Douglas Macgregor explains why his predictions have been coming true.

22 January 2026, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

On January 22nd, Glenn Diesen asked Douglas Macgregor, “how could you see this coming, because uh no one’s denying the fragmentation anymore?”:

“Douglas Macgregor: Why NATO is Finished & the Ukraine War Was Lost”

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DIESEN: Four years ago when the Russians

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went into Ukraine, there seemed to be a consensus in the media that, and by the politicians that, NATO would now be

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stronger than ever. Uh, given that we face this Russian threat [to defend itself against the voraciously expanding anti-Russian military alliance NATO, I would say, but Diesen appears to think otherwise — he presumes that the aggressor is Russia not NATO], uh, with an

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exception of you, though within the first weeks [of Russia’s invason of Ukraine], I think you said something along the line that this would end with NATO’s

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uh possible collapse. I was wondering, um, yeah, how, how could you see this [dissension within NATO] coming,

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because uh no one’s denying the fragmentation anymore. MACGREGOR: Actually, I, uh, told, uh, I think it was

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Dmitri Simes or George Beebe [see especially after 40:00 and then after 1:05 in that video] can’t remember which one in

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an interview [with several colleagues] with the National Interest in January of 2022, before the Russians

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went in. Two things: that, first, the Russians would very definitely intervene militarily

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and a lot of people in Washington and in Europe all said oh, no, the Russians will never do this, it would uh destroy their

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economy and the regime can’t withstand that, no, the Russians will never never go

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into Ukraine, they will not do this; and, so, I said, yes, they will, and then I said that if they do, NATO will not survive uh

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the crisis. Now, why did I say that? I think because

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a substantial portion of my career involved service in the US military inside the North Atlantic Treaty

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Organization, and I think that’s important to understand. I was there for the first

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time I came in, in March of 77, and my assignment for most of the time that I

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was there in 77 — and I was there until 1980 — was a service on the border with the

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Czechoslovakia and East Germany. And so I had a lot of

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interaction with many many people. I had a chance to see the Warsaw Pact forces

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and I concluded three things. First of all, that uh

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there would, the Warsaw Pact was not going to attack you, that the Soviets were not going to risk a war, that they

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were effectively defending what they had gained as a result of the collapse of German military power at the end of the

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second world war. Secondly, that, uh, you know, the the NATO alliance was a

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conglomeration of different national military establishments and this is not conducive to success on

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the battlefield, and that in most cases the smaller nations, the Dutch, the

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Belgians, and I saw both of them in the field, as well as the Canadians, excuse

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me, the British and ultimately the French. Everyone was sort of a uh, a

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limited liability partner as we say. They were there because they saw it as being in their interest to be there, but

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they really weren’t prepared to fight anybody, and their focus was extra-territorial. This is particularly true

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for the French and the British, the Belgians and the Dutch, because they were former colonial powers and they all had interests overseas.

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Now, that was my first tour, and I worked closely with German military units and I

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concluded that the Germans were the only ones that were adequately equipped and trained to fight effectively against the

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Soviets if anything happened. So then I spent time in graduate school

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in in Munich and in Vienna in 1983

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and 84. Uh, this was when I was writing my masters, and I I went to those places

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to see the to to talk to members of the mutual balanced force reduction talks

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that were both Soviet and non-Soviet as well as the US side. And again I reached very similar conclusions about

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what I thought was realistic. And then in 1986, I was assigned briefly

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for about six weeks to uh uh an office in the Pentagon that used to be called

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Net Assessment, uh and uh it was a very useful assignment because I was able to read

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translated works from the Soviet General Staff Journal which were extraordinarily

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highly classified at the time. And these were very informative in so far as the

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Soviet understanding of us and our understanding of them. And they pointed out that we had performed very poorly

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during the Second World War, the Anglo British Alliance, because we managed the

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forces, uh, as though they were separate countries and there were limited uh

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authorities exercised by Eisenhower and others whenever they commanded Canadian, French, uh non non-American forces. And

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so he’s basically said you can’t run a war this way. And if you fight somebody as competent as the Germans, you have no

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chance of success at all. So the bottom line is uh I went back then as a major.

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I served again on the border briefly, and then I went to Supreme Headquarters of Light Powers Europe and I was there from

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November 1997 until January 2000. And what I saw was evidence for the same

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problem. Everyone had their own agenda. They only temporarily or briefly cooperated, and there had to be an

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incentive for them to cooperate. there had to be some payoff to get people to join together to do much of anything.

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The exercises that we did conduct were not very realistic. So the point is when this happened, a

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couple of things were very obvious to me. Russia was now a Russian state which meant they had unity of command, unity

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of effort. Everybody spoke the same language. There were no disputes about who was going to command what. And NATO

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remained exactly what it was, a chorus of competing voices that couldn’t agree

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on much of anything. And I didn’t see much evidence that regardless of what Ukraine did that it could outlast the

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Russians. Ukraine wasn’t large enough, didn’t have the scientific industrial base, didn’t have the manpower. And we

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knew almost from the outset that you know the Ukrainian population was

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diminishing in size not just for reasons of fecundity or the lack thereof but

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because you know Ukrainians didn’t want to fight in the war so large numbers of people left and then of course you have

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the corruption issues. So, I don’t think it was I know a lot of people say, “Oh, well, how could you possibly have figured that out?” But if anybody looked

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at any of the things I’ve described objectively, it was hard not to reach that conclusion. The one thing that I

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did not anticipate was that the Russians would move as cautiously and slowly at the beginning

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as they did. And I didn’t understand the true state of affairs with the Russian army. The Russian army was designed for

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territorial defense, nothing else. So that’s why all these claims of Putin’s

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determination to rebuild the Soviet empire, it’s all nonsense. Always was. Today they have an army that is second

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to none in my judgment in many respects. But at the time it wasn’t up to the task that it was assigned. And it took a

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year, year and a half to really build up that force to what you see today. So I

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guess that’s the easiest explanation. And everyone else, and this is true in Washington as well as in the capitals of

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Europe. Glenn, everyone suffers from a terminal case of wishful thinking. You

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know that I mean they they fully believe in all the nonsense uh that is now

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crashing and burning so badly over in Davos and also in uh in all of Europe’s

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capitals about this thing we call NATO and the European Union.

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…

MY COMMENTS:

Macgregor attributes all of it — his track record of success as a predictor — to his extensive experience as a geostrategist, but there are many people who have as much experience at it as he does and who turn out to have been wrong more often than they have been right, and the U.S.-and-allied billionaires’ media go to those, and not to people such as Macgregor, as being the ‘experts’ who opine in the mass-media — radio, TV, ‘news’-papers, and magazines — about international relations. The few predictors who have superb records of confirmation as predictors, such as Macgregor, Scott Ritter, Larry C. Johnson, and Alastair Crooke, are ignored by the major ‘news’-media. So, throughout the U.S. empire, the publics can look back on decades of things having turned out very differently than the media had been pretending that things had been.

The rest of this interview of Macgregor is also very thought-provoking, and not at all what the U.S.-and-allied publics get to hear and read on the paying and paid-for media.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.