Col. Douglas Macgregor (ret.), whose most recent position was that of a senior advisor to acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller at the end of the Trump Administration, warned in an April 12 article in the American Conservative that a U.S.-Russia war over Ukraine would be a disaster for the U.S. and, potentially, for the planet. Macgregor stated that in 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt did not authorize retaliation against Japan for the sinking of the gunboat USS Panay on the Yangtze River, because he knew that there was no public support for a war with another great power at that time and that the U.S. military was not prepared for such a war.
A similar situation prevails today with respect to Ukraine, in that Russia has military superiority over NATO on the ground in southeastern Ukraine and, Macgregor argued, the counterinsurgency wars of the last two decades have not prepared American military leadership for war against a tough and determined adversary. “Equally serious is America’s deteriorating societal cohesion, which was on full display during the summer of 2020,” Macregor wrote. “When added to the dramatic spike in illegal human and drug trafficking pouring across the southern border, it seems certain that a major war in Eastern Europe would expose not only serious vulnerabilities in the U.S. armed forces, but the fragility of American society to the whole world.”
