Colonel Macgregor: America’s Collapse Will Create A New Financial System
Summary
Geopolitical Tensions: The podcast discusses the impact of global alliances like NATO and the EU, suggesting they may contribute to geopolitical tensions rather than prevent them.
US-China Trade War: Recent escalations in the US-China trade war, particularly concerning rare earth metals, highlight the strategic importance of these resources and the economic vulnerabilities of the US.
Economic Dependencies: The conversation emphasizes China's limited economic dependency on the US, contrasting with the US's significant reliance on Chinese imports, which affects global trade dynamics.
Global Financial Shifts: There is an ongoing shift towards a multipolar financial system, with countries like India and Saudi Arabia engaging in trade using currencies other than the US dollar, indicating a move away from dollar dominance.
Military and Economic Strategy: The discussion critiques the US's reliance on military power and suggests a need for diplomatic engagement and economic restructuring to address domestic and international challenges.
Resource Security: The importance of securing critical resources, such as rare earth metals, is highlighted as a strategic priority for maintaining economic and military capabilities.
Investment Opportunities: The podcast underscores the significance of investing in commodities like gold amidst global economic uncertainties, as discussed in the context of the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference.
Transcript
My guest today says that all of these global alliances like NATO and the European Union that are designed to prevent the world from descending into war are in fact the cause of it. This is the subject of iatrogenetics where the cure is in fact worse than the disease. My guest is the renowned Colonel Douglas McGregor, absolute proud favorite. And today we dive deep into all of the geopolitical threads that most people are either misunderstanding or outright sleeping on. If you enjoy this interview, the colonel will be joining me at my conference in Vancouver January 25th and 26th in Vancouver, British Columbia, alongside about a 100 other keynote speakers, 9,000 investors, and around 300 mining companies. If you're curious about how to allocate money into the mining or the metals market in such a volatile world, you're not going to want to miss the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference January 25th and 26th. Hit the link below, vicia.com, for tickets. Here is Colonel Douglas McGregor. Enjoy. >> This is J. Martin. >> All right. Here I am with Colonel McGregor. It's great to have you back on the program and very timely. Lots I would like to discuss with you today. >> Sure. Good to be here. Let's start with the major headline that's been sending uh markets and media into a tail spin last week and obviously that is the recent escalation in the China US trade war on the heels of extended restrictions of rare earth metals and now everybody is suddenly talking about the significance of rare earth metals. Uh when I saw this headline as a commodity investor my first thought was this outcome was baked in the cake 20 years ago. It's not necessarily news, but maybe it's news to a lot of folks. What's your take, Colonel, when you saw this recent escalation? You know, a lot of headlines are substantive, a lot aren't, right? What's your take on this one? >> Well, I think the problem that we have right now in the White House and in Washington in general is frustration with the unwillingness of the rest of the world to do what we tell them to do. And you have this uh predisposition to bully instead of uh recognizing the criticality of diplomacy, the value in studying a problem, uh talking to people about the problem, discussing uh solutions, proposals. Uh there is an automatic predisposition to bully and that's what this White House has been doing now ever since it took office. You know, you were talking about rare earth as one item, but we just were told earlier today that apparently we're not going to buy cooking oil any longer from the Chinese. And that removed about $750 billion of value from the stock market. Uh I I think there is a failure to understand that China is the world's principal market now, not the United States. Everyone wants to do business with China. That's the first thing. Second thing is that if you look at China's position, the Chinese economy uh depends upon American imports to a very limited degree. I think they they finally studied it carefully and less than 3% of China's economy depends upon imports from the United States. Now, I don't know what the percentage of imports from China is that we depend upon, but I know it's a lot larger than 3%. There there's a failure to look at our own vulnerabilities and there is a failure to understand that someone's refusal to align with you on all of your policies doesn't necessarily mean that these people are hostile. You know, no country can be expected to move beyond the limits of its own interests. China is no exception. Neither are we. But you've got to know what your interests are. And right now the only interest we seem to have is in harming China or harming Russia or harming India, harming anyone, any particular nation, state or group of states that refuses to do business with us on our terms. Well, that's a dead end. There's no future in that whatsoever. And rare earth is something that we've known about for decades. We've been dependent upon that for a very long time, not just in the Department of Defense. What have we done about it? What what have we done to invest in that area to ensure that we are not solely dependent upon very few sources? We haven't done anything. And now we're angry. It's almost childish. There's no future for this. >> Let me ask you a second order impact of this announcement and and the announcement this morning. for example, is that it's appearing that that China's flexing its ability to move the US market by provoking the administration. Right? We've we've gotten used to, I think, an era of politics where the president can move the market with a tweet. This has become normal. And now as I'm watching these new developments unfold, I'm curious about how much China's recognized their ability to do the same by provoking the administration getting a bombastic response and triggering a major shift in the market. I'd love your thoughts on that. And then and then secondly, just last question on the rare earth restrictions. You know, China came out and said the purpose of this restriction was actually to prevent our materials from being used as tools of war. Right? That was the language that came out of the the PBOC. Uh I never take any political statements at face value, but what I think is very real is that a a stop order on export on the export of rare earth metals is a stop order on the American military-industrial complex. Is that true? >> Well, it's a stop order not on everything, but certainly on a whole multitude of high-tech weapon systems. It's also going to have an impact on our ability to rapidly develop and field things. You know, we simply don't have access to it. I think the real purpose was pointing out and this is something again that we've absolutely rejected. China is not a subordinate state. China is not a backward entity. Neither is India. Neither is Russia. And for that matter, neither is Iran. And there are many other nations that that we have treated for many many years as essentially uh backward secondary uh un unimportant. What they're demonstrating to us is that we not only live in a new multi-olar world. We live in a world where we have peers. In other words, nation states that can field forces and and have economies that allow them to compete effectively against us. Now, what we have to do is we have to decide whether or not we're going to live with it, find out how to accommodate it, assimilate into it, or are we going to run around and essentially threaten everyone with war who disagrees with us? You know, this is the biggest problem that we have right now. We've demonstrated for years now that we don't have any respect for anyone uh who doesn't have the force to stop us. Our first inclination is to reach for military power. And we continue to assume that our military power is unique and unchallengeable. Well, it's not. It really isn't. And the Chinese and the Russians and others have bent over backwards to avoid confronting us militarily. We interpret that as weakness, Jay. It's not weakness. It's common sense. It's rationality. They live in a world where war is destructive and antithetical to business. We don't seem to have a role in that world. We seem to think when all else fails, even if all else hasn't failed, you use military power to intimidate, to beat down, to suppress. The Chinese are not going to put up with that and neither will the Russians. So right now, I think, you know, an answer to both of these questions, we are the problem. provoking us is easy because we're easily provoked. We want our way. We've lived in a world for 80 years where we've had our way, where we could print as much money as we want and then pass our debt on to everybody else and tell them to like it. This is ending. You know, this is this is the end of dollar dominance. And we're watching India do business with China and yuan. We're watching the Saudis do the same thing. We're watching gold vaults being set up in Riad in Hong Kong by the Chinese for a goldbacked economic system. Not necessarily for one kind of currency. Maybe it'll be a basket of currencies. I don't know what the answer will be, but the point is that they have managed to build parallel institutions much faster than we thought they could. They're not yet as sophisticated as we are in our banking system, but they're getting there. And instead of fighting this and and aggravating and antagonizing the situation, we ought to be figuring out how we're going to interact with it. Because I think where we're headed right now, Jay, in a on a macro level is two separate distinctive systems on the globe. One will be dominated by our financial system. uh even if it's limited basically to uh Europe and North America, I'm not even sure the Australians will join that because they're in China and they're very dependent upon the Chinese. But my point is that's one system and then perhaps the rest of the world will enter this bricks system. So we'll have this divergence. That's one outcome. But I don't think we're going to have a single global system any longer. And that's because people are fed up with us. And you know, we can look at all sorts of implications for what that means in trade and commerce. >> Well, let me ask you because as you mentioned, there's a handful of states that have been playing the neutrality game very effective. Saudi Arabia being one, India being another, Japan being another. They're happily buying Russian oil today because it's in their best interest. It's the right move for that economy. Um you mentioned Australia which is a economy that we assume is western aligned but from a geographic and proximity standpoint you know Asia is a better trade partner and China is their biggest customer. When all of this rare earth headline began making waves, there was another development that I was watching that made me an eyebrow because at the end of September, uh, China, who imports more Australian iron ore than anybody else, about 710 million tons per year, put a stop order on new US dollar purchases of iron ore. So, not a stop order on Australian iron ore from BHP, but a stop order on US dollar purchases. Now obviously this brought BHP to the negotiating table and where they landed is that going forward China can pay for its iron ore 70% in US dollars 30% in ren Mindi right now that's really interesting because that's that's not Venezuela that's not um Vietnam that's not a bricks aligned nation that's Australia right that's like a G7 adjacent nation uh one way to think about that I thought this was super relevant for three reasons number one it's it's precedent Whenever a deal like this happens, you always have to think about the trajectory that it might put you on. This is new president that China can take to the world and say, "This is how we do business now." And it's good enough for BHP, so it's good enough for you. It's good enough for Australia, so it's good enough for you. And that's a new president that gives countries the ability to say, "Okay, no, this is this is reasonable. This is reasonable." Secondly, obviously the transaction is a two-way street. BHP will now be accumulating a treasury of REM Mindi and they're going to have to spend it somewhere. They could just convert that to US dollars, but anybody who runs a non-American company knows the risks of currency exchange. Like it's expensive, it's risky, it's tough. That's the headache that China offloaded to BHP. They don't want that. They'd much rather just spend the ren Mindy. The most logical home is in China, right? But they're now incentivized to find other players who will accept Ren Mindbi because they have it to spend, right? So they're incentivized to inspire to a degree more darization. And the third I just think as the rest of the world watch this, we all think about uh the transition from the US dollar to something else. We think about the shift that BHP will have to make. But the rest of the world's worried about one thing, and that's does cheap Chinese steel still arrive. I don't care what you guys do. I don't care what's in BHP's treasury. None of that. Right? I need the steel. Well, that's get the deal done, right? Uh, do you see this as like a bit of a tipping point precedence? It's notable, I believe, but what's your take on on that picture, Colonel? >> No, I I think the picture that you painted is a very accurate one, and that's where we're headed. The United States is not the scientific industrial giant that it once was. We're not the indispensable market any longer. uh what we need