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I kicked things off today with a fairly simple question: Has there ever been a more dangerous time for America than right now?
Macgregor’s answer was interesting because he immediately rejected the threats Washington spends most of its time talking about.
Not Russia.
Not China.
In fact, he told us that when Trump asked him inside the White House what the existential military threats to the United States were, Macgregor answered:
“There are no existential military threats to the United States, certainly none from China or Russia.”
His concern was much closer to home: Mexico, the Caribbean Basin, organized criminality, uncontrolled borders, collapsing social cohesion and, eventually, the possibility that the American political system simply stops working.
That became the thread running through the entire conversation.
The Bigger Risk Is Internal
Macgregor’s argument is that America is still operating under a strategic model that no longer makes sense.
We maintain forces all over the world. We have hundreds of overseas bases. We continue behaving as if American military power can be projected anywhere, indefinitely, at relatively little cost.
Meanwhile, the actual United States is increasingly difficult to govern.
The border is a mess. The institutions are losing legitimacy. The military is stretched thin. The debt is approaching $40 trillion. Young people increasingly recognize that many of the institutions they were told to trust simply don’t work.
And yet Washington remains obsessed with managing everybody else’s problems.
Macgregor’s point was essentially: What if the American government tried defending America for a change?
He believes the Army should have a major role on the southern border, something he points out was historically normal. He thinks much of America’s forward military presence is obsolete in an era of precision missiles, drones and increasingly sophisticated surveillance.
His criticism wasn’t really that America is too weak.
It’s that we are spending enormous resources doing things that no longer make strategic sense while neglecting the things that actually determine whether the country survives.
That struck me as exactly right.
What Happens When Abundance Ends?
But the most important part of the conversation came when we moved away from military strategy.
Macgregor believes America is still living in a period of relative abundance.
Things are expensive. Plenty of people are struggling. Young men are having a harder time finding good jobs. College degrees increasingly aren’t delivering what was promised.
But the shelves are still full.
Gasoline is available.
The electricity works.
Most people are still able to maintain something resembling normal life.
His argument is that politics changes radically when abundance turns into genuine scarcity.
That’s when all of the divisions that can currently be papered over become impossible to ignore.
Economic.
Racial.
Cultural.
Rural versus urban.
Citizen versus state.
Macgregor referenced Crane Brinton’s Anatomy of Revolution and the historical pattern in which declining prosperity exposes fractures that were always there.
I think that’s an incredibly important point.
We spend a lot of time on this program talking about the debt, monetary manipulation, precious metals and what ultimately happens when governments try to postpone a financial reckoning forever.
My own view is that the longer you delay the reckoning, the worse the eventual adjustment becomes.
Macgregor sees essentially the same thing politically.
The financial manipulation isn’t solving anything.
It’s buying time.
And when the economic table finally gets kicked over, the political table probably goes with it.
The Government Is Not Ours
At one point I tried to clarify something Macgregor was saying about authoritarianism.
Because there’s an important distinction here.
A stronger state is not necessarily the same thing as the existing bureaucracy becoming even bigger.
What Macgregor seems to envision is something much more radical: a government capable of exercising authority because it actually sees its purpose as defending the interests of the population.
When I put it that way, he answered:
“The government is not ours. The government is not acting in the interests of the American people.”
That may be the most important line from the entire episode.
You can argue about exactly how we got here.
But I think an enormous number of Americans, on both the Right and Left, instinctively understand the basic problem.
Washington has become an ecosystem unto itself.
The bureaucracy exists.
The contractors exist.
The NGOs exist.
The political class exists.
The lobbying apparatus exists.
And increasingly, ordinary Americans get the sense that they exist to support the system rather than the system existing to support them.
Macgregor thinks that arrangement eventually breaks.
I do too.
The Authoritarian Question
This led us somewhere uncomfortable.
Could America actually get through the next crisis without becoming more authoritarian?
Macgregor’s answer was simple:
No.
Doug immediately pointed out the obvious danger.
FDR dramatically expanded the power of the federal government during the Depression, and most of that power never went away. The great things that made America unusual—free minds, free markets and limited government—were substantially weakened in the process.
Macgregor didn’t really dispute that.
His point was that governments under severe pressure tend to become more forceful whether we like it or not.
Lincoln suspended habeas corpus.
FDR wielded enormous power over the press and federal agencies.
Historical leaders ranging from Washington to Cromwell exercised authority in ways that would be considered extraordinary under normal conditions.
Which raises the real question:
If a crisis produces a much stronger government, who controls it and toward what end?
That matters far more than the abstract question of whether the state becomes larger.
We already have an enormous state.
