Douglas Macgregor is a retired and decorated U.S. Army colonel, government official, author, consultant, and political commentator. In this interview, he warns that the Swedish government’s decision to join NATO and to sign the military DCA agreement will turn Sweden into a U.S.-controlled deployment area for a war against Russia. He also touches upon the background of the Ukraine conflict and what could be done to reinstate Swedish autonomy.
Interview by T. Sassersson and Kristoffer Hell. The transcript is linguistically improved
T. Sassersson: As you know, Sweden has joined NATO, and the Swedish government is about to sign the DCA Agreement (giving the US access to at least 17 Swedish military bases). My first question is, what does the combination of NATO membership and the DCA agreement entail for Sweden’s security? And may any power that wishes to conquer Russia misuse this combination of commitments and concessions?
Douglas Macgregor: Many people like me who have seen Sweden over many, many years in the international system were quite astonished at the suddenness and speed with which the Swedish government committed itself to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and then ultimately to sign a status of forces agreement with us.
It was almost as though everyone was convinced that massive Russian forces were in the Baltic region, in Northern Russia, poised to invade and march West into Sweden. I’ve never seen any evidence for that. It doesn’t make any sense to me at all, and I don’t know why people have reached these conclusions.
The Swedes would do themselves a favour by seriously questioning what they’re being told about Russia. I think that’s the first and most important issue. Russia, whatever it is, is not the Soviet Union. Russia has no interest in going to war with NATO or Europe, for that matter. Russia never wanted this war and was goaded into it primarily by Washington.
And that’s something that the Swedes don’t seem to understand. They’ve been listening to an utterly false and fictitious narrative. We are the ones who were pressing Ukraine’s membership in NATO, unnecessarily, by the way.
At the Supreme Headquarters in Europe, I served under the American four-star [General], the Supreme Commander of Europe […] I would tell you that the conventional view of Ukraine was that Ukraine was performing a valuable mission by putting several hundred miles between NATO and the Russian military establishment, even though we did not view Russia by any means as a direct or imminent threat.
But we saw great value in Ukraine sitting in a neutral position between NATO and Russia. All of a sudden, now, we’ve convinced ourselves that Russia is hell-bent on conquering the Baltic states, its former satellite states, and nothing could be further from the truth. If the Russians have learned anything, it’s that that is an economically losing proposition. There’s no profit in it; the people don’t want it, and frankly, neither do the Russians. But we caused this coup [the Maidan coup in Kyiv 2014].
It was essentially staged by the CIA and the MI6 in Great Britain. We took over the government. We installed our puppets and began massively building up Ukrainian forces. The Ukrainians immediately began attacking the so-called breakaway provinces in eastern Ukraine, Donetsk, and Luhansk, killing people almost on a daily basis.
Russians were even more oppressed, subjugated, and brutalized under the Ukrainian government than they had been previously, and the situation grew worse. We put our Biolabs in; we gave them Ukrainians enormously powerful equipment and weapons, and we lavished a great deal of money on them.
And keep in mind, this [Ukraine] is perhaps certainly in the top five globally of corrupt countries, we flooded the country with a lot of cash, which made matters even worse. Ultimately, the Russians sensed very accurately there was an existential threat to Russia growing in Ukraine.
So, they felt compelled to intervene. They tried very hard to reach an agreement with us, to come to some sort of understanding about conventional forces in the region, how many there would be, when, and so forth.
We rejected everything they mentioned and essentially told them they had a choice. They could capitulate to our demands, or they could essentially find themselves at war with us. Ultimately, the situation in Ukraine was so dangerous that the Russians intervened.
When they first went in they used very small forces. The army itself was small, and people were very critical of the Russian conduct of the operation. Still, President Putin and the leadership in Moscow did not want a direct confrontation. They were trying to signal the seriousness with which they took our actions in Eastern Ukraine. We decided that that was irrelevant to us.
