land-mass lines of communication and rail and everything else. That’s why Pakistan is important to China; that’s why Iran is important to China. And from Iran and through the Suez—I’m not talking about the Suez Canal, but across [land] into Africa—you now have lines of infrastructure developing in Africa, so that Africa becomes part of this giant commercial trade system.

The ‘Golden Spike’ Rail Program
All of this is good news, for most people, most of the time. And you’re right, we should welcome— I put together a plan that was published in the Washington Times, with one of my business partners, a very brilliant [U.S.] Naval Academy graduate Stephen Burke, and it was called the Golden Spike Program. We tried to make the argument—if you go back to the railroads and look at what the railroads did after the Civil War, that was absolutely vital to our industrial development as a nation.

And we could do something very similar, but we have to do two things: First of all, we have to build high-speed rail from East Coast to West Coast, West Coast to East Coast. I mean serious high-speed rail. And we also have to do something else: We need to build high-speed, commercial sea lift [cargo ships], so that we can pick up goods in a place like Rochefort, in France, on the western coast of France on the Atlantic; move it within a couple of days in high-speed [sea transport], across the Atlantic—maybe two, three, four days, depending upon sea states—into Philadelphia, into New York, into Baltimore, into Charleston. You could go all the way down into Corpus Christi [Texas]. But my point is, you put it into those ports, and then you have a high-speed rail right there, where the port begins; you roll things off, on a predesigned platform, [the cargo] comes off the ship and goes right onto the rail car, if you will. That goes across the country.

Now, in some cases, you’ll want to deliver some of these [goods] internally, which is part of the deal. That means that you’re developing infrastructure in the heartland. This is the place where we have systematically ignored the industrialized [sector] and treated it badly. This was a wonderful opportunity for President Trump. Obviously, it went nowhere. It was destined to him—I don’t know if he ever saw it, I doubt it. But the lady at the time who was the U.S. Secretary of [Transportation], I think was Elaine Chao. And, of course, it went nowhere. Well, why would Elaine Chao, whose father is one of the biggest shipping magnates in the world in China, want to do anything for the United States? So, my suspicion is, this is a big problem for us, right now, in Washington, D.C.: Everyone is on somebody’s payroll, and everyone is looking out for the donor. No one is looking out for the interests of the American people.

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China is following the American tradition of building railroads.
Sare: Right. Well, you definitely have that sense. Now, I have a whole bunch of things that you brought up in my mind, but I want to make sure we discuss the situation in Southwest Asia. Because I’ll tell you, the head of MI6 [UK’s foreign intelligence service], Sir Richard Moore, was just in Istanbul, giving this, I thought, completely bizarre speech. I don’t know if he believes it, or thinks everyone else should—[he said] that Ukraine can still win the war, and that Israel has now humbled Iran—and this was just after this unbelievable conference in Doha, of all of these nations which came together in the wake of the Israeli strikes on Qatar, attempting to kill the Hamas negotiators. And of course, we now have this Saudi Arabian-Pakistani agreement on the nuclear umbrella. But what are your thoughts? I think this is a huge change in the world, and I don’t think it’s really registered with everyone.

Macgregor: No, you’re right. Everybody forgets that Pakistan is a nuclear-armed state. The Pakistanis have a very long history of cooperation with the Turks. Remember, the Turks are Sunni Muslims; so are the Pakistanis. They are brothers under the skin. And [Kemal] Ataturk, who came to power in Türkiye [the country’s first president, 1923-38—ed.], was viewed by most of the people who founded Pakistan, as kind of a model for what they wanted to do in Pakistan. Of course, what they did was a little different, but nevertheless, that close relationship has persisted.

The other point is, that they have also promised the Turks, on more than one occasion, privately, but it’s an open secret—everybody in Washington, the National Security staff, knows it—promised the Turks a nuclear weapon if they need it. Now, you have the same thing happening with Saudi Arabia, and I would expect a nuclear-armed missile battery, sitting somewhere, perhaps in the Empty Quarter, I don’t know, that will be owned, operated, and— Well, it’ll actually be owned by the Saudis, but it’ll be operated and manned by the Pakistanis.

In other words, the Chinese have said, we’ll back this. Well, that means that those missiles will probably be Chinese. I suspect we’ll see new missiles arrive in Egypt; new missiles arrive in Türkiye. And we’ve already got the Chinese on the ground with missile technology in Iran.

