Michael J. Totten's Blog, page 7

What the Qatar Blockade is Really About

The blockade against Qatar, Defense Secretary James Mattis said on Tuesday this week, referring to the tiny Persian Gulf emirate, is “a very complex situation.” It certainly is. Taken at face value, it doesn’t even make any sense.

It started late last month when Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain severed diplomatic and economic relations with Qatar. They said it’s because of the latter’s funding of Islamic extremism, but that doesn’t even pass the laugh test.

The Saudis...

Why the Rise of Corbyn's Labour Party Should Worry the West

My latest piece, published in The Atlantic, is live. Here's the first part.

In the days since British Prime Minister Theresa May’s disastrous snap election, the Labour Party and its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, have been taking in the sheer surprise of their upset near-victory: gaining 30 seats after being down some 20 points in the polls only weeks ago. While May’s Conservatives won the most seats in the election—an election the prime minister expected would give her a mandate to negotiate the U....

Trump's Trip a Disaster for Transatlantic Relations

Donald Trump manufactures enemies and unfriends allies like it’s his job.

His first trip abroad to the Middle East and Europe could have been a success, could have given him at least a temporary reprieve here at home as his poll numbers continue to slide. He skated through okay in the Middle East, as I wrote last week, one of the toughest places in the entire world to get good reviews. For the European leg of his trip, all he had to do was reassure our friends that the Transatlantic alliance...

The Geopolitical Education of Donald Trump

On Sunday, President Donald Trump delivered a speech to the leaders of dozens of Muslim-majority countries in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, written by bombastic travel ban architect Stephen Miller. Most of the world cringed in advance. As it turned out, Trump’s speech marks a radical departure from the crude, obnoxious and flat-out hysterical rhetoric we’re all accustomed to hearing from him and (some of) his aides on the subject.

“To the leaders and citizens of every country assembled here today,” h...

Syria’s Surreal Fake Peace Process

Staffan de Mistura has a strange job. The United Nations is paying him to organize peace talks in Geneva that he knows perfectly well aren’t going anywhere.

“Nothing substantial" will result from the talks Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said last week. They are just for show, “merely a meeting for the media.”

Of course they are. Even journalists who cover Syria for a living are hardly paying attention, and not just because the general public isn’t interested. We aren’t interested either. Th...

Arming the Kurds Is Worth Angering the Turks

My lastest piece in The Tower magazine is live. Here’s the first part:

The United States government has formally announced that it’s going to arm Kurdish militias in Syria in a bid to capture the city of Raqqa from ISIS, the “capital” of the Islamic State’s “caliphate.”

It’s about time.

The YPG, or Kurdish Protection Units, is the largest faction in the Syrian Democratic Forces and the military arm of the leftist Democratic Union Party. It is loosely aligned with the PKK, or Kurdistan Worker...

The Center Holds in France—but for How Long?

Nearly everyone but Vladimir Putin, chief Brexiter Nigel Farage, and the staff writers at Breitbart are celebrating centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron’s landslide two-to-one victory in the French presidential election against the National Front’s Marine Le Pen.

In The American Interest, journalist and Paris resident Claire Berlinski compares French voters to “passengers on a long-haul flight, colicky infants on either side, [who] find themselves trapped with a flight attendant cheerfully offe...

Russia is Arming the Taliban

So much for Donald Trump’s Russian reset. The United States military has just confirmed that for the past eighteen months, Russia has been arming the Taliban.

“We continue to get reports of this assistance,” General John Nicholson said at a press conference alongside Secretary of Defense James Mattis. “We support anyone who wants to help us advance the reconciliation process, but anyone who arms belligerents who perpetuate attacks like the one we saw two days ago in Mazar-e Sharif is not the...

The Real North Korean Missile Crisis is Coming

North Korea makes the Middle East look like a walk.

Firing 59 Tomahawk missiles from warships in the Eastern Mediterranean at Bashar al-Assad’s Al-Shayrat airbase in Syria was not a big deal. Assad can’t strike back. Not at the United States, anyway. But that largely bloodless exercise in deterrence against the development and deployment of weapons of mass destruction will never be repeated on the Korean Peninsula.

For two decades, the United States and its allies in Northeast Asia have pract...

America First is Dead

President Donald Trump hasn’t even finished his first 100 days yet and his isolationist “America First” creed is already dead.

First, he ordered two American battleships in the Eastern Mediterranean to pound Syria’s al-Shayrat airbase with 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles. According to Defense Secretary James Mattis, the strikes damaged or destroyed 20 percent of Bashar al-Assad’s air force in ten minutes.

In case you hoped or feared this might be a one-off before returning to business as usual, h...