We castigated the Russians for being incompetent, and so forth. We told the Ukrainians to commit the full brunt of their military power, about 400,000 troops, and The killing began ultimately. It didn’t go well for the Ukrainians, contrary to popular belief.
By the end of March or the beginning of April in peace talks, There was an agreement in Istanbul, which was ultimately spoiled by us and essentially subverted, which would have brought the war to an end and Provided equal rights for Russian citizens inside Ukraine that the Russians wanted as well as an end to this platform that we had built in Ukraine as a way to attack Russia all of that failed and at this point President Putin was told by his generals look No one is going to negotiate with us.
We will have to win this militarily, and to do that, we have to build up our military power substantially and expand the ground forces. We must provide them with new equipment, and we must do it over the next six to twelve months, which begins in earnest in the fall of 2022.
Certainly, by Christmas or January of 2023, you will have this rapidly growing. A competent Russian force that has established itself in the defensive posture in areas that were overwhelmingly Russian historically and in terms of the population culture and language, and The Ukrainians did the Russian Now, the point is that the Russians sat in utter amazement that the Ukrainians would be so stupid is to attack these very, very elaborate and deep defensive works, but they kept it up and eventually bled themselves white in the process.
At the end of that long period of pointless counterattacks, Russian forces are now moving slowly but deliberately to the West. Again, there is still a willingness to negotiate, but Moscow has no one to talk to.
And in the meantime, everyone, I would say the globalist leaders, this ruling elite in Western Europe and in the United States, is pouring buckets of filth and abuse all over the heads of Moscow and the Russian people, accusing them of crimes they’ve never committed.
And the outcome is that there’s no room for discussion. And at this point, I don’t think they’re… There will be any I think this war will be ended on on Russian terms the question for Sweden is Why did you want to become part of this?
Why do Swedes suddenly want to be hostile to Russia when there is no reason to do so? This is not the Soviet Union. This is not an expansionist imperialist power, not by a long shot. Russia’s gross domestic product is about the same as the gross domestic product of Texas in the United States. The Russians were not interested in threatening anyone. So why does Sweden now want to join this unambiguously hostile alliance?
It sets Sweden up for the potential to be dragged into a war that Washington may well start against Moscow. Not the other way around. So, that’s really the question I’m asking is I don’t understand. It doesn’t make any sense to me. The Finns don’t make any sense at all. The Finns were doing land office business with the Russians. Uh, the business is what the Russians want to do. They certainly don’t want to go back to the Baltic states in Poland, Good lord.
That’s like saying I had a smallpox. Let’s go back and get it again: The Russians aren’t stupid. What is the source of all of this? Now, the very idea of placing nuclear weapons on Swedish soil is even more Lunatic than any other idea I’ve heard thus far.
T. Sassersson: Can I say something about the prime minister of Sweden? He said that it is an existential question. It has to do with the the future of Europe and and Sweden So he says that Ukraine must win the war. He also says that Sweden needs a American nuclear umbrella for protection and safety. That’s how they keep repeating their narrative
Douglas Macgregor: It’s stunning to me. The Soviets reached Berlin thanks to our significant help and assistance to them filled the power vacuum in central East Europe, and suddenly now, Sweden decided to join NATO.
I mean, there were certainly good reasons for the Swedes to consider joining NATO in the 1950s and early 1960s but why they would want to do it at this point is a mystery to me. The other thing is suddenly, you want nuclear weapons on your soil, ostensibly on the assumption that the nuclear weapon on your soil protects you.
I would argue right now the opposite is the case if you put a nuclear weapon on Swedish soil, you become an unavoidable target for a Russian nuclear strike if Russia is attacked by us. Now, all of this has to be viewed against the backdrop of a lost war. People in Sweden figured out that this war was lost; there were over 600,000 dead Ukrainian soldiers.
There are more than a million casualties. Millions have left Ukraine. Ukraine is a dying nation at this point. It has no chance to win anything. And we are simply subsidizing the puppet regime there to maintain the fiction that we’ve done something good there, when in fact, the opposite is the case.
