Michael Totten Quotes

108 Sourced Quotes

To paraphrase Leon Trotsky, you may not be interested in war but war is interested in you.

Michael Totten
A few years ago, the government stopped physically blocking Cubans from hotels and restaurants, partly because Raúl is a little more relaxed about these things than Fidel but also because most Cubans can't afford to go to these places, anyway.

Michael Totten
Iran has been funding terrorism for decades. Iran hasn't stopped funding terrorism for even five seconds since the day it started. We can safely assume that since Iran funded terrorism yesterday, and that since the sun came up this morning, Iran is still funding terrorism today. And unless the government is overthrown before midnight tonight, it's safe to assume that Iran will continue funding terrorism tomorrow. Iran's rulers haven't even pretended to stop, so let's just cut through the B. S.

Michael Totten
Russia is justifying its invasion of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula by saying the ethnic Russians who live there are threatened by a nascent fascist regime in Kiev. The habits of Soviet propagandists die hard. What's really going on here is simple. Vladimir Putin, like most Russian leaders before him, feels he must shove his weight around the near abroad to maximize his power and influence in the thin buffer between him and the West. Now that he's without his vassal—mini-Putin, Viktor Yanukovych, is on the run—Moscow has to do the grunt work itself.

Michael Totten
The Iranian government has been a malignant force since the day it seized power in 1979. It has taken diplomats hostage, destabilized one neighboring state after another—beginning with Lebanon, then moving to Iraq, Syria, Bahrain and Yemen—and created terrorist armies that have killed Americans, Israelis, Iraqis, Lebanese, Syrians and—yes—even Argentines. The Iranian government has done all this without nuclear weapons. The only reason it wasn't able to wreak even more havoc is because it was crippled by sanctions. That's over now.

Michael Totten
Russia is not Belgium, and it is not Canada. It was one of only two superpowers until the Soviet Union imploded under the weight of its own belligerent imbecility, and it has been wallowing in a post-imperial funk, 'malaise' in Jimmy Carter's lexicon, ever since. It could theoretically regain some of its lost power as the West's partner, but being one of many is not how Russia rolls. Whenever Washington makes a friendly overture to Moscow, Russians interpret it the way Luke Skywalker heard Darth Vader say, between bouts of heavy mechanical breathing, 'Join me, and together we can rule the galaxy as father and son'.

Michael Totten
Arab Muslims born and raised in the United States are just as American as I am, but Arab Muslims born and raised in Belgium will never be Belgian. They may or may not be citizens of the state of Belgium, but they won't have a Belgian identity. A Belgian identity scarcely even exists. Most Belgians identify first and foremost as Dutch-speaking Flemish or French-speaking Walloons.

Michael Totten
The truth about Che now has its boots on. He helped free Cubans from the repressive Batista regime, only to enslave them in a totalitarian police state worst than the last. He was Fidel Castro's chief executioner, a mass-murderer who in theory could have commanded any number of Latin American death squads, from Peru's Shining Path on the political left to Guatemala's White Hand on the right.

Michael Totten
Trump's national security advisor is much more eager to fight a huge war than George W. Bush or Barack Obama. If you voted for Trump because you want less war instead of more, you're probably out of luck.

Michael Totten
There were no violent Nazi-like demonstrations in the United States against Arabs or Muslims, not even on or after September 11, 2001, when ten times as many people were murdered in the most spectacular terrorist attack in world history.

Michael Totten
Did somebody have a nice little chat about the 2 billion dollars in aid money we give Egypt every year?

Michael Totten
Cuba is a police state and Che was its co-founder. Cubans 'love' him the same way Romanians 'loved' Nicolae Ceausescu and East Germans 'loved' Berlin Wall architect Erich Honecker. You know what happens to Cubans who display open hatred of Che? They get arrested. When he was still alive, they were executed or herded into slave-labor camps. So yeah, everyone 'loves' him. It's required by law. Woe to those who disobey State Security.

Michael Totten
If Turkey wasn't already in NATO, it would not be invited to join. Indeed, a lot of Americans want to kick Turkey out of NATO. Don't. It might be emotionally satisfying, but we're going to have to deal with the Turks whether we and they like it or not, and we'll get far better results if we do it within a cooperative framework than if we don't.

