Douglas Macgregor on Polish government policy

Douglas Abbott Macgregor is a retired US Army colonel and government official. He contributed to the US strategy during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. After retiring from the military in 2004, he became more politically active. In 2020, President Donald Trump proposed Macgregor as US Ambassador to Germany, but the Senate blocked the nomination. On November 11, 2020, a Pentagon spokesman announced that Macgregor had been hired as a senior adviser to the acting Secretary of Defense. He held the position for three months. Trump also appointed him to the board of Westpoint Academy.

– We have countries such as Poland or Portugal donating Leopard tanks from the 1970s with the goal of pleasing the West by saying this: , “Mr. President Biden, we have some museum-quality equipment that we will gladly give away to please you. Now Poland is to send its F-16s and brand-new Apache helicopters, which it will buy from the U.S. and keep them too. Do they want to please the US with this? Is that the goal?

I think this statement is true, but it does not apply to Poland, because the Polish government lives in the distant past. When the Polish government thinks of Russia, they see the Bolshevik Russia of the 1920s, they see the Soviet Union and Stalin. They don’t want to deal with reality. They fail to see that it is no longer a Soviet country, much less a communist one. Russia is not interested in war with Europe, because Russia wants to do business precisely with Europe. Moscow does not want to occupy and rule another nation that is not a Russian nation. They are learning the great lesson of imperialism. Well, imperialism doesn’t work very well. Territorial imperialism is expensive. You’re dealing with a sizable group of people who are foreign to you and don’t want you to rule them. Russia knows this. Alexander Solzhenitsyn described it. He is the author of the famous phrase - , “We Russians should be happy that these people are free and independent with respect to us. We do not want to rule them. We want to have our own country. There is no person more devoted to Solzhenitsyn’s idea than Putin. Such an idea that the Russians want to come in and have to deal with 40 million disgruntled and pissed off Poles is absurd. It’s not true, however, they are spinning this war because it smolders in their minds that if they try hard, they will please us. However, they don’t understand something. We do not live in Europe. We are a naval and aeronautical power. We do not maintain significant land forces in other areas of the world. That’s why we now have only 50,000 troops ready to fight in Europe, so they’ve gone crazy. Over the years we have developed a bad habit. Whenever a country asks us to help them, we should simply answer them - Learn to live with your neighbors. War is not the only solution.