to do for ourselves is another subject and we need to talk about that because the United States needs to take a different path into the future. But right now I think what you just described is unavoidable. Most of the people that I listen to, whether it's Nasim Talib, who has been telling people for months now that gold is the reserve currency, not the dollar, and large numbers of other prudent financial analysts, whether it's Alistister Mloud in London, who's very concerned about the gold exchanges, they all are pointing at the same thing. The dollar is crumbling and most of the world is beginning to ddollarize. And I don't think there's a great deal that we can do to stop that in the short run. I think it's going to continue. We're the ones that have effectively debased our currency. So the question is where do we fit in? How do we fit in? What do we do in the future? That's really the question for us. The rest of the world is making up its mind exactly as you have described. And that's why I said at the very beginning, no nation can be expected to move beyond the limits of its own interests. And right now most people's interests dictate dd dollararization. So the real question is what do we do? And that's something that is very painful for the people in Washington. And it it's not painful for the American citizenry. The American citizenry has not been consulted on any major decisions. But when Trump was elected, what he should have done was begun shedding our overseas military commitments. He should have been interested in terminating these conflicts as quickly as possible because they are a drain on our prosperity. Then he needed instead of going into a tariff war and declaring war effectively on most of the world. I mean it's one of the first times I think in modern history we've seen tariffs imposed on friend and foe. I mean suddenly people that were friends of the United States that have been allies, have worked with us are suddenly being punished with tariffs. didn't make a lot of sense. But China should have been approached quietly, not in public, and we should have sat down with them and said, "Look, this dollar isn't really working very well for us. It's a problem." Because the ch Chinese have been saying very publicly and I think very honestly, they do not want to be the world's reserve currency. And we could have sat down with them and said,"Well, what are the things that we need to do that we can do with you to avoid the crisis, the conflict that we see in the financial markets and the problem for the dollar. We never did that. This is back to what I was saying before. We we immediately respond by threatening people with one thing or another and ultimately it becomes military." That's a dead end. There's this thing called diplomacy. It's almost completely missing from our vocabulary. You know, there's no willing to sit down willingness to sit down and negotiate. We we really need to negotiate with the Chinese. Now, I don't know how ready they will be to talk to us any longer, especially with this administration. The last one was bad in this connection. This one has turned out to be worse. So, nobody sees any light at the end of the tunnel with us. So the predisposition is to say America is patient zero. They're at the end of the hall. We've locked them in a in a room by themselves. So they're no longer contagious and the rest of us are going to get on with life on planet Earth. Literally, I think that's where we're headed to some extent. And I don't think people in Washington understand it. They really live in in a fantasy world where we are everything and everybody needs us and no one can contradict us. you mentioned the biggest question we need to answer is you know uh what's the new path forward and I I agree right we need to take a different path into the future and you referenced um one initiative within that should be withdrawing military force from around the world something that I'm inclined to say the majority of American public would support maybe not Washington those are two different animals as you and I have discussed and I think as to quote you uh Washington has become donor occupied territory so maybe that's the hurdle um I would imagine >> that's one >> okay um >> well let's let's get into that because I have to imagine there are some rational thinkers in Washington who see things this way and maybe it's a small group hopefully it's a growing group maybe it isn't What's your take on that? Are there sound minds in politics to the extent that we we might move this direction in in one or two election cycles? >> I would like to think there are, but I don't. I think there's a very small number of people who recognize the criticality of turning inward, of moving away from conflicts and crises overseas that frankly we don't need. This is what Trump was talking about when he ran for office. That's why so many people voted for him. He said, "We need to worry about our own hemisphere. Specifically, we need to defend our own borders. We need to get control of things inside the United States. The rule of law is is really absent in too many places in the United States right now. We have to restore that rule of law. We have to rebuild trust and confidence in the population, in our institutions. Americans no longer believe in many of our institutions. All you have to do is listen to the radio or even the mainstream media will admit to this. You know, the FBI is no longer trusted. There are now commercials that run on the on the media that say if you are approached by the FBI, don't say a word unless you have an attorney present. Other words, don't cooperate with law enforcement unless you've got an attorney. This is a very serious change in the history of the United States. Certainly from the country I grew up in where people frankly worshiped the FBI as the guardian of internal security and with the best people, the most honest people that you could ever find. Well, that's all gone. That's vanished. You know, we are dealing with crime, half of which is not even reported in the statistics that's overwhelmed our major cities. And we have governors uh who are saying, "We don't want you in our state. Federal law doesn't apply. We've we've unilaterally lifted uh federal law from the books. It doesn't it doesn't have any impact here. We have rights as states, mayors and cities that have decided that federal law is irrelevant to them. That's how we ended up with these sanctuary cities. Now, we fought a war some time ago called the Civil War, which was supposed to have settled this issue of federal supremacy, but it seems like we're back to it. What I'm suggesting is not that we arm ourselves to the teeth and go to war internally. What I'm suggesting is that instead of focusing on a place like Venezuela for God's sakes or uh what's happening in the Middle East right now, which I think is beyond our ability to fundamentally change. And then finally, stop the nonsense in Ukraine. Stop pretending that we as Americans have any interest in eastern Ukraine. We have no strategic interest there. Our only interest from day one was to stop the war, to hammer out some sort of solution. And if the puppet government sitting in Kief doesn't want to do that, well then the puppet government will have to get along without our support. We haven't been willing to do that because there is this underlying assumption that we rule the world. We do not rule the world. We do not enjoy absolute military hegemony over the planet. nor do we need to, nor can we afford to. So, I think what has to happen now is a serious financial downturn as a result of the mess we've created for ourselves with the dollar, uh the people that we've alienated overseas, the the commerce and trade war that we don't need. These things are all going to come together in some way. I would prefer they came together without having to have a military conflict overseas at the same time. But I think you you you've got to go through the catharsis. Then you will have people on the hill where the lights will begin to come on and they'll realize that they're in danger of losing their office and being thrown out or a lot worse. At which point in time we may see a real appetite for change. But right now, Jay, I don't see it. I see three, four, five people that are willing to stand up and say we don't want to be part of this. We want a different way forward. But that's all. Now, that's as you point out, that's not the American people. Today, most people talk about the uniart. I mean, if you have Republicans that have a budget that results in a $2 trillion deficit, and you have Democrats that have a budget that results in a $3 trillion deficit, you please explain the profound difference here. one is headed quicker on the road to suicide than the other potentially. But when you reach trillions, it it you know, it's decibel dust. So, we're in a lot of trouble. But no one is reacting yet. You know, I saw something somebody reran some Phil foot film footage from uh I think it was 1998 or I could be wrong, could have been 97. This is when N. Genrich, who was uh the leader in the house, the speaker of the house, shut down the government in a confrontation with Bill Clinton, who was president. And people complained, but this was in San Francisco. A newsman reached up and said, "Sir, sir, this is a man on his bike." And the man pulled up, stopped, got off his bike, and said, "Yes, what can I do for you?" Said, "Would you answer a few questions?" He said, "Sure." Uh, he said, "What do you think about the shutdown in Washington, DC? Oh, I don't know. I I don't think much about it. Really? Aren't you affected in some way? Said, "Well, as long as I can strap a case of beer to the back of my bike, I can go home, turn on the television, watch the game, uh, and I still have a car with gas in it, and I can eat." Well, no, I guess not. I think he was telling us the truth. Things have to get a lot worse before people pay attention. So, it doesn't really make any difference what I think or or what the financial analysts say. It's pain. When the pain barometer rises, that's when you're going to see change. And right now, there just isn't enough pain to go around. And that's an apology, by the way, to millions of Americans who are feeling pain. Absolutely. It's just not enough at this point. You know, as I listen to this, Colonel, I think about the um explanations that we hear about why America has to be so militarily active around the world. And one of the most common ones is that we need to do this to keep us safe, right? That's often the that's often the headline that comes home, right? Um, in a scenario where the United States successfully withdraws military power from around the world, uh, it comes home to arguably the safest bunker the world has to offer. The United States as a country geographically is buffered by oceans to the east, oceans to the west. The stopping power of water is very real. It's very difficult to invade a country from the sea. You've got Canada to the north, uh Mexico to the south, you've got agriculture, you've got energy. Um people would debate manufacturing, but that's available in Mexico. Uh and so all the pieces you need are there. Um there is a path there right now. The rest of the world I think is more of a question mark. If you remove the uh global policemen, inevitably I think you have some real politic jockeying for power in that vacuum. Right? Right now it's easy to point the finger at the US and say they're the bad guys stirring up trouble. But if the US were to exit the conversation, inevitably uh I I would assume we'd see um power grabs attempted left, right, and center regional fracturing and maybe maybe back to like a pre-1945 world of of more like regional anarchy. What's your take on that? And then I want to get to the situation at home a little bit more. >> Well, two things. First, let me add something to what you were saying about the United States. I was looking at a chart the other day that talked about the trillions in natural wealth, in other words, mineral wealth, agriculture, all these kinds of things. And it said that uh Russia in terms of its resources and mineral wealth has uh you know some sort of quotient of 73 trillion you know dollar equivalents and then it said we have uh 43 trillion dollar equivalents in terms of our mineral wealth in the United States. In other words, we and Russia are apart, but both of us are potentially so well equipped with natural resources that we could operate independently for a long period of time if we chose to do so. Now, Russia was postured to do that and it it learned very quickly that given our our hostility to Russia and the determination we seem to have to ruin and destroy Russia as a country, they had to embark on that 100%. They had an advantage though. You have China that I think in terms of natural resources is somewhere in in the 15 trillion range. So while China is turned into this giant production machine, this amazing market, it desperately needs most of the resources that Russia has to offer. So it's a symbiotic relationship. It's a very good thing and both sides see absolutely no value in going to war with each other under any circumstances. So I think that needs to be borne in mind. Now, when it comes to enemies and power vacuums, I would point to General Eisenhower when he was president and when he agreed to sign on for the NATO treaty, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in the 1950s, one of the things that he said at the time was, and I think this was 1956, he said, "If this organization still exists in 10 years, then we have all failed because there's no reason why it should. Now, this is Eisenhower in in the middle of the so-called cold war who appears to be pouring cold water all over the notion that the Soviets are hellbent to invade Europe and conquer the world. He didn't seem to think so at the time. Uh he said he did know the Soviet leadership. He met with them. He understood them. But he didn't buy the argument that we