Michael Totten
Trump has changed his position on Syria twice and even reversed himself once, but he still can't find the right answer... He said he thinks the Middle East would be better off if Saddam Hussein and Moammar Qaddafi were still in charge of Iraq and Libya, and that Syria will be better off if Bashar al-Assad remains in power for the same reason... He sounds like a random guy in a bar who's thinking out loud after reading a couple of newspaper articles that are fuzzy on the details. We all run into people like that once a while, people who don't really know anything about the Middle East but think they've got it all figured out anyway. He realizes it's hard, though, and figures, hey, let the Russians deal with it instead.

Michael Totten
Sexual assault in public is so pervasive in Egypt that the authorities ban men from some cars on the subway so women can get to work in the morning without being mauled.

Michael Totten
Americans are good at solving problems. We've put men on the moon, cured countless diseases, and invented nearly all modern technology from televisions and telephones to microchips and the Internet. We created a durable democracy that has lasted more than 200 years, ended slavery, destroyed Hitler's Nazi regime, and bested the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Surely, then, we can solve terrorism, or at least drastically reduce it, but let's get one thing clear. There is no such thing as The Answer. There is no silver bullet, no magic wand, no perfectly calibrated piece of legislation that Congress can pass to make terrorists leave us alone.

Michael Totten
I don't think it's right to compare German gullibility to American gullibility by pointing out, for example, that lots of Americans falsely believe Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11 attacks. There is a qualitative difference between believing Saddam was behind an attack on America and believing that the American government was behind an attack on America. It is at least plausible that Saddam had something to do with it, even though he didn't. The idea that the U.S. government committed that deed is insane.

Michael Totten
People in Scotland don't enjoy having decisions made for them in England any more than the English like having decisions made for them in Belgium. Nationalism in Britain cut both ways.

Michael Totten
A mob set fire to the Saudi embassy in Tehran, stormed the compound and trashed its offices while Iranian security personnel stood aside. This is hardly anything new. The Iranian government has been violently contemptuous of worldwide norms of diplomacy ever since it seized power in 1979. The Iranian hostage crisis, where Islamist revolutionaries held 52 foreign servicemen and women hostage at the American Embassy for 444 days, was just the beginning. Four years later, Iran's terrorist proxies in Lebanon used to a suicide truck bomb to destroy the American embassy in Beirut. Ten years later they blew up the Israeli embassy in Argentina, also with a suicide truck bomb.

Michael Totten
By obsessing over politics above all else, identitarian artists of the twenty-first century resemble the Socialist Realists from the Soviet Union in the early- to mid-twentieth century. One could charitably call Socialist Realism an artistic style, one that glorified peasants, factory workers, and Communist values, but it was nurtured by a totalitarian police state and was the only style allowed by the government lest hapless artists wished to live out the remaining days of their lives in a Siberian slave labor camp.

Michael Totten
Lebanon may not be the most crucial country according to narrowly defined American interests, but like Tunisia, it's one of the few Arab countries that has had a real shot at building something resembling a democratic system during the last couple of years. Lebanon is divided against itself, though, as it always has been, and Syria and Iran are aggressively and even violently backing the anti-Western and anti-democratic side. With no one supporting Lebanon's pro-Western and pro-democratic side, there was ever only one possible outcome.

Michael Totten
I stared at the city below out the window as I sipped my red wine. Havana looked like a glittering metropolis in the dark. Night washed away the rot and the grime and revealed nothing but city lights. It occurred to me that Havana will look mostly the same—at night, anyway—after it is liberated from the tyrannical imbeciles who govern it now. I tried to pretend that I was looking out on a Cuba that was already free and that the tables around me were occupied—by local people, not foreigners—but the fantasy faded fast. I was all alone at the top of Cuba's Elysium and yearning for home—where capitalism's inequalities are not so jagged and stark.

Michael Totten
Would it be great if we could get along with Russia or reset relations? Of course. But it's not going to happen because there's not a damn thing you can to do change Russia's national interests or its centuries-long hostility toward its neighbors.

Michael Totten
What will become of Northern Ireland? It can't be neatly partitioned any more than Baghdad can be neatly partitioned.

Michael Totten
I've been unhappy with the Democrats for various reasons for almost ten years now. As time passes I have fewer and fewer reasons to stick with them... Democrats seem to think it's 1968 or 1972 all over again. And it isn't. They are decades out of date, and they're almost certain to lose.

Michael Totten