Catching Up With Doug Macgregor Re Ukraine

Also, Japan Snubs Sanctions

Doug Macgregor’s most recent full length interview is well worth a listen. It’s only 28 minutes long, and it goes into Macgregor’s fears of how things could get totally out of control. Totally out of control means: gone nuclear. Briefly, Macgregor fears a scenario in which US forces other NATO forces in establishing some sort of buffer zone along the Ukrainian border—i.e., actually within Ukraine’s borders. He speculates on that eventuality either with Romanian forces in the direction of Odessa or with Polish forces in the direction of Lwów. I will say, without access to the information Macgregor probably has, that I’m skeptical of that. Nevertheless …

Here’s the video, and beneath that I’ve included a selective transcript:

21:30 My great fear is that maniacs in Washington will say, well, we'll send our troops in. We'll go into Odessa, we'll go to Lwów, maybe a little further. We'll go in with the Poles, we'll go in with the Romanians, and the Russians will be deterred. That is not gonna deter the Russians, because the Russians have convinced themselves that we are committed to their destruction, and we are allying ourselves with people in Europe, particularly the Poles, who are openly talking about destroying Russia, and have for a long time. So what we're effectively doing is creating a nightmare scenario for the Russians. So if we do those things, the Russians are not going to sit quietly by. They'll probably give us two hours to turn around and get out, or we will be considered co-belligerents and they will destroy us. We're talking about a force of over 700k that is building up in various areas around Ukraine in the Russian armed forces in the Western theater, and that force is going to attack in November or December. And equally important for people to understand is that this 300k man mobilization has occurred. They're largely integrated, they're trained, but the mobilization has not stopped, because a decision was made not to suspend it--out of fear that we are intent on going to war with Russia. So by January it is very reasonable to expect that there will be a million men in the field fighting for Russia.

25:30 You have the ideologues at the top, who see Russia as the last obstacle to the destruction of what they perceive to be the civilization that they hate. And that civilization is Western Christian culture. They wanna get rid of it. The Russians have steadfastly refused to support same sex marriage. They've steadfastly refused to open their borders to millions of people from what we call the developing world, particularly from the Middle East and Africa. The Russians are refusing to sign on for the "values" that are espoused by the World Economic Forum, the WEF. These places, these things, are at stake as far as the ideologues in Washington are concerned. Congress, I'll be frank with you, the senators sign on for whatever is gonna reward them financially and politically. But when you get into the House, very few people know what's happening over there, one way or the other. They just don't know, and so they are handed narratives. The narrative may come from the Heritage Foundation, it may come from the Brookings Institute, it may come from the American Enterprise Institute. They say, Russia's terrible, Russia's horrible, they're committing all these crimes, they deserve to be destroyed.

Now, here’s an interesting news item that affects the “collective West,” even though Japan isn’t a Western country:

Anti-Russian Alliance Fractures After Japan Decides To Stay In Russia's Sakhalin-1 Energy Project

While Europe continues the unvarnished hypocrisy of pretending it is imposing draconian sanctions against Russian oil and gas, when instead it is merely buying the country's natural resources via such middlemen as India and China (an exercise in virtue signaling that costs it a 20% mark-up to Russian prices), less than a year since the start of the Ukraine war, some countries have had enough of pretending.

Today, the Japanese government decided to officially screw the sanctions, and remain involved in the (formerly Exxon-led) Sakhalin-1 oil and gas project in Russia, as it seeks a stable supply of energy (who doesn't) despite international sanctions on Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine, the Nikkei reported.

It’s a complicated situation—and you can follow the link and read all about it—but it’s a major blow to the sanctions regime. The awkwardness affects not only sanctions on Russia but relations with Russia’s ally, China:

Translation: the upcoming G-20 will be rather awkward as Japan's PM Fumio Kushida, an anchor pillar of the G7 in Asia, may decide to sit at the table next the Xi and Putin.