had to be in Europe in perpetuity to stiffen defense for the Germans, the French, and others against a possible Soviet invasion. In fact, he went even further. When Austria adopted neutrality, he told people in the White House, "We ought to look at whether or not we can neutralize the rest of Eastern Europe." And his his answer was, "We can't afford to defend these countries. We'll never have enough military power, never enough conventional military power. So we don't want to be put into that position. It'll be much less expensive for us if Austrian style neutrality is adopted by the Hungarians, the Poles, the Checkexs, the Slovox, and so forth." Well, we know sadly that didn't go anywhere. I'm not suggesting that it would have been immediately acceptable to the Soviets, but I think there was a higher probability of that thing succeeding at the time than most of us realize. Now, when you look at the rest of the world and you look at the history of the world, I I I hate to be blunt about this, but the most warlike peoples on the planet are Europeans. And if you look at the numbers of wars that have been fought in Europe, and then the ex, what's the right word? the uh export or exportation of wars and military power overseas. They are astonishing. Far far more hostility and violence emanating from Europe than perhaps anywhere else on the globe. Now, I'm not saying that therefore Europeans are terrible people. I'm just pointing to a fact. If you go and do the research, there are maps out there that will go back 300 years, 500 years, a thousand years, 2,000 years. And it it's patently obvious that we have a lot more problems with war and and military confrontations than anybody else on the planet. So I think the rest of the planet is remarkably Pacific. In other words, I would not expect the Chinese to suddenly develop an appetite for intervening or invading Southeast Asia. Don't see it. Uh this business of Taiwan, I think, has been grossly exaggerated out of all proportion to reality. The Chinese are have always been concerned, well I shouldn't say always, but certainly since the Second World War with a possibility that Taiwan could be converted into another unsinkable aircraft carrier instead of for the Imperial Japanese armed forces for the United States and its allies that we would put missiles on Taiwan that would threaten the Chinese homeland, the Chinese mainland. uh there the idea that the Chinese want desperately to go to war with Taiwan doesn't make a lot of sense especially when you look at both the Taiwanese the Chinese in particular both of them will tell you that their model for Chinese business commerce and society is Singapore both of them really want to live in some form of Singapore now I would not frankly as a westerner be terribly happy living in Singapore. But I can appreciate that Chinese are different from us. There are people all over the world that are different from us. We are not the approved solution for the rest of the world. What we do is fine and what we have is good in most cases. That doesn't mean that what they want to build is not better. But my point is I don't see the evidence for this massive mobilization of manpower to invade somebody else. I once sat with uh Tom Clancy who was the author of all these interesting spy novels. A very nice man. I got to know him reasonably well because he wrote a book about the Gulf War and he was very interested in this battle of 73 Easting that I and 1100 other people were involved with. But he told me he said well you realize what the future is. I said well you know you tell me what you think it is. He said oh it's China is going to invade Australia. They're going to invade Australia. I said, "Really?" I said, "The Chinese don't even like to go to sea. They have a huge problem with desertion in the Chinese navy. The Chinese have never really been a seafaring nation. And most Chinese really want to live in China in a in a Chinese society with Chinese culture and Chinese laws. Oh, no, no, no. They need the land." Well, I I didn't argue any further. He was very committed to this. And of course, the next question out of my mouth is where are they going to live in Australia? You know, there there are not too many places in Australia other than the coast where you're going to want to live for any length of time. Well, look, people develop these fantastic notions. And they develop it because they're projecting the European experience onto the rest of the world. Take a look at Latin America. Latin America has lots of problems. No one will question that. But how many wars have they fought with each other? Remarkably few. Their problems are internal to their countries in most cases. My my point is this idea that if we are not everywhere to ensure there is no change in the status quo, the status quo will fall apart. The world will end as we know it. I don't think that's true. But here's another flash news flash for everybody. How often have borders changed in Europe over the last thousand years? More times than we can count. And if in that case, what's everybody losing sleep over Ukraine about? changing borders, shifting populations, shifting shifting alliances in order to achieve peace, not to fight war, has been the status, you know, the the ultimate goal in Europe for centuries. Trade a province, change loyalties, alter, you know, the the people who are in charge and you get on with it because some by the way, you know what Khalenrad is? Khaled and Groat used to be East Prussia. It was retained after World War II. Stalin kept it because our friend FDR, and I'm being facitious, told him he could have it now. The people living there for the last thousand years have been overwhelmingly German speakers, but it hasn't always been under German rule. The king of Poland ruled it for quite a while. Uh, so it's only had pure German rule for about 600. My my point is that now people are upset over Khalenraat because an American general said, "Well, we can take it over in a couple of days or something, which I think is nonsense. It's sovereign national territory right now as far as Russia's concerned." But that has seen many, many governments come and go. Borders there have changed repeatedly. We're going to see that in the future. We have to live in the real world and accommodate each other. Just as we need to accommodate each other in trade and commerce, we need to accommodate each other politically and militarily. And that has to happen. The best news I've heard in the last 6 months, 7 months is that Donald Trump said when he was asked about the START treaty, he said, "Would you be willing to extend that some number of months into the future?" He said, "Yeah, I think that's a good idea." Thank God. At least there's some rationality on that point because the last thing anybody wants under any circumstances is a nuclear war. So, I think there's hope for us. I don't want to be terribly gloomy, but right now we've just made a mess of things. We've been making this mess for over four years, ever since Biden was in office, and now we have Donald Trump. Let me ask you, I want to uh I want to dig into the concept of neutrality which you mentioned and that we covered actually on my stage yourself and uh Pascal Lo, geopolitical analyst from Kyoto. Uh both of you are coming back to my conference in January in Vancouver. Uh so very excited about that to revisit some of these topics. But before I I get to that, you said something else I'm just curious about. You um you you referenced the frequency of war on the European continent. you doesn't matter how far back you go. The written history of Europe is just rife with shifting borders, control. It descends into chaos and war on a very consistent basis. That continent does. But and as a as a North American, uh I could say, well, that's because there's so many small countries and cultures sharing one continent. The reason this doesn't happen in North America is because we've ended up in a place anyways where from coast to coast there's unity. Uh but as he pointed out, that's not the case in South America. Yet it doesn't have, as far as I understand, the same history of consistently descending into war and shifting borders. Why is that, Colonel? >> First, we have these alliance systems that people thought would guarantee collective security. Join the alliance. Everybody promises to go to war at the same time against whoever threatens the collective. This was a catastrophe in 1914. It created essentially automatic triggers for intercontinental war. That was a big mistake. In other words, the original idea that Bismar had was that Austria and Pruss and Prussia Germany and uh ultimately Russia would all have an agreement in place that said if the Russians decide to go to war with Austria, Germany will stay out of it. If Austria goes to war with Russia, Germany will stay out of it. If Russia fights with Germany, Austria will stay out of it. In other words, to limit the damage. Instead, that became a hard fast alliance structure so that as soon as someone was attacked on the west or on the east, everybody automatically went to war. This is catastrophic. It's the last thing we need. And that's why the Russians are looking at this insistence that Ukraine become part of a NATO alliance as a very dangerous thing because they don't want to be put in a position uh of facing NATO in a war unnecessarily. This is the problem with NATO expansion that has caused this war to occur. I think we're much better off if we live in a world where we view people as limited liability partners. In other words, you you you and we we and the Russians agree that we have a joint interest in doing something somewhere in the world and we'll cooperate for that purpose, but that's it. We're not blood brothers for life and it's not necessary that we be blood brothers for life. The same thing with the French or the Italians or the Germans. That's one thing. Secondly, you have to go back to World War I and understand that the real problem with the First World War was our intervention into it. Had we stayed out of it, that war would have exhausted itself. The British and the French would not have been victorious, but the Germans and the Austrians would not necessarily have been triumphal or triumphant. In other words, had we stayed out of it instead of meddling in it, uh I think it could have solved many of the problems on its own, but we meddled. We distorted the outcome. And that was very obvious with the Versail treaty. You were talking about all these little nations. You know, AustriaHungary was not a bad solution for central East Europe. Contrary to popular belief, neither Imperial Germany nor Austria were necessarily evil states. Far from it. And there had been a concerted deliberate effort for centuries to create a confederation of states under the leadership of the Hapsburg crown. It actually worked pretty well. You know, when the Austrians wanted to go to war with the the Serbs, the Hungarians resisted for two weeks. I'm sorry. The Hungarians didn't say, "No, we're not going." Because if they'd done that, it would have been very difficult for Austria to go to war. But ultimately promises were made, deals were cut and they said all right grudgingly. But there my point is that there are ways to deal with this multitude of different people. And I understand your argument and I agree with you. For our purposes, speaking one language from Atlantic to Pacific, one set of laws is an enormous advantage. But imposing that on Europe has turned out to be pretty much of a dead end. Everybody who's tried it has failed. And so I don't think that's the answer. But I think you could still have confederations of people and that might be helpful. I mean the checks, the Slovox, the Hungarians, the Slovians, the Croats, all these little groups of people are tribal groupings that became nations. They now have histories. They have literature, language, all of those things. And and they have produced great minds there. That's not going to go away. It doesn't need to. But you need a different framework. And the problem with the EU is that someone tried to turn the EU into the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation. It didn't work because the EU wants to meddle with everybody's affairs, everybody's laws. You could live in the old Holy Roman Empire and from Denmark all the way down to central Italy and you may never know who's really in charge in Vienna because your laws, your way of life are untouched. you're not imposed on, if you will. We have to become more tolerant. I think the Europeans can do that. I've got complete confidence in their ability to do that, but they're not going to get there with this thing called the EU. So, I think that will go away and we may see other regional groupings emerge. But what we don't want to do as Americans is stay there any longer. We have distorted the natural dynamics of the continent. Wherever we do, we have that impact. You go into the Middle East, you stay for any length of time, you distort the the regional dynamics. And what happens when you leave, things inevitably return to the way they were because there is a cultural mean on a regional level. If you want to know what Iraq is going to look like in 50 years, look at Iran. Look at Syria, which is not really a country anymore, uh, or Saudi Arabia. It'll be some some version of it. Do do you understand what I'm saying? We need to come to terms with the reality that these things are deeply embedded in people. Let's recognize it. Let's live with it and stop trying to erase it. But all these regime change operations are bound up with this notion that we're going to globalize everything. We're going to make everybody the same. In my judgment, it's produced catastrophe after catastrophe, and we Americans need to get out of that business. I'm sorry for being so long-winded. >> No, not not at all, Colonel. I really appreciated this, and I was sort of struck by the irony that the European alliances that have been built with the intention