We’ve cultivated hatred and destruction against Russia. It doesn’t make any sense at all because Russia has not behaved as our enemy. The point is that there are forces at work here that the Swedes need to understand.
They need to understand that the globalist ruling class in Europe and the United States is driving this war. And it has failed miserably. Russia has won it. It will now be left to Russia to decide what the post-war region looks like.
They will draw the new lines, territorial arrangements, and borders, not us. And there’s nothing we can do about it. The United States is not the power it was in 1991. We are certainly not going to challenge the Russians in the nuclear sphere.
And we do not have the conventional military power to challenge them on a conventional level. Our army is pitifully small. We are having trouble recruiting for our armed forces because, frankly, many Americans don’t want to be part of this organization anymore because they don’t support the goals and aspirations of the American government, which is completely divorced from the interests of the American people.
So, Swedes need to stop it and reconsider all of their assumptions. You know, for instance, there are discussions underway in Washington behind closed doors about how we can move more and more, if not all, of our nuclear weapons offshore. We don’t want intercontinental ballistic missiles sitting in the ground in the Midwestern United States for the same reason I just mentioned to you. They’re simply sitting ducks.
They’re targets that will attract nuclear attack in the event of a nuclear exchange, which, incidentally, nobody wants. The Russians have made it very clear they will not use a weapon unless such a weapon is used against them.
The Chinese have publicly embraced the no-first-use doctrine. We should do the same. We haven’t. In fact, since Biden came to office, he’s done the opposite. He’s created a solution that suggests we might actually fight and win such a nuclear exchange, and that’s an impossibility.
We know very well that if the Russians and we go to war and use nuclear weapons, 90 million Americans will die in the first hour. Another 90 million will die in the weeks and months afterward of all sorts of horrible diseases as a result of the radioactivity in the fallout.
No one in their right mind is going to use a nuclear weapon. And what is the point of using a nuclear weapon? All it does is destroy everything. The population, the scientific industrial base, and anything that may be worth having is ruined.
So, back to Sweden. What are the Swedes thinking? Why would you want to make yourself a target? Secondly, when Eisenhower was president of the United States, he actually penned a memorandum that is available in the White House where he had this debate in the 1950s when people wanted to put nuclear weapons in Europe.
And he said, well, this is a very dumb idea. He said if we’re going to use nuclear weapons, we would want to place them at sea or potentially in North Africa or somewhere in the polar region. But we certainly don’t want them inside any of our NATO-allied countries.
We don’t want them inside the United States. Now, we’ve managed to avoid this insanity of a nuclear exchange. And that’s a good thing. But putting nuclear weapons into Sweden right now doesn’t help us.
It doesn’t help the United States. Certainly doesn’t help Sweden. So why would the United States want to do a thing like that? And why would Sweden want to surrender its sovereignty, its independence, its freedom of action to us?
The third point is that we don’t live in Europe. Americans live in North America. People don’t seem to get that. This is a very important point. Charles de Gaulle said it many, many years ago. The British are an island, and the Americans live in North America.
They don’t live in Europe. They’re not Europeans. So why would you place the destiny of your country in the hands of people? Washington certainly isn’t interested in placing its destiny in the hands of Swedes.
Why would you want to do it? It doesn’t make. It just doesn’t pass the common sense test. And one last thing, a SOFA, a Status of Forces Agreement, is something we always establish that ensures that our soldiers if they commit a crime, will not instantly be tried and convicted and imprisoned in a foreign court.
We insist that we must investigate it, try the soldier, and punish him. Now, there are exceptions from time to time because the crime was so heinous. We have made exceptions in Okinawa, where some terrible things have been done to the inhabitants.
But on the whole, we tend to insist on maintaining control of our troops and the laws they abide by. Again, I don’t understand why you would want to open the floodgates to American military power, aircraft, troops, missiles, rockets, whatever.
It just doesn’t pass the common sense test.
