Michael J. Totten's Blog, page 11

Cuba’s Walled Garden

The United States government no longer bans tourists from visiting Cuba. American commercial flights to Havana resumed this week for the first time in more than a half-century.

Most Cuban people are thrilled. Their isolation from their estranged American neighbors has finally drawn to a close. A certain kind of American tourist is also excited but wants to get down there in a hurry, enough to prompt Natalie Morales to write an op-ed with a rather blunt title: Please Stop Saying You Want to Go...

To Ban or Not to Ban the Burkini

France is all over the news this month, first because several coastal towns banned “burkinis” on Mediterranean beaches, and again this week when its supreme court, the Conseil d’Etat, overturned one of the bans.

Burkini is a loosely defined word describing what basically amounts to a cross between an all-enveloping burka and a bikini which ultra conservative Muslim women wear to the beach and in the water so they don’t show any skin.

American commentators overwhelmingly oppose the French ban....

Liberal Democracy and its Discontents

A set of disturbing essays and reports has landed on my desk over the summer that together paint a grim picture of the state of liberal democracy in the early 21st century—and the grimness is not restricted to the dumpster fire of an election we’re currently enduring in the United States.

Let’s start with political scientists Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk. They published an unsettling report in the July issue in the Journal of Democracy that portends a rough road ahead for nearly all th...

Comments are Temporarily Closed

This election year is a dumpster fire. Political discussion boards all over the Internet are more abrasive than usual—and the baseline is plenty abrasive already.

So I’ve decided to turn off my comment section for the time being. It’s better for the state of my nerves and mental health if I avoid the discussion threads for a while, and if I’m not there as a moderator, no one will be there as a moderator. If nobody is moderating the comment section, it will be taken over by trolls who will dri...

Iran Payment Wasn’t Ransom, but it Was Ransom

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that an American plane carrying 400 million dollars in cash landed in Iran at the precise time the Iranian government released four American hostages.

Critics claim the 400 million was a ransom payment. The White House and State Department deny it emphatically.

They’re right. The 400 million wasn’t a ransom payment, but it was a ransom payment.

The United States sort of owes Iran money. In 1979, the previous government of Iran’s Shah Reza Pahlavi pa...

Russia Hacks the Republican Party

If Ronald Reagan could come back from the dead, he’d kick Donald Trump in the balls. Because somehow, astonishingly, the Republican candidate for president of the United States is pro-Russian and anti-NATO.

“NATO is obsolete and it's extremely expensive for the United States, disproportionately so,” he said in March. “And we should readjust NATO.” In July, he told the New York Times that he would only assist European nations during a Russian invasion if they first “fulfilled their obligations...

Hanging with the People's Mujahadeen of Iran

In 1997, US President Bill Clinton added Iran’s People’s Mujahadeen (Mujahideen Khalq in Persian, or MEK) to the list of designated foreign terrorist organizations, and in 2012 his wife Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took them off.

One of them erred and erred badly.

The MEK fought hard against the Shah Reza Pahlavi before and during the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Afterward, when the Islamist faction led by Ayatollah Khomeini emerged the strong horse in the ensuing struggle for power, the...

Slow Blogging For Now

This isn’t exactly a slow news week with another ISIS massacre in France and an aborted coup attempt in Turkey. It is, however, a slow writing week for me.

The National Council of Resistance of Iran invited me to an Iranian opposition conference in Paris last week. I’m still in Paris at the moment, cat-sitting and house-sitting for my friend and colleage Claire Berlinski while she travels away from home to research her next book about Europe.

I’ll write about the Iranian opposition when I get...

Will Brexit Unite Ireland?

The British decision to exit the Europe Union may end up dissolving the United Kingdom and uniting Ireland.

Northern Ireland may not be part of the UK for much longer. While the majority of English voters chose to leave the European Union, 56 of Northern Ireland’s want to remain. The (Protestant) Ulster Unionist Party and (Catholic) Sinn Fein both supported the Remain faction, only the second time in history they’ve stood on the same side of a big political question. They’ve been at each othe...

History Returns to Europe

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The British decision to leave the European Union is the most momentous event across the Atlantic since NATO bombed Belgrade.

If I lived in the United Kingdom, I would have voted to Remain in the EU, but it’s not hard to see why the majority voted to Leave. I wouldn’t want the United States to join the EU for the same reasons the Brexiters want out of it.

The EU is a brilliant idea. Unite splendidly diverse yet like-minded yet nations into a powerful bloc that’s greater than the sum of its par...