Team America Is Back - And No Plan - Douglas Macgregor

The Insider and His Verdict: Biography and an Uncomfortable Truth

Colonel (ret.) Douglas Macgregor is among the sharpest military-strategic critics of American interventionist policy.

Douglas Macgregor is a former U.S. Army colonel, military strategist, and national security analyst. He served for more than 30 years in various command and planning roles and participated in the 1991 Gulf War, where he was involved as a staff officer in planning high-mobility, maneuver-based operations.

Macgregor gained international recognition through his fundamental critique of U.S. military doctrine after the Cold War. Early on, he warned against endless intervention wars, strategic aimlessness, and the illusion of military omnipotence. In multiple books and professional analyses, he examines the structural decline of Western military power, the transformation of modern warfare, and the inability of political elites to adapt to the geopolitical realities of the 21st century.

He held several roles within the U.S. security establishment:

• Served as an advisor within the U.S. Department of Defense
• Considered under President Trump as a potential U.S. ambassador to Germany
• Regular guest in international media and defense policy forums

His analyses are characterized by sobriety, historical depth, and a rejection of moralized war rhetoric. For Macgregor, military power is never an end in itself, but an instrument that must remain subordinate to clear political objectives, realistic means, and calculable consequences.

The Operation — Tactical Success, Strategic Void

There is no strategy, no coherent framework for any action of any kind. Everything is impulse-driven — we go in, declare victory, congratulate ourselves, and then someone says: now what?

The arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was, by the narrow metrics Washington prefers, a success. No significant American casualties. The target was captured and paraded. The president held a press conference. And then — as Colonel Douglas Macgregor recounts it with barely concealed exhaustion — the answer to every subsequent question was a variation of the same non-answer: we’ll figure it out.

“What are you going to do now?” the press asked. “We’re going to run Venezuela for a while,” the president replied. A country the size of France, Germany, and Austria combined. A population of nearly thirty million. A political landscape fractured between Maduro loyalists, opposition factions with their own agendas, and a new acting president already speaking out of both sides of her mouth — promising cooperation with Washington in one breath, vowing resistance to foreign dictates in the next. Marco Rubio, it was suggested, would manage the details.

Macgregor has been saying this for months, about everything. The absence of a coherent national military strategy — let alone a grand strategy — is not a gap that can be patched with bravado or filled with the personal ambitions of Cabinet members. It is a structural condition of the current administration, and it predates Trump. What Trump has done is strip away the diplomatic vocabulary that used to disguise it.

The operational picture, as Macgregor reconstructs it:

• Enormous sums were spent buying off every institution and individual that might interfere — a strategy of paid compliance rather than military capability
• Cuba’s security detachment protecting Maduro was neutralized — by what means, whether U.S. forces or mercenaries, remains publicly unaccounted for
• One American aircraft was badly damaged, forced to abort, after encountering the single Venezuelan air defense battery that had not been instructed to stand down
• The new acting president has already begun contradicting herself — signaling to Washington and to Venezuelan nationalists simultaneously, which means she is signaling to neither
• There is no plan for the millions of Venezuelans who supported Maduro and Hugo Chávez — no political roadmap, no economic reconstruction strategy, no answer to the question of what comes next

Trump’s press conference instinct — to lead with the casualty count and declare the operation “wonderful, beautiful, perfect” — is not a rhetorical tic. It is the substitute for analysis. He deployed the same framing after the strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities: wonderful, over, done. Within weeks, Netanyahu was back in Washington, and a new war with Iran is now being constructed in plain sight. The pattern is consistent. The celebration of tactical execution is the mechanism by which the absence of strategic thinking is made invisible — at least briefly.

The Wolfowitz Fallacy, Again — Oil, Gold, and the Revenue Fantasy

Wolfowitz said Iraqi oil would pay for everything. We lost trillions. Venezuelan oil looks like sludge — thick, sulfur-rich, and years away from any strategic relevance.

One of the central justifications circulating in Washington for the Venezuela operation is economic: seize control of Venezuela’s oil reserves, flood global markets, and thereby drain the revenues that sustain Russia’s war effort in Ukraine. Macgregor is precise and dismissive about each link in that chain.