T. Sassersson: Thank you for that answer. Suppose Ukraine is finished as a military ramp to attack Russia. How likely is it that Sweden or Finland may be the new ramp to attack Russia for some other reason but with the goal of conquering Russia? Because that’s what people are starting to think.
Douglas Macgregor: Well, that’s a legitimate question. I mean, why are we doing what we are doing? Why have we been involved in Ukraine for the last 20 years, trying to turn it into a ticking time bomb for Russia, cultivating hatred, antipathy, and opposition to Russia in Ukraine?
Why? It makes no sense. Why are we trying to destroy Russia? Well, I don’t think Americans have any interest in it at all. However, the globalist elite would undoubtedly like to get control of the resources, which are in abundance in Russia, mineral resources, and agricultural resources, and strip Russia of its abundance of natural wealth.
I think that’s a legitimate question. Why is this happening? And I think that’s the answer. It’s failed. This is what people need to understand. The war has failed miserably. And at the end of such a horrible contest where one side has been so completely and utterly destroyed, which is Ukraine, the humanitarian thing to do is end this war.
We should try to come into some sort of arrangement that meets our security interests as well as Russia’s. I don’t think that’s impossible, particularly when we can agree to neutrality for Ukraine. That was always the preferred outcome from Russia’s standpoint, and it should be from ours.
A neutral Ukraine would not have been destroyed. It would never have become involved with us and NATO and made itself an instantaneous threat to Russia. So I don’t know why the Swedes, the Finns, the Norwegians, and the Danes—even though I know they’re in NATO—have all embraced this illogical hatred of Russia, which I just don’t buy for a second.
I think it’s foolish and dangerous, but you’ve got to debate this inside your parliament. Somebody’s got to stand up and say, show us evidence for this imminent threat that justifies American military power on our soil, and then finally understand the world has changed since the 1950s technologically and warfare dramatically.
Now, how has it changed? If there was a major war on the conventional level as opposed to being nuclear, we could not reach you in time to make any difference. We could never cross the Atlantic in time to save anybody because Russian submarines in the Atlantic would sink everything.
Land-based missiles would sink everything. I’m not talking about nuclear missiles. I’m talking about conventional warheads. It just wouldn’t work. We can’t maintain enough forces forward today in order to prevent a rapid Russian offensive if the Russians want to unleash it.
I don’t see any evidence that they do, far from it. But the point is that that’s a huge problem you’ve got to wrestle with. Then, that means everything has to escalate instantaneously to the nuclear level.
Well that’s insane. That brings you back to where we were at the beginning of this thing. You have a nuclear weapon or nuclear weapons that belong to us on your soil. Your expectation is that if Sweden is threatened, we will use those nuclear weapons.
Will we consult with anyone in Stockholm? What if the Swedish people decide they don’t want to be involved in the conflict we’ve started? By the way, if you don’t think that’s a possibility, all you have to do is look at Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya.
We pulled NATO members into these misguided, self-defeating interventions. What makes you think we will not try to drag you into such interventions? Is the nuclear weapon coming to you for your benefit? I don’t think so. I think it’s another means of hope. together America’s control system for vassal states. Why would you want to make yourself a vassal of Greater Washington? It’s insane and makes no sense.
T. Sassersson: If you look forward, what do you think will happen next? Of course, I read today that Victoria Nuland is back in business, and she says that we need to give weapons so that we can reach deeper into Russia. If that happens, what could be the game-changer if Russia is poked too much?
Douglas Macgregor: Well, thus far, President Putin has exercised incredible restraint. If you go back over the last three years, you’ll see that President Biden has made a number of public statements about so-called red lines.
And he made it clear to people that we will never send modern aircraft, we will never send missiles and rockets with an operational range that is a range of, You know, 150 to 300 miles. We will never do this. We will never do this and never do this, and we’ve crossed all of those red lines. We’ve violated all the promises that we made ourselves up front, and it’s because the war is lost, and sending strike weapons that can reach 300 kilometers across Ukraine into Russia is an exercise in pointless revenge.