to protect from or prevent war are often the cause of it. And you know you mentioned Nasim Taleb earlier he has this great phrase he uses in a couple of his books called iatrogenics right which describes medical intervention uh being worse than the disease itself right >> uh the cure is is worse than the disease which is sort of it's the exact same principle right here right it's it's intervention policy >> causes these rifts and tensions to escalate proxy wars to extend in length unnecessarily all of this stuff. Um, okay. One last question on the >> one. If I could say one thing though, we have to keep in mind that unfortunately there are people in the west uh they're a minority but nevertheless they are there. They are in the banking system. They are in the corporate sector who have enriched themselves as a result of these interventions and they are disincined to go quietly into the good night because they make money. It's income. That means that internally in the United States, we have to change something that nobody wants to disrupt. It's called the money flow. Other words, we have to not incentivize war. And right now, it's incentivized because we haven't endured much pain. And as long as the average American is not in pain, what difference does it make what they do in Washington? Who cares what happens overseas? That's somebody else's problem. War has become something that happens in other people's nations, not in ours, not on our soil. And this is my fear right now with uh Venezuela. There is no debate going on right now on the c on Capitol Hill about why are we interested in intervening in Venezuela? People say, "Well, you know, the drug cartels." Well, the drug cartels are in Mexico. they're a lot closer and a lot more dangerous and have a lot more control there as well as in Colombia. And then people will say, well, you know, what about all that oil and gas? And we have already discovered that Mr. Maduro tried to forge some sort of compromise with us that would give us a stake in the oil and gas industries, which would be very good because we have in the American oil companies the best drilling engineers in the world and they're all sitting around looking for work in many cases going down to Venezuela to restore that industry under their government whether we like it or not makes a lot of sense. particularly if we can raise the quality of life for the people of Venezuela while we also benefit economically. We've decided no. President Trump has said I'm breaking off diplomatic relations. He's assembling thousands of troops. So my next question is if you go into Venezuela and you plan to remove the government, how many millions of people in Venezuela are you making dependent on us? Because if their government falls apart, which it most certainly will, and their armed forces are defeated, and they're certainly defeatable by us, who's paying for everything? Who's feeding them? We haven't even talked about the potential for an insurgency in that country against our military presence. The bottom line is we we tend to do things in the United States because we have the capability to do it, not because we need to do it. We've gone into the Dominican Republic in the 60s the same way we went into Vietnam because we could. You know, we were not under existential threat from anything happening in Vietnam. There was no existential threat to us in the United States in 1917. Germany and AustriaHungary certainly weren't threatening us. Neither were the Turks. But if you have the capability to do something and the wealth to afford it, there is an inclination to do it for all the wrong reasons. Because we're the best, we're the greatest, and we should be in charge. Three big lies. I >> I think you know, you you asked a question inside that uh that struck me. You said, "Who's paying for all of this? Who's paying for everyone postregime change?" Right. And it earlier you referenced, you know, Americans need to feel enough pain to demand a change in the world order. And until they feel the pain of waging war globally for so long, they won't want anything to change. And maybe think, you know, I think that pain is coming home now. And it's it's in the um well, I think Americans are beginning to realize that they're the ones paying for this, right? And we can't globe trot around the world funding military endeavors anywhere, Ukraine, Middle East, next up, Venezuela, without printing and massively devaluing the currency, which continues to just deepen this division between the asset holders and the income earners, right? And that's where we're at, right? And you know, the recent president was elected on a mandate to stamp out inflation. um uh he's also recently gone on a bit of a spending spree, right? And I think, you know, I'd love to know your take on this because devaluing the currency is destructive most of the time, right? I have a belief that we're not going to stop the printing press anytime soon. So, if that's the case, you might as well put it to productive use. And the administration's been on a role right now of doing deals with like f taking a 5% stake in Lithium America's, a 15% stake in MP Materials to build rare earth refineries, uh a 10% stake in Intel, uh a golden share in US Steel, just last week a 10% stake in Trilogy Metals, um a critical um metal explorer up in Alaska. And you know, maybe this is intelligent strategy to uh secure the metals that America needs to be competitive without looking everywhere else. I don't know. But at the end of the day, it's going to be massively uh inflationary. Massively inflationary. And that's the pain, right? That's the pain. I guess that's what I'm getting at is that the pain has come home. People just need to identify that the causality. Why am I feeling this pain, this economic pain? Why is the house that I couldn't afford last year somehow less affordable this year? What's going on? Right? I played the game by the rules, right? But somehow I'm being excluded from participating and and that pain is home, but the connection needs to be made that this pain is a consequence of that military adventurism. And once that connection's made, maybe things begin to land. But am I being uh too optimistic? Like what's your take? >> Well, there are two things to consider. Uh, one is that if I had a choice, I would not want the United States government involved in the private sector making decisions on investment and production or anything else. >> So, one of these people doesn't think that's a good idea. I don't think we have to do that to shape investment and shape production and shape prosperity. That's another that's a another series of of questions. The other thing is someone said to me in in Washington quite recently, they said, 'Well, Doug, they have gold mines and emerald mines in Venezuela. I said, "Yes, I know. Obviously, emerald mines and gold mines have application. I mean the the metals and and the the gems have or not gems but the minerals have a role to play in national defense and building construction drilling so forth. But it was quite obvious that there's this notion that we somehow or another like the Vikings are going to land in our long ships come ashore uh slaughter anybody who gets in the way and steal everything we can carry with us. Uh, I don't think that's a good idea. And I'm worried that we're already not terribly popular in Latin America. And this will make us a hell of a lot less popular than we already are. And we may discover that Venezuela overnight becomes the center, a rallying point, if you will, for some broader regional crusade against us, so that our position down there becomes intolerable as well as unsustainable. There's a there's a there's a lot going on right now in Washington in the minds of people, none of which makes any sense to me. What did make sense to me was Maduro's offer because I'd much rather leave the government of his country in his hands. Whether you like him or not, I don't want the United States Army down there trying to govern the country. We've been through that. That doesn't work very well. Even when we do it well, it doesn't work very well. Nobody likes to be governed and policed by foreigners. So why not leave what's there and find a way to work with those people? To me, that's the that's the logical outcome. But I I appear to hold the minority opinion. So I think we're on our way down there. >> You do? Okay. you know, when I saw the headlines and I saw the the, you know, the drone strikes on little fishing boats that may or may not have had narcotics on them. Um, and and I'm reading the headlines. I tended to think that this was this was like the Kansas City shuffle that we've seen from this administration many times. You look left, I'm going to go right. And everyone's eyes are on Venezuela right now. So, what's really happening, right? What's the real story as we're all focused on what might occur on the shores of Venezuela? something else probably more material is in play. Um it's interesting to hear your take on that Colonel. >> Keep in mind that our rationale for attacking Russia is not just to remove Putin. There was a real interest in dividing Russia up and raping it for its mineral resources, its oil, its gas, everything. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> I mean that was openly discussed on Wall Street by all sorts of horrible human beings. You know this when you go down to the Middle East, I heard people say, "Well, this thing in Ukraine has fallen apart, so we've got to get control of Iran's oil and gas wealth." In other words, we've got to get control of something. We need to recapitalize our banks. We We need somehow or another to get out of the doldrums that we're in. I just don't think that'll work. And I think that's a bad idea. So, now we're up to three wars that are still bubbling along. sort of like a slow boil in Ukraine. But that could go phenomenally badly very quickly for the Ukrainians if Mr. Putin decides he has no choice but to cross that river and head west. Not because he wants to. That's the last thing in the world he wants to do. He knows his country's history. He knows the people in Ukraine, that is in western Ukraine, west of the Emperor River, do not want to be governed or administered by Russians. He knows that. He doesn't want to go there. We're mistaking that for weakness. It's not Russian weakness that has prevented that. It's Russian prudence, but we could go them into doing bad things. We could go them into doing more. We can escalate. This Tomahawk nonsense is a good example of it. Even though that's not some brilliant game-changing strategic weapon by any stretch of the imagination, but nevertheless, if they get 20 to 50 of those and let's say they fire 50 at once or 30 at once, I think the Russians would probably shoot down most of them, but some get through. And what happens if it strikes Moscow? What happens if it strikes St. Petersburg? What happens if it strikes Kazan? Any number of cities and kills large numbers of Russian citizens? Now you're staring at something that the Russians would regard as a unambiguous act of war. We don't want to go there, but we have stupid people pushing this and they're misreading the tea leaves. They're mistaking restraint for weakness. The Russians are not weak. Anybody who thinks that is a very, very foolish individual. They have not taken these heavy casualties because they don't need to to be successful. Ukrainians have impaled themselves on the Russian army for years now. There are 1.7 to 1.8 million dead Ukrainians. This is this is horrific. Anyone with a shred of humanity in them in Washington would say this must stop. We have no right to use these people's lives in this purpose. They didn't invent it. We did. And then when you go to the Middle East, you have something similar. And that's unfinished business. Everyone hopes that this current uh peace agreement, not that it's really a peace agreement, it's just a ceasefire at this point, will last for some period of time. Anybody who has experience in the Middle East is very skeptical. And remember that none of the goals and objectives of the Israeli government have changed. So I would expect further war in the future, particularly against Iran, and the Iranians expect that as well. I would prefer we not be part of it. But thus far, we have proven incapable of isolating ourselves from that sort of thing. That's why I say we've got these two wars that continue and now we want to add a third one without thoroughly examining the strategic implications for us and completely ignoring our brittle financial system. You know, you paint the picture of inevitable global regime change and the questions around that are, you know, how much control and ownership are we going to take over that? How much how much responsible proactive measures are we going to take over that? And you know, no matter how that shakes out, I think, you know, we're in alignment. Um that in any kind of a transition state like that, the supply and security over key resources becomes less certain and countries and economies are willing to pay more for that certainty. Um and that's what we're going to be talking about at the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference January 25th and 26. I'm so excited that you're coming back. We have an amazing uh agenda coming together and this is what we do at that event. We look at the world through the lens of supply and demand of raw materials and then as a commodity investor. What's your angle there? For a lot of us, it's gold right now specifically. Uh Colonel, I'm very excited that you're coming back to Vancouver in January. >> Okay. Thanks, Jay. I appreciate look forward to seeing you and I hope you'll warm the place up. >> Pretty good. Last time it was pretty good. Hey, it wasn't really that cold. >> So, see what you can do again. >> Yeah, >> I got it. I'm on it. I'm on it. Colonel, thanks so much for your time today. I sincerely appreciate it. See you soon. >> Thank you. See you soon. Bye bye. All right.