Venezuelan crude is among the most difficult to refine in the world: heavy, high in sulfur, located deep underground, in a country with underdeveloped extraction infrastructure and insufficient road networks to move material from the interior. Getting production up to three or four million barrels per day — the volume that might meaningfully affect global markets — would require years of sustained capital investment and operational development. “It’s doubtful,” Macgregor says flatly, “that Venezuelan oil is going to have much impact on the world market” in any timeframe that corresponds to the current conflict.

The analogy to Paul Wolfowitz’s testimony before Congress in 2003 — that Iraqi oil revenues would pay for the reconstruction of Iraq — is exact and instructive. That promise was made by the same class of confident planners, about the same class of resource-rich nation, with the same level of scrutiny of the operational details. The United States spent trillions. Iraqi oil paid for none of it. The revenue fantasy has been run before. It has failed before. It is being run again.

The mineral and resource argument fares no better:

• Venezuela holds approximately $22 billion in gold reserves and substantial deposits of emeralds, rare earths, and other minerals
• The interior of the country is poorly connected — sparse road infrastructure means that even accessing and extracting those resources is a long-term logistical problem, not a short-term strategic asset
• Russia holds more gold domestically than any other country in the world; Venezuelan gold is of no existential importance to Moscow
• China’s interests in Venezuela are commercial — soybeans, minerals, oil — and if Venezuela becomes inaccessible, Beijing will source those materials elsewhere; the world, as Macgregor notes, is a large place
• Neighboring Guyana’s oil, often bundled into the regional argument, faces similar long lead times before any significant production increase reaches global markets

What survives, once the resource rationale is stripped away, is something more nakedly ideological. There was, Macgregor acknowledges, a desire to punish Venezuela for its pro-Palestinian posture — though he notes there are no Hamas or Hezbollah training camps in the country, and a far stronger case could be made for a Hezbollah presence in northern Mexico. Beyond that, the operation appears to reflect the personal ambitions of Secretary of State Rubio, whose longstanding project involves the sequential “liberation” of Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Colombia.

“It looks more like a vanity project,” Macgregor says, “for the president, the secretary of state, and Secretary Hegseth — more than anything else. And obviously their donors are very interested in it for their own private reasons.” The billionaire class, in his analysis, is calling most of the shots. The remaining ninety-five percent of the American population sees no benefit from it at all.

The Monroe Doctrine — A Shibboleth, Not a Strategy

During the Monroe Doctrine era, there were thirty thousand French troops in Mexico. So who are we kidding? This whole thing is not worthy of serious attention.

The formal invocation of the Monroe Doctrine in Trump’s national security strategy has generated considerable commentary, especially in Europe, where the language of hemispheric exclusion carries echoes of nineteenth-century great-power competition. Macgregor cuts through the mythology with a historian’s precision.

The Monroe Doctrine was barely noticed when President Monroe originally stated it, and effectively vanished from American political discourse almost immediately afterward. It was resurrected — and became a meaningful political touchstone — only in the 1920s, when the aftermath of the First World War produced a powerful revulsion against European entanglement. Americans had lost 110,000 dead in 110 days of fighting on the Western Front. Harding and his successors said: never again. Hemispheric defense became the strategic framework. Keep Europe’s wars out of the Americas. Keep American blood out of Europe.

That context is entirely absent from the current invocation. Today’s Monroe Doctrine is not a response to American exhaustion from foreign military adventures — it is a justification for new ones. The logic has been reversed: instead of “stay out of other people’s wars,” it now means “deny other great powers access to our hemisphere.” The doctrinal substance has been emptied out and refilled with a different geopolitical project.