What we’re watching is this sort of quiet, back-door diplomacy, both financial and military, between China and the states that are coalescing into a front against Israel—and us. It’s not because China wants a war with us, or anybody does. Nobody wants to go to war with us. We’re the ones that seem to be intent on going to war with everybody else. You know, Trump is a bully. He loves to bully. He thinks bullying works. Not really. It’s a bad habit—over time, it fails.

But I think what we have to reckon with now, is that Israel is in a difficult position. The longer it waits to strike again at Iran, the less likely it will have any freedom of maneuver in the future.

Sare: Do you think that’s what [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu was referring to, when he said, “We’ll deal with this Palestinian state,” or something like that, “after I get back from the United States”? Is he expecting to get permission or cooperation for another Iran strike?

Macgregor: I don’t think he needs permission. I think he’s in charge. I think he is probably going to sit down with key figures, like the President, the Vice President, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense. And the team that comes with him from Israel, will sit down with others, primarily in Defense and CIA—and I’m sure, also in the State Department, but primarily Defense and CIA—to sort through the details before he launches another offensive against Iran, to ensure we’re entirely onboard. And oh, by the way, he has a similar relationship, right now, with [Prime Minister Keir] Starmer in Britain.

You know, for this latest strike that was launched on—what was it, Sept. 7? I think so—against Doha, the [UK’s] Royal Air Force supplied [air-refueling] tankers. And MI6 was very much involved in all of this. MI6, the CIA, and Mossad [Israel’s national intelligence agency], are all involved in destabilizing, or working on destabilizing Syria, bringing a new government to power there, at least insofar as the Islamist, former Al Qaeda types are now running things. They’re also connected to the Kurds. They’re operating in part of Syria. And then, they’re also connected to the Israelis and the Druze. In other words, if the Israelis wanted to balkanize Syria, they’ve gotten what they wanted.

They want to balkanize the Caucasus; that’s why they were so heavily involved in Azerbaijan. I think that’s being largely shut down, now, by the Russians. And they want to balkanize Iran, carve it up into smaller provinces. It’s effectively the same thing they wanted to do to Russia, but they’ve failed, and they lost that war. This is the City of London banks and the New York City banks, the banking cartels, and their puppets are all interested in getting control of the Middle East oil and gas reserves and fields, and so forth.

Russia and China Turn to the Middle East
So, that’s what’s really going on. And what’s happening now is, China, which is the principal purchaser of much of that oil and gas, has said, “I don’t think so.” China has stepped in and provided the Islamic states in the region with the wherewithal to potentially stand up to Israel, and to us. At the same time, I think Russia has its hand in this, because Russia is not going to stand by and allow us to pulverize Iran out of existence. And with the diminishing of Russian military activity against Ukraine—and right now, the Russians are taking casualties in single digits; sometimes in double digits, but mostly in single digits. Whereas the Ukrainians continue to lose thousands of people, Russians can devote a lot more of their time and resources to the Middle East, and that’s what they’re doing.

So, you have Russia and China, along with most of the states—and you mentioned Türkiye. Türkiye will have a nuclear weapon, if it needs it, and the Turkish people are enraged at what is being done to the Palestinians. And we are not even aware—I don’t think most Americans understand the true dimensions of the tragedy in Gaza. But the bottom line is, people in the Middle East know it, and they will tell you openly, Diane: “Sykes-Picot is over! There will be no future compromise.”

And what that means is, you’re either going to get a Palestinian state, or an Israeli state, but you’re not going to have both. So, the people who talk about, “Oh, well, we need a two-state solution”—those people are dreaming. The time and opportunity for that solution is over.

Now, Israel, just like ourselves, is viewed as a menace. It has to be defeated, and there can be no quarter given. That’s where we’re heading. It’s sad, it’s tragic, but I think it’s inevitable.

Earlier today, I was listening to someone—it could have been Jeffrey Sachs, I don’t know—saying that the true death toll in Gaza is something in the neighborhood of 600,000. I mean, that’s outrageous! And here we are, bankrolling and enabling it. What a catastrophe for us, as well as the world.

