Michael J. Totten's Blog, page 5

Manafort Down

So much for the Bob Mueller investigation being a fake news witch hunt. Donald Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort, Manafort’s business partner Rick Gates, and former Trump foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos have all been indicted.

Manafort and Gates are charged with concealing their work as agents of a foreign government, money laundering, and a number of additional crimes. Papadapolous just pled guilty for lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian officials on behalf of th...

Trump Throws the Kurds to the Wolves

The one part of Iraq that was considered an unalloyed success until now is going to hell, and it’s partly Donald Trump’s fault.

Last month, voters in the Kurdish autonomous region chose overwhelmingly to secede from Iraq, which they’ve wanted to do since the day the country was forged in the ashes of the British Empire in Mesopotamia, and Israel was the only country in the entire world to support them. The United States said no. Europe said no. NATO said no. The hostile regimes in Iran, Syria...

Turkey Is Behaving like an Enemy Now

Turkey, along with the American-Turkish relationship, is going so far off the rails so quickly right now that there’s no chance you’re aware of everything that’s going on unless you track it professionally or get Google Alerts in your inbox.

Where to even begin? We could start, I suppose, with the fact that a Turkish court sentenced a Wall Street Journal reporter to two years in prison in absentia for “promoting a terrorist organization.” Her real crime? Interviewing and quoting members of th...

The Trump Administration Just Stabbed the Kurds in the Front

On September 22, the Kurds in Erbil, Suleimaniyah, Dohuk and Kirkuk voted overwhelmingly to secede from Iraq.

This has been a long time coming. With 28 million people, the Kurds are the largest stateless people on earth, their “nation” parceled out in pieces to despotic governments in Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey. Roughly six million of them live in Iraq. The central government under Saddam Hussein’s genocidal regime murdered them by the hundreds of thousands with conventional and chemical we...

The First Book in the Resurrection Series is Now Free

My new book, Into the Wasteland, is officially released today and, for a limited time, the first book in the Resurrection series is now free at all online retailers, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and iTunes. (The electronic edition of the sequel is only 5.99.)

Here’s the description from the back of the book:

Welcome to a world turned to ashes.

Annie Starling is missing her memory of the last eight weeks—the most devastating in history. It started in Russia and went global in a...

The Black Sheep of NATO

It was made abundantly clear last week in Philadelphia, of all places, that NATO is being undermined from within and lacks the will to defend its own values and interests.

I flew to Philadelphia to speak to visiting members of NATO’s Parliamentary Assembly at a foreign policy conference organized by the Middle East Forum, where I am a fellow. Most of the event was off the record, but the final portion was not, and that’s when the news broke.

First, a bit of background. Rumi Forum President Em...

New book release – the sequel to Resurrection

Into the Wasteland, the sequel to Resurrection, is now available for pre-order in Amazon’s Kindle store. If you order your copy today, it will be delivered to your device automatically next Thursday, September 28.

A trade paperback edition will also be available next week, as will electronic editions for Nook, iBooks, Kobo, Sony e-reader, etc.

Here’s the back jacket copy:

In the sequel to Resurrection, as Parker, Annie, Kyle and Hughes begin their journey across a shattered and empty contine...

Cuba’s Dig Out from Hurricane Irma Could Take a Generation

It’s going to take a long time for Texas and Florida to fully recover from Hurricanes Harvey and Irma—years, more likely than not—even though the United States is one of the world’s richest and most capable countries. God only knows how long it’s going to take Cuba and its people to fully recover after Irma cut through the island like a buzz saw. Probably not until after the Communist Party is long out of power.

I visited Cuba a little more than three years ago and wrote the following descrip...

Turkey Can Forget About EU Membership

Turkey will never become a member of the European Union, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel finally said so in public. “The fact is clear that Turkey should not become a member of the EU,” she said in an election debate with her opponent, Martin Shulz. “I'll speak to my colleagues to see if we can reach a joint position on this so that we can end these accession talks.”

The only thing surprising here is that it has taken so long, but Merkel is at last willing to effectively call a dictatorsh...

America’s Longest War Is Hardly Its Worst

Just about everyone in America is sick of the war in Afghanistan, especially our Gold Star families who’ve lost sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers to the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Clocking in at nearly sixteen years, this is the longest we’ve ever fought, yet President Donald Trump, after railing against it for years, is ordering 4,000 more troops into war.

“Let’s get out of Afghanistan,” he wrote on Twitter long before he was elected. “Our troops are being killed by th...