The limits of the anti-China framing in Latin America:

• China is commercially embedded across South America — soybeans from Argentina and Brazil, infrastructure investment, minerals, oil — and has been for years
• No U.S. legislation prevents Chinese investment in American agricultural land; Macgregor points to this as an obvious inconsistency in the rhetoric about Chinese commercial threat
• If the concern is genuine national security, the priority should be the Chinese and Islamist presence in northern Mexico — a far more proximate threat that goes largely undiscussed
• Russia’s stake in Venezuela was primarily the gold reserves; with its own vast domestic gold holdings, Russia faces no existential loss from Venezuelan access being closed
• The doctrine of “deny access” has not been operationalized into a coherent policy; it is a rhetorical frame without strategic content

The deeper contradiction, which Macgregor names directly, is the one between the Monroe Doctrine’s implicit geography and the reality of American strategic behavior. “We should never have challenged the Russians in Ukraine,” he says. “It was a dumb idea. Strategically, how dumb can you get? The Russians can win any battle on their turf. We can win any battle in the southern Caribbean. It’s simply a fact of life.” If the principle is that great powers have legitimate spheres of influence in their immediate geographic neighborhood, then it applies symmetrically — or it is not a principle at all, but merely a claim to privilege.

The invocation of the Monroe Doctrine in the national security strategy is, in the end, another instance of what Macgregor identifies as Washington’s governing pathology: the use of historical language to create the impression of strategic coherence where none exists. Monroe was mentioned briefly in 1823 and then forgotten for a century. It is being mentioned again now — and will likely be forgotten again, once the Venezuela operation produces the inevitable reckoning with consequences that were not planned for.

Venezuela Today, Iran Tomorrow — And Why the Analogy Is Dangerous

A military mission that’s too successful tends to embolden. Venezuela is micro-militarism against an easy target. Iran is something categorically different.

Israeli media made the connection immediately: Venezuela today, Iran tomorrow. The speed and apparent ease of the Maduro operation is being read in Jerusalem — and in certain circles in Washington — as proof of concept. If a government can be removed without significant American casualties, by spending enough money to neutralize resistance in advance, then the template is exportable. Macgregor does not dispute the political logic of that reading. He disputes the operational analogy entirely.

Iran is not Venezuela. It is a nation of eighty-five million people with a substantial conventional military, an advanced missile arsenal, deep regional ties, and a population that has been shaped by over forty years of external pressure and sanctions into a coherent national identity organized around resistance to American and Israeli power. MI6, the CIA, and Mossad have been working overtime through Western mainstream media to create the impression that Iran is on the verge of internal collapse — that revolution is imminent, that the leadership is preparing to flee to Moscow. Macgregor is direct: “That’s not true.”

What is actually happening inside Iran, in his assessment, is a healthy political process: a confrontation between reformers and conservatives. The outcome will be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and Iran will continue to develop. “The country is united nationally against the external enemy — namely Israel and the United States. No one should doubt that.”

The structural differences between Venezuela and Iran:

• Iran has developed its military and missile capabilities over decades specifically in preparation for this contingency — it is not an unprepared target
• China and Russia have political, commercial, and strategic stakes in Iranian survival that they do not have in Venezuela — they will respond, though not militarily in the Caribbean
• The BRICS architecture means that an attack on Iran has implications for the entire non-Western economic order, not merely for one country’s government
• Turkey and Israel are already on a collision course in Syria; an Iranian war could accelerate that confrontation into something far larger and more unpredictable
• Israel has nuclear weapons, and Macgregor names his greatest fear plainly: Israeli frustration leading to use of a nuclear weapon — a scenario he will not dismiss

The political architecture driving the push toward Iran is, in Macgregor’s analysis, straightforward and unambiguous. “We have a group of billionaires who own and operate the government. They own the Hill. They own the presidency. They want war with Iran.” Netanyahu’s most recent visit to Washington made the direction of travel unmistakable. “Whatever Bibi wants, Bibi gets,” Macgregor says. The American president has made that clear repeatedly and explicitly.

A war with Iran will not be clean. It will not be quick. It will not be contained. It will not be paid for by Iranian oil. And unlike the Venezuela operation, it cannot be pre-cleared through payments to the relevant institutions. Macgregor hopes the president retains enough instinct for self-preservation to avoid it. His confidence in that hope is not high.

The Multipolarity Problem — An Order That Cannot Be Reassembled

Even the dumbest politician in Washington knows the old order is disintegrating. What they cannot accept is that it cannot be put back together again.