Colonel Macgregor: America’s Collapse Will Create A New Financial System
Summary
Transcript
My guest today says that all of these global alliances like NATO and the European Union that are designed to prevent the world from descending into war are in fact the cause of it. This is the subject of iatrogenetics where the cure is in fact worse than the disease. My guest is the renowned Colonel Douglas McGregor, absolute proud favorite. And today we dive deep into all of the geopolitical threads that most people are either misunderstanding or outright sleeping on. If you enjoy this interview, the colonel will be joining me at my conference in Vancouver January 25th and 26th in Vancouver, British Columbia, alongside about a 100 other keynote speakers, 9,000 investors, and around 300 mining companies. If you're curious about how to allocate money into the mining or the metals market in such a volatile world, you're not going to want to miss the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference January 25th and 26th. Hit the link below, vicia.com, for tickets. Here is Colonel Douglas McGregor. Enjoy. >> This is J. Martin. >> All right. Here I am with Colonel McGregor. It's great to have you back on the program and very timely. Lots I would like to discuss with you today. >> Sure. Good to be here. Let's start with the major headline that's been sending uh markets and media into a tail spin last week and obviously that is the recent escalation in the China US trade war on the heels of extended restrictions of rare earth metals and now everybody is suddenly talking about the significance of rare earth metals. Uh when I saw this headline as a commodity investor my first thought was this outcome was baked in the cake 20 years ago. It's not necessarily news, but maybe it's news to a lot of folks. What's your take, Colonel, when you saw this recent escalation? You know, a lot of headlines are substantive, a lot aren't, right? What's your take on this one? >> Well, I think the problem that we have right now in the White House and in Washington in general is frustration with the unwillingness of the rest of the world to do what we tell them to do. And you have this uh predisposition to bully instead of uh recognizing the criticality of diplomacy, the value in studying a problem, uh talking to people about the problem, discussing uh solutions, proposals. Uh there is an automatic predisposition to bully and that's what this White House has been doing now ever since it took office. You know, you were talking about rare earth as one item, but we just were told earlier today that apparently we're not going to buy cooking oil any longer from the Chinese. And that removed about $750 billion of value from the stock market. Uh I I think there is a failure to understand that China is the world's principal market now, not the United States. Everyone wants to do business with China. That's the first thing. Second thing is that if you look at China's position, the Chinese economy uh depends upon American imports to a very limited degree. I think they they finally studied it carefully and less than 3% of China's economy depends upon imports from the United States. Now, I don't know what the percentage of imports from China is that we depend upon, but I know it's a lot larger than 3%. There there's a failure to look at our own vulnerabilities and there is a failure to understand that someone's refusal to align with you on all of your policies doesn't necessarily mean that these people are hostile. You know, no country can be expected to move beyond the limits of its own interests. China is no exception. Neither are we. But you've got to know what your interests are. And right now the only interest we seem to have is in harming China or harming Russia or harming India, harming anyone, any particular nation, state or group of states that refuses to do business with us on our terms. Well, that's a dead end. There's no future in that whatsoever. And rare earth is something that we've known about for decades. We've been dependent upon that for a very long time, not just in the Department of Defense. What have we done about it? What what have we done to invest in that area to ensure that we are not solely dependent upon very few sources? We haven't done anything. And now we're angry. It's almost childish. There's no future for this. >> Let me ask you a second order impact of this announcement and and the announcement this morning. for example, is that it's appearing that that China's flexing its ability to move the US market by provoking the administration. Right? We've we've gotten used to, I think, an era of politics where the president can move the market with a tweet. This has become normal. And now as I'm watching these new developments unfold, I'm curious about how much China's recognized their ability to do the same by provoking the administration getting a bombastic response and triggering a major shift in the market. I'd love your thoughts on that. And then and then secondly, just last question on the rare earth restrictions. You know, China came out and said the purpose of this restriction was actually to prevent our materials from being used as tools of war. Right? That was the language that came out of the the PBOC. Uh I never take any political statements at face value, but what I think is very real is that a a stop order on export on the export of rare earth metals is a stop order on the American military-industrial complex. Is that true? >> Well, it's a stop order not on everything, but certainly on a whole multitude of high-tech weapon systems. It's also going to have an impact on our ability to rapidly develop and field things. You know, we simply don't have access to it. I think the real purpose was pointing out and this is something again that we've absolutely rejected. China is not a subordinate state. China is not a backward entity. Neither is India. Neither is Russia. And for that matter, neither is Iran. And there are many other nations that that we have treated for many many years as essentially uh backward secondary uh un unimportant. What they're demonstrating to us is that we not only live in a new multi-olar world. We live in a world where we have peers. In other words, nation states that can field forces and and have economies that allow them to compete effectively against us. Now, what we have to do is we have to decide whether or not we're going to live with it, find out how to accommodate it, assimilate into it, or are we going to run around and essentially threaten everyone with war who disagrees with us? You know, this is the biggest problem that we have right now. We've demonstrated for years now that we don't have any respect for anyone uh who doesn't have the force to stop us. Our first inclination is to reach for military power. And we continue to assume that our military power is unique and unchallengeable. Well, it's not. It really isn't. And the Chinese and the Russians and others have bent over backwards to avoid confronting us militarily. We interpret that as weakness, Jay. It's not weakness. It's common sense. It's rationality. They live in a world where war is destructive and antithetical to business. We don't seem to have a role in that world. We seem to think when all else fails, even if all else hasn't failed, you use military power to intimidate, to beat down, to suppress. The Chinese are not going to put up with that and neither will the Russians. So right now, I think, you know, an answer to both of these questions, we are the problem. provoking us is easy because we're easily provoked. We want our way. We've lived in a world for 80 years where we've had our way, where we could print as much money as we want and then pass our debt on to everybody else and tell them to like it. This is ending. You know, this is this is the end of dollar dominance. And we're watching India do business with China and yuan. We're watching the Saudis do the same thing. We're watching gold vaults being set up in Riad in Hong Kong by the Chinese for a goldbacked economic system. Not necessarily for one kind of currency. Maybe it'll be a basket of currencies. I don't know what the answer will be, but the point is that they have managed to build parallel institutions much faster than we thought they could. They're not yet as sophisticated as we are in our banking system, but they're getting there. And instead of fighting this and and aggravating and antagonizing the situation, we ought to be figuring out how we're going to interact with it. Because I think where we're headed right now, Jay, in a on a macro level is two separate distinctive systems on the globe. One will be dominated by our financial system. uh even if it's limited basically to uh Europe and North America, I'm not even sure the Australians will join that because they're in China and they're very dependent upon the Chinese. But my point is that's one system and then perhaps the rest of the world will enter this bricks system. So we'll have this divergence. That's one outcome. But I don't think we're going to have a single global system any longer. And that's because people are fed up with us. And you know, we can look at all sorts of implications for what that means in trade and commerce. >> Well, let me ask you because as you mentioned, there's a handful of states that have been playing the neutrality game very effective. Saudi Arabia being one, India being another, Japan being another. They're happily buying Russian oil today because it's in their best interest. It's the right move for that economy. Um you mentioned Australia which is a economy that we assume is western aligned but from a geographic and proximity standpoint you know Asia is a better trade partner and China is their biggest customer. When all of this rare earth headline began making waves, there was another development that I was watching that made me an eyebrow because at the end of September, uh, China, who imports more Australian iron ore than anybody else, about 710 million tons per year, put a stop order on new US dollar purchases of iron ore. So, not a stop order on Australian iron ore from BHP, but a stop order on US dollar purchases. Now obviously this brought BHP to the negotiating table and where they landed is that going forward China can pay for its iron ore 70% in US dollars 30% in ren Mindi right now that's really interesting because that's that's not Venezuela that's not um Vietnam that's not a bricks aligned nation that's Australia right that's like a G7 adjacent nation uh one way to think about that I thought this was super relevant for three reasons number one it's it's precedent Whenever a deal like this happens, you always have to think about the trajectory that it might put you on. This is new president that China can take to the world and say, "This is how we do business now." And it's good enough for BHP, so it's good enough for you. It's good enough for Australia, so it's good enough for you. And that's a new president that gives countries the ability to say, "Okay, no, this is this is reasonable. This is reasonable." Secondly, obviously the transaction is a two-way street. BHP will now be accumulating a treasury of REM Mindi and they're going to have to spend it somewhere. They could just convert that to US dollars, but anybody who runs a non-American company knows the risks of currency exchange. Like it's expensive, it's risky, it's tough. That's the headache that China offloaded to BHP. They don't want that. They'd much rather just spend the ren Mindy. The most logical home is in China, right? But they're now incentivized to find other players who will accept Ren Mindbi because they have it to spend, right? So they're incentivized to inspire to a degree more darization. And the third I just think as the rest of the world watch this, we all think about uh the transition from the US dollar to something else. We think about the shift that BHP will have to make. But the rest of the world's worried about one thing, and that's does cheap Chinese steel still arrive. I don't care what you guys do. I don't care what's in BHP's treasury. None of that. Right? I need the steel. Well, that's get the deal done, right? Uh, do you see this as like a bit of a tipping point precedence? It's notable, I believe, but what's your take on on that picture, Colonel? >> No, I I think the picture that you painted is a very accurate one, and that's where we're headed. The United States is not the scientific industrial giant that it once was. We're not the indispensable market any longer. uh what we need to do for ourselves is another subject and we need to talk about that because the United States needs to take a different path into the future. But right now I think what you just described is unavoidable. Most of the people that I listen to, whether it's Nasim Talib, who has been telling people for months now that gold is the reserve currency, not the dollar, and large numbers of other prudent financial analysts, whether it's Alistister Mloud in London, who's very concerned about the gold exchanges, they all are pointing at the same thing. The dollar is crumbling and most of the world is beginning to ddollarize. And I don't think there's a great deal that we can do to stop that in the short run. I think it's going to continue. We're the ones that have effectively debased our currency. So the question is where do we fit in? How do we fit in? What do we do in the future? That's really the question for us. The rest of the world is making up its mind exactly as you have described. And that's why I said at the very beginning, no nation can be expected to move beyond the limits of its own