Sare: Right. And, as if the world doesn’t know, which they absolutely do— I was thinking about this as well, because it seems to me, if it all ends up becoming Israel for a moment, there’s no basis for that to last. Because it’s simply not human nature to tolerate that kind of oppression. And it won’t end up that way. It will end up as a non-apartheid state of some sort. Ultimately, how much suffering goes on— I think that’s why it’s very, very much incumbent upon us, to make the United States better, in any way. And one thing that I and some of my associates in the LaRouche movement were discussing, which you brought to mind when you talked about rail, is that we are coming to the 250th anniversary of the founding of our republic. And I think that if there’s any hope of saving this country, we have to somehow rekindle in Americans the idea that our nation was founded to be good! I mean, we were explicitly founded against these policies.

Benjamin Franklin and Confucius
As you may know, I direct a choir. I founded a chorus, and we were talking about our repertoire for the 250th anniversary. And then we said, you know, this is way too small; we should be doing a week of events that include exhibits of great infrastructure projects being built all over the world; that include readings and study of Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, the collaboration of these people with people in Europe and around the world. I don’t know if you’re aware that Ben Franklin used to publish the Analects of Confucius in his newspaper. They were very fascinated by the way Confucian society functioned. So, he was a student of that.

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The Corliss engine which powered the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition.
And, you, I’m sure, are aware of what happened in Philadelphia in 1876, the Centennial Exhibition, on the 100-year anniversary, where we had people from all over the world, the largest steam engine—I think it was a Corliss engine—ever built. A chorus of 1,000 people singing the Hallelujah chorus. And it sparked things like the Trans-Siberian Railroad, the Berlin-to-Baghdad Railroad. People came here, and they had an idea about the way they could develop the rest of the nation.

Macgregor: And it’s particularly true for the Germans. [Chancellor Otto von] Bismarck was a huge admirer of [President] Abraham Lincoln, calling him “the man of the century.” And people don’t realize that Alexander II, the Czar of Russia, was equally enamored of Lincoln. And they believed that what Lincoln was doing in the United States was something that everyone should support. Which is kind of interesting, because the British and the French were trying to find a way to support the Confederacy. And the two nations we turned into enemies in the 20th Century, were the two nations that were trying hardest to help us. The Czar actually parked his navy in the U.S. ports during the Winter, in order to keep the French and the British out of the area. And Bismarck, who was very, very concerned with the tremendous drain of talent from Prussia, actually kept open emigration to the United States for Germans, because he wanted to help Lincoln win the war. And at one point, the entire Second Corps of the United States’ Army was German.

Sare: Wow!

Macgregor: When the war ended, of course, that’s when Bismarck intervened. He said, That’s it. We’re not sending any more Germans, because we’re losing the talent, all the best people.

So, you know, these are things people don’t know. My great-great-grandfather—I have his program for the 1876 Centennial [Exposition], because they were living in Philadelphia, and the whole family has been there since 1681. They were Quakers, on my mother’s side.

So, I’m well aware of it. And again, we were not yet what a man named [Walter] McDougal called us later on, “a crusader state.” This messianic impulse to go everywhere, and convert everybody to being an American had not yet taken hold. But we resisted it, for the most part. This is John Quincy Adams, who talked about, “Let’s not go abroad in search of monsters to slay.” He was absolutely right. But we cast that aside, and we’ve been in a messianic role now, at least for 100 years, I’m afraid.

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Portrait of Russian Emperor Alexander II by E. Botman.

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Alexander Gardner
Czar Alexander II of Russia was a great admirer of Abraham Lincoln.
Sare: Yes. And that isn’t really what the BRICS nations are doing. I think what they’re demonstrating is that you can cooperate. You’re not going to see [Chinese President] Xi Jinping going over to South Africa and telling them how to run their country, or something like that.

Macgregor: In fact, that’s very important, the Chinese: They had—what’s the right word? They’re no longer Communists. I know that everybody that wants to create hostility to China, talks about “the Chinese Communist Party.” OK, it’s a party, it’s a one-party state. It’s a fascist state, but it is a fascist state in one country. It is not exporting that model to anybody.

