Vlahos And Macgregor: A War Of Deceit And Denial

Yesterday I watched the first of what will be a three part video discussion between Dr. Michael Vlahos and Col. Douglas Macgregor. The first part focused on the current situation in Ukraine and was largely familiar from past Macgregor interviews. Today I watched the second part (45 minutes), which turned out to be a very wide ranging and stimulating geopolitical discussion which I highly recommend. What I’ll do here is embed the video, followed by my summary of the discussion. These are my words, although they follow the discussion closely. I hope I hit the salient parts of the discussion, but there’s more of interest that will flesh out the summary. As you’ll see, the two men get involved in discussion on the US political scene, as well.

Dr. Michael Vlahos & Col. Douglas Macgregor: Why NATO strategic failure? A war of deceit, denial Pt2

Col. Douglas Macgregor, bio

Dr. Michael Vlahos, bio

VLAHOS: In the second part [of this discussion] the question has to do with why NATO is failing so badly at a strategic level and why the Ukraine conflict has become a proxy war that has "galloped out of control", because it's run on deceit and denial.

Entering the war the narrative was that Putin's Russia is an expression of pure evil, as opposed to the US as expressing a "divine" goodness which it seized upon after WW2. The US and its vassal states (the US and UK in particular) have engaged in a war of propaganda. The US intel community has organized an "entire ecology" to obscure what's actually going on. Why would the US do this, clearly deliberately--propagating a narrative that is sheer fantasy? What does this say about the ability of the US Deep State to actually engage with reality? To deal with things as they are, rather than as we wish them to be.

MacG: We have to address how NATO has evolved over its lifespan. Originally the NATO idea was that we were defending against a real threat of war from the USSR. Long before the USSR broke up, it was clear that it was falling apart. At the end of the Cold War a new purpose had to be found for NATO. The only way, normally, to hold an alliance like this together is to define a threat. In a defensive alliance If the original threat fails, a new one must be found--or the purpose of the alliance must be redefined. That's what happened. The purpose of NATO was redefined from a defensive to an offensive alliance, one that would spread "democracy" from the Atlantic to the Urals. This began during the Clinton years with the idea of a "democratic revolution", starting in the Balkans (Serbia).

NATO thus becomes an offensive weapon in the hands of the US. Americans don't understand this. There is no C4ISR

the C4ISR concept of Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance, the U.S. term for C4ISTAR

that is European. It's entirely American. Anything that happens militarily in Europe is American.

Europe volunteered for this, reducing themselves to the status of vassal states.

VLAHOS: This is a common evolution of empire. Allies are gradually reduced to vassals of the dominant power. The US never made an effort to reach out to the Russian Federation, preferring to depict Russia as the USSR phoenix rising again from the ashes, rather than a new entity.

MacG: Another factor was the Gulf War. People like Madeline Albright were so impressed by that war that they began asking, Where does the US military go next? We have such a great army, so let's use it. The military was transformed into a sort of 911 force--responding to any call that came in from the political establishment, muddling through. That hasn't worked out so well.

VLAHOS: We became a sort of "swat team military". That has transformed the US military into something more like a Light Infantry force, from being an army capable of confronting Russia in a land war. Meanwhile European NATO began disarming, becoming mere accessories to the US.

MacG and VLAHOS: Discuss the descent of Britain into a US vassal, more or less against Britain's will. None of Britain's attempts to return to at least ally status have worked.

VLAHOS: It's about the relationship of the imperial center with its client states.

MacG: However, we now have the phenomenon of client states that are deeply interested in leveraging their relationship with the imperial center's power, economic, military, for their own narrow purposes--purposes which may not be to the benefit of the empire. The primary example is Poland. [I would add: Romania.] We should not be willing to be dragged into conflicts involving the unique aspirations of client states.

VLAHOS: Worse, the American embrace of the concept of Russian evil has led the US to overextend itself, especially in this dangerous proxy war. Why has the US gone so far out on a limb in this way, driven especially by the Blue elites in the imperial court in DC?

MacG: Remember, we're not talking about the American people. Nobody asked them about any of this, and most aren't interested. So we need to be very specific about the well financed minority in the Imperial City on the Potomac, who are pursuing this warlike agenda. Moreover, the same concept of overextension with regard to Russia also applies to Asia. The US is not examining any of this carefully. It's useful to consider the following.

First, we don't understand the extent to which we're overextended. We've been making military commitments around the world for which we're unprepared. We have a very fragile grip on things that we think we control. We see that in the financial markets, economically (outsourcing mfg. capacity), not defending our borders--while still courting outright war, not police actions.

VLAHOS: Part of the thinking behind this is the belief that the US military is supreme, the instrument that never fails. So, being the "sharpest arrow in the quiver," we tend to turn to it to solve all problems. And yet the US military HAS failed--again and again since the 1960s. We're entranced by our own symbols of power.

MacG: The perception that the US military has never been defeated is misleading. There are various ways you can win or lose. We're only looking at our strengths--which haven't recently been tested--and not our vulnerabilities. In Russia I see a greater societal cohesion and confidence in the Russian state and national culture. We don't seem to have that.

VLAHOS: We have in DC a navel gazing courtier class, a global elite that is increasingly cut off from the common people, with a vision of greatness that doesn't really exist anymore. The kind of people who insist inflation isn't that bad--who rarely if ever actually visit America. The Imperial ethos is cut off from the American ethos, thus the financialization of the economy, which benefits the elites, and deindustrialization which harms Americans. They have no concept of "the nation". They use "identity" as a political weapon, whereas Russia possesses the reality of identity that we have lost. Our elites belong to a global class separate from America.

MacG: Trump's tough love--Europe needs to become its own first responder--was a threat to the European ruling elite, because it would have returned them from their global class interests to national interests. A multi-polar world is healthy, but it's a threat to the global elite because they lose control--which is what the war on Russia is about.

VLAHOS: And we have dismantled many of the levers of our actual power, such as energy. And let the military slide. And now the elite has, in a sense, become a captive to their use of Russia as the universal boogeyman. We see this especially after the Russia Hoax of 2016. It controls their actions, even in self defeating ways. It has developed a sort of elite class psychosis that makes us slaves of our emotions and fantasy narratives.

MacG: There's no doubt that this war is intertwined with all the other political pathologies in America. There's no easy way out of this, but in the not too distant future this narrative will fail, it will collapse. The one factor in our favor is that more and more Americans are slowly coming to an awareness that American problems are being ignored by the elite in favor of global adventurism.

VLAHOS: Perhaps military leaders will, at some point, need to simply say, No. This is too dangerous.

MacG: But we have a military leadership that is focused strictly on advancement, promotion.

VLAHOS: When the Russian offensive does finally start and all the fantasies of our elites collapse, there will be those--the Neocons--who will want to escalate dramatically. That will the moment when the military leadership will need to step up. The problem is that military leaders today have been focused on appeasing the civilian political elites, rather than thinking it real strategic terms.

Eisenhower learned our very real limits in WW2, and that enformed his presidency. Later generations did not learn those lessons. The mythology of WW2 lives on. The Blue elite has tried to recreate the myth of WW2, another ecstatic realization of their fantasies. They want to be the lineal descendants of WW2.

MacG: Maybe the American electorate will rise up and save us.

VLAHOS: The contrast between our domestic problems--upheavals and conflicts--and the absolute fecklessness of our elites involving us in a dangerous situation in Ukraine, is the most salient issue for Americans to address.