Col. Douglas Macgregor - decorated combat veteran, author, and former advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Defense - returns to Neutrality Studies with an argument that cuts against almost everything said in Washington and Brussels. His thesis is not that America will lose a war. It is that America will run out of money first. Macgregor compares the present moment to the final months before the Soviet collapse — a period he says he lived through as a young academic, when informed observers agreed the system was unsustainable but nobody could name the date. In his reading, the same conditions now exist in the United States: unfunded liabilities that cannot be met, an interest-rate trap with no exit, a defense budget that is the easiest line to cut and the hardest to defend politically, and a foreign policy establishment structurally incapable of reforming itself. He also argues that the era of forward presence is ending for military reasons, not just financial ones. Precision missiles paired with space-based surveillance have made large concentrations of forward-deployed forces survivable only at distance - which is why, in his account, carrier groups now sit far offshore rather than in the Gulf.<



The conversation ranges across the war in Ukraine, the German political realignment, the logic of the American base network, Vietnam and the gold standard, Korea, Cuba and Puerto Rico, and why he believes any American withdrawal will look lessUnited States: unfunded liabilities that cannot be met, an interest-rate trap with no exit, a defense budget that is the easiest line to cut and the hardest to defend politically, and a foreign policy establishment structurally incapable of reforming itself. He also argues that the era of forward presence is ending for military reasons, not just financial ones. Precision missiles paired with space-based surveillance have made large concentrations of forward-deployed forces survivable only at distance - which is why, in his account, carrier groups now sit far offshore rather than in the Gulf. The conversation ranges across the war in Ukraine, the German political realignment, the logic of the American base network, Vietnam and the gold standard, Korea, Cuba and Puerto Rico, and why he believes any American withdrawal will look less like Gorbachev's orderly exit from East Germany and more like Kabul. <




https://youtu.be/fFqLDDpo9E8?si=0IZBNXcTLlpW3Zx3