Michael J. Totten's Blog, page 10

American Brexit

Global markets plunged after learning that Donald Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States.

Few saw it coming, and the polling industry will have to spend some time in the wilderness for a while, but the market response shouldn’t shock anyone. It’s exactly what happened after the Brexit vote, when the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union.

“They will soon be calling me MR. BREXIT!” Trump said on Twitter in August. “Brexist times five,” he said at rallies last month...

The New Socialist Realists

I reviewed Sohrab Ahmari’s book, The New Philistines, for City Journal. Here’s the first part.

The general public hates modern art. In an online poll, The Escapist magazine asked if modern art even qualifies as art in the first place. Only one person in five said that it does. At Debate.org, when asked if modern art is real art, 70 percent said no, it’s not. The collapse in artistic standards has been obvious for a while. In 2005, ABC News ran an experiment showing that even most artists and...

An Open Letter to the Next Leader of the Free World

My latest long-form piece has been published in The Tower magazine. Here's the first part.

Dear President-Elect,

Congratulations on winning the election for the 45th president of the United States, but are you sure you really want this?

The world is a mess, as it usually is, and taking on this awesome responsibility right now is like trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube that a devious trickster messed with by moving some of the stickers around.

You are not battling a Hitler or Hirohito that you ca...

Estonia Prepares for an Anti-Russian Insurgency

Estonia may look like a European country out of a children’s storybook, but it’s bracing to become another Afghanistan.

The Defense League is preparing more than 25,000 volunteers, including women and teenagers, to fight a deadly insurgency against a Russian invasion. It’s training them to make IEDs and strike Russian convoys in hit-and-run attacks, and the government is encouraging everyone to keep guns and ammunition in their houses and hidden in backyards and forests.

They are not overreac...

Children of the Revolution

City Journal sent me to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia this summer. More than 20,000 journalists were there, and since I covered the convention for a quarterly magazine, it’s probably safe to say that my piece was published dead-last.

I had to be sure, then, that what I wrote wouldn’t be dated before it even saw print, and I tried to write one that will be relevant for many years.

Here’s the first part.

In this year’s race for the White House, American voters nearly had...

The Battle for Mosul is On

A coalition of Iraq government forces, Christian militiamen, and Kurdish soldiers in home-made post-apocalyptic battle tanks are now on the outskirts of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, and with air support from the US and Britain, they are poised to retake it from ISIS.

Mosul is the last Iraqi city still under ISIS control. Washington and Baghdad saved it for last because, with a normal population of more than two million people, it will likely prove the most difficult battle.

The number o...

Slow Blogging This Week

Two weeks ago, my mother-in-law died of liver and kidney failure.

My wife and I have just returned home from Southern California where we scattered her mother’s ashes at sea off the coast of Ventura. She is doing okay, but her father is having a much harder time. Her parents were married for 49 years.

There’s plenty going on in the world right now, but it’s going to take me a couple of days to catch up and get back in the swing of things. Thanks for being patient.

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What Just Happened in Colombia?

By a razor-thin margin of less than half a percentage point, Colombian voters narrowly rejected a proposed peace plan that would have formally ended the longest-running war in the Western Hemisphere.

Almost everyone thought the referendum would pass, that it was a mere formality after years of painstaking negotiations in Cuba, but no.

The UK’s Independent calls the vote “Farcxit.” Indeed, the peso crashed hard against the dollar for the same reason the British pound fell after Brexit—internat...

Trump Botches Iraq

Donald Trump hit Hillary Clinton hard on foreign policy during the first presidential debate Monday night.

“Secretary Clinton is talking about taking out ISIS,” he said. “Well, President Obama and Secretary Clinton created a vacuum the way they got out of Iraq, because they got out -- what, they shouldn't have been in, but once they got in, the way they got out was a disaster. And ISIS was formed.”

Bernie Sanders has made a similar argument. Lots of people on both the left and the right have...

From Kosovo to Oman

After a brutal firefight Monday morning, police officers in Linden, New Jersey, shot and arrested Ahmad Khan Rahami for detonating improvised explosive devices in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan and along the Jersey Shore two days earlier.

The media and political response was predictable. Willful naifs wondered aloud what on earth might have motivated Mr. Rahami. Suspect's Motive Unclear In New York, New Jersey Bombings, reads an embarrassing NPR headline.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s surr...