And [BRICS nations] realize that the Chinese are right about this, that their society, their culture, is uniquely suited to them. It’s not something that they’re going to try to impose on anybody else. But, again, these are realities that we lose sight of. And it’s in our interest to try to understand it, but there’s no willingness in Washington to touch it. Because, if you can’t create the illusion of a world of enemies that are poised to attack us and destroy us, how do you justify a trillion dollars for defense?

Sare: [laughs] Right. But it doesn’t benefit anyone here. My husband and I traveled to China in 2023 and had an absolutely wonderful time. And also, hard, I think, for Americans to imagine, is that the Chinese people— There were a couple of people who didn’t like Xi Jinping, and would say so in hushed tones. But overall, the younger generation very much like their government! And they said, “Our government is responsive to us.” There’s a certain matter of pride. You’re supposed to serve the people. If you’re not doing what you’re supposed to do in the eyes of the population, then you’re in a lot of trouble over there. And I got the sense from them, that they actually felt more optimistic about their ability to influence their leadership, than most Americans feel today about our ability to influence our leadership.

Macgregor: Well, I think that’s probably true. Keep in mind that there is a social contract, of sorts, between the people that rule the country and the people who are ruled. And they’re very sensitive to what you just described.

We don’t seem to have that—I mean, we just don’t. And I tell people, “You know, the last people who are represented in Washington, on any given occasion, are Americans, the average American on the street. That’s why you have somebody like [U.S. Rep.] Thomas Massie [R-KY], or [U.S. Rep.] Marjorie Taylor Greene [R-GA], who are standouts, unique, remarkable; or [U.S. Sen.] Josh Hawley [R], from Missouri, and [U.S. Sen.] Rand Paul [R-KY]. These people periodically do not vote for the things that everybody else in the [Republican] Party votes for; and in many cases, many Democrats vote for.

You know, this is why, I think we really need a third movement, something else besides these [two] parties. I think the American people are ready for it. But to do that—and you know this from personal experience, Diane—you need a lot of money! It doesn’t mean you have to have billions and billions of dollars, but you’ve got to get off the ground. And I think it can be done, and I think it’s going to happen. I mean, that’s one of the things that I’ve been trying to do, and I know you are. But I think it can be done.

Sare: Well, I think, actually, there’s also a poetic principle, which you saw when the Berlin Wall came down. You know, there’s a certain point—and we’re going to see it in the Middle East—where the injustice simply becomes unbearable and things really shift. And people decide, like the East Germans [decided], that they were not afraid. If the tanks were going to roll them over—they came out in huge numbers, and of course, that didn’t happen, couldn’t happen. And the fluke announcement about the border being open, everyone assumed that the Wall was coming down. But also, what they were listening to at the time, were the dramas of Schiller and the music of Beethoven. They were sort of infused with the best contributions of their culture.

And that’s why, in part, I want to make a really big deal about the American Revolution, because one of the most exciting things for me, as a younger person, was when I began to discover that the United States was actually very good! And our Founders had a very noble intention, and what you were taught in the schools—and by the way, did you ever notice, all of our textbooks are from Britain? Houghton-Mifflin, the big company, is a British company! [laughs] So you have this really screwy view, sort of like the terrible toast that Trump made at Windsor Castle—I don’t know if you saw that.

Macgregor: No, I missed that. What did he say?

Sare: It was about how the English-speaking nations are leading the world, and all of the great contributions of the British Empire, and he picked the worst ones, and how our country owes the British everything, and we never would have accomplished anything without them. That was the tone of it.

Macgregor: Well, you know, he has a cocktail level of familiarity with history, as with many other subjects, and tends to say things that are misleading. Very few people realize that up until about 1931-32, if you go back and look at the war plans, in the [U.S.] Army staff and in the [U.S.] Navy, we were focussed on a potential war against Great Britain!

Sare: As we should have been! I mean, that was the enemy, and I’m sure you’re familiar with this—and I guess we have to wrap up pretty soon—but a friend of mine just recently did some work on [British Prime Minister Winston] Churchill’s “Operation Unthinkable,” where, before World War II was won in the Pacific—and clearly, it was even planned before Victory in Europe Day [May 8, 1945]—he was talking about organizing a war against the Soviet Union, which had just been our allies in defeating the Nazis!