The nightmare scenario is not simply authoritarianism.
It is authoritarianism in service of the same people and institutions that created the problem.
The Coming Vacuum
Macgregor doesn’t have much faith that elections alone solve this.
Neither does Doug.
Neither do I.
When Doug asked him what happens if Republicans win the midterms, Macgregor’s response was basically: what difference does it make?
Both parties remain committed to most of the same fundamental policies.
That doesn’t mean elections are irrelevant.
It means elections may not be capable of producing the scale of change required.
Macgregor thinks we could eventually reach something resembling what happened in Sri Lanka, where the political order simply lost legitimacy and the government effectively fled.
His phrase was the “Sri Lankan response.”
And if that happens, the key question becomes:
Who fills the vacuum?
Macgregor has been involved in groups trying to recruit younger, capable people precisely because he thinks entirely new human capital will be required.
That part of the conversation resonated with me.
I spend a lot of time around young people, including my own Zoomer kids, and I’m actually more optimistic about them than a lot of people my age.
They don’t have much reverence for institutions.
That’s usually described as a weakness.
I’m not sure it is.
They grew up watching the institutions fail.
They know the college system is broken.
They know the political system is corrupt.
They know the bureaucracy is dysfunctional.
They know the financial system is being manipulated.
They’re not nostalgic for some idealized 1985 because they never experienced it.
That means they may be psychologically much more prepared for radical institutional change than the Boomers who still seem to believe everything can somehow be put back the way it was.
Then There’s Iran
We eventually got Macgregor onto the subject I knew everyone would want to hear about: Iran.
His outlook isn’t encouraging.
He expects renewed action against Iran and believes the United States is likely to get pulled deeper into the conflict.
His broader point, though, was even more important.
While Washington remains fixated on maintaining the old order, the rest of the world is reorganizing without us.
China, Russia and Iran are cooperating more closely.
Turkey, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are developing another emerging power structure.
Egypt may eventually move closer to that world as well.
Macgregor sees Turkey becoming increasingly important across the Middle East and believes many of the political arrangements Washington has relied upon for decades are becoming unstable.
Whether every one of those predictions proves correct almost doesn’t matter.
The larger trend is difficult to miss.
The post-1991 world—where America was the uncontested power and could dictate terms almost everywhere—is gone.
Yet much of Washington is still behaving as if it’s 1991.
That disconnect may be one of the most dangerous things happening in the world today.
Something Breaks
Near the end, I tried to summarize what I thought Macgregor was telling us.
An economic calamity creates a revolutionary environment.
The existing institutions lose legitimacy.
The political system becomes incapable of dealing with the problem.
The table gets overturned.
And out of that disorder something entirely different emerges.
Maybe better.
Maybe much worse.
Macgregor agreed, but with one important qualification:
“We’re not gonna be the same at the other end of this process as we are now.”
That’s probably the right way to think about what’s coming.
Most people still assume the future is a modified version of the present.
Republicans win.
Democrats win.
The Fed cuts rates.
The Fed raises rates.
Gold goes up.
Stocks go down.
Another election comes along.
But history doesn’t always move linearly.
Sometimes the system itself changes.
Macgregor thinks we’re approaching one of those moments.
After this conversation, I’m inclined to agree.
The real question isn’t whether something breaks.
It’s what replaces it when it does.
— Matt
00:00 Biggest Threats Today
01:40 No Military Existential Threat
04:17 Ukraine War Reality Check
05:34 Putin Hitler Narrative
06:14 Son Visits Russia
08:22 Why Russia Moves Slowly
11:30 Ukraine as Zombie State
12:49 Border Security Focus
15:15 End Expeditionary Warfare
17:33 Demographics and Migration
18:19 Army on the Border
20:30 American Identity Erosion
23:08 Immigration and Prosperity
24:46 Europe Identity Rebound
30:35 Assimilation or Collapse
31:55 Scarcity and Education
40:29 Government Not Ours
41:12 Israel First Policies
45:19 Rural Urban Civil Strife
48:20 Hybrid American Identity
49:20 Executive Power Creep
50:01 Historic Strongmen Examples
52:48 Trump and Donor Control
55:04 Corruption and Cromwell Fix
56:12 Midterms and ICE Backlash
58:10 Scarcity and Revolution Risks
01:00:52 Institutional Decay and Youth
01:05:31 Debt Reckoning and Vacuum
01:10:40 Iran War Paths and Alliances
01:17:02 Gaza as Regional Catalyst
01:18:02 Where to Follow MacGregor
01:19:08 Military Reform and Four Stars
01:24:57 National Conversation Closing