interests. And right now most people's interests dictate dd dollararization. So the real question is what do we do? And that's something that is very painful for the people in Washington. And it it's not painful for the American citizenry. The American citizenry has not been consulted on any major decisions. But when Trump was elected, what he should have done was begun shedding our overseas military commitments. He should have been interested in terminating these conflicts as quickly as possible because they are a drain on our prosperity. Then he needed instead of going into a tariff war and declaring war effectively on most of the world. I mean it's one of the first times I think in modern history we've seen tariffs imposed on friend and foe. I mean suddenly people that were friends of the United States that have been allies, have worked with us are suddenly being punished with tariffs. didn't make a lot of sense. But China should have been approached quietly, not in public, and we should have sat down with them and said, "Look, this dollar isn't really working very well for us. It's a problem." Because the ch Chinese have been saying very publicly and I think very honestly, they do not want to be the world's reserve currency. And we could have sat down with them and said,"Well, what are the things that we need to do that we can do with you to avoid the crisis, the conflict that we see in the financial markets and the problem for the dollar. We never did that. This is back to what I was saying before. We we immediately respond by threatening people with one thing or another and ultimately it becomes military." That's a dead end. There's this thing called diplomacy. It's almost completely missing from our vocabulary. You know, there's no willing to sit down willingness to sit down and negotiate. We we really need to negotiate with the Chinese. Now, I don't know how ready they will be to talk to us any longer, especially with this administration. The last one was bad in this connection. This one has turned out to be worse. So, nobody sees any light at the end of the tunnel with us. So the predisposition is to say America is patient zero. They're at the end of the hall. We've locked them in a in a room by themselves. So they're no longer contagious and the rest of us are going to get on with life on planet Earth. Literally, I think that's where we're headed to some extent. And I don't think people in Washington understand it. They really live in in a fantasy world where we are everything and everybody needs us and no one can contradict us. you mentioned the biggest question we need to answer is you know uh what's the new path forward and I I agree right we need to take a different path into the future and you referenced um one initiative within that should be withdrawing military force from around the world something that I'm inclined to say the majority of American public would support maybe not Washington those are two different animals as you and I have discussed and I think as to quote you uh Washington has become donor occupied territory so maybe that's the hurdle um I would imagine >> that's one >> okay um >> well let's let's get into that because I have to imagine there are some rational thinkers in Washington who see things this way and maybe it's a small group hopefully it's a growing group maybe it isn't What's your take on that? Are there sound minds in politics to the extent that we we might move this direction in in one or two election cycles? >> I would like to think there are, but I don't. I think there's a very small number of people who recognize the criticality of turning inward, of moving away from conflicts and crises overseas that frankly we don't need. This is what Trump was talking about when he ran for office. That's why so many people voted for him. He said, "We need to worry about our own hemisphere. Specifically, we need to defend our own borders. We need to get control of things inside the United States. The rule of law is is really absent in too many places in the United States right now. We have to restore that rule of law. We have to rebuild trust and confidence in the population, in our institutions. Americans no longer believe in many of our institutions. All you have to do is listen to the radio or even the mainstream media will admit to this. You know, the FBI is no longer trusted. There are now commercials that run on the on the media that say if you are approached by the FBI, don't say a word unless you have an attorney present. Other words, don't cooperate with law enforcement unless you've got an attorney. This is a very serious change in the history of the United States. Certainly from the country I grew up in where people frankly worshiped the FBI as the guardian of internal security and with the best people, the most honest people that you could ever find. Well, that's all gone. That's vanished. You know, we are dealing with crime, half of which is not even reported in the statistics that's overwhelmed our major cities. And we have governors uh who are saying, "We don't want you in our state. Federal law doesn't apply. We've we've unilaterally lifted uh federal law from the books. It doesn't it doesn't have any impact here. We have rights as states, mayors and cities that have decided that federal law is irrelevant to them. That's how we ended up with these sanctuary cities. Now, we fought a war some time ago called the Civil War, which was supposed to have settled this issue of federal supremacy, but it seems like we're back to it. What I'm suggesting is not that we arm ourselves to the teeth and go to war internally. What I'm suggesting is that instead of focusing on a place like Venezuela for God's sakes or uh what's happening in the Middle East right now, which I think is beyond our ability to fundamentally change. And then finally, stop the nonsense in Ukraine. Stop pretending that we as Americans have any interest in eastern Ukraine. We have no strategic interest there. Our only interest from day one was to stop the war, to hammer out some sort of solution. And if the puppet government sitting in Kief doesn't want to do that, well then the puppet government will have to get along without our support. We haven't been willing to do that because there is this underlying assumption that we rule the world. We do not rule the world. We do not enjoy absolute military hegemony over the planet. nor do we need to, nor can we afford to. So, I think what has to happen now is a serious financial downturn as a result of the mess we've created for ourselves with the dollar, uh the people that we've alienated overseas, the the commerce and trade war that we don't need. These things are all going to come together in some way. I would prefer they came together without having to have a military conflict overseas at the same time. But I think you you you've got to go through the catharsis. Then you will have people on the hill where the lights will begin to come on and they'll realize that they're in danger of losing their office and being thrown out or a lot worse. At which point in time we may see a real appetite for change. But right now, Jay, I don't see it. I see three, four, five people that are willing to stand up and say we don't want to be part of this. We want a different way forward. But that's all. Now, that's as you point out, that's not the American people. Today, most people talk about the uniart. I mean, if you have Republicans that have a budget that results in a $2 trillion deficit, and you have Democrats that have a budget that results in a $3 trillion deficit, you please explain the profound difference here. one is headed quicker on the road to suicide than the other potentially. But when you reach trillions, it it you know, it's decibel dust. So, we're in a lot of trouble. But no one is reacting yet. You know, I saw something somebody reran some Phil foot film footage from uh I think it was 1998 or I could be wrong, could have been 97. This is when N. Genrich, who was uh the leader in the house, the speaker of the house, shut down the government in a confrontation with Bill Clinton, who was president. And people complained, but this was in San Francisco. A newsman reached up and said, "Sir, sir, this is a man on his bike." And the man pulled up, stopped, got off his bike, and said, "Yes, what can I do for you?" Said, "Would you answer a few questions?" He said, "Sure." Uh, he said, "What do you think about the shutdown in Washington, DC? Oh, I don't know. I I don't think much about it. Really? Aren't you affected in some way? Said, "Well, as long as I can strap a case of beer to the back of my bike, I can go home, turn on the television, watch the game, uh, and I still have a car with gas in it, and I can eat." Well, no, I guess not. I think he was telling us the truth. Things have to get a lot worse before people pay attention. So, it doesn't really make any difference what I think or or what the financial analysts say. It's pain. When the pain barometer rises, that's when you're going to see change. And right now, there just isn't enough pain to go around. And that's an apology, by the way, to millions of Americans who are feeling pain. Absolutely. It's just not enough at this point. You know, as I listen to this, Colonel, I think about the um explanations that we hear about why America has to be so militarily active around the world. And one of the most common ones is that we need to do this to keep us safe, right? That's often the that's often the headline that comes home, right? Um, in a scenario where the United States successfully withdraws military power from around the world, uh, it comes home to arguably the safest bunker the world has to offer. The United States as a country geographically is buffered by oceans to the east, oceans to the west. The stopping power of water is very real. It's very difficult to invade a country from the sea. You've got Canada to the north, uh Mexico to the south, you've got agriculture, you've got energy. Um people would debate manufacturing, but that's available in Mexico. Uh and so all the pieces you need are there. Um there is a path there right now. The rest of the world I think is more of a question mark. If you remove the uh global policemen, inevitably I think you have some real politic jockeying for power in that vacuum. Right? Right now it's easy to point the finger at the US and say they're the bad guys stirring up trouble. But if the US were to exit the conversation, inevitably uh I I would assume we'd see um power grabs attempted left, right, and center regional fracturing and maybe maybe back to like a pre-1945 world of of more like regional anarchy. What's your take on that? And then I want to get to the situation at home a little bit more. >> Well, two things. First, let me add something to what you were saying about the United States. I was looking at a chart the other day that talked about the trillions in natural wealth, in other words, mineral wealth, agriculture, all these kinds of things. And it said that uh Russia in terms of its resources and mineral wealth has uh you know some sort of quotient of 73 trillion you know dollar equivalents and then it said we have uh 43 trillion dollar equivalents in terms of our mineral wealth in the United States. In other words, we and Russia are apart, but both of us are potentially so well equipped with natural resources that we could operate independently for a long period of time if we chose to do so. Now, Russia was postured to do that and it it learned very quickly that given our our hostility to Russia and the determination we seem to have to ruin and destroy Russia as a country, they had to embark on that 100%. They had an advantage though. You have China that I think in terms of natural resources is somewhere in in the 15 trillion range. So while China is turned into this giant production machine, this amazing market, it desperately needs most of the resources that Russia has to offer. So it's a symbiotic relationship. It's a very good thing and both sides see absolutely no value in going to war with each other under any circumstances. So I think that needs to be borne in mind. Now, when it comes to enemies and power vacuums, I would point to General Eisenhower when he was president and when he agreed to sign on for the NATO treaty, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in the 1950s, one of the things that he said at the time was, and I think this was 1956, he said, "If this organization still exists in 10 years, then we have all failed because there's no reason why it should. Now, this is Eisenhower in in the middle of the so-called cold war who appears to be pouring cold water all over the notion that the Soviets are hellbent to invade Europe and conquer the world. He didn't seem to think so at the time. Uh he said he did know the Soviet leadership. He met with them. He understood them. But he didn't buy the argument that we had to be in Europe in perpetuity to stiffen defense for the Germans, the French, and others against a possible Soviet invasion. In fact, he went even further. When Austria adopted neutrality, he told people in the White House, "We ought to look at whether or not we can neutralize the rest of Eastern Europe." And his his answer was, "We can't afford to defend these countries. We'll never have enough military power, never enough conventional military power. So we don't want to be put into that position. It'll be much less expensive for us if Austrian style neutrality is adopted by the Hungarians, the Poles, the Checkexs, the Slovox, and so forth." Well, we know sadly that didn't go anywhere. I'm not suggesting that it would