And the targets the Ukrainians have picked and are still picking are always civilian targets, cities Objectivist to kill Russians, which makes no sense at all. All you have to do is listen to the insane statements coming out of Washington That this was this war is of great benefit To the United States because Ukrainians are killing Russians. Absurd. We don’t benefit from killing Russians; quite the opposite. So, I think your question is legitimate. At what point does it?
Mr. Putin, say the hell with it. I don’t know, but I know that right now, the Kinzhal and Iskander missiles and other weapon systems can reach virtually every target in Europe—effectively from Bergen in Norway all the way down to southern Portugal. So, if the Russians decided to advance against Europe on the assumption that they have no choice because we continue to attack them and refuse to negotiate, I don’t know what we can do about it.
There is no integrated air and missile defense in NATO. We have no means of stopping the missiles, None whatsoever. The Russians have an integrated air and missile defense system. They probably have the best such System in the world.
They may be the only ones, although the Chinese are trying to build it to protect themselves from us. But we don’t have such a thing. Again, the other question you might want to ask is, let’s assume that the Russians are bearing down on you.
What makes you think we are going to launch nuclear weapons from North America against Russia? We’ll be happy to use the nuclear weapons on your soil and then point to Sweden and say, oh, the Swedes have done this.
We haven’t. I mean, it’s just crazy. The whole thing is absurd. And I don’t understand why anyone, I mean the Swedes, are well-educated, intelligent people. Why would you do this to yourselves?
T. Sassersson: We have to ask the politicians and confront them, I think. I wish they could listen to your words here. Do you know the island of Gotland in the middle of the Baltic Sea? We have some patriots. Could they protect Sweden from Russian Kinzhal missiles or the same kind of missiles?
Douglas Macgregor: No. The Patriot system is an old system. It’s old technology. Some of it has been reworked, but it’s still an old system. The technology the Russians use in many cases, such as the hypersonic [Kinzhal] missile, is new.
Right now, we have no means to stop a hypersonic missile. We simply can’t stop it. It doesn’t make any difference what you do. And these hypersonic missiles are proliferating. The Iranians fired hypersonic missiles at targets in Israel.
And the point of that was to demonstrate that those targets they fired at were very sensitive ones near Israel’s nuclear deterrent if you will. And it signaled that you can’t protect yourselves and we can reach and destroy you.
That’s one of the reasons things have come to a screeching halt in terms of the desired war between Israel and Iran, the war that Israel desires. My point is that if you depend on a few batteries of Patriot missiles, good luck. They haven’t performed very well in Ukraine.
T. Sassersson: As you know, we have a group of Gripen fighter jets, and they said that they might send them down to Ukraine to educate Ukrainian pilots and so on. And we interviewed a Swedish ex-military pilot, and he said, well, if you start to use them and they are becoming successful, it’s possible that the Russians will attack the factory of the planes in Sweden?
Douglas Macgregor: That’s accurate, you know; the Gripen can also launch the series RBS 15 cruise missiles, the other things you produce, which are excellent weapon systems. Why would the Russians sit on their hands and let this happen?
And I think the Russians have already clarified this to the French and the British. Macron has now backed down from his ridiculous statements about committing 20,000 French troops to Ukraine.
Because it became very clear to him if you think you can strike at us with impunity and that metropolitan France will not be targeted, you’re wrong. The same thing is true for the foolish British. You know, what possible interest do they have in waging war against Russia and Ukraine? None.
But they have threatened to turn over very, very dangerous weapon systems like the Storm Shadow and others to the Ukrainians. The Russians have managed to shoot most of these things down, which Is probably fortunate for everyone involved, but there’s no guarantee the Russians will not strike targets in Great Britain ports, airfields, missile installations, and factories. It’s the same thing in Sweden, but again, this makes no sense.