Diesen raises the structural question that frames everything else: is the Trump administration making its peace with being one great power among many, or is this a last attempt to fight multipolarity and restore hegemony? Macgregor’s answer is nuanced in its diagnosis and bleak in its prognosis.

Within the Trump administration, he argues, there is genuine understanding that certain military confrontations are unwinnable: the war in Ukraine cannot be won, and everyone at the top of the administration knows it; a war over Taiwan would produce consequences even more catastrophic than Ukraine; and China is so deeply integrated into the global economy that decoupling is, in Trump’s own businessman’s calculus, self-destructive. China has been producing approximately fifty percent of global GDP growth. Remove China from the equation, and the global economy contracts in ways that hurt American interests as severely as Chinese ones.

But this recognition of limits in the major theaters coexists with a refusal to accept the structural implications of decline. “NATO is disintegrating. The EU is disintegrating,” Macgregor says. “The interests that underpinned both no longer apply. People have different interests. The world has moved on.” Orbán is not an outlier or an irritant; he is simply the European leader willing to say plainly what others are calculating privately. When Hegseth steps to the podium and announces that “America’s back,” what he is really doing is producing domestic bravado for an American audience that needs to be told it is still winning.

The multipolarity the administration has tacitly accepted:

• Ukraine: the war cannot be won; the administration is extracting itself while managing the optics of that extraction
• Taiwan: a military confrontation would be catastrophically costly; the administration privately acknowledges this even while maintaining the public posture
• China trade: Trump the businessman understands he needs to do business with China; the impossibility of that in today’s political climate is a contradiction he has not resolved
• Europe: the administration is pushing Europeans to take responsibility for their own defense, which reflects a genuine strategic reassessment of NATO’s value to American interests

The multipolarity the administration refuses to accept:

• Latin America: the Monroe Doctrine revival represents an attempt to re-establish a unipolar zone of control in the Western Hemisphere while accommodating multipolarity elsewhere
• Middle East: the billionaire-funded drive for war with Iran is a direct attempt to reassert unipolar outcomes in the region most consequential to Israeli security
• Dollar dominance: the administration continues to behave as though dollar hegemony is a permanent feature of the international system rather than a condition being actively eroded by the BRICS alternative payment architecture

The incoherence is not accidental. It reflects a genuine tension within the administration between the instincts of businessmen who understand comparative advantage and the demands of donors who require military action for ideological or financial reasons. What emerges is not a strategy but a series of impulse decisions, each rationalized post hoc, each producing consequences that were not planned for and will not be managed well.

Losing, Losing, Losing — The Balance Sheet of American Military Power

Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine — losing against the poorest countries in the world. In the meantime, Russia and China have become enormously richer. One needs a level of blindness that even Americans are finding hard to sustain.

Macgregor does not engage in the rhetorical flourish of American decline for dramatic effect. He is working from a ledger. Vietnam: the United States had 550,000 troops in country, every technological advantage, and lost to an agrarian guerrilla force with Chinese and Soviet backing. Afghanistan: twenty years, trillions of dollars, the Taliban reconstituted itself the moment American forces withdrew and took Kabul within weeks. Iraq: the destruction of the Ba’athist state produced ISIS, a decade of civil war, and a country that now tilts toward Iran. Ukraine: enormous material support, NATO intelligence, and the front line has moved in Russia’s favor.

The pattern is not about incompetence at the tactical level. American soldiers fight well. American logistics are formidable. American air power is genuinely impressive. The pattern is about the mismatch between military capability and political objective — the persistent inability or unwillingness to ask, before committing force, what outcome is actually achievable and whether military force is the mechanism for achieving it.

“If you are who you say you are, you don’t have to threaten anybody,” Macgregor says, invoking Eisenhower’s handling of the 1956 Suez Crisis as the counter-model. When Britain, France, and Israel moved to seize control of the Suez Canal, Eisenhower did not threaten military force. He made phone calls. He said: this will cost you dearly. Get out. And they got out. That is what credible power looks like. It does not require constant demonstration. It does not need to announce itself. “The most effective use of force lies in not using it, but in possessing it — and for it to be credible.”

