VRIC: U.S. military retreat inevitable as defence spending goes ‘insane’ – former colonel

Unsustainably high military spending will soon force the United States to scale back its overseas presence and stop meddling in regional conflicts, former Pentagon adviser Douglas MacGregor predicted.

U.S. Department of Defense spending rose almost 10% to a record US$842 billion in 2023, government data show. In April, Congress approved a US$95 billion defense supplement that included more aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.

“You cannot maintain the kinds of forces we have all over the world, intervening in other people’s affairs, telling other people how to live if you can’t afford it,” MacGregor, a retired U.S. Army Colonel and geopolitical analyst, said Sunday during a panel discussion at the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference. “I read the headlines yesterday that the House and the Senate want to add US$200 billion to the defense budget. It’s insane.”

Military spending now represents just under half of all U.S. federal discretionary budget outlays and about 40% of global military expenditures. For the mining industry, part of U.S. defence spending includes billions for critical minerals projects, including some in Canada.

MacGregor’s warnings come amid a recent rise in geopolitical tensions coinciding with attempts by several Western nations to challenge China’s role as the world’s leading refiner of critical minerals – a vital component in the production of cutting-edge aerospace and defense technologies.

Domestic Resources

While U.S. President Donald Trump, who was sworn in for a second term Monday, has not publicly commented on the Pentagon’s support for mining projects, his administration’s policies reflect a concerted effort to reduce reliance on foreign sources for critical minerals, particularly from China. This approach aligns with the broader goal of strengthening national security and ensuring economic stability through the development of domestic resources.

Trump has often complained that the country is paying more than its fair share to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Last summer, he campaigned on a pledge to keep U.S. forces “out of wars” – though he vowed in Monday’s inaugural speech to take back control of the Panama Canal.

“If you’re smart right now, you cut your losses everywhere in the world,” MacGregor said. “If you’re an American, you get out. You get out of all of these places, you come home.”

Even massive U.S. aid to Ukraine hasn’t been enough to prevent Russia from steadily making territorial gains, MacGregor stressed. Claims that the Russians are losing the war are “nonsense, just total nonsense,” he said.

Failure to retrench and cut U.S. military spending would put Trump “in a lot of trouble very quickly,” MacGregor said. “The world doesn’t want us in their backyard, contrary to popular belief.”

Regional disputes

To hear MacGregor tell it, U.S. forces need to “step out” of regional disputes, which are increasing and bring their own entrenched leaders to conflict.

“For almost 1,000 years, the leading powers in the Middle East were Persia and the Turks,” he said. “We don’t belong there. We’ve got to get out of this business. When we go into places, we disrupt the natural dynamic. We create inequalities between powers.”

Slowing this shift is a misguided belief among some in the U.S. that the country still dominates the world order, MacGregor said.

“In Washington in particular, there is a failure to understand the world, and that’s because we have been the centre of it, at least in our imagination, since the end of the Second World War,” he said.

Countries with millennia-old cultures – such as China, India or Iran – “are roaring back into the world,” he added. “We’re not very comfortable with that, and we have a bad habit of denigrating it and ultimately grossly underestimating them, and we’ve seen that with Russia. So the world itself is changing, and we are not really changing at all. Our view of the world is that we are the centre of it. It’s a huge problem.”

On top of that, MacGregor argues, the U.S. has lost its monopoly on cutting-edge military technologies.

“Most of the technologies that people are expressing concern about, particularly in terms of military applications, those were ours 30 years ago,” he said. “They are now proliferating everywhere.”