Last month, U.S. Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor spoke to the Serbian American Voters Alliance at the New Gračanica Monastery in Third Lake, Illinois. I attended the event on behalf of the Thinker and heard Macgregor discuss his experiences in the U.S. Army, America’s fiscal and cultural decay, and his analysis of the Russo-Ukrainian War.
Macgregor was heavily involved in the 1990–91 Gulf War and in the conflict between Albanian separatists and Yugolasavia over Kosovo. Under former President Donald Trump, Macgregor served as the senior advisor to the acting secretary of defense.
America’s Fading Moral Compass
Discussing American national leadership, Macgregor observed that “there is no moral compass in Washington anymore.” While we used to have one, he argued, we no longer do because it is “either being ignored or jettisoned.”
America’s moral compass faded away because the “religious principles [that] guided us for centuries” are no longer front and center in the contemporary U.S., contended Macgregor.
The fruits of American moral dissolution include the dollar “being destroyed and ruined”; the rule of law “almost being formally suspended” because “criminals have more rights than victims”; and, more broadly, “gross mismanagement at every level.”
Are the Days of Dollar Supremacy Over?
In postulating the destruction of the dollar, Macgregor addressed the flawed nature of our financial system: “We have a financialized economy. What do we build? What do we produce? Almost nothing.” And now that the U.S.-led “global financial system is failing,” Macgregor argued that a “new system” led by the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) economic coalition is replacing it.
Macgregor’s assessment of the shaky status of the dollar and the U.S. financial system is spot-on: As the U.S. money supply skyrocketed due to the federal government’s disastrous COVID-19 response, Russia temporarily tied its currency to gold by “buying [it] from banks at a fixed rate of 5000 rubles per gram.”
And at a recent meeting of BRICS foreign ministers in South Africa, Indian Minister of External Affairs Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said that these officials having convened must “send out a strong message that the world is multipolar,” adding that at “the heart of economic problems we face is economic concentration that leaves too many nations at the mercy of too few.”
The push from other economic powers to move away from the unipolar, West-centric orientation of global economic control is, in Macgregor’s eyes, a natural outcome of the fact that “what we do with our financial system is bully people.”
Who is the Culprit in Ukraine?
On the topic of waning American hegemony, Macgregor pivoted to the Russia-Ukraine conflict, arguing that while American bureaucrats believe “we have cornered the market on wisdom and goodness,” the reality is that “the ideology of perpetual war to advocate this great democratic revolution is actually a facade, and the real interest is always the same: gain control of resources, gain control of territory.”
Macgregor also contended that the West has made it difficult for Russian President Vladimir Putin to engage in good-faith negotiations regarding an end to the conflict: “He can’t negotiate with us. We’ve lied. He now knows that the Donetsk accords [Minsk II agreement] were a lie. If you’re sitting in Moscow, what do you believe? Who do you believe?”
The historical record once again backs up Macgregor: Ukraine has repeatedly violated its 2015 Minsk II agreement with Russia—which France and Germany brokered—with the help of hundreds of millions of dollars of American military aid. Former Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump initiated and perpetuated these shipments, respectively.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky himself said he had no intention of following Minsk II, recounting how he told French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel that “we cannot implement it.” Last year, Der Spiegel paraphrased Merkel as saying that “during the Minsk talks, she was able to buy the time Ukraine needed to better fend off the Russian attack. She says it is now a strong, well-fortified country.” And François Hollande, president of France at the time of the Minsk agreements, said “Merkel is right on this point.”
Evidently, none of the three countries who developed Minsk II with Russia had any interest in following through on the agreement. Putin echoed this sentiment in January, arguing that “the West lied to us about peace while preparing for aggression, and today, they no longer hesitate to openly admit it.”
If the U.S. is truly interested in putting a peaceful end to this conflict, it would behoove those in charge of our foreign policy to take heed of what Macgregor told the audience. We need to put ourselves in the shoes of our enemy—Putin—and recognize that while his war in Ukraine is one of aggression and war crimes, it was not unprovoked.
Following Macgregor’s talk, the Thinker asked him for his thoughts on the accidental Ukrainian missile strike on Poland, which U.S. intelligence and Ukraine painted as a Russian attack against a NATO country before the truth came out. The Associated Press’ national security reporter who prematurely and incorrectly reported the missile as Russian rather than Ukrainian violated the AP’s journalistic standards so egregiously that the AP fired him and “review[ed] its standards on the use of anonymous sourcing.”
Macgregor’s response was simple yet chilling: In all likelihood, the propagandistic portrayal of this attack was an instance of the West “trying to provoke a war.”
* The views expressed in this article solely represent the views of the author, not the views of the Chicago Thinker.
