Michael J. Totten's Blog, page 9

The Real Problem with Trump’s Executive Order

President Donald Trump’s “Muslim ban” isn’t a Muslim ban. The now-infamous executive order he signed last week bans non-citizens from entering the United States regardless of religion if they come from one of seven Muslim-majority nations. Those affected include Christians, Jews, atheists, pre-Islamic Yazidis, Kurds and the brave souls who risked their lives and no doubt saved American lives while working with and for the United States military.

The travel ban initially even included permanen...

The United States Slams the Door on Cuban Refugees

One of Barack Obama’s last acts as president was a total jerk move, and Donald Trump approves of it.

Our outgoing president ended two long-standing policies that helped Cuban refugees flee the oppressive Castro regime and find safe harbor and the opportunity to live free and productive lives in the United States.

First, the “wet feet, dry feet” policy, a modified version of the Cuban Adjustment Act passed in 1966, granted political asylum to Cuban citizens who managed to reach American soil....

The New Arab-Israeli Alliance

I wrote the following essay for the summer issue of World Affairs. It hasn't been available online until now, but it's just as relevant now as it was when I wrote it.

During the early years of the Obama administration, conventional wisdom in Washington held that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict trumped everything else in the Middle East, that no problem could be resolved until that one was out of the way. “Without doubt,” former president Jimmy Carter said, “the path to peace in the Middle E...

America’s Moment of Truth About Russia

Donald Trump finally acknowledged that Russia most likely hacked the Democratic National Committee and turned over stolen files to WikiLeaks. “I think it was Russia,” he said for the first time at a press conference earlier this week, though he angrily denied that Russian shenanigans swayed last year’s election. He’s right on both counts.

Until this week, though, the president-elect seemed to trust Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and WikiLeaks founder and fugitive Julian Assange more he trust...

Turkey Goes Off the Rails

Last year was a gruesome one for Turkey, and this year is getting off to the worst possible start.

On the very first day of the new year, not six months after a botched military coup and an almost Stalinist-style purge of the army, the courts, the academy and the bureaucracy by its authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, ISIS declared open war.

A terrorist crossed the border from Syria and shot his way into Istanbul’s posh Reina nightclub and murdered at least 39 people with an automati...

The Fall of Aleppo

The Syrian city of Aleppo has fallen. Iran, Russia, Hezbollah and the Bashar al-Assad’s Arab Socialist Baath Party regime have won.

Long known as Syria’s Stalingrad, the Battle of Aleppo has raged since July, 2012, when the Free Syrian Army opened fire on Assad’s security forces in the Salaheddine district.

Four and a half years later, after being held by checkboard of various rebel factions, Assad’s army has retaken the city with a rogue’s gallery of international allies.

It’s just about th...

Trump’s Taiwan Call Wasn’t a Blunder

President-elect Donald Trump took a phone call last week and created an international incident before even being sworn into office.

He spoke with Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen for ten minutes, which must seem entirely innocuous to almost everyone in America, but professional diplomats went immediately into pearl-clutching mode. And they weren’t the only ones. Several US military generals—including reliably conservative generals—made stern-faced appearances on CNN and said the call was incre...

Springtime for Morsi

I reviewed Eric Trager's book, Arab Fall: How the Muslim Brotherhood Won and Lost Egypt in 891 Days for Commentary magazine.

Almost everyone got the Arab Spring wrong.

At a casual glance, the Middle East and North Africa appeared to be sprouting political liberals like daisies at the tail end of 2010, when a nonviolent revolution in Tunisia spread to Egypt, Libya, and Syria. Tunisia’s autocratic Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fell in a matter of weeks, followed a month later by Egypt’s Hosni Mubara...

How Trump’s General Mike Flynn Sees the World

General Mike Flynn will be President-elect Donald Trump’s national security advisor, and if the only things you know about the man come from the mainstream media, you have no idea who he really is or what he really thinks, which means you have no idea what he’s likely to do when he starts his new job.

Yes, he had dinner with Vladimir Putin, and no, he’s not politically correct or even diplomatic. Yes, he was fired from his job as the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency because he does not...

An Uncertain New Era Begins

The election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States feels to some like the end of the world. It’s not. It’s the beginning of a new era. And it’s time to take some deep yoga breaths. Uncertainty always triggers anxiety, but it’s important for the anxious not to catastrophize.

“Catastrophizing relies on an overestimation of the odds of a bad outcome as well as an underestimation of your ability to cope with it should it befall you.” Those are some serious words of wisdom rig...