There’s no reason for any of this. Why is everyone in Sweden suddenly interested in destroying Russia? Now I could have understood this after the treaty of narva You know, that’s a different matter. That was a different age. That was a very tragic outcome, in my estimation, for Western civilization when Sweden lost control of the Baltic land and ultimately subsequently lost control of Karelia. Now, that was then, this is now we’re not dealing with czarist Russia. The Russians aren’t looking for more territory. They have all the territory they need with all of the resources they could ever want. All they have to do now is effectively exploit them. So where is the evidence that Russia is some dangerous, bloodthirsty juggernaut bent on destroying Scandinavia? I see none.
T. Sassersson: The only thing we can read in mainstream media about Russia is that it’s a bad country. Putin is a dangerous person, a dictator, and all that. So we are flooded daily with all that in the big news channels about how bad and dangerous Russia is. So the media is a huge problem. Still, I don’t understand myself. Why can’t people look at other sources and think about it? Is this really true? So that’s the problem we have.
Douglas Macgregor: Well, the United States has more people incarcerated In prisons than any other nation in the world, And that certainly is a proportion of our population as well as the numbers.
Does this make us a bad country? You know, we have locked up people involved in January 6 for months and years without proper trial. We suspended habeas corpus. The last time we did that was during the outbreak of the Civil War. We did it with these people. In one case, a man who was just released was released after it was found that he was picked up simply because he was passing a sign that was a Trump sign over his head to someone in front of him.
And that was judged to be a threatening act to the police. Well, then he was incarcerated for, you know, over 100 days for nothing. Now it looks like he will be paid seven million dollars or more in damages.
given the false charges under which he was arrested. And by the way, he was advised to plead guilty to get out. Of course, that’s subsequently going to be overturned. However, the point is that the average American citizen cannot afford to pay for the defense he or she needs when up against the Justice Department.
You know, the Ministry of Justice, if you will, in European terms, never runs out of money. So, they can go bankrupt anyone they want to, with the possible exception of someone like Bill Gates or Elon Musk.
So, the average American’s rights have been ground into the dust. Does this make us a bad country? Now, I’m not suggesting that Russia is perfect or a model. I don’t think we’re a model for anybody.
I never have. I think that somebody said to me the other day, don’t you think the United States is exceptional? I said, yes, it’s so exceptional. We can’t export it. We should stop.
T. Sassersson: What should the Swedish people do to change this situation concerning Swedish safety and so on? What shall we do with the politicians? Because we are kind of clueless within the Swedish peace movement.
Douglas Macgregor: Your population has to demand accountability from its elected leaders. So do we. You are in a somewhat stronger position because you have a parliamentary democracy. That means that you can actually cause the government to liquidate itself and start over effectively.
I think I would start asking very hard questions, and frankly, I would threaten my representatives. By saying that, we will not only not support you in the future, We will never vote for you again unless you hold hearings and air grievances.
This is so important when you are suddenly taking into your country nuclear weapons that are capable of killing tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people or destroying cities, and that is, in fundamental terms, what you’re doing.
You’re allowing that kind of weapon on your soil in the absence of any demonstrated threat to the Swedish people, only hot air vacuous allegations, empty accusations that somehow or another Putin is Stalin-like or Hitler-like, which is nonsense whatever he is. He’s none of those people.
Whatever is being said about Russia is probably fundamentally false. So, I, as a Swedish citizen, would be very concerned about that. I’d say I want this debated in parliament. Don’t allow some Defense minister who’s here today and gone tomorrow To sign a document that commits you to accept such things in your country from us. Remember, you take that from us.
You also take our control and, ultimately, our dominance in any decision-making process involving the security of Sweden. You have to measure what you think you’re gaining by how much you lose. I would argue that you’re losing your sovereignty, and there’s no reason for that.
T. Sassersson: Okay, thank you very much for your service to peace and normalization. I hope a lot of new listeners will come and listen to this interview. Thank you again.
Douglas Macgregor: Sure. Torbjorn, and Good luck.
Related
- Douglasmacgregor.com
- NewsVoice: Colonel Douglas Macgregor Warns Sweden about the Dominant Military DCA Agreement
