Michael Totten - Country Quotes

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Every country in the world has a national anthem... It's perfectly normal.

Michael Totten
Colombia's scenery is spectacular, its literary and arts scene world class, its biodiversity unmatched by any nation on earth. While it still has a moderately high crime rate in some areas, the homicide rate is now as low as Portland, Oregon's. It's almost as if whatever dark force consumed Colombia for so many decades picked up and moved to the country next door.

Michael Totten
Even hotels are asking guests to bring their own, which is almost impossible unless they're coming in from abroad. Violent crime has spread throughout the country, even to rural areas. Police officers don't even attempt to suppress or solve crime, partly because they're too busy protecting the crooked and oppressive government from its furious subjects, but also because crime is as ubiquitous in Venezuela right now as the heat and humidity.

Michael Totten
And at least the U.S. got something out of the deal. At least our people are still among the living when they come home... Iran committed three criminal acts against American citizens and paid no price. We put kidnappers in prison for a very long time in this country, but the Iranian government was rewarded. What's to stop that government from doing it again? Nothing. Why should the Iranian government stop? Kidnapping and ransoming hostages works. And the regime is already gearing up to do it again.

Michael Totten
Iraq has never been a coherent nation-state; arguably, it wouldn't exist if the British Empire hadn't installed the Kingdom of Iraq in 1932. Its three biggest communities—Sunni Arabs, Shi'a Arabs and Kurds¬—have proven themselves incapable of living together in peace. The country will probably never be both democratic and stable within its current borders. Splitting Iraq into its three constituent parts would be better for the people who live there. It would be better for us, too, insofar as this separation would prevent the kind of unstable anarchy that breeds both Sunni and Shia militias, including ISIS.

Michael Totten
Of course sanctions have a negative effect on the economy, but the main cause of Cuban poverty is communist economics. Every communist country in the history of the world has been impoverished. It's a bankrupt system that has never worked and never can work. Here's just one reason why. The United States has a minimum wage while Cuba has a maximum wage. And that maximum wage is a paltry 20 dollars a month. No one can get ahead. It's impossible. It's illegal. When prosperity is a crime, there can be no prosperity, and that's entirely the fault of Cuba's communist party.

Michael Totten
I visited Iraq seven times during the war... Baghdad, while ugly and dangerous, is vastly freer and more prosperous these days than Havana. Anyway, Iraq is precisely the kind of country with which Castro wants you to compare Cuba. It's the wrong comparison. So are impoverished Third World countries like Guatemala and Haiti. Cuba isn't a developing country; it's a once-developed country destroyed by its own government. Havana was a magnificent Western city once. It should be compared not with Baghdad, Kabul, Guatemala City, or Port-au-Prince but with formerly Communist Budapest, Prague, or Berlin. Havana's history mirrors theirs, after all.

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
Plenty of Crimeans are unhappy about it, of course. A fourth are ethnic Ukrainians, an eighth are Tatars, and one would have to be a truly obnoxious determinist to suggest every Russian on the peninsula is thrilled being occupied by a foreign army just because they speak the same language. Ukrainians elsewhere in the country (especially outside the ethnically Russian east) are mobilizing for war.

Michael Totten
Latin America veers far more wildly from the extreme left to the extreme right than the West does, but it's not the Middle East. Every Latin American country so far except Cuba has reverted to democratic rule after a period of dictatorship. One way or another, Venezuela will get there eventually. Maduro isn't at all likely to die in bed while in office like Chávez did in 2013. He'll lose an election, the army will put him in jail, or he'll be strung up, Mussolini-style, from a Caracas lamppost. Whenever it finally happens, though, that country will face a long dig-out.

Michael Totten
Whether we and the Ukrainians like it or not, Ukraine is still a buffer state within Moscow's sphere of influence. The US has little more leverage there than Russia has in Canada. And since ethnic Russians outnumber ethnic Ukrainians in the Crimea by more than two-to-one, a Russian invasion of that part of the country is a bit like a French invasion of Quebec—troublesome indeed, and infuriating to the capital, but different from, say, a North Korean invasion of Quebec. That's why Russia could take it without firing a shot and why nobody shot at the Russians.

Michael Totten
Want a trip into bizarroland? Take a look at the Twitter feed for Iran's 'Supreme Guide' Ayatollah Khamenei. No, his Twitter feed hasn't been hacked by Al Sharpton. Nor is this a spoof site. It's the real online megaphone for the Iranian dictator. This pasty old man doesn't give a flying fork about black people, especially those who live in the United States. When he and his underlings chant 'Death to America', they don't mean death to white America. They're talking about the whole country, from our black president at the top to undocumented immigrants on the bottom and everyone in between.

Michael Totten
Ukraine could end up permanently divvied up in the future, with the Russian regions annexed by Moscow, either formally or de-facto, while the rest of the country, which naturally tilts more to the West, admitted to the European Union and NATO. That's a best-case scenario rather than a likely scenario. Ukraine in its current borders, though, surely won't be admitted to the European Union or NATO, at least not before the Russian Federation liberalizes dramatically, because too many people in its political class are volunteer tools of Moscow.

Michael Totten
A majority of American Muslims view themselves as Americans first, rather than as Muslims first, whereas 81 percent of British Muslims view themselves as Muslims first. French Muslims are as likely as American Muslims to identify first with the nation-state they live in, but France is the only country in Europe that has seriously attempted to nurture a French identity among its immigrant populations. Europe's Muslim population feels far more alienated from the general society, so it's easier for a violent anti-Western ideology to find traction. And when trouble erupts, as it is now, Europeans react far more harshly than Americans do.

Michael Totten
Russian civilization was born more than a thousand years ago in Kiev in the medieval state of Kievan Rus. If that city ever gives the finger to Moscow once and for all and joins the EU and NATO, that would be something to see. It's why Russia cares more about Ukraine than the West does and will probably get what it wants. No one in charge of the fate of that country is asking what the Ukrainians want. They should, but they aren't and they won't. Such is the fate of the vassals of Moscow.

Michael Totten
For years, Turkey has thrown more journalists into prison than any other country on Earth. That all by itself should tell you everything you need to know about Erdogan, but if the picture wasn't clear before, it had better be now. The failed coup attempt by Turkish army officers in July of this year unleashed Erdogan's inner Hugo Chavez.

Michael Totten
Bullies drunk on power do reckless and unpredictable things sometimes, though, so the possibility of an all-out invasion—even if the odds are against it—can't be ruled out. So now what? The US and NATO are not going to declare war on Russia over Crimea or even Kiev, but that doesn't mean Putin can just barge in wherever he wants. It goes without saying that the invasion of a European Union or NATO country is over the line and would be resisted with force. Putin surely knows that already. Everybody in Russia knows that. What Putin does not necessarily know is whether or not the red line is closer to Moscow.

Michael Totten