have been immediately acceptable to the Soviets, but I think there was a higher probability of that thing succeeding at the time than most of us realize. Now, when you look at the rest of the world and you look at the history of the world, I I I hate to be blunt about this, but the most warlike peoples on the planet are Europeans. And if you look at the numbers of wars that have been fought in Europe, and then the ex, what's the right word? the uh export or exportation of wars and military power overseas. They are astonishing. Far far more hostility and violence emanating from Europe than perhaps anywhere else on the globe. Now, I'm not saying that therefore Europeans are terrible people. I'm just pointing to a fact. If you go and do the research, there are maps out there that will go back 300 years, 500 years, a thousand years, 2,000 years. And it it's patently obvious that we have a lot more problems with war and and military confrontations than anybody else on the planet. So I think the rest of the planet is remarkably Pacific. In other words, I would not expect the Chinese to suddenly develop an appetite for intervening or invading Southeast Asia. Don't see it. Uh this business of Taiwan, I think, has been grossly exaggerated out of all proportion to reality. The Chinese are have always been concerned, well I shouldn't say always, but certainly since the Second World War with a possibility that Taiwan could be converted into another unsinkable aircraft carrier instead of for the Imperial Japanese armed forces for the United States and its allies that we would put missiles on Taiwan that would threaten the Chinese homeland, the Chinese mainland. uh there the idea that the Chinese want desperately to go to war with Taiwan doesn't make a lot of sense especially when you look at both the Taiwanese the Chinese in particular both of them will tell you that their model for Chinese business commerce and society is Singapore both of them really want to live in some form of Singapore now I would not frankly as a westerner be terribly happy living in Singapore. But I can appreciate that Chinese are different from us. There are people all over the world that are different from us. We are not the approved solution for the rest of the world. What we do is fine and what we have is good in most cases. That doesn't mean that what they want to build is not better. But my point is I don't see the evidence for this massive mobilization of manpower to invade somebody else. I once sat with uh Tom Clancy who was the author of all these interesting spy novels. A very nice man. I got to know him reasonably well because he wrote a book about the Gulf War and he was very interested in this battle of 73 Easting that I and 1100 other people were involved with. But he told me he said well you realize what the future is. I said well you know you tell me what you think it is. He said oh it's China is going to invade Australia. They're going to invade Australia. I said, "Really?" I said, "The Chinese don't even like to go to sea. They have a huge problem with desertion in the Chinese navy. The Chinese have never really been a seafaring nation. And most Chinese really want to live in China in a in a Chinese society with Chinese culture and Chinese laws. Oh, no, no, no. They need the land." Well, I I didn't argue any further. He was very committed to this. And of course, the next question out of my mouth is where are they going to live in Australia? You know, there there are not too many places in Australia other than the coast where you're going to want to live for any length of time. Well, look, people develop these fantastic notions. And they develop it because they're projecting the European experience onto the rest of the world. Take a look at Latin America. Latin America has lots of problems. No one will question that. But how many wars have they fought with each other? Remarkably few. Their problems are internal to their countries in most cases. My my point is this idea that if we are not everywhere to ensure there is no change in the status quo, the status quo will fall apart. The world will end as we know it. I don't think that's true. But here's another flash news flash for everybody. How often have borders changed in Europe over the last thousand years? More times than we can count. And if in that case, what's everybody losing sleep over Ukraine about? changing borders, shifting populations, shifting shifting alliances in order to achieve peace, not to fight war, has been the status, you know, the the ultimate goal in Europe for centuries. Trade a province, change loyalties, alter, you know, the the people who are in charge and you get on with it because some by the way, you know what Khalenrad is? Khaled and Groat used to be East Prussia. It was retained after World War II. Stalin kept it because our friend FDR, and I'm being facitious, told him he could have it now. The people living there for the last thousand years have been overwhelmingly German speakers, but it hasn't always been under German rule. The king of Poland ruled it for quite a while. Uh, so it's only had pure German rule for about 600. My my point is that now people are upset over Khalenraat because an American general said, "Well, we can take it over in a couple of days or something, which I think is nonsense. It's sovereign national territory right now as far as Russia's concerned." But that has seen many, many governments come and go. Borders there have changed repeatedly. We're going to see that in the future. We have to live in the real world and accommodate each other. Just as we need to accommodate each other in trade and commerce, we need to accommodate each other politically and militarily. And that has to happen. The best news I've heard in the last 6 months, 7 months is that Donald Trump said when he was asked about the START treaty, he said, "Would you be willing to extend that some number of months into the future?" He said, "Yeah, I think that's a good idea." Thank God. At least there's some rationality on that point because the last thing anybody wants under any circumstances is a nuclear war. So, I think there's hope for us. I don't want to be terribly gloomy, but right now we've just made a mess of things. We've been making this mess for over four years, ever since Biden was in office, and now we have Donald Trump. Let me ask you, I want to uh I want to dig into the concept of neutrality which you mentioned and that we covered actually on my stage yourself and uh Pascal Lo, geopolitical analyst from Kyoto. Uh both of you are coming back to my conference in January in Vancouver. Uh so very excited about that to revisit some of these topics. But before I I get to that, you said something else I'm just curious about. You um you you referenced the frequency of war on the European continent. you doesn't matter how far back you go. The written history of Europe is just rife with shifting borders, control. It descends into chaos and war on a very consistent basis. That continent does. But and as a as a North American, uh I could say, well, that's because there's so many small countries and cultures sharing one continent. The reason this doesn't happen in North America is because we've ended up in a place anyways where from coast to coast there's unity. Uh but as he pointed out, that's not the case in South America. Yet it doesn't have, as far as I understand, the same history of consistently descending into war and shifting borders. Why is that, Colonel? >> First, we have these alliance systems that people thought would guarantee collective security. Join the alliance. Everybody promises to go to war at the same time against whoever threatens the collective. This was a catastrophe in 1914. It created essentially automatic triggers for intercontinental war. That was a big mistake. In other words, the original idea that Bismar had was that Austria and Pruss and Prussia Germany and uh ultimately Russia would all have an agreement in place that said if the Russians decide to go to war with Austria, Germany will stay out of it. If Austria goes to war with Russia, Germany will stay out of it. If Russia fights with Germany, Austria will stay out of it. In other words, to limit the damage. Instead, that became a hard fast alliance structure so that as soon as someone was attacked on the west or on the east, everybody automatically went to war. This is catastrophic. It's the last thing we need. And that's why the Russians are looking at this insistence that Ukraine become part of a NATO alliance as a very dangerous thing because they don't want to be put in a position uh of facing NATO in a war unnecessarily. This is the problem with NATO expansion that has caused this war to occur. I think we're much better off if we live in a world where we view people as limited liability partners. In other words, you you you and we we and the Russians agree that we have a joint interest in doing something somewhere in the world and we'll cooperate for that purpose, but that's it. We're not blood brothers for life and it's not necessary that we be blood brothers for life. The same thing with the French or the Italians or the Germans. That's one thing. Secondly, you have to go back to World War I and understand that the real problem with the First World War was our intervention into it. Had we stayed out of it, that war would have exhausted itself. The British and the French would not have been victorious, but the Germans and the Austrians would not necessarily have been triumphal or triumphant. In other words, had we stayed out of it instead of meddling in it, uh I think it could have solved many of the problems on its own, but we meddled. We distorted the outcome. And that was very obvious with the Versail treaty. You were talking about all these little nations. You know, AustriaHungary was not a bad solution for central East Europe. Contrary to popular belief, neither Imperial Germany nor Austria were necessarily evil states. Far from it. And there had been a concerted deliberate effort for centuries to create a confederation of states under the leadership of the Hapsburg crown. It actually worked pretty well. You know, when the Austrians wanted to go to war with the the Serbs, the Hungarians resisted for two weeks. I'm sorry. The Hungarians didn't say, "No, we're not going." Because if they'd done that, it would have been very difficult for Austria to go to war. But ultimately promises were made, deals were cut and they said all right grudgingly. But there my point is that there are ways to deal with this multitude of different people. And I understand your argument and I agree with you. For our purposes, speaking one language from Atlantic to Pacific, one set of laws is an enormous advantage. But imposing that on Europe has turned out to be pretty much of a dead end. Everybody who's tried it has failed. And so I don't think that's the answer. But I think you could still have confederations of people and that might be helpful. I mean the checks, the Slovox, the Hungarians, the Slovians, the Croats, all these little groups of people are tribal groupings that became nations. They now have histories. They have literature, language, all of those things. And and they have produced great minds there. That's not going to go away. It doesn't need to. But you need a different framework. And the problem with the EU is that someone tried to turn the EU into the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation. It didn't work because the EU wants to meddle with everybody's affairs, everybody's laws. You could live in the old Holy Roman Empire and from Denmark all the way down to central Italy and you may never know who's really in charge in Vienna because your laws, your way of life are untouched. you're not imposed on, if you will. We have to become more tolerant. I think the Europeans can do that. I've got complete confidence in their ability to do that, but they're not going to get there with this thing called the EU. So, I think that will go away and we may see other regional groupings emerge. But what we don't want to do as Americans is stay there any longer. We have distorted the natural dynamics of the continent. Wherever we do, we have that impact. You go into the Middle East, you stay for any length of time, you distort the the regional dynamics. And what happens when you leave, things inevitably return to the way they were because there is a cultural mean on a regional level. If you want to know what Iraq is going to look like in 50 years, look at Iran. Look at Syria, which is not really a country anymore, uh, or Saudi Arabia. It'll be some some version of it. Do do you understand what I'm saying? We need to come to terms with the reality that these things are deeply embedded in people. Let's recognize it. Let's live with it and stop trying to erase it. But all these regime change operations are bound up with this notion that we're going to globalize everything. We're going to make everybody the same. In my judgment, it's produced catastrophe after catastrophe, and we Americans need to get out of that business. I'm sorry for being so long-winded. >> No, not not at all, Colonel. I really appreciated this, and I was sort of struck by the irony that the European alliances that have been built with the intention to protect from or prevent war are often the cause of it. And you know you mentioned Nasim Taleb earlier he has this great phrase he uses in a couple of his books called iatrogenics right which describes medical intervention uh being worse than the disease itself right >> uh the cure is is worse than the disease which is sort of it's the exact same principle right