“Another dissident colonel.”
An exchange with Douglas Macgregor.
Two centuries ago, the British statesman John Bright warned against “following visionary phantoms in all parts of the world while your own country is becoming rotten within.”
It is symptomatic of how diseased American strategic thinking has become over the past 30 years that so few Americans in a position to influence the direction of U.S. foreign policy would have the guts or insight to issue a similar warning today.
That cannot be said of retired Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor, whose views on American defense and foreign policy run 180 degrees counter to the prevailing consensus that has dominated U.S. strategic thinking for decades. Macgregor was a staunch supporter of President Trump’s efforts finally to bring a lasting peace to the Korean Peninsula. He has long been an outspoken proponent of a worldwide U.S. military drawdown, in particular calling for a serious rethink of the benefits of NATO.
Macgregor’s books on military transformation are read widely in the U.S., Europe, Israel, Russia, China, and Korea: Breaking the Phalanx (Praeger, 1997) and Transformation under Fire (Praeger, 2003). Macgregor’s views, as he made plain during our exchange with him, run 180 degrees counter to those who compose the DC foreign policy “blob”—none of whose members has ever been held to account for their many grave failures over the past 20 years, but many of whom now hold prominent positions in the Biden administration