What the losing streak has produced:

• Russia: from the economic basket case of the 1990s, when American economists visited Moscow and were condescended to, to the fourth-largest economy in the world by purchasing power parity, with a military that has been battle-hardened across multiple theaters
• China: from a developing country excluded from Western economic institutions to the engine of global growth, producing fifty percent of global GDP expansion, with a military that has been modernized specifically to address American capabilities
• Iran: from a country isolated by sanctions and targeted for regime change to a regional power with missile arsenals, trained proxy forces across the Middle East, and a nuclear program that the strikes on its facilities did not end
• The American financial position: catastrophic debt, ongoing quantitative easing under various labels, a currency being debased in real time, and a commercial sector being choked by the cost of sustaining military commitments that produce no economic return

Macgregor quotes Lord Salisbury, who served as British Prime Minister around 1900, at the peak of British imperial power: “If my generals and admirals were allowed to do it, they would garrison the space between Earth and the moon on the grounds that there was a threat.” Britain in 1900 was more secure than it had ever been in its history. There was no existential threat. The lavish military spending was not defending British security; it was feeding the institutional logic of an imperial bureaucracy that could not conceive of a world in which garrison and patrol were not the primary activities of power. The United States is in precisely that position now.

The Financial Reckoning — A Perfect Storm in Formation

A perfect storm: bankruptcy in Europe and the United States, coinciding with war in the Middle East. I think the crisis is already underway.

Macgregor is not, by instinct or training, a financial analyst. But the people he talks to are. And what they are telling him about the underlying condition of the American financial system does not correspond to what is being publicly communicated by either the administration or the Federal Reserve.

Quantitative easing has not ended. It is continuing through two channels that receive less public scrutiny than the headline interest rate decisions: the repo window, through which the Fed is reportedly moving billions into the banking system to maintain solvency and liquidity; and the private equity sector, which is deeply vulnerable and being quietly supported by the same mechanisms. The currency is being debased. The debt is structural, not cyclical. And the people who understand these dynamics best — Ray Dalio, James Grant, Warren Buffett, Alistair McLeod — are not offering reassurance. They are, in various registers, warning of a financial crisis that could exceed the Great Depression in scope.

The perfect storm scenario and its components:

• Financial crisis in the United States, driven by debt, debasement, and the unwinding of the quantitative easing architecture built since 2008
• Financial crisis in Europe, accelerated by the energy price shock, forced investment in American markets, deindustrialization, and the cost of military rearmament without an industrial base to support it
• Outbreak of major war in the Middle East, centered on Iran, that disrupts energy markets, triggers regional escalation, and pulls American military resources into another unwinnable conflict
• The three crises arriving simultaneously or in rapid sequence, each amplifying the others — the scenario that keeps globalist establishments in Paris, London, Berlin, and Warsaw awake at night

Macgregor offers a counterintuitive observation about the American bankruptcy scenario: “Privately, several people who’ve looked at us and our reckless behavior on the world stage see this as perhaps the thing that will save the United States from itself — bankruptcy. That could well turn out to be the case.” A financial crisis severe enough to force genuine retrenchment might accomplish what strategic rationality has failed to accomplish: an end to imperial overstretch, a withdrawal from commitments that cannot be sustained, a reckoning with the gap between ambition and resource.

He would prefer this to happen before rather than after a Middle Eastern war, because a war with Iran layered on top of financial crisis would be, in his assessment, genuinely catastrophic — not merely expensive, not merely strategically counterproductive, but potentially civilization-altering in its regional consequences. The tinderbox metaphor he uses is deliberate. The Middle East is not a problem that can be solved by adding more combustion.

Cycles of Empire — The Decline Nobody Will Name

Are we in decline? Pretty clearly, yes. But no one in Washington will admit it — so we’re spending money we don’t have and adding to the number of people who dislike us unnecessarily.

Macgregor is not an advocate of American decline as a political position. He is a career military officer who spent decades inside the institution he is now analyzing. What he is doing is applying the same framework a competent staff officer would apply to any other operational environment: reading the terrain accurately, assessing resources and objectives honestly, and identifying the gap between them.