here right it's it's intervention policy >> causes these rifts and tensions to escalate proxy wars to extend in length unnecessarily all of this stuff. Um, okay. One last question on the >> one. If I could say one thing though, we have to keep in mind that unfortunately there are people in the west uh they're a minority but nevertheless they are there. They are in the banking system. They are in the corporate sector who have enriched themselves as a result of these interventions and they are disincined to go quietly into the good night because they make money. It's income. That means that internally in the United States, we have to change something that nobody wants to disrupt. It's called the money flow. Other words, we have to not incentivize war. And right now, it's incentivized because we haven't endured much pain. And as long as the average American is not in pain, what difference does it make what they do in Washington? Who cares what happens overseas? That's somebody else's problem. War has become something that happens in other people's nations, not in ours, not on our soil. And this is my fear right now with uh Venezuela. There is no debate going on right now on the c on Capitol Hill about why are we interested in intervening in Venezuela? People say, "Well, you know, the drug cartels." Well, the drug cartels are in Mexico. they're a lot closer and a lot more dangerous and have a lot more control there as well as in Colombia. And then people will say, well, you know, what about all that oil and gas? And we have already discovered that Mr. Maduro tried to forge some sort of compromise with us that would give us a stake in the oil and gas industries, which would be very good because we have in the American oil companies the best drilling engineers in the world and they're all sitting around looking for work in many cases going down to Venezuela to restore that industry under their government whether we like it or not makes a lot of sense. particularly if we can raise the quality of life for the people of Venezuela while we also benefit economically. We've decided no. President Trump has said I'm breaking off diplomatic relations. He's assembling thousands of troops. So my next question is if you go into Venezuela and you plan to remove the government, how many millions of people in Venezuela are you making dependent on us? Because if their government falls apart, which it most certainly will, and their armed forces are defeated, and they're certainly defeatable by us, who's paying for everything? Who's feeding them? We haven't even talked about the potential for an insurgency in that country against our military presence. The bottom line is we we tend to do things in the United States because we have the capability to do it, not because we need to do it. We've gone into the Dominican Republic in the 60s the same way we went into Vietnam because we could. You know, we were not under existential threat from anything happening in Vietnam. There was no existential threat to us in the United States in 1917. Germany and AustriaHungary certainly weren't threatening us. Neither were the Turks. But if you have the capability to do something and the wealth to afford it, there is an inclination to do it for all the wrong reasons. Because we're the best, we're the greatest, and we should be in charge. Three big lies. I >> I think you know, you you asked a question inside that uh that struck me. You said, "Who's paying for all of this? Who's paying for everyone postregime change?" Right. And it earlier you referenced, you know, Americans need to feel enough pain to demand a change in the world order. And until they feel the pain of waging war globally for so long, they won't want anything to change. And maybe think, you know, I think that pain is coming home now. And it's it's in the um well, I think Americans are beginning to realize that they're the ones paying for this, right? And we can't globe trot around the world funding military endeavors anywhere, Ukraine, Middle East, next up, Venezuela, without printing and massively devaluing the currency, which continues to just deepen this division between the asset holders and the income earners, right? And that's where we're at, right? And you know, the recent president was elected on a mandate to stamp out inflation. um uh he's also recently gone on a bit of a spending spree, right? And I think, you know, I'd love to know your take on this because devaluing the currency is destructive most of the time, right? I have a belief that we're not going to stop the printing press anytime soon. So, if that's the case, you might as well put it to productive use. And the administration's been on a role right now of doing deals with like f taking a 5% stake in Lithium America's, a 15% stake in MP Materials to build rare earth refineries, uh a 10% stake in Intel, uh a golden share in US Steel, just last week a 10% stake in Trilogy Metals, um a critical um metal explorer up in Alaska. And you know, maybe this is intelligent strategy to uh secure the metals that America needs to be competitive without looking everywhere else. I don't know. But at the end of the day, it's going to be massively uh inflationary. Massively inflationary. And that's the pain, right? That's the pain. I guess that's what I'm getting at is that the pain has come home. People just need to identify that the causality. Why am I feeling this pain, this economic pain? Why is the house that I couldn't afford last year somehow less affordable this year? What's going on? Right? I played the game by the rules, right? But somehow I'm being excluded from participating and and that pain is home, but the connection needs to be made that this pain is a consequence of that military adventurism. And once that connection's made, maybe things begin to land. But am I being uh too optimistic? Like what's your take? >> Well, there are two things to consider. Uh, one is that if I had a choice, I would not want the United States government involved in the private sector making decisions on investment and production or anything else. >> So, one of these people doesn't think that's a good idea. I don't think we have to do that to shape investment and shape production and shape prosperity. That's another that's a another series of of questions. The other thing is someone said to me in in Washington quite recently, they said, 'Well, Doug, they have gold mines and emerald mines in Venezuela. I said, "Yes, I know. Obviously, emerald mines and gold mines have application. I mean the the metals and and the the gems have or not gems but the minerals have a role to play in national defense and building construction drilling so forth. But it was quite obvious that there's this notion that we somehow or another like the Vikings are going to land in our long ships come ashore uh slaughter anybody who gets in the way and steal everything we can carry with us. Uh, I don't think that's a good idea. And I'm worried that we're already not terribly popular in Latin America. And this will make us a hell of a lot less popular than we already are. And we may discover that Venezuela overnight becomes the center, a rallying point, if you will, for some broader regional crusade against us, so that our position down there becomes intolerable as well as unsustainable. There's a there's a there's a lot going on right now in Washington in the minds of people, none of which makes any sense to me. What did make sense to me was Maduro's offer because I'd much rather leave the government of his country in his hands. Whether you like him or not, I don't want the United States Army down there trying to govern the country. We've been through that. That doesn't work very well. Even when we do it well, it doesn't work very well. Nobody likes to be governed and policed by foreigners. So why not leave what's there and find a way to work with those people? To me, that's the that's the logical outcome. But I I appear to hold the minority opinion. So I think we're on our way down there. >> You do? Okay. you know, when I saw the headlines and I saw the the, you know, the drone strikes on little fishing boats that may or may not have had narcotics on them. Um, and and I'm reading the headlines. I tended to think that this was this was like the Kansas City shuffle that we've seen from this administration many times. You look left, I'm going to go right. And everyone's eyes are on Venezuela right now. So, what's really happening, right? What's the real story as we're all focused on what might occur on the shores of Venezuela? something else probably more material is in play. Um it's interesting to hear your take on that Colonel. >> Keep in mind that our rationale for attacking Russia is not just to remove Putin. There was a real interest in dividing Russia up and raping it for its mineral resources, its oil, its gas, everything. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> I mean that was openly discussed on Wall Street by all sorts of horrible human beings. You know this when you go down to the Middle East, I heard people say, "Well, this thing in Ukraine has fallen apart, so we've got to get control of Iran's oil and gas wealth." In other words, we've got to get control of something. We need to recapitalize our banks. We We need somehow or another to get out of the doldrums that we're in. I just don't think that'll work. And I think that's a bad idea. So, now we're up to three wars that are still bubbling along. sort of like a slow boil in Ukraine. But that could go phenomenally badly very quickly for the Ukrainians if Mr. Putin decides he has no choice but to cross that river and head west. Not because he wants to. That's the last thing in the world he wants to do. He knows his country's history. He knows the people in Ukraine, that is in western Ukraine, west of the Emperor River, do not want to be governed or administered by Russians. He knows that. He doesn't want to go there. We're mistaking that for weakness. It's not Russian weakness that has prevented that. It's Russian prudence, but we could go them into doing bad things. We could go them into doing more. We can escalate. This Tomahawk nonsense is a good example of it. Even though that's not some brilliant game-changing strategic weapon by any stretch of the imagination, but nevertheless, if they get 20 to 50 of those and let's say they fire 50 at once or 30 at once, I think the Russians would probably shoot down most of them, but some get through. And what happens if it strikes Moscow? What happens if it strikes St. Petersburg? What happens if it strikes Kazan? Any number of cities and kills large numbers of Russian citizens? Now you're staring at something that the Russians would regard as a unambiguous act of war. We don't want to go there, but we have stupid people pushing this and they're misreading the tea leaves. They're mistaking restraint for weakness. The Russians are not weak. Anybody who thinks that is a very, very foolish individual. They have not taken these heavy casualties because they don't need to to be successful. Ukrainians have impaled themselves on the Russian army for years now. There are 1.7 to 1.8 million dead Ukrainians. This is this is horrific. Anyone with a shred of humanity in them in Washington would say this must stop. We have no right to use these people's lives in this purpose. They didn't invent it. We did. And then when you go to the Middle East, you have something similar. And that's unfinished business. Everyone hopes that this current uh peace agreement, not that it's really a peace agreement, it's just a ceasefire at this point, will last for some period of time. Anybody who has experience in the Middle East is very skeptical. And remember that none of the goals and objectives of the Israeli government have changed. So I would expect further war in the future, particularly against Iran, and the Iranians expect that as well. I would prefer we not be part of it. But thus far, we have proven incapable of isolating ourselves from that sort of thing. That's why I say we've got these two wars that continue and now we want to add a third one without thoroughly examining the strategic implications for us and completely ignoring our brittle financial system. You know, you paint the picture of inevitable global regime change and the questions around that are, you know, how much control and ownership are we going to take over that? How much how much responsible proactive measures are we going to take over that? And you know, no matter how that shakes out, I think, you know, we're in alignment. Um that in any kind of a transition state like that, the supply and security over key resources becomes less certain and countries and economies are willing to pay more for that certainty. Um and that's what we're going to be talking about at the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference January 25th and 26. I'm so excited that you're coming back. We have an amazing uh agenda coming together and this is what we do at that event. We look at the world through the lens of supply and demand of raw materials and then as a commodity investor. What's your angle there? For a lot of us, it's gold right now specifically. Uh Colonel, I'm very excited that you're coming back to Vancouver in January. >> Okay. Thanks, Jay. I appreciate look forward to seeing you and I hope you'll warm the place up. >> Pretty good. Last time it was pretty good. Hey, it wasn't really that cold. >> So, see what you can do again. >> Yeah, >> I got it. I'm on it. I'm on it. Colonel, thanks so much for your time today. I sincerely appreciate it. See you soon. >> Thank you. See you soon. Bye bye. All right.