Macgregor: Well, he was a little late. You know, I’m a George Kennan disciple, and George Kennan was approached by [U.S. Presidential Envoy and Director of Lend Lease] Harry Hopkins, who died before he could be convicted in a court of law, of treason for his NKVD [Soviet secret police] connections. The [President Franklin] Roosevelt White House was full of NKVD agents; Harry Dexter White was prominent among them. And of course, they had fellow-travelers in the form of [U.S. Secretary of the Treasury] Henry Morgenthau and others, all of whom were determined to drag us into war in Europe against Germany. I think George Kennan summed it up best, when Hopkins came to Europe and spoke to the people in Moscow in the [U.S.] embassy, and he talked about, “what is your opinion of cooperation with the Soviet Union?” And [Kennan] said, I cannot conceive of any set of conditions, under any circumstance, where our interests, and their interests converge or coincide. And so, he said, I would advise against any aid, under any circumstances, to [Marshall of the Soviet Union Joseph] Stalin. Of course, he was well aware that Stalin had already killed 20 million people, in addition to the perhaps 5 or 10 million that Lenin annihilated through famines and other things, in the inter-war period. And he knew what Stalin was interested in.

It was a breath of fresh air, to hear someone in the UN point out that, without Stalin, there wouldn’t have been a Second World War. Because Stalin was very interested in getting that war off the ground, and he wanted Hitler, and Germany, to be mired in a long-term war with France and Great Britain, in the hopes that he could then strike from the East in the back of Germany. It didn’t work out that way.

By the way, FDR had a similar approach: He was hoping the Germans would attack, and the British and the French would then be entrenched in warfare for years against the Germans, so that we could make money from the process, as we did during the First World War. There’s a lot more out there, that we know, but I think George Kennan was right: I wouldn’t have helped anybody. I think we should have stayed out of it.

False Narrative of the British
But you pointed to the British texts, and you’re right: Because they’re promoting a narrative that’s false. Because the British texts promote the idea that we should have gone to war in [1914]! We had no business in the war [World War I], against Germany, or Austria-Hungary. They were never our enemies. They didn’t threaten us. And, again, you’ve got to go back and look at the banking connections. Back to the Bank of England. Who controlled the Bank of England? You start answering those questions, you begin to see all of these things fall into place.

So, we’re back to where we were. We still have these enormously powerful banking cartels that are calling the tune in Washington, and London and Europe. And hopefully, we can get through it this time, without being dragged into a major war. I think the Russians have exercised extraordinary patience and restraint, regarding the whole business.

Sare: Right. Me, too. I don’t think we would be alive— I actually don’t look at this, and I would like to discuss this more, otherwise, the World War II situation, because I really think it was Brown Brothers Harriman, Montagu Norman [Governor of the Bank of England], and others, who wanted to put Hitler into power, because the British wanted Germany and Russia to go at it, hoping that both of them would destroy each other, and then the British Navy would rule the world.

Macgregor: Well, I would much rather have gone with that plan, than the one we went with. Because we lost an awful lot of people, in both those wars, when we didn’t really have to. And we haven’t even discussed all the efforts made by FDR to bring on the attack on Pearl Harbor. That was no accident, and we made it inevitable that that would happen. That’s another interesting set of topics.

Bottom line is: How do you get Americans to understand that most of the wars we fought, we didn’t need to fight! And that we are now on this path of bullying. What’s the first choice? Here’s your list: military power, diplomacy—go down the list, what’re you going to try?—commercial, economic. We go immediately, number one: military power. It’s insane! It’s the last thing! And we’re now in a very dangerous position. If you listen to what is being said by [Radosław] Sikorski, recently, the Foreign Minister of Poland [regarding a recent incursion of drones allegedly deployed by Russia as the greatest threat in 60 years—ed.] Outrageous nonsense, over nothing!

Sare: Right, right. Exactly. Well, I think this is what we have to do: Frankly, war has to become a thing of the past. I was just on a platform with Lt. Col. (ret.) Tony Aguilar, whom you know, left the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. He was describing what happens when one of these depleted uranium weapons goes through a tank—which is a horror I could not even imagine—to the people inside, and [the effects of] tank-destroying weapons. And he said: “This is all insane! Why would we do this to each other? Why would human beings do this? Isn’t there something more we could be working on, together?” And I think we have to get to that point, and I hope it doesn’t take the death of everyone to get there.

Macgregor: Well, I join you in that hope.