The framework is historical and structural. Great powers rise, overextend, and decline. The mechanism is consistent: military commitments that exceed the economic base available to sustain them, accompanied by financial debasement to cover the gap, accompanied by institutional rigidity that prevents the adaptation that might arrest the decline. Britain went through this cycle. Rome went through this cycle. The specifics vary; the architecture is consistent.

What is distinctive about the American case, in Macgregor’s analysis, is the ideological intensity of the denial. Every significant power has faced decline and found ways to rationalize it or resist naming it. But the American case involves a particular form of exceptionalism — the conviction, embedded deep in the political culture and reinforced by decades of genuine global dominance, that decline is something that happens to other countries. “Everyone is scurrying to get their cut of whatever financial benefit is on hand,” Macgregor observes. There is no incentive structure in Washington that rewards honest accounting.

The structural indicators Macgregor identifies:

• Military: consistent failure to achieve political objectives in major conflicts over fifty years, against adversaries with a fraction of American material resources
• Financial: debt levels that are structural rather than cyclical, ongoing currency debasement, a banking system maintained on life support through repo operations and private equity support
• Industrial: the outsourcing of manufacturing capacity over decades has produced military and commercial vulnerabilities that cannot be rapidly remedied — the ammunition shortage in Ukraine was a symptom of this
• Political: an institutional system so captured by donor interests that it cannot produce the strategic rationality that would be required to arrest the decline
• International: an accelerating consolidation of non-Western nations into alternative economic and security architectures — BRICS, the Belt and Road, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation — that are explicitly designed to reduce dollar dependency and American leverage

The cycle, Macgregor insists, is not necessarily terminal. “Will we be back? Of course.” But the precondition for return is the acknowledgment of the slump — and that acknowledgment is precisely what no one in Washington will make publicly. The political cost of honesty is too high. The campaign donor class benefits from the current trajectory. The media ecosystem that sustains political careers is built on American triumphalism. The incentive structure at every level produces the continuation of behavior that deepens the decline.

“If you overspend, if you engage in imperial overstretch, and your economy suffers, and you mismanage it, you’re going to decline. You’re going to go into a slump.” The logic is not partisan. It is not ideological. It is arithmetic. And it is being ignored by the full political spectrum, which is how slumps become collapses.

The Billionaire Problem — When Donors Drive Strategy

We are dominated by the billionaire class — they’re calling most of the shots. The other ninety-five percent of the population sees no benefit from any of this.

One of Macgregor’s most pointed analytical contributions to this conversation is his insistence on naming the structural relationship between donor interests and foreign policy decisions. This is not a conspiracy theory; it is an institutional observation about the incentive structures that produce American foreign policy outcomes.

The billionaire class — the donor networks that fund both parties, though the specific individuals vary — has concrete financial interests in military action, in certain foreign policy outcomes, in the continued application of American power in particular regions and against particular targets. Defense contractors profit from military action. Financial interests profit from access to post-conflict reconstruction and resource extraction. Ideological donors fund specific policy outcomes — the Iran war project, the Cuba liberation project — as personal or communal priorities. And these interests are represented with extraordinary effectiveness in both the executive and legislative branches.

“Their donors are very interested in it for their own private reasons,” Macgregor says of the Venezuela operation. “Remember, the donors — who are overwhelmingly billionaires — will inevitably see to it that they profit in some way from everything.” This is not an observation about corruption in the criminal sense. It is an observation about the structural alignment between donor interests and the foreign policy choices that get made — and the structural misalignment between those choices and the interests of the overwhelming majority of Americans who neither profit from nor bear the strategic consequences of endless military action.

The donor-strategy alignment in the current administration:

• The drive for war with Iran is explicitly connected to a specific set of donors with ideological commitments to Israeli security maximalism — Macgregor names this directly
• The Venezuela operation serves donors with interests in Latin American resource access — gold, minerals, oil — regardless of the strategic or military logic
• Defense contractors benefit from any military action, from the initial operation through the reconstruction phase, which historically costs more than the war itself
• The billionaire class also has interests in the financial architecture — in dollar dominance, in the petrodollar system — that drive opposition to the BRICS alternative payment infrastructure
• The ninety-five percent of the American population that sees no benefit from these operations also has no comparable institutional representation in the processes that produce foreign policy decisions

The structural problem this creates for strategic rationality is severe. Strategy requires an honest accounting of costs and benefits, a willingness to accept unfavorable assessments when the evidence demands it, and an institutional culture that rewards truth-telling over confirmation of preferred narratives. The donor-driven model produces the opposite: an institutional culture in which the analysis is subordinated to the outcome the donor class requires, in which dissent is career-limiting, and in which the lessons of failure are never institutionalized because acknowledging failure would threaten the donor relationships that sustain the institution.

The Historical Verdict — Team America, and the Lessons It Will Not Learn

Genghis Khan never occupied anything — and he understood why. Occupations turn soldiers into jailers. We keep making this mistake and we don’t seem to have learned it.

Macgregor titled his analysis of the Venezuela operation with a reference to the 2004 puppet film “Team America: World Police” — a satire so accurate in its premise that, as he notes, it functions as a documentary. The premise: America goes everywhere, breaks things, kills people, declares victory, and leaves destruction in its wake, sustained by absolute confidence in its own righteousness and absolute indifference to consequences. The film was a satire. The policy has been consistent.

The historical record Macgregor draws on is extensive and consistent. The Mongols, under Genghis Khan, understood the fundamental problem of occupation: it converts military assets into garrison forces, binds them to fixed positions, makes them vulnerable to the long-term attrition of populations who resent their presence, and eventually consumes more resources in maintenance than the occupation produces. The Mongol solution was not occupation; it was deterrence. Leave a small force near the capital. Make the consequences of non-compliance clear. Collect tribute. Return and kill everyone if the arrangement is violated. It was brutal and it worked — far longer and more efficiently than any American occupation has.

The World War II analogies that Washington perpetually reaches for — Germany and Japan rebuilt under American occupation, therefore occupation works — are, in Macgregor’s analysis, the product of specific conditions so unusual as to be essentially unrepeatable. Germany cooperated because the alternative was Soviet occupation. Japan cooperated because the country had been physically destroyed and because the Soviet threat to the north was credible. Both were sophisticated industrial nations with educated populations and existing institutional capacity. None of these conditions have applied to any country the United States has occupied since 1945.

The occupation problem in its current iteration:

• Venezuela: a politically divided country with a large population of loyalists, an acting president of uncertain allegiance, and no plan for the day after the initial operation
• Iraq analog: de-Baathification destroyed the Iraqi state’s institutional capacity; the equivalent Venezuelan risk is the destruction of whatever governing infrastructure exists
• The Puerto Rico garrison: fourteen to sixteen thousand troops, assembled and waiting, without a clear mission, creating pressure for commitment that may not be rationally calculated
• The Rubio sequence: each subsequent target — Cuba, Nicaragua, Colombia — represents a new governance problem added to existing unresolved ones
• The Afghanistan lesson: twenty years, trillions of dollars, the Taliban back in power within weeks of withdrawal — the lesson is available; the institutional incentive to learn it is not

Macgregor ends where he begins: there is no plan. “And frankly, I don’t know what they’re going to come up with.” This is not rhetorical despair. It is an honest assessment of an institutional condition. The planning apparatus that would need to exist to produce a coherent strategy is not functioning. The political environment in which honest strategic analysis could occur does not exist. The donor class does not pay for plans that don’t produce the outcomes it wants. And the president is, by temperament and background, a man of impulse and opportunity rather than deliberate strategy.

Team America is back. It has no plan. It has no end state. It has no mechanism for learning from failure. And somewhere in Tehran, in Beijing, in Moscow, the people who spend their careers studying American strategic behavior are watching the Venezuela operation and drawing their own conclusions about what comes next — and what it will cost.

Thank you, Douglas Macgregor.

Sources & Geopolitical References

Substack – US-Edition

This article is also available as a English-language edition on Substack:

    Team America Is Back - And Still Has No Plan - Douglas Macgregor

Original conversation (video)

YouTube-Interview:

    War Without Strategy - Venezuela Today, Iran Next - Douglas Macgregor

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