Great News: Pentagon Adviser Douglas Macgregor May Have the Trump Administration Withdraw Troops from Afghanistan

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Nov 12, 2020

Earlier this week President Donald Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who has now been replaced by Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller. The situation has gone down an intriguing path now that Miller has brought on retired Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor as a senior adviser to the Pentagon.

Macgregor was originally nominated as ambassador to Germany and is one of the biggest skeptics of interventionism within the Trump administration. The decision to bring Macgregor into an advisory role indicates that the administration is serious about pulling troops from Afghanistan before Trump leaves office in January.

In an Axios report, a senior official claimed that the recent series of firings at the Defense department and the hiring of Douglas Macgregor is part of Trump’s “personal scores.” In addition, senior White House officials stated “they want them more publicly to talk about getting out of Afghanistan by the end of the year.”

Axios listed off some of the points regarding the Macgregor hire:

  • Trump, who ran in 2016 on a promise to bring U.S. troops home, is frustrated with the slow pace of withdrawing troops from the Middle East, another senior administration official said.
  • The president has told advisers on numerous occasions he wants troops home from Afghanistan by Christmas.

Macgregor has made himself famous for calling for the U.S. to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan and Syria. Macgregor has also been a critic of neoconservative’s efforts to bring regime change to Iran and believes that the U.S. should have better relations with Russia. The retired colonel has unconventional views on countries with an American military presence such as South Korea. He believes that the American government needs to “turn the operational control of the [Korean] Peninsula militarily over to President Moon and the Koreans.”

Axios received a statement from the Pentagon which confirmed Macgregor’s hire as a senior adviser to acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller. The Pentagon cited Macgregor’s “decades of military experience” which “will be used to assist in the continued implementation of the President’s national security priorities.”

The retired colonel is known for his hawkish immigration views and understands the political impact mass migration has on the American nation. Macgregor has plenty of enemies from the defense industry to the open borders boosters. For that reason, he will be attacked from all angles.

Trump should have hired Macgregor as a foreign policy adviser earlier on in his